Where to even begin...
I barely made it past the first paragraph of this before I was ready to start throwing things at the screen. The whole thing went off the rails when the author started going on about "consuming". We do not, and can not, consume copyrighted works, because the verb "consume" means that the thing being consumed is used up, gone, no longer there. When you read a book, an article, a blog post, it's still there when you finish. When you listen to a song, it's still there after you stop listening to it. When you watch a movie, it's still there when you're done. None of those things can be consumed.
And don't even get me started on the use of the pretentious quasi-legal term "intellectual property". Heaven forbid that writers should use a plain word like "copyright", for then anyone might know what they mean.
As for the rest of the thing, this brave new organisation has done nothing but invent a simplistic narrative where the issue of copyright is presented as a debate between virulently anti-copyright freetards on the one side and heartless greedy megacorporates on the other, whereupon they plant themselves in the middle and name themselves a reasonable compromise.
All of us here know the origins of copyright - a limited monopoly granted to authors and composers and artists so that they have an incentive to do their work, and the public gets more works thanks to the creators having more incentive to create. But here is the reality of the current copyright debate - on one hand you have a vast repository of work of literature and art that people want to see, read, hear, and use in creating their own works, some copyrighted, some whose copyright has expired, and on the other, you have the internet, a vast globe-spanning platform where anyone can copy any book, music, or art and make it available to millions in seconds. And in the middle, you have the copyright system, designed in the era of manual printing presses, which governments find themselves unable to enforce.
The actual debate then is this - what role does copyright play in a world where copyright can't be enforced without massively intrusive spying on what people do on their computers and cellphones, yet where there is more demand for the works of writers, artists, and composers than there has ever been? Can we re-make copyright for the internet era, or can we come up with something different, a new way to reward artists and writers and composers that allows for unlimited private copying?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
