The Ownership Society in the Digital Age.

[leftlibdem420]

1. It's the fault of the liberal and the social democratic left...

In many countries, including the United States, the moderate left has done nothing to stand up for the rights of consumers with respect to the imposition of draconian copyright laws and curtailments on the rights of consumers. In Canada, it's now even illegal to jailbreak an iPhone, though to be fair the law in question was passed by a right-wing government that got elected because of idiots, some unfortunately on the left, who oppose electoral reform.

As long as business interests behave this way, consumers have the moral right to ignore any and all copyright laws and to hide themselves from the people charged with enforcing them by any means necessary. I would even go as far as to argue that t here is a moral duty to intentionally infringe on Disney's copyrights to punish them for the damage they've done by bribing "Democrats" like ex-KKK member Earnest Hollings to lobby for obscene copyright term extensions. Unfortunately, I have too often seen people even on this very website who have come out in favour of things like absurdly long copyright terms, the criminalization of technologies used to pick digital locks, the provision of legal protection for regional lock technologies, bans on parallel importing, and punitive damages for non-commercial infringement, and it's something that Skinner and the admin ought to treat in the same way as opposition to equal marriage and to a woman's right to choose. No sane progressive can support these things, and no privately-run progressive website should welcome such reactionary and ignorant "discourse".