In response to the August 30 Perspectives column by Charles Cooper, "Meditations on baseball and file swapping":
I guess I'm too old to distinguish the fine distinction between electronic theft and physical theft. As you point out, the cost of producing the physical copy of a CD is in the range of a few pennies; so shoplifting a CD from the mall is really petty theft from your perspective.
I have very little sympathy for the bigwigs at RIAA and am violently (proper use of the term here) opposed to the concept of legalized attack-software designed to hunt and destroy violators of the copyright law.
Having said that, I am equally outraged by people who seem to think that the Internet provides some God-given right to free use of someone else's efforts without their consent. These are in the same league as the clowns who post info about warez sites on a game company's fan site and then have the gall to demand new content.
Personally I would like to see major league baseball go belly up. I gave up after the strike in 1974.
Thomas H. Ridgway
Cincinnati, Ohio
Discuss: Faults on both sides of copyright fight
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