Among the standard responses to any proposal to mitigate online piracy is an insistence that it just cannot be stopped. Perhaps not entirely. But it can be starved. That was the underlying goal of SOPA, but people decided the criminal sites deserved the money they were making because freedom. As many readers know, the piracy universe is still largely supported ...
Internet companies and digital rights activist organizations have spent considerable resources over many years promoting the idea that we should think of the Web as an extra-legal territory. From Barlow’s evangelical Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996 to current debates over the relevance and meaning of an “open” Internet, one recurring theme that still holds sway among many ...
