I am beginning to think that corporatism is the root of much evil.

It starts by focusing on profit above all else. There is nothing wrong with making a profit, as I even try to do this, so that I can feed and clothe my family. The problem begins when you do this “above all else”. When corporations were granted rights of persons, without any social or moral obligations, we started down a slippery slope as a society. Now we have too many people making their livings on behalf of a disembodied entity that only wants to make profit.

Add to this amoral mix the notion that ideas can be owned and patented. For instance, software programs, consisting of nothing more than lines of code, are ideas. So now we have an information society, moving into a knowledge society, where some greedy people think that corporations should own ideas and make profits off these ideas for a very long time. The problem is that we cannot grow as a society without the free flow of ideas. Patenting ideas will slow down our collective ability to learn. However, the US Patent Office thinks that it is a good thing to protect ideas, as do other national patent offices.

Take for instance a software company that has bought and borrowed ideas from multiple public sources (processes, code, how-to) and put a brand on it and called it a unique idea. So far, no one has taken the idea to patent the concept of zero and stop further development of any computer programs (see The People Who Owned the Bible, for another analogy). In the case of computer code or ideas, it is impossible to say where the original idea started. In the case of ideas, pretty well everything is based on some prior art.

We can see the Counter Reformation of the Corporate World today as they use Copyright as their main attack. Think Harlod exaggerates? Do you not know what is going on in the UK? Here is JP on this http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2010/04/05/the-digital-economy-bill-be-careful-...

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

Viacom’s brief misconstrues isolated lines from a handful of emails produced in this case to try to show that YouTube was founded with bad intentions, and asks the judge to believe that, even though Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube, YouTube is like Napster or Grokster.

Isn't the corporate world a fun place and how they game the system

And next time they come with the "free downloads are damaging the creative people" shtick, show them this.

Brilliant.

Copyright has gone mad - the creative people are being robbed!