this is just a piece of the puzzle, but a very important puzzle. Imagine a Player Piano society where those who are the winners own all thc opyrights, not as a group, but by members of thsi group. You can see how copyright becomes a fence between inside and outside, and further polarizes society. My view is that people on the inside are doing all they can to make sure most property is inside the circle. (I imagine the circles as being Dantesque).
For my Guardian column today, I took the LibDem Lords to task for introducing legislation that would ban web-lockers because these services allow for copyright infringement. I won't argue that copyright infringement takes place on services like Google Docs and YouSendIt, but the reason that these services are great for piracy is that they're great for privacy: the same feature that lets me use YouSendIt to send a family member a private video of my kid in the bath is the feature that lets a copyright violator to share a pirated movie. And you can't get rid of the copyright violations without eliminating our ability to privately share large files for legitimate reasons.
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