“As Robert Levine describes in his book Free Ride, down this road lies a barren culture with lots of dancing kittens on YouTube but no infrastructure that can nurture future artists. Piracy enablers stress the need to maintain incentives for investment in tech companies. But maybe business models that depend on using copyrighted material for free should not attract investment in the first place.”
(via The Nation)
SOPA wasn’t a good idea, but not for most of the reasons it’s opponents said out loud. It’s number one issue was that it was completely redundant. All the tools to do what it’s authors thought they wanted already exist. It would have only served to muddy the waters. At the same time Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing and the other sites that went dark in protest weren’t doing it to stand up and be counted for the sake of liberty, they were one and all worried about their business model. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it’s a little deceitful for them to portray it as anything else.
