What currently illegal things would you do if they were legal?

[xiphias]

A bunch of people hither and yon on LJ and elsewhere are discussing this question -- I saw it on nancylebov's LJ.

It's an interesting question. I mean, I can think of several things which are illegal which I would like to see legalized, either for the sake of friends of mine, or on general principles, but, for myself? What is there that I personally want to do that the law prevents me from doing?

Oh, and you're not allowed to say, "not pay taxes," because that's too easy.

I mean, I speed sometimes. So the law doesn't actually prevent me from doing that. So that doesn't count. I've got no desire to steal, murder, fight, or break any of those Big Laws.

I remember, when I was a teenager, my mother (rebmommy) and I said that, if marijuana was legalized, we'd get baked together once. Just to have done it. But, since then, both she and I have developed allergies which, through extrapolation, would probably include cannabis. So that one's out.

The one thing that I think I'd do if it were legal would be to use the first floor of our house as a bar/private club. 'Course, right now, vonbeck is living there, so he'd have to find another apartment first, but, if it weren't for zoning laws, public accommodation laws, liquor licensing and serving laws, health code inspection regulations, and food service laws, I'd do that.

And, frankly, I'm generally in favor of all of those categories of ordinance and regulation.

How about you?

Comments

[holyhippie]

Some thoughts:

* Travel on a plane, paying cash, without showing ID. Freedom of movement and association is very restricted by the need to show ID when travelling.

* Buy a region-free DVD player. This is an item where the legality is somewhat murky - but the DMCA and such makes it difficult for people to sell reverse-engineered region-free DVD players here, because they can be sued or prosecuted out of existence.

* Walk around naked when I feel like it. I'm not the biggest naturist or exhibitionist out there, but it would be nice to be able to be naked, or a little sloppy about getting dressed, without fearing prosecution as a sex criminal.

* This isn't something for me personally, but for my kids in the future - I'd like to see marijuana decriminalized. I don't particularly want my kids to become potheads or otherwise drug addicted - but if they do happen to occasionaly get stoned during their teen years, and get caught; I'd like to see them treated as minor offenders, rather than raked over the coals as major offenders.

* I'd like to get DSL service from the provider of my choice, rather than the local monopoly. This isn't so much the case of me trying to do something that is currently illegal - but changing the local landscape to force the telcos to act as neutral carriers, rather than monopolistic greedheads.

* I'd like to download a free copy of the original Star Wars movie, and to use clips in my own projects. See, this is currently prohibited by copyright laws. Copyright laws that in the past, said that copyright expired after a fixed number of years, and after that the copyrighted work was made public domain. Copyright laws that were changed by the corporate greedheads running the media industries to have effectively permanent copyrights, so work would never enter the public domain. Damn it, some things like Star Wars should be public domain by now!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I could accept copyrights that:
1. Lasted 50 years from first publication or the life of the copyright holder + 10 years, whichever is longer -- if the copyright holder is a human being
OR
2. Lasted a flat 70 years if the copyright holder was a corporation.

That's as long a period as I feel I could accept, though.

[phantom_wolfboy]

That's about as short as I could accept, personally.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

And that's why I mention those particular time periods. They tend to be long enough to let creators make their money off of it, plus long enough to make people who have deep personal connections to their works not have to live to see fanfics of them, if they don't want to, yet are short enough to allow people to make derivative works in vaguely-reasonable time.

[holyhippie]

I disagree that these are reasonable - but then again, I am not a lawyer, writer, artist, or otherwise very connected with the creation of media.

As far as software releases go, I think that in the current era, copyright protections of 10 years would be more than sufficent. Pretty much, after 5 years, the computer environment around the software release has changed enough so that the software is obsolete and no more value can be extracted from it anyway. You notice that software that doesn't release new versions every couple of years pretty much withers away and dies.

For creative creations (books, music, movies), I think copyright should expire under 30 years, probably 20 years. The period of time on which you really can capitalize and monetize a particular version of a book or a movie isn't that long - just a few years. After that, returns dwindle.

With a '50 years from first publication' rule, stuff produced in the 50's would be going into public domain now. People who were around in the fifties to participate in that content being part of the culture of the time are old. Most are gone. I think that is too long - it puts too much distance between the original creation of the content, and being able to reuse it in public domain.

According to Wikipedia, the original laws in the US had 14 year terms for copyright, renewable for 14 years. That seems reasonable to me.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I'd be happier with those periods -- but I also know people who are authors who feel a deep emotional connection to their characters, and would feel quite hurt to live to see other people use them without their permission.

That's the reason for a "life of the copyright holder (+ N years, N >= 0), if the copyright holder is a person."

The other numbers, as I said, are simply the largest numbers I could live with.