I actually think we don't have the choice to keep copyright. Copyright is so dysfunctional that it didn't work well even with the highest public support it ever enjoyed. What helped it most was that copying used to be difficult. Now what keeps copyright alive is lingering public support.

In recent decades we've seen support for copyright weaken greatly, thanks in no small part to industry actions to strengthen it. Instead of adapting to the changing situation of copying becoming far, far easier and cheaper to do, they've called for overly restrictive terms that come across as petty, mean, greedy, and not really effective at helping artists make a living, while causing a great deal of inconvenience and sometimes dramatic reduction in value to the users. They've attempted to elevate copyright to some sort of higher right that trumps all other rights. They've tried to tell the public that we can't use new technology because it harms copyright, and they've even had the gall to whine about long standing traditions such as the used book store, demanding that those places be closed. They've been forced to agree that time and format shifting are not illegal, but they begrudge it and still act as if it is immoral. They've gone on well publicized terror campaigns, abusing our legal system to bully ordinary people. They think they have the right and duty to take any action necessary to protect holy copyright. They're so extreme I would not be surprised if some would like to impose the death penalty on pirates. If that wasn't enough, they've also run propaganda campaigns, done their utmost to confuse the public, get people to accept the false proposition that copying is equivalent to stealing. Once that lie is believed, they then try to appeal to our sense of morals. But it's no longer working too well. What kind of delusional, senseless, alternate reality thinking does it take to come up with an idea like Captain Copyright? They really believed a comic superhero could win if not adults, perhaps gullible children over to a hopeless cause like that, and never expected that Captain Copyright would be an instant laughingstock that just looks plain silly and stupid? All that these desperation measures really show is that copyright is badly broken. And not just the implementation, but the concept.

Yes, I think some kind of patronage system is the leading idea to replace copyright. While in past centuries it was a system that only worked for the rich, today, patronage, like copying and many other things, can now be done by the masses.

Evidence is moot because copying should not be a crime, not even a civil infraction. Sharing/copying should be encouraged as a social good. Sharing of knowledge is what made our civilization, and keeps it alive. Voluntarily allow a few elite control over what may be copied and who can copy, and you weaken civilization. Perhaps not fatally, but why take that chance for something so trivial as a broken business model? There are other ways for artists to earn a living.

Disagree. Look how different our culture is to just 3 centuries ago, before the Industrial Revolution and the telegraph. The steam engine was in its infancy, too recently arrived to matter much at that time, and such railroads as existed used wooden rails. There used to be massive business ecosystems that revolved around horses and sailing which hung on until the 1920s and the 1850s respectively. The fastest a message or person could travel between London and NYC was 18 days, if the ship had favorable winds. Average was more like 30 days. Many people wore "homespun" -- made their own clothes at home, from threads they also spun at home, from crops they grew for that purpose. The change from horse to automobile changed NYC dramatically. No more horse manure in the streets, with the accompanying threats of typhoid fever and other diseases vastly reduced.

You could argue that human behavior has not changed much, and won't. I am not so sure of that either. We are evolving at a furious rate. But people are prejudiced against seeing many of them. We used to have duels, as depicted in the start of the Three Musketeers story, and more than stories. The mathematician Galois and politician Alexander Hamilton and his son were killed in duels. After a last surge in the wild west, that custom has faded away, and good riddance. Even so, there were a number of unwritten rules about dueling that made it less deadly, like that the duelist could purposely shoot to miss on the first shot, and somehow signal that the miss was deliberate. Then the other was supposed to also shoot to miss, and then both parties could honorably back down. War could be all out, no holds barred, until the Cold War. Now, total war could kill us all off. We've had to evolve to be less hot headed, and we have. This wasn't a recent change, this has been ongoing for centuries as weapons grew more powerful. Why was the disagreement over slavery settled through the US Civil War, rather than voting? Hotheads helped start that war. The result was a long brutal war that killed close to a million, not a few short battles delivering a knockout blow to end the dispute quickly. The hotheads at least put their lives where their minds were, and ended up dead. Evolution in action. The hotheaded tendencies also ultimately hurt the Confederate war effort. Despite being on the defensive, most Civil War battles feature Confederate assaults that killed more Confederate soldiers than Union ones. But that was the kind of fighting they wanted, manly and showy. There's the whole idea of the "southern gentleman" somehow being more manly than the men of the North. Cooler heads in the South surely realized the war was unwinnable, given the large imbalance in power between the sides, but if they were going to fight, dragging the war out was the better strategy.

Why did OPEC and the Saudis send oil and gas prices downwards in recent weeks? From over $3/gallon in the US to $2.50 and still falling. Maybe batteries and electric cars scare them too?

Publishers wish they had that choice. No, the choice is, will they release it, or will they be left behind when someone else releases it, legally or not? The law can't stop piracy. DRM is just fake security, it can't stop piracy either. Nothing can stop piracy.

Nor should we want piracy stopped. Sharing of knowledge is crucial to our advancement. It is these rent seeking parasites who are the real criminals. Their anti-social hostage taking of knowledge that they did not help create could result in us not discovering something crucial in time to act on it. I'm not talking about mere cures for diseases, I'm talking about knowledge that could save civilization. What if, unknown to us, a big asteroid is headed on a collision course with Earth, and we would have learned of it in time if some damned publisher hadn't locked the knowledge away? And that's only one of the most obvious dangers. More subtle dangers abound, anything from climate change to large scale chemical imbalances, atmospheric and magnetic changes that let radiation through.

Bad enough that we have propagandists of the school of Big Tobacco alive and doing well, we should not make life even easier for them. Copyright is too often misused for censorship, with DMCA takedown notices one of their favorite methods.

No, I do not agree with that defeatism. They have not won. In fact, their cause is a losing cause. And they know it. Secrecy and treaties tried as attempts to bypass legislatures are not signs of power, they're signs of weakness. Enforcement is utterly impractical. No organization has the power to force everyone to obey copyright. It only works somewhat because people are willing to obey it, thinking that doing so helps artists.

What can we do? If we do nothing, they lose. The only way copyright cartels can win is if we help them win. Don't help them. That's all you and everyone else has to do. Don't buy DVDs or CDs, or devices that play them. Don't buy devices that enforce DRM. If you want to help, we can do a bit more than that. Use your public library, and not corporate bookstores (*cough* Amazon *cough*). Help crowdfund art projects. Tell your schools to use open, libre textbooks. Tell the library and politicians you want libraries and schools to have digital options for everything, as soon as possible.

Copyright infringement is not stealing! It should never have been criminalized. It should not even be a civil violation, or thought immoral or wrong. Sharing is a public good, and as such should be encouraged. Yes, encouraged. The government should never have tried to regulate sharing. Restricting copying was a terrible way to raise revenue for any purpose, and as for the stated purpose of enabling producers to profit and thereby encouraging more production, it is failing miserably. Instead, copyright and patent law are frequently misused to censor and suppress the very arts and sciences it was supposed to encourage.

The real greedy scum in this show are the RIAA and MPAA members. Many people, and apparently you too, have swallowed their line of reasoning. They are nothing more than slimy monopolists. They squelch most art to keep the rest small enough for them to manage it all themselves. They own it, or they bury it. In doing so, they hold us all back. Who knows what scientific advances we would have now-- cures for cancer, solutions for famines, and so much more, if they had not created this climate of denial of knowledge.

Want to be careful about criminalizing an action. Governments are all too likely to seize upon that as a revenue opportunity. If the rules are themselves bad or counterproductive, breaking them may be to everyone's benefit, and the only way to get the government to see that a particular change is necessary.

Especially in software engineering, which is notorious for being difficult to estimate, customers are always paranoid that they are getting a bad deal, and often compensate by making excessive demands. They will try to put the screws to you, threatening to take their business elsewhere if you resist their extreme demands. You have to finesse that kind of pressure. Not an outright, flat no, but counterproposals that won't break your company. I've seen more than one business fail because they didn't push back hard enough. Sometimes the customer got what they wanted, at far too low a price and then the vendor folds, and sometimes they didn't because the vendor folded before delivery.

This problem is harder to avoid than it might appear. in one case, the company was screwed by their own employees, that, to be fair, they had put in a bad position. The employees were told that if the company didn't win the contract, they would all be laid off. So what happened? The employees did anything they had to, to win the contract. They lowballed their own company. They severely underestimated the effort and work required, coming up with a plan that called for the job to be finished in just 6 weeks, with another 6 weeks margin of error. Even the customer was doubtful that the work could be done that fast, but the deal was so good, from their point of view, that they accepted. Why management approved it, I'm not sure. Desperation maybe? They blew right past the 3 month mark of course. A deathmarch was nowhere near enough to compensate. After 8 months, they managed to deliver one working part, just enough so that the customer grudgingly decided not to sue them. The customer had little appreciation or sympathy for the vendor's plight. The rest of the work was abandoned. The company lost a lot of money on the deal. One bad deal wasn't fatal, but they made several other bad deals, and those were enough to kill them.

To add to the parent, austerity helps the rich and hurts the poor. How? By driving inflation so far into the dirt that we have deflation. Deflation makes debt more burdensome. If you have debt, and your income gets cut thanks to deflation, it's now harder to pay off your debt. Your material assets also go down in value, so selling to pay off your debt isn't as effective. You may be underwater, your house now worth less than the amount you still owe on the mortgage, and it may be impossible to pay off your debt. Meanwhile, piles of money are worth even more. And it becomes a better idea to sit on piles of money, rather than invest it in business ventures. Trickle down economics is completely backwards. Give the rich more money, through tax breaks and austerity, and they won't respond by creating more jobs. Instead they'll hoard. You have to have some inflation to keep the economy moving. Just how much inflation is the question, but 2% is thought to be too low.

What's so crazy is that we really do have a lot of work to do. We have crumbling infrastructure that's been neglected for years thanks to relentless budget slashing. We also have a big problem with Climate Change. The work is not getting done. In times like these, workers are dirt cheap, but even now employers still want wages pushed further down, and refuse to let the government compete for workers. It's nuts. We may have to see some more bridge collapses, like in Minneapolis, to get some attitudes changed. If the elite aren't careful, we will have riots, like what happened in Greece.

Jeez, again? Do you want the list? There's reason for the hate. Big corporations have shown, time and time again, that they are not to be trusted. When a company like Microsoft rolls out "Trusted Computing" and it turns out that it does the opposite of what the product is named, and they try to pass it off as actually enhancing trust in a roundabout way, they show how insulting, stupid, and treacherous they really are. Same story with Windows Genuine Advantage. They keep trying to conflate security for us with security for them against pirates which somehow includes everyone. By their lights, we're all guilty of piracy. Microsoft still sponsors the Business Software Alliance. And that's hardly the only dirty crap they've pulled. What about file format lock in? Bribing and threatening members of standards bodies to ram through their OOXML garbage? The Microsoft Tax? Embrace, extend, extinguish?

Microsoft thinks we are so stupid that all of us swallow that? I don't like the constant demands to prove that I am not a pirate, or the implication that all copying and downloading is probably piracy and is bad and immoral. The whole intellectual property narrative they pitch is warped and wrong, but there's no convincing them of that. We made them one of the richest companies in history, and the founder Bill Gates into the richest person in the world, but that's not good enough for them, no sir! In spite of all the wealth we've paid them, they've worked themselves into a fury, feeling all wronged over the "theft" they believe they constantly suffer from those dirty pirates. Do I need to keep looking over my shoulder, to check if the BSA is coming for me today? Innocent until proven guilty, unless you're a Windows user, then it's the other way around. The only reason many people continue to do business with a company with such a bad attitude is force. Many feel that they still have to use MS Office. But love MS? No.

Any place could be linked to child porn. Poles are often used to hold signs, for rewards for missing dogs, lawn mowing services and that sort of thing. If someone posts some kind of solicitation for child porn on a pole, is the city that owns the pole somehow liable or responsible? Of course not. If the city also puts signs up on the pole, advertising their services, does that change things? No. Why should it be any different for a web site? So it's not useful to drag child porn into the discussion. That's like saying water is wet. And applying a double standard. Person A got wet, and it's no big deal, but person B also got wet, and on the Internet, oooo!

Better is to compare the Pirate Bay to a dating site which runs ads. The site is profiting off of love, showing ads to people who are trying to find a date. Nothing immoral about that. But imagine that the dating site is trying to operate under a very prudish public and government who doubts the morality of their activities, accusing them of enabling prostitution, and constantly threatening not to go after prostitution only, but to shut the whole thing down under the thought that it's all prostitution anyway. Law enforcers are egged on by powerful interests that aren't interested in justice, but rather are interested in eliminating competition any way they can. Dirty pool.

But they are also spreading a political message, saying that they see nothing wrong with prostitution. There's nothing wrong with that either. We do have freedom of speech. If the users of the site turn towards prostitution or are already mostly prostitutes and "Johns", does that somehow change the morality? No! To shut down the site is about the same as tearing out a pole because someone advertised sexual services on it. Ripping out the pole is not going to stop anything, solve any problem, or convince anyone of the error of their ways. There are other poles. They can't all be torn out, and even if they could, people could use walls instead. Also, tearing out poles is damaging. Innocent 3rd parties, perhaps trying to find their lost doggies, will be harmed.

The Pirate Bay should be left alone. They didn't do anything wrong. We know very well that they are being made into scapegoats for what their users do. Why don't authorities go after the users, as they ought since those are the people who are actually guilty of violating the law as it stands currently? They've tried, and managed to torture a few victims, make examples of them, rather like the Inquisition used to do. But they've seen that they simply can't do it. They would have to charge half the world with piracy. If they can't scare people away from copyright infringement, or convince people it's immoral, no force available to the law can stop it. No technical measure can stop it either. They are trying very hard now to save face, refusing to admit that they can't stop it, refusing to talk about it, and still hoping that somehow the public will come around to their viewpoint. It won't happen. They are definitely refusing to admit that they are actually the ones in error. And that the law will have to change. The Inquisition discredited itself centuries ago. It was a stupid idea from the start, trying to frighten and bully people into being better Christians according to their narrow definition of what it meant to be a good Christian, which excluded Protestants. Today, Protestants enjoy the same rights and protections as Catholics, and the Inquisition is properly seen as at best a tragic mistake and at worst a vehicle for sadists and torturers to have a little fun. Now here we are, repeating that mistake but this time with copyright law.

You touch on the perils of our unprecedented increase in our power to control our environment. We do all kinds of things not because they are a good idea, but out of instinctive prejudice. For instance, mowing the grass. One idea I have heard is that we like grass short because poisonous snakes can't hide in it. We couldn't do much to satisfy that prejudice before the advent of powered mowers, just took way too much labor. Now that we can mow quickly, we do so with a vengeance, to the detriment of biodiversity, the environment, and even our own health and well-being. We've even anointed a few species of grass, shrubs and trees as desirable, and call all other plants weeds. In many cities, it's even against the law to let the grass get too high. Crazy.

I thought of fireplaces as primarily entertainment devices, but I like your take on it better. So many people really like to watch the pretty flames. I confess I like it too, but not so much that I'm willing to work for it. Once again, we have gained the power to have far more fire than we need, and have let our love of fire lead us into unthinking wastefulness.

Light is another of our prejudices. We are not nocturnal. Darkness has become associated less with rest and sleep and more with crime and evil, and plain inconvenience. In our eternal drive for more security, we've done all in our power to banish darkness. Who's afraid of the dark? We are. We have streetlights everywhere. Keeps crime down, they say. Maybe we should not drive at night? What if it was the custom to not drive at all in the dark, and cars did not have headlights because they are not needed? Before artificial lighting, people didn't travel much at night. And now? We don't have to quit when the sun sets, we can keep working. We could do that before the incandescent light, with candles, but candles were inconvenient enough that we usually didn't. Now, it's so easy to stay up late. We don't give ourselves enough sleep, and we're finding out what that does to us. It could be one of the factors causing the obesity epidemic. One popular idea for the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire is lead poisoning. Lot of the emperors behaved in just plain crazy ways that could be explained by mental problems caused by lead poisoning. Doubtless most of the elite of Roman society suffered the same affliction. In the future, will America decline and fall because of sleep deprivation empowered by artificial lighting?

Even indoor climate control may not be pure, unadulterated goodness. I've read that it's actually healthier to swing a bit with the seasons. Don't try to force the house to be a constant 75F year round. Let it drop to 70F in the winter, and rise to 80F in the summer, or more.

So many of our modern conveniences have non-obvious dangers. Bisphenol A sure is convenient, but now we are more aware of problems with it. We would be wiser to fear those dangers more, and worry less about other dangers, particularly foolish ones like that gay marriage could somehow be a threat to the family.

That's what I want. These "smart" homes are the wrong kind of smart, when it means stuffing the house full of expensive gadgetry of little practical use. A house like that is designed to extract the maximum money from home buyers, by dazzling them with ostentatious "tech light" junk. It's not actually meant to be more liveable or something.

One luxury house built around 1880 that I looked over was full of hokey gadgetry that makes us all laugh today. A laundry room with a wood burning heater for the irons (sad irons) so the residents could have the wrinkles removed from their clothes the moment they were out of the wash! This house was built with gas lights, and that was later upgraded to incandescent lighting. Curiously, it had some silly centralized control. By the front door was a large panel of switches for turning on and off all the lights in the house. Does that sound sort of familiar, like maybe even "smart"? 19th century style "smart" home? Also in a room near the front door was a large clock that tracked phases of the moon and sunrise and sunset times. Today, there's an app for that, no need to waste valuable floor space on such a clunky apparatus.

As far as low hanging fruit goes, housing in the US is a target rich environment. There are so many stupidities in how homes are currently constructed. Yeah, LED lighting is good, but you know what? A skylight is even better. Also, so many people in the biz, including the buyers, are really stuck on antiquated and exremely inefficient construction methods. Don't have a brick layer work with tiny bricks, at the least use cinder blocks! Even better, just make entire walls off site, truck them in, and erect them. Can have the walls up in hours. That method works great for commercial buildings, why can't the same thing be done for residential? No reason at all, it's just inertia and custom. Also explains why we still have fireplaces everywhere. Ben Franklin complained about their inefficiency and wastefulness all the way back in the 18th century, and here we are today, still shoving those things into new homes! Then there's the roof. Why, why do people just have to have a complicated roofline? More expensive and less durable at the same time.

No, you don't get it. (A child porn comparison? Really? Weak, dude, really weak. Maybe you could try for a more accurate and less loaded analogy?)

The Pirate Bay is helping the world see that copyright does not work. They aren't parasites, copyright is a bad business model. And, artists will not starve without copyright! There are other ways to earn a living from art.

The real parasites are the Big Media companies who stole works from the public domain by extending copyright again and again, despite that flying in the face of the public interest. They helped cause this backlash through their greed. Copyright might have hung on longer otherwise. Don't think for a moment that we have forgotten being forced to pay the Microsoft tax, and in the "no good deed goes unpunished" department, purchasing media like good citizens only to be rewarded by being forced to watch unskippable commercials at the start, and being told we can't format shift or time shift the media we bought, and even fed propaganda against used record stores and libraries! One of the worst offenses was Sony's CD with the rootkit. They're so damned arrogant that they think their precious copyrights are more valuable than their customers' data? Why aren't you complaining about them? Why do you pass over their far worse crimes and thefts in silence, while screaming about the supposed immoralities and thefts committed by perfectly ordinary citizens? Do you love Disney that much?

Most of all, these antiquated laws are harming us all. We should have had a real digital public library by now. Instead, the works availabe online are scattered, fragmentary, and mostly unsearchable. Good work is being overlooked and buried, for the sake of Mickey Mouse.