That's the crucial point where the analogy fails completely. You cannot be billed for something you have never agreed with in the first place, and at least in Europe you also cannot enforce a contract unilteraly by showing it to someone or hide it in the source code.

Regarding monetization of the web, I think you're a bit confused there. There is no right for businesses to sustain moronic business models that are not sustainable, and I really don't give a shit about whether and how people could make money from the web when I and others are using ad blockers. I have a right to determine what is displayed on my computer screen, and I sincerely hope that all ad-sponsored websites someday will go the way of the Dodo.

The poor sod might have thought that US government authorities don't really care, since the US government is the largest sponsor of the Egypt military anyway.

Cory Doctorow is wrong. That's an old platitude. There are no such rules in writing. Science fiction can be about anything you want and can convey any message you like. It can be pure entertainment, philosophy, hypothetical scenarios, fascination with engineering, etc. Whatever you want as an author and whatever you are capable of transmitting in your writing.

Of course, publishers want to sell books according to their profile. So if you want to sell your books you'll have to fit the profile of the publisher, and if you want to sell lots of books, they should at least create some suspense or attract readers by its mastery of language, or be about a currently "hot" topic. But that's an entirely different matter.

I cannot think of a single good fiction novel that is only entertainment. The idea of fiction is that you have less restrictions as a writer to make the point and develop the story you want to, be that for entertainment or other purposes.

But it's true that there is a mass market of fiction books that is intended only to entertain, and that's totally okay. It's just not a "rule".

Exactly. It's a bit like traveling to other countries and foreign cultures today. Languages, daily habits and circumstances of living can be very different from the outside, but once you've get to know them people are essentially the same everywhere - worrying about jobs, love, passions, etc.

If you'd be catapulted into the 15th Century, you'd be able to connect immediately to the people without any problems except for the language and some external habits (norms of politeness, classes, way to dress) that can indeed change drastically over time. (And you cannot change the latter arbitrarily as an author, because you would not be understood and you're writing for today.)

It would be kind of pointless because there is nothing to "cyber-attack" in North Korea.

I don't know. While I personally don't really care which programming language is used and have no quirks with programming in Python if I had to (I've done it in the past), it's not easy to see why Python became so popular except for confirming the widely held suspicion that only lousy programming languages can become popular. Even Ada has higher productivity, testability and maintainability, and it's as fast as C.

To make things worse, Python is also slower than Ruby, Scala, Clojure, Racket, Common Lisp (sbcl), Rust, FreePascal, PHP, ....

Also, explain to me why anyone should use an interpreted programming language when even CommonLisp was already compiled in the 80s?

It's also the slowest language, at least among the common ones. In fact it's so slow that it's even a lousy replacement for Basic, because most Basic implementations are faster. And it's not standardized.

Exceptions???

I very much doubt that a high salary for an Ada engineer is an exception, it would be suprising if there are any low-wage Ada jobs at all. The same goes for COBOL, without doubt.

Not just the North Koreans, though ... also about half of all people who ever had the misfortune of owning a Sony device. Or wait, make it 2/3 ...

That's not only wrong, pirates would also not give a fuck about it. Piracy was alive and prosper well before Bittorrent was invented and *any* fast content delivery system can (and will, if needed) be used for piracy. People pirated video games on floppy disks and tapes.

If you want to stop piracy, you need to close the Internet (i.e., prohibit TCP/IP connections except those by content providers) and strictly prohibit all mass storage media like hard disks, USB sticks, CDs and DVDs, and Blueray. But if you really want to make sure, it's probably best to also prohibit computers because people will always look for a way to transfer files.

As long as the majority of the world population does not have enough money to buy the content anyway, piracy will always exist.

The only piece of shit here is you.

NZ courts have already decided that the seizure was illegal.

Oh wait, you mean the US of A courts, the ones who claim to have legal authority over a German living in New Zealand whose company was registered in Hong Kong?

He's guilty of absolutely nothing, and he's actually fairly nice guy. But none of this will help him ...

That's splitting hairs. Without his legal team, he had been extradited by now.

Highly doubtful. He offered free access to delete content, a system similar to the one that Youtube has implemented, and had an additional team of employees to deal with copyright complaints. Three different legal teams checked the business model and gave him the thumbs up.

I find it very unlikely that he's actually guilty of criminal copyright infringement. You would think that this law is designed for people who actually infringe copyright, but apparently not in the US. If he's guilty, then thousands of file hosting companies that are still in business would be guilty as well, and the executive boards of the biggest copyright infringers on earth Google and Youtube would all have to be in maximum security prison by now.

The problem is, however, that by "guilty" you might mean "guilty according to the faulty undue process of corrupt US justice, acting on illegaly obtained evidence and on the basis of breaking the laws of other souvereign nations". Well, in that case, he might indeed be guilty, although he still will still be able to make a pretty good case. The US does in fact not even have jurisdiction over his company, they had to resort to mind-boggling legal tricks to still be able to reach him -- tricks that no souvereign nation should allow to be pulled, but apparently some of them like New Zealand and UK are nothing more than additional states of the US.