To Paco's post:
It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.
There is a fascinating discussion to be had just under the surface here about the role of popular culture in the lives of Westerners and to whom culture belongs.
Not to mention the irony of the bolded part given that the people in the MPAA are the ones writing the laws. (And vice-versa, as Mongrel notes.)
Peel away the layers of the onion and yes, an argument about who owns culture is at the very CENTER of this debate. Something I said a couple of pages ago:
You know where I stand on this -- I won't consider our side to be "winning" until the DMCA is repealed.
And then it's on to repealing the 1998 Copyright Act.
And then repealing most of the 1976 Copyright Act.
And then maybe by that point we can start reassessing copyright and its purpose outright.
Piracy, DRM, takedown notices, DMCA, work-for-hire, copyright registries, the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension -- these are all good topics, but "Who owns culture?" is at the center.
What we're dealing with here is, as I said, people who are offended by the very notion that something they owned is being used in a way they haven't approved or profited from. It's THEIRS, and how dare anyone else violate it?
And then they sing a rather different tune every time they go back to Shakespeare/Grimm/Shelley/Kipling/Baum/Stoker/whoever.
I think all of this leads to the fundamental question, Why do we have copyright? And at the risk of playing constructionist, it's to temporarily restrict the rights of the public in order to grant an incentive for people to produce creative works -- because the individual benefits in the short term and the public benefits in the long term.
And if Warner disagrees with me, that's fine, but I'm sure going to miss Fables, Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE, and The Unwritten.
