It gives me hope to read pieces such as John Perry Barlow's The Crime of Sharing. Hope that such a clearly presented argument might actually start the ball rolling towards some change in the right direction.

Over the last several years, the entertainment industry has railroaded a number of laws and treaties through Washington and Geneva that are driving us rapidly toward a future in which the fruits of the mind cannot be shared. Instead they must be purchased—not from the human beings who created them in the first place, but only from the media megaliths.

Of course, the justification for this tightened control is the Internet, which ironically, grew almost entirely from sharing. Imagine how different things would be today if IBM had maintained proprietary control over the architecture of the personal computer, or if Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn had created a highly proprietary company called TCP/IP, Inc. What if Tim Berners-Lee had decided to take out a software patent on the World Wide Web?

The fact that the Internet makes it possible for individuals to distribute their intellectual creations directly to consumers terrifies the old industrial intermediaries. At the same time, the Internet gives intermediaries the potential to extract a fee from every single repetition of an expression. Unfortunately, this infringes on the time-honored practice of fair use.