His rant is skewed in several directions.
"
Refusing to enforce existing copyright law and allowing rampant unauthorized use amounts to mass collectivization. "
Nobody's talking about refusing to enforce existing copyright law; we're talking about not extending it to new arenas and forbidding enforcement methods that aren't currently legal. Rightsholders and, much more often, their agents are complaining that existing copyright law is not enough, and they need more power to restrict people's use of the content.
"
Further the for-profit-unauthorized-use industry is what inhibits the formation of additional legal media sites. Not the other way around. Basic common sense should tell you this."
I don't see him offering any actual evidence of this--he falls back on the "why would people buy a car when they could steal one for free" metaphor and ignores the most profitable denial of that claim: the bottled water industry. People do, indeed, buy things they can easily get for free--if the purchases are convenient and inexpensive enough.
Basic common sense would tell you that there's no way people will pay as much for distilled water as they will for a carbonated soda... but common sense is wrong.
"
There is nothing in the architecture of the internet that makes policing and free speech incompatible."
No, not inherently. There is something in the *culture* of the internet that makes them incompatible, and I don't just mean in the geeky hacker technophile corners of the web. Aside from the thousands of businesses that want speed and efficiency that would be greatly affected by the implementation of "is it copyrighted?" checkpoints, there's the
Cute Cat Theory of the Internet:
- Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
- Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.
Joe Average Internet User and his wife Jane don't give a damn about "piracy" online, for or against, and if their favorite authors and musicians say it's bad, then they'd like it gone. But that doesn't mean they're happy to have their emails inspected, or that they want their baby pictures impounded because they put a onesie that said "SEXY THING" on a 6-month-old infant.
I notice he doesn't actually say *how* the internet can be regulated. He mentions traffic regulations on physical highways--but we know how those are done: police are assigned to drive around the area and pull over anyone they think looks dangerous, as defined by law. If there are too many dangerous people to pull over at once, police can take license plate numbers and go after them later. If the potentially-dangerous people think they were misidentified or weren't actually breaking the law, they can say so in court.
How will police be assigned to the internet? What will they watch? Much of the internet, unlike our highways, is private transactions--will they be watching those? (The equivalent of patrolling roads on private property--except that they far outnumber the public lanes.) For the public areas, how will they "pull people over?" Assuming anonymity is removed and the internet requires a license--will someone immediately call the house of whoever's being accused of wrongdoing? Will an arrest warrant be issued? "On this date, Officer [Name] observed IP Address ###.##.#.###, assigned to [User], commit the crime of..."
Wait. Copyright infringement on a small scale is not a crime; it's a civil offense. Officer [Name] can't report it.
Okay, let's assume the officer saw money changing hands and that bumped it into criminal jurisdiction. "...commit the crime of copyright infringement. An arrest warrant for [User] is hereby issued in the state of..."
Where will the case be tried?
What happens if [User] is in another country? I don't mean, "how will we
ever get international support for this?" I mean, what if [User] is a student in London and a US net-cop notices him paying to join a bootleg-album-download site?
Issue arrest warrant; he doesn't show up. Now what? Does the US netcop call London and say, "you need to arrest [User] for the crime of downloading 12 songs illegally?"
How many netcops are we talking about paying for, here?
The Trichordist says it's possible to police the internet without breaking it... but he doesn't mention how. Perhaps because... he has no idea how. People have been trying to figure that one out for more than a decade; if it were simple, it'd be done by now.
He's just morally convinced that it *is* possible.