Let’s compare.  Both of these videos are technically marketing pieces. I would know as I’ve made a few hundred marketing videos in my career.  But what is each video selling, and how is each doing its job? The video on the left is produced by Kim Dotcom and is selling ...

To those who comment unceasingly that copyright and anti-piracy efforts are exclusively about big labels and big studios, meet the owners of ESL.  This is an indie label that has a blanket 50/50 deal with all of its artists.  Eric Hilton comes from the technology sector, so they’re anything but Web luddites.  They are literally telling young, talented musicians they ...

If we define culture in the context of pro-piracy utopianism as described in Part I, then we’re really talking about movies, TV shows, music, and fiction literature. So, the first distinction I would make between these media and that which we’ve defined as information is that these are technically luxury goods, to which there is no natural right.  In the U.S., we generally agree ...

The defenders of online piracy (the polite ones anyway) often paint a vision of a future that, on paper, sounds very attractive indeed.  This, from one commenter on my blog, is a good representation of a sensibility we encounter all the time: “Imagine a world where you have access to all the world’s books, movies, music, the entirety of the ...

Imagine your diet will henceforth be determined by the tastes of a majority of American ten-year-olds.  This may sound as unlikely as it does unappetizing, but the prospect is not really all that different from the basis for at least one of the arguments of the copyleft crowd with regard to distributing creative content via the Web.  One assumption behind DIY ...