No doubt you're right - but the difficult question is not whether the US and other countries support opposition movements for cynical reasons. Of course they do. The difficult question is whether those movements can still be legitimate. Was everyone who protested after the Iranian elections paid by the CIA? If not, do they still have a legitimate right to demand change, or does US involvement taint every opponent of the regime by association?

While I broadly agree with Shirky that free communication between people in authoritarian societies is a more important driver of social change than communication with the outside world, we have to recognise that the two can't be neatly separated. One of the reasons people currently use circumvention tools is to reach social media sites where they can communicate with other people who are behind the same firewall. That's a crazy situation for two reasons.

First, it turns commercial entities like Facebook, which couldn't give a fuck about fighting censorship, into vital tools for opposition movements. If there's one thing the WikiLeaks/Anonymous bunfight has shown, it's that internet companies aren't mature enough as institutions to balance their short term political and financial interests against their long term responsibility to protect free speech. We can't rely on them.

Second, it means that all communication between people in authoritarian societies has to cross the border twice, even though borders are among the easiest places to monitor and control. If you wanted to design a communication system for prisoners in neighbouring cells, I doubt your design sketch would begin, "First get the message to a trusted third party outside the prison."

Unfortunately, moving the social media sites inside the firewall doesn't solve the problem. Take China for example. There are already Chinese equivalents of Facebook, Twitter, and other firewalled sites, but they're subject to a variety of pressures to police their users, especially those that start to form political groups. If Facebook isn't going to stand up for Chinese dissidents then Baidu certainly won't.

It's also pretty tough to maintain social media sites outside the firewall that are dedicated to supporting opposition movements - such sites are susceptible to DDoS attacks and subtler forms of infiltration and monitoring, as in the Ghostnet case. The basic problem is that the web wasn't designed or implemented with censorship-resistance in mind. Let's not ask anyone to bet their life on the security of Wordpress.

So what do we do? In my opinion we need new tools. Tools that are designed with security in mind, that don't rely on servers inside or outside the firewall, that can be used from an internet cafe or a mobile phone, that don't produce easily recognised traffic patterns, that can be used to hold meetings, plan rallies, or just tell jokes - in short, to talk to people you trust without revealing anything to people you don't. We already have some partial solutions we can learn from - Freenet, WASTE, txtmob, CryptoSMS, Gazzera, Retroshare, SocialVPN - and a million research papers that never made it as far as implementation. Now we need some specs, some code, many eyes and regular backups. :-)

I agree, there's a sad lack of vision in America today. The whole country seems bitter and afraid. Nobody talks about principles. Of course the same's true in Europe, but I feel like we've been suffering from that disease for longer - America used to be different. Perhaps it's a symptom of post-imperial decline, which America's only just beginning to enter. Or perhaps I've fallen for the golden age myth after all - Americans must have been bitter during the Great Depression, afraid during the Cold War - why did we ever think they were different?

When the iPad was first announced, I dismissed it as an insignificant device - little more than a giant phone or a netbook without a keyboard.

How wrong I was.

What Jobs & Co have developed is nothing less than a fucking time machine. The iPad offers to transport us back to the comfort and safety of the mid-twentieth century. A time when citizens' minds were untroubled by pornographic smut or government leaks. A time when the news was delivered to your doorstep once a day, and you were happy to pay for the privilege. A time when anyone who disagreed with the policies designed to keep them safe was quietly taken away and never heard from again.

What next from these technological wizards? Here are my predictions:

• The iDollar, a digital currency based on the rock-solid security of the Gold Standard.
• The iCadillac, a car the size of a house, with stylish white-wall tires and a DRM-equipped stereo.
• The iWife, a lifelong companion and domestic servant who will teach your iKids strict gender roles and other Apple-approved family values.
• The iCigar, a relaxing treat for gentlemen, with no proven medical link to cancer.
• The iMac, a dapper yet practical wrap-around raincoat, available in beige, light brown, or camel.

I'm truly excited to be living in the future my grandparents dreamed of!

When was the last Northern Ireland-related terrorist incident outside of Northern Ireland? Looks to me like it was the Ealing car bomb, nine years ago.

Getting out of Afghanistan won't bring an end to violence in Afghanistan - but it will make it a lot harder for people to justify spreading that violence abroad.

For those without access to the journal Information Economics and Policy, I've uploaded the original paper here.

That'll be $5, please.

Sorry, I don't really buy the argument that copying a fashion design is as easy as copying a photograph - have you every tried to reproduce a skillfully made piece of clothing?

In fact, most of the items in your first list require considerable skill, investment, or both to reproduce (exception: rules of games), whereas most of the items in the second list don't (exceptions: choreography, architecture). While I don't believe that current copyright laws strike the right balance between protecting artists from cheap copies, allowing audiences to benefit from cheap copies, and encouraging creative derivative works, I can understand why copyright would be more important for things that are easy to copy than for things that aren't - and your lists seem to show that copyright applies almost exclusively to things that can be copied without much skill.

I absolutely agree with you, however, that the argument about protecting creativity is badly framed. The question should not be, "Is the work creative?", but rather, "Does the work require creativity to copy?"

Reframing the question in that way suggests an interesting alternative rationale for copyright law: if we want to maximise the benefit of copyright to creative people as a whole, we should remove protection from anything that requires creativity to reproduce, in order that those who reproduce it can access it as freely as possible, maximising the number of creative reproductions. Furthermore, we should create exceptions to copyright for substantially creative derivative works.

For example, copyright would be removed for songs and musical scores, since performance requires both creativity and skill, but it would be maintained for recordings of songs, since replicating a recording requires neither.

But then we get into some interesting grey areas. Is a recording that samples another recording sufficiently creative to justify an exception to the copyright protection of the sampled work? What about a mashup of two recordings, with no original material? What about a mixtape?

Fortunately, we have judges and case law to deal with grey areas like this: after an initial period of boundary-testing I hope we'd establish some rules of thumb about what's "creative use" of a copyrighted work and what's "mere replication". Once we reached that point we'd have a system that encouraged substantially more creativity than the current system, much of it based on the forms of creative reuse that fans of Larry Lessig's Free Culture (myself among them) like to point out as being ill-served by the current system.

Do you have any alternative to bombing other then letting the terrorist thrive to plot more attacks and put more innocent lives in danger?

So your justification for killing innocent people is that not doing so would put innocent people in danger? Want to take a minute to ponder that logic?

I mean seriously, what is the other options here?

This might sound a little extreme, but the other option is not to invade and occupy an ungovernable country. Fine, the U.S. wanted to destroy Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan. That was accomplished by the end of 2001. What the fuck are large numbers of NATO troops still doing in Afghanistan nine years later?

Does the U.S. seriously think that "nation building" is either (a) possible, or (b) going to keep Al Qaeda out of the country? If so, I've got bad news: nation building is not possible (Afghanistan has never been a nation state and won't be one in the next 100 years, political power is divided among too many tribal, ethnic and religious groups), and nation building is not going to keep Al Qaeda out (Bin Laden is quite happy sheltering in Pakistan, which is, guess what, one of the most advanced nation states in the region). The only sane solution is for the U.S. to go the fuck home and launch the occasional special forces raid against any Al Qaeda bases that might emerge... which does not require a permanent presence on the ground or widespread civilian casualties.

That is the other option.

Gah, accidentally modded you Redundant instead of Insightful... replying so my moderation gets discarded. Bloody trackpads. ;)

For those who aren't familiar with Shoreditch, this music video provides a quick primer.

The plaintiff has not proven distribution in this case, so the damages in question are for copying the songs, not for distributing them.

Please consider uploading some information about Cisco's involvement to WikiLeaks (or any other site that you trust to preserve your anonymity).

Pressuring American companies to end their involvement in internet censorship would be more effective in the long term than a 40ft shipping container full of Kindles, and would help to undermine some of the "USA good, China evil" hypocrisy surrounding this issue.

Are you talking about restriction regarding books, or all areas of life? I feel a Libertarian wind blowing.

Hey, that wind is private property - I hope you've signed a service contract with the wind supplier. We don't need no commie freeloaders feelin' our Libertarian wind without paying!

China's kind of like the neighbor kid that knocks on my door and offers to mow the lawn for $20. It's not that I can't mow myself, but when it's so cheap to pay someone else why do it myself? If he ever didn't show up for a couple weeks I'd just do it myself, but as long as he's offering I'll keep paying him.

So you keep paying the kid to mow your lawn for a couple of years. One day he shows up with his own lawnmower. No point having your own mower when it's not being used, so you put your mower on eBay. A few years later you lose your job at the lawnmower factory and find yourself mowing lawns for $20 a time, of which $5 goes to the kid for borrowing his mower.

Oh, also the kid is exerting increasingly firm control over the South China Sea, but I'm not sure how to work that into the analogy. ;-)