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Let’s All Sit and Watch the Moneygoround
I suppose it’s just indicative of the dreary, authoritarian, secrecy-obsessed times we live in: less than a week after finding out about Microsoft’s efforts to crush all innovation in the software industry by suing the Open Source movement out of existence, I learn that there is a movement afoot to throttle access to artistic works by excessively extending copyright. Bills to extend copyright are already pending in Great Britain, and on our side of the pond, no less than an authority than the Paper of Record is editorializing in favor of extending American artistic copyrights – forever.
A pox on all their houses. Curses and fulminations upon money-grubbing whores and corporate swine who want to reduce all artistic, cultural, and technological progress to a dollar figure. How far have we sunk when this slavish dedication to “the market” and “free enterprise” leads some shitheads to believe that it’s perfectly acceptable for someone to monopolize access to an idea, in perpetuity?
But maybe, just maybe, the backlash against the privatization of information and information access has begun. A bipartisan bill currently working its way through the Maine state legislature would make my home state the first in the nation to legally enforce net neutrality. As the concept of protecting net neutrality gains widespread notice, more public figures are taking up the banner, most notably Al Gore.
(You know, it’s a damn shame that this Al Gore didn’t run for President in 2000. If he had, he would’ve won by a landslide, and the unmitigated disaster that is the Bush Presidency never would’ve happened…)
