I must admit, "compassion fascists" has always been one of my favorites, to describe any number of pseudo victims groups too loud for their own good (like the American Society for Short people or something that, which has taken offense at the self-deprecating jokes Mass. gubernatorial candidate and ex-Clinton cabinet officer Robert Reich has been making--about himself!)

This notion of the rights holder vs. the consumer reminds me of a position I held a while back that got me into some trouble on various message boards.

During the furor over Microsoft's obnoxious Smart Tags "feature," some people objected to them on the grounds that they were a violation of the right of the Web page *creator* to have total control over the rendering of the page. I argued that the focus instead ought to be on whether they provided any value to the *user*; the creator never in fact had that right of control in the first place, and asserting it would amount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater-- you'd be saying that things like user CSS are unethical.
Of course this got me accused of being a useful idiot for Redmond. Some more reasonable people objected to my argument on the grounds that Smart Tags crossed the line between content (which they imagined as inviolable) and presentation (OK to tweak at the client end). But I still think that something like Smart Tags, but under actual control of users rather than advertisers, could be useful-- I wouldn't want something like Mosaic's user annotations or Vannevar Bush's memex hyperlinks dismissed as a violation of the creator's rights.

Matt: I agree with you (unsurprisingly). There's a critical point that the CF's badly want to bury, and most ordinary people seem unaware of: copyright is not a natural, inalienable right, but one mandated by government simply as a means of ensuring that producers of content would get rewarded for their effort. As Macaulay put it, it is a tax to subsidize writers (and, these days, others).

There are other ways of funding writers, lest we forget. Literary patronage probably won't work -- I don't see many millionaires commissioning their favourite novelist to write a book for them, at a cost of $20-30,000 -- but direct tax support is one possibility that's been used; that's how the USSR did it, for example.

But, ultimately, copyright exists purely to keep the readers supplied with fun content. Using copyright to chop the readers off at the feet is a perversion of the original goal.

Remember, it's the readers who matter, not the raft of middle-men who've insinuated themselves into the distribution chain to lap up the cream without contributing anything extra. (Note that I exclude those middle-men who do do something useful.)

Reading Jessica Litman's book Digital Copyright, which includes the legislative history of US copyright law and points squarely at the need for and lack of representation of the public interest at the bargaining table when new legislation is developed for enactment, is definitely worthwhile reading (or re-reading) for anyone thinking about these intellectual property issues.

For example, our alleged right to lend each other copies of books we've bought would not be sancrosanct to "copyright laywers who only ever talk to other copyright lawyers, and have no idea how absurd the things they are talking about appear in the context of normal society." (Quoted from memory, presumed to be fair use.)

I now walk down the street thinking about copyright violations when some fuckwit drives by with his windows down and his radio cranked up. I might not have much power against this guy, but get both ASCAP and BMI on to him with their lawyers and maybe he'll learn a lesson!

I haven't finished reading the book, but so far the easiest path to restoring sanity to the situation appears to be public interest groups hiring competent legal representation and pressuring the US Congress into including them in the negotiations that formulate the wording of US copyright legislation. Creators of "content" do not appear to have acted with public interest in mind in the past, if only because, as Litman points out, in an extremely complex multi-party negotiation between the attorneys, whose job is only to represent the parties who pay their fees, the larger picture is easily lost during the inevitable hyperprecise drawing of lines between those actually present.

Litman also notes that a thousand people with significant knowledge and experience of copyright law, working together on an e-mail list, couldn't formulate a reliable means to dedicate such writing to the public domain. The law, she says, is certainly too complex and obscure to be used as a guide to correct behaviour by citizens.

Back in 1992, this guy argued on rec.arts.sf.written that borrowing books was morally theft:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=99023%40brunix.UUCP

He wasn't really insisting that everyone stop borrowing books, he was arguing more that there are some forms of theft that, while theoretically wrong, are accepted because they're not very socially destructive (and predicting the eventual replacement of piracy by what would now be called a micropayment system). But it wasn't generally agreed that what he was talking about was theft at all.

I was reminded at the time of a throwaway line in John Sladek's novel _Roderick_ about how the developers of a sentient robot could get in trouble for teaching him things without permission from copyright holders for reproduction in an electronic data storage system. The remark has only seemed more relevant with the passage of time.

John Sladek was definitely one of my favourite authors. He saw the underlying absurdity of our collective reality with terrible clarity and a truly incredible sense of humor. Or humorous sense of the incredible.