Blocked again

I've only been blocked on Twitter once before, that I know of.  That was by Helen Razer and to this day, I have no idea why.  I only know that I was blocked, because I went to follow her one day and found that I could not.

But I thought I'd regale you with this tale of more blockage.  This time, it came about in a record quick exchange with some tetchy Belgians who run an online magazine that goes by the name of Side-Line Magazine.

Specifically, it was this article that suggests reasons why you can't re-sell electronic media files once you've bought them.  It reads as a defence of DRM, because the reasons given is that once you have the file, you might copy it before you re-sell it.  Just "might", mind you - we're not all pirates.

This, of course, means that you should not be able to re-sell CDs, which are totally able to be re-sold.  Why not?  Because, and here's the word "might" again, you might copy the files on the CD before you re-sell it.

Now the act of re-selling files is not necessarily illegal.  However act of copying is, and so I pointed out in a tweet that there was a baby and bathwater issue, and an inconsistent one at that in a tweet.  I also may have expressed some dissatisfaction with the notion that we all need to be protected from our inherently evil nature:

A crap argument which assumes piracy and accidentally, further rules out resale of CDs: side-line.com/news_comments.… via @sidelinemag
— Dikkii (@dikkii) April 10, 2013

Almost immediately, I got this back:

@dikkii No, you are wrong. That's also why there are laws and prisons. Because we can assume people do not always do what is correct...
— Side-Line Magazine (@sidelinemag) April 10, 2013

I'm quite curious who Side-Line Magazine are, now.  Ostensibly, they're notionally a magazine about industrial and darkwave European music, which I still find interesting.  It's not unheard of for record companies to shill for themselves with magazines, although whilst I'm not suggesting that Side-Line Magazine are a record company shill, a small part of me won't deny the possibility.  And very few ordinary people (i.e. not industry types or the odd musician) take the approach that the precautionary principle must prevail in the battle against wholesale privacy.  DRM is the precautionary principle with brute force - it's there to stop people copying files.  But DRM stops a number of other things, as well.  Things like resale of goods that you've paid for.

This is where the baby gets thrown out with the filthy suds.  It's inconsistent to not apply this to media containing the same electronic files.  We're now seeing licensing tightening up in software land to prevent electronic files and media being re-sold - witness the extraordinary lengths that Microsoft is going to with Windows 8 and Office 2013.  But files are still easily copyable from CDs, and if you were to suggest tomorrow that people could not re-sell these particular items, there would be a resulting minor state of martial law.

So I pointed this out to them:

@sidelinemag Rubbish. You've assumed that people ALWAYS do what's wrong. Plus you've implied that resale of CDs is also wrong.

— Dikkii (@dikkii) April 10, 2013

to which I got the following response:

@dikkii didn't imply that at all. You imply they ALWAYS do the correct thing.

— Side-Line Magazine (@sidelinemag) April 10, 2013

which is, of course, a load of rubbish. Remember, the illegal act is copying. You prove someone is guilty first - you don't just assume that they're going to break the law:

@sidelinemag No I didn't, but I do have the presumption of innocence on my side.

— Dikkii (@dikkii) April 10, 2013

Of course, I also had to point out to them their inconsistency on the ease of copying files from CDs:

@sidelinemag And you did.What was that about copying the files before the resale?

— Dikkii (@dikkii) April 10, 2013

I wasn't expecting this in response:

@dikkii then leave the door of your house open all day long when you are away. Laws are there to protect. Not to assume like you do.

— Side-Line Magazine (@sidelinemag) April 10, 2013

@dikkii sorry, but you don't seem to grasp why there are laws in the first place. So this discussion leads nowhere.

— Side-Line Magazine (@sidelinemag) April 10, 2013

"Leads nowhere". Well, of course it does.  They've assumed that users are always guilty.  Then they've effectively ignored the issue of file storage media outright, denied the presumption of innocence and to top it all off, gone off on some bizarre victim-blaming rant where laws and preventative mechanisms are conflated and people are now responsible for having their own homes burgled.

I think that I might have crossed the line, though, because the next thing I tweeted was this, in a fit of anger...

@sidelinemag Probably not. I hope that you don't tell rape victims who wear short skirts that they were asking for it.
— Dikkii (@dikkii) April 10, 2013

...and that saw me blocked for only the second time that I'm aware of.  What do you think?