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And to clarify my original point regarding libraries, I believe my comparison was sound. For those who have not had the benefit of reading Ben Franklin's autobiography, his conception of public libraries was formed due to his inability to acquire books which he wanted to read, which was a great inconvenience to him.
To rectify this situation, he got together with his book-loving friends, and they combined their resources, pooling all their books in a central location, and allowing all the members to borrow whichever of the pooled books they so desired.
Thus the natural scarcity of useful information was defeated and everyone benefited. To repeat myself, this communal benefit, which was so obvious to Franklin and his fellow "book club" members, was the driving force behind Franklin's effort to instutionalize this behavior in the form of Philadelphia's first library.
Take that same principle, and apply modern information technology to it. The inevitable result is "file sharing". And while libraries, due to their early adoption in the American colonies are, and will forever continue to be, legal, filesharing has unfortunately been relegated to a sort of limbo because it threatens the existing structure of book production.
Yet in its very essence, the act of borrowing a book from a library, or a mutual book-lovin' friend, is the same as sharing a file. It is not theft. Or at least Ben Franklin didn't think so, and some might say he was a highly moral man.
This was, and still is, my point.
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