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 ...
Originally published on the blog at Copyright Alliance, and the folks at Techdirt were insulted. A few months ago, our Facebook walls were adorned with images of “pink slime,” the nickname given to Mechanically Separated Meat (MSM) that is now the subject of controversy. And although claims that pink slime is currently used in McDonald’s nuggets aren’t true, who isn’t ...
This is a piece I wrote as a guest post for The Copyright Alliance. It got the folks over at TechDirt into a lather, but I suspect that’s because it wasn’t read or read very carefully by most of them. Not only have Copyright and Free Speech coexisted peacefully for the entire history of the Republic, but I would ...