... the biggest risk you face is showing off your capability to the locals.

My own experience and the opinion of those (business people) I spoke to is that the Chinese don't really care if you are using VPN of some sort, as long as they don't suspect you are involve in some kind of dissidence or other "subversive" activity.

For what it's worth, I have used SSH tunnelling to my own tinyproxy installation. I enjoyed moderately high speed from my hotel rooms and from Starbucks.

Incidentally, I didn't set this up to bypass censorship. I use the proxy any time I am at a wireless hotspot for obvious security reasons. It also enables me to use my credit card overseas without being flagged as a risk because as my IP address always jives with my credit card postal address.

But here's the problem: the very concept of "marginal cost of production" is nearly made obsolete by computers and the Internet. It used to be that the effort to produce the copies was proportional to the number of copies being made. Not any more.

Actually, marginal cost is not made obsolete. It is very much applicable. But a low marginal cost and the larger audience that the Internet affords should dictate a lowering of the selling price.

The RIAA and its ilk are interfering with this natural process by keeping prices artificially high. The ease at which you can pirate a book or CD today is an opportunity but the incentive to pirate should not be coupled to that.

(Why else would we have spam?)

Spam is not a product for sale and is only part of the cost of whatever is being sold, so I'm not sure why you think that is relevant.