A Nation Divided Over Piracy

Wired News:

"In Fleischer's world, the Motion Picture Association of America and rights holders are attacking digital technology itself, trying to hang on to an outdated model. 'It's an inevitability that digital data will be copied.... The alternative to peer-to-peer piracy is person-to-person piracy,' he says. While some online pirates take pains to distinguish themselves from those who sell counterfeit DVDs and CDs, he sees such physical bootlegging as just 'a symptom of underdeveloped computer networks.'

When asked about compensation for artists, both men reject the language itself. No artist sits down to 'create content,' Fleischer says. 'Culture has always been heterogeneous,' and money is only one way of rewarding creativity. The idea of a rights holder, like a record label or movie studio, that patronizes and distributes human creativity is, for Fleischer, 'a very strange utopia that has never existed.'"

Another Wired article on piracy; this one covers the growing-by-leaps-and-bounds "Pirate Party" of Sweden -- a political group poised to overtake the green party in terms of parliament representation.