One more thing on that...

I'd love to share more ideas about ownership and property, but we're winding things down.  So, just indulge me a bit more on copyright.

The core of the issue, in my view, is that technology has altered the economies of scale in information reproduction so drastically that we have all become de facto publishers.  Laws that were clearly written as industrial regulations suddenly apply to individuals.  The right to own, share, or alter the information we use was never was never codified because it was assumed; it was taken for granted. Nowadays, these freedoms threaten the sanctioned monopolies of powerful interests, so they get crushed.

This redirection of the law is not inevitable, nor is it harmless.  We now face the prospect of all information going behind a pay wall. Our complicity is monitored and enforced by programs installed, often against our will, on the machines we depend on.  This is an affront to the notion of an open society.  It is entrenched by propaganda that teaches us to view ourselves as consumers (not citizens) within economies (not societies) where "free" means "without payment" rather than "without restriction."  (Richard Stallman points out the semantic difference between the phrases "free beer" and "free speech.")

Consider public libraries.  What is their purpose? What values inspired our predecessors to create them?  This is not a rhetorical question.  Clearly, libraries were put in place to (among other things) remove the barriers to shared knowledge.  Those barriers are being rebuilt stronger than ever.

Books were once so valuable that the were chained to desks.  Now they are so cheap that we are being chained.