Copyright

In the article "The Tyranny of Copyright?" by Robert Boynton, it talks about students of Swarthmore College getting access to memos talking about flaws in Diebold Election Systems (the largest maker of electronic voting machines) software. The students posted the memos on the internet, but thanks to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the memos were taken off, but no legal action was taken. A little bit later, they were put back on the Internet. I think this is truly wrong for the students to do, and that no act should prevent legal action from being taken, which is the case in the Act that "their speech could be silenced without the benefit of actual lawsuits, public hearings, judges or other niceties of the proccess." (http://econ.gsia.cmu.edu/ecommerce/The%20Tyranny%20of%20Copyright.htm)
On the issue when the Recording Industry Association of America began suing people for illegally downloading music off the internet, including pre-teens, I agree with the suing. I will be honest, I used to do it, but as soon as it became an issue, we took it off our computer, and I haven't used it since. Currently, my family and I have Rhapsody, which you can still listen to many songs on the computer, but you pay for the service, and then you pay just under a dollar a song to copy them onto a CD. There are people that fear that increasing copyright protection will "hinder our ability to experiment and create and eroding our democratic freedom. I do not agree at all with this viewpoint. We have plenty of freedoms without using other people's copyrighted things. There is a point why copyright was created, and that is that the information that is on the internet was created by another person, and unless they say specifically that others can use that information, no one should be allowed to. In conclusion, I agree with copyright in any form and the direction society is going in, as long as it doesn't go too far.