Re:I don't like the term "pirate". (Score 1)

The countries that succeeded most in the Industrial age were those where it was easy to set up industry. The countries that succeeded most in the agricultural age were those where it was easy to farm. The tribes that succeeded most in the bronze age were those where it was easy to smelt/trade bronze. And so forth.

Information is the most important commodity now. Artificial barriers to its exchange will therefore be crippling.

And the environment still suffers from a lack of appropriate artificial barriers to industrialization, and people still suffer from an inadequate regard for human dignity in some heavily industrialized nations (sweatshops, anyone?) The free market solves most problems. It does not solve all, and so some sort of artificial checks are in fact needed. That does not mean that everything connected with DRM (or whatever) is legitimate. It does mean that lassez faire-ism does not deal well with problems whose consequences do not show up in the short-to-mid term bottom line (e.g., there's no immediate business consequence to loss of privacy).