UPDATE: Yow! Lileks is back in the pink and gives this guy a righteous fisking.

ADDENDUM: I wrote this in response to Kenny B.'s e-mail about how legitimate copyright-reformers are suffering the same fate that the Democrats have:

It's sort of funny how much argument these days can be boiled down to "wanting to get something for free"; just as thoughtful Democrats with a realistic plan for national health and growth find it hard to differentiate themselves from the throngs of sign-waving angry youth who essentially base all their politics on wanting the government to condone and sponsor them getting more sex and drugs and not having to have jobs, the people who want some reasonable copyright reform to reflect how pop culture has changed in the last couple of centuries are hard to hear over the din of those who want nothing more noble than to be able to keep collecting MP3s without having to worry about getting sued.

    The argument over copyright w.r.t. content that can be freely copied and distributed inevitably goes down any of several roads. The "free beer" types all talk about how if they copy an MP3, nobody's lost anything; yeah, they got something for nothing, but nobody has lost access to what they took, so what's the problem? Shouldn't we all be celebrating this triumph over the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Whereas the counterargument is that what's lost is exclusivity, which is the actual product; they've diluted the value of the good by copying it, and breached not a law against theft of material objects, but an unspoken agreement that only certain people should have access to certain kinds of information, gated by a fee paid to some keymaster, even though in the real world such a process is an entirely voluntary matter. And that gives libertarians hives, even if it is the coldly consistent view of things.

    I don't know what would be a good way to resolve the matter in the courts, in a way that's consistent with libertarian values and yet doesn't totally wreck the market. The law has to come down either on the side of the content consumers, or the content producers; they can make file-sharing legal like in Canada (and pay artists out of blanket taxation), protecting consumers and incentivizing them to consume more for free—or they can keep trying to prosecute file-sharing and thus defend the producers, by making production the activity that people are incentivized to do. Like taxing sales versus taxing income. What do you want to be the more attractive thing for people to do?

    I tend to come down on the side of defending the producers, because I like the idea of incentivizing production rather than consumption (it's the only way wealth is created, the thing that labor-theory-of-value types always ignore). But that's what we've been doing, and it's none too easy to put into practice as technology keeps changing—and it's harder every day to sell the idea to kids who are growing up never having known a world without KaZaA.