The Laboratorium : Rich Man's Crime

What you have to remember is that copyright infringement is a rich man's crime. No one ever slept under a bridge because of the laws against unauthorized reproduction. In fact, copyright crimes go beyond even such felonies of the upper crust as securities fraud: modern copyright infringement, in its heavily-contested form, is a pastime of the idle rich. After all, the first threshold for using Napster was owning a computer.

A lot of people have been getting worked up about copyright. Getting worked up is good. There's plenty to get worked up about, every enlightenment has to begin somewhere, and it's not like copyright's abuses aren't an essential part of the Problem. But I can't escape the feeling that, politically, copyright may be a Hempfest issue.

We're going to be nostalgic for the days when bad copyright laws seemed like big problems. Oh, so nostalgic.