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Information Doesn't Want To Be Free; People Want It
Captain Pooh writes "Nicholas Petreley expresses his opinion about how "Information Doesn't Want To Be Free--People Want It To Be". " Pretty provocative piece - although his reasoning is sound.
Sorry, don't understand. Do you mean the web as the IP transmission protocol or the http protocol. Any information that is going to be sent anywhere is going to be going over the web is it not?
While it is good for many things I do not think it is a very reliable source for distributing binaries.
Again, slightly confused. If you mean reliable as in trusting that the binary that you think you are downloading is really what you wanted then I agree.
A file-sharing approach allows you to mirror on a scale impossible to acheive with the web.
Yes you can mirror the information in many places, but this gives you no guarantee over the bandwidth that the end user will get when they download the file. For all you know, the mirror that you happen to choose to download the file is going to be sitting on someone's box with a single ISDN connection and 10 other people already downloading and its going to crawl. However, if your central legal service is working, ie enough people are choosing to buy the music that the digital distributor is making money (and therefore by definition the record company and the artist are also making money) then they can invest in a controlled distributed network of servers that are all offering the same services located at the right places in the net to maximise bandwidth to the subnets that are currently choking (a la yahoo).
The trick is to make digitally signed music that can be verified by the end-user as the original before downloading the music.
only necessary if you don't trust the site. place the site on an https connection with a signed certificate and the overhead of having to sign all the files individually disappears and your operating costs go down (more money ultimately to the artist (hopefully)).
Also I'm a geek and therefore it is in my nature to explore new possibilities. :)
New possibilities are always good. The trick is to find the new possibility that enables people to fight against the major labels while giving people what they want (ie access to music). The only way to build a sustainable system against the creatures of chaos with their law suits is to make something that is so legally airtight and not open to abuse that it can grow to its logical conclusion without having to factor in $120,000,000 dollar fines (or whatever the figure was). If the model works, then there will be plenty of opportunities to geek out on distributed download systems within the umbrella of the parent company. I'm quite sure that if someone started an open source project to run the site which was secure then the distributors would welcome it with open arms (less in house costs, probably better product etc etc).
Remember, when you write code, it is your choice as to what licence you release the code under. Same for musicians. All the artists at atrecordings must have given their permission to let their music be downloaded for free because they think that it is good for them and i totally respect that opinion. But, if an artist chooses to release their work under a 'closed' model then that is their right and your distribution system for 'open' works must be able to protect itself from license abuse.
Personally I would like to see a situation where it makes economic sense for all concerned to go for the open model. Only time will tell if this is the case and the only way you are going to buy time is by keeping it legal long enough for the momentum to build up.
The only Good System is a Sound System
Superficially, it may seem anthropomorphic. But it is essetially the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Nitrogen molecules do not want to gather in the corner of my room - they want to spread out. In the same way, information wants to be free. And it will be.
It's a law of nature. And if a government or corporation wishes to oppose a fundamental law of nature, then they must spend a proportionate amount of energy to maintain the highly ordered state of control or secrecy.
And the higher the temperature in thermodynamics, the more effort is required to maintain that ordered state.
The internet has raised the temperature in the information mileu by an order of magnitude. I don't think any company or government will have the resources to maintain the highly ordered and unlikely state of control.
Information wants to be free. Regardless of your moral position, it's a law of nature. This is what the author of the article fails to see or acknowledge.
A priori, there is no moral reason why copying and sharing pure patterns, regardless of their origin, is immoral. I don't care if somebody spent a whole lifetime to create a pattern. I have considered several kinds of moral thinking - Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's utilitarianism, Chritianity, and my own intuitive ideas on what is moral. I simply fail to see how, in light of these moral theories, copying patterns could be immoral.
I believe it is immoral to unnecessarily limit the freedom of a human being. Copyright and patent laws seek to limit our freedoms in profound ways, and increasingly so. Does the benefit the we, as a society, gain from these laws outweigh the sacrifice of our freedoms? I say that the benefits are to very few while the freedoms of everyone are sacrified. I don't think it's good social policy.
I believe people have a basic human right to record and remember their life experiences as accurately as they see fit - using their brains or brain aumenting devices such as computers, tape recorders, or some day neural implants. I also believe they have the right to share their experiences with arbitrary fidelity. If you seek to limit these self-evident (to me, at least) rights, you had better have a damned good reason that benefits everyone more than it harms everyone. I can't think of such a reason.
If you don't want your information to be spread, the keep it in your head. If you send sound waves, text, or code in someone's direction, then that becomes part of their life experience which they then have the right to remember and share as they see fit.
Saying "information wants to be free" is like saying "water wants to run downhill". Sure there's a force behind it (people want information). But IMO the saying just means that stored data will tend to become free.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
This problem is expanding fast, fueled in part by the technology that the more naively ethical among us thought would be used for the common good. Every significant corporation on earth is now trading in "customer profiles", information about you and me that they can use against us. That's not just spam -- that's employers being able to fire you over Usenet (or Slashdot postings), overzealous politicians using your purchases at Amazon.com to ferret out your private beliefs, and insurance companies discriminating against people on the basis of behavior and genetics. It's fair to say most people don't want that information getting out, much less distributed to the highest bidder, but they won't come to you for licensing fees -- they'll just take it and then get Congress to expand copyright law to protect their "right" to your most intimate details.
Intellectual property would be a good idea, except that more than in almost any other area, virtually any IP system favors the rich and powerful over the common man. Increasingly, it institutionalizes the plundering of common knowledge by corporations while depriving the public of the right to actually own anything they pay for. Opposing IP rights isn't communism or airy-headed idealism -- it's cold, hard common sense aimed at protecting the rights of private individuals and preventing the arbitrary abuse of corporate and governmental power.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I hear your credit card screaming, sitting captive in your wallet. "Free me post my number on the web where all the world can know me!" it says.
"Nicholas Petreley expresses his opinion about how "Information Doesn't Want To Be Free--People Want It To Be". " Pretty provocative piece - although his reasoning is sound."
I think we can come to this conclusion ourself, if need be, thanks.
Petrely writes:
"The fact is our current system entitles us to some free information, and it requires us to purchase or license other information. You may not like the fact that some information must be licensed, but that's how it is. Those who want information to be free as a matter of principle should create some information and make it free. But what they shouldn't do is license or buy existing information that is not free and then cut it loose without permission. That's just plain wrong,..."
There are two types of objects - tangible and intangible. Tangible objects (food, your car, a minidisc player) can only have one owner at any given moment. Intangible objects (music, inventions, words) can have any number of owners. Physical objects have a single owner out of nessesity - it cannot exist in two places at the same time. But what about an idea? Clearly I can make a copy of your poem without depriving you of that poem.
So what is the point of giving exclusive ownership of an idea when it can be shared by all without depriving the creator of that idea? It is power, clearly enough. I have, you don't, let's negotiate. It is easy to use Napster as a sort of strawman to attack, but it's another issue entirely when you look at intellectual property in the light of the AIDS epedemic where millions have died and continue to die because pharmecuticals own the right to the knowledge. "Give us a half billion for the rights to create our vaccine. OH, you don't have that kind of cash? Oh, your entire country's GDP isn't even half that? Sorry." How about irrigation technologies? I could go on but I think my point is made.
I'll grant that there needs to be an impetus for the company to create the vaccine in the first place, but once it's created that knowledge should be in the public domain.
"...and it demonstrates that what they are interested in is not free speech at all but getting stuff without paying for it."
This is akin to saying electronic hobbyists are only interested in descrambling their cable feed. Can it be a side result? Yes. Is it the point? No.
Are you not aware of what a 21st century, western idea ownership of knowledge is? Is it beyond your ability to comprehend - not even nessesarily to understand but to just acknowledge - that ownship of an idea is repugnent, almost humorous?
As an aside, I enjoy the fact that I can get a song and erase it if I don't like it. No blood no foul. I appreciate the fact that I haven't heard a single radio ad in 2 years. I can't name a single radio station and I live in metro Boston. I haven't seen a single TV ad that I haven't gone out of my way to see.
Free speech, Nick, isn't only about the right to speak myself but the right of others to speak so I might hear them. You've got this idea that free speech means "me me me" but what it really does (and should) stand for is "them them them". And what does a company that control information fear more than anything? Loss of market share, loss of mindshare, loss of control.
And what is intellectual property about if not control?
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My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
The central problem here, which this article makes perfectly clear, is that someone who owns and creates something has every right to sell it under any terms they want. If those terms suck, no one will buy it.
Exactly. They will download it on MP3.
Just because people want something does not mean they deserve to have it- especially not on terms THEY choose.
Paying money doesn't mean I "deserve" to hear a song. I am entitled to use my ears whether the record execs want me to or not. If someone is playing a CD on their speakers and I walk by, I suppose you could say I don't "deserve" to be able to hear it, but it seems rather silly. Similarly, if I download a song and play it on my computer, you could say I don't "deserve" to be able to hear it. But it misses the point, really.
The point is that artists and record companies need to be reimbursed or else they won't be able to continue producing music. We shouldn't reimburse them simply because to do otherwise would be "wrong." We should reimburse them because we appreciate their efforts, we enjoy their songs, and we want them to produce more. If we do not enjoy the songs, if we wish they'd stop putting out such crap, then to reimburse them would be counter-productive. (Some might even say harmful.)
But you don't have the right to change the terms of their sale just because you don't like it, or because you think they're behind the times.
The way you're wording this is a bit odd. I suppose you could think of MP3 trading as "changing the terms of sale" but it only serves to obscure the issue. You could say "it is illegal to distribute copies of their copyrighted work" and I would say, "you know your Title XVII." When you say "you don't have the right" do you mean that we don't have the legal right, moral right, or what? Your own personal idea of what "rights" we have?
Speaking for myself, I believe we have the right (and sometimes obligation) to reimburse those who provide a valuable commodity, such as music or software; and we have the right to withhold reimbursement from those we choose. You may have your own idea, and the law certainly provides a different viewpoint.
>The Africans are free to develop their own chemical compounds, and to do with them as they please.
and if they dont want to pay, or cant pay it is their choice, they have themselves chosen to die. Because our revenue-stream is more important than human lives.
yup.. makes perfect sense...
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
You claim, in your September 4 Infoworld column, that Napster is all
about greed. The jury is still out on that. And it will stay out
until you can go buy the MP3 for an artist you hear on the radio, or
even an artist you heard when you were a teen (e.g. 10CC, or Seals and
Crofts, or Styx). Whenever you interfere with a market -- whenever
you tell people that they can't buy something -- you get a black
market.
Napster functions exactly like a black market, except that the price
is solely your time spent finding a good copy of what you want. Black
markets aren't about greed -- they're about buying what you want to
buy, not necessarily what's for sale. The RIAA wants to sell music
one way, and consumers want to buy it another way. They happen to be
paying a low price to get it that way, but there's no reason that has
to last.
If the RIAA *really* wants to find out if Napster is about greed or a
new business model, it'll go into competition with Napster. Surely
the RIAA knows how to set up a web server big enough to sell the same
content available via Napster. And they have very little to lose by
doing so, since most people are aware of the existance of Napster, and
frankly, Napster works, at least if you want a popular piece of music.
Only then will we be able to say whether Napster is about stealing or
sharing. One thing this economist can tell you for certain: the RIAA
will be as successful at suppressing music file copying as the US
government has been at suppressing some drugs. And the US government
has been throwing many people in jail for decades -- something the
RIAA has only fantasized about doing.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
As recounted in this website, the phrase "information wants to be free" has a little-known counterpart: "information wants to be expensive." It was first uttered back in 1984 (now there's an ironic year for information wanting to be free!) by Stewart Brand:
(emphases mine)So, people, next time you use the phrase, please take a moment to reflect on what it really means?
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Nick Petreley really hit the nail on the head here. PEOPLE want information to be free, and seem to have a tremendous lack of respect (or perhaps just a tremendous amount of ignorance) about our current economic system, so they just go about circumventing it without allowing the market to operate. The market *needs* at least a minimal notion of intellectual property in order to function.
Very often I see a lot of arguments that "information has no scarcity", and I reel back in horror at that inaccuracy. Raw, unfiltered data has no scarcity. It's just bits. Information, however, is a specific configuration of bits that adds value. The fact that there is a lack of "valuable information" (i.e. good music, good software, good books) implies that there is a form of scarcity involved -- a scarcity of skill and talent to create valuable information.
Information creation is a scarce service.
So this implies that we probably should have mechanisms to require payment for information if the market finds it valuable. What's at question is whether we should have to pay for it as a product, like we currently do, which is clearly inefficient from an economic perspective as it leads to excessive profits, or in english, "rich rock star" syndrome.
So the question really shouldn't be about how to destroy intellectual property. It should be about how to come up with new business models that are much more efficient than the "shrink wrap" business model... and this actually seems to be what the industry is doing. Subscription-based software, ASP's, etc. are all signs of the times.
-Stu
If you really like one songs, buy it as a single. But just because you don't want the whole CD doesn't make it right for you to steal even part of it.
Oh, of course, let me see... Now... where IS that purple haze single... Hrmmm. That's right, there isn't one! Well... I'll just buy the original album that had it on CD, what? No cd for that album! All they have is Band of Gypsies and Greatest Hits?! But all I want is Purple Haze.... Well, I guess since they aren't selling Purple Haze they can't possibly lose money if I download it. So there.
Not all songs are offered as singles, and not all albums are available in CD format, or even Tape format. What if I want music that the RIAA has decided there is no market for and so stopped selling? What am I supposed to do if there is no way for me to BUY the music I want? Buying it at a used CD shop or used Record shop doesn't give the RIAA a dime... So why should they care if I download it instead? If you aren't selling a product anymore, and someone can get that product for free without taking it away from you then no one is stealing from you.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Before you impugn the critical thinking skills of others, you might want to break out a logic textbook and look up the term "begging the question". In this case your thesis is that ideas are property per se, and therefore using those ideas without their owners' permission is theft. You then go on to prove your thesis by assuming as a premise that ideas are property per se, and therefore using those ideas without their owners' permission is theft. That is not logic in any meaningful sense. No progress is possible in this debate until people recognize that the real question is not, "Is it ok to steal?" but rather "Does it make sense to classify something that can be endlessly replicated without cost as `property'?"
The argument in favor of intellectual property is that creators need incentive to create. I'm not entirely sure I believe that, but it is certainly true that creative people need to pay their rent and grocery bills the same as everyone else. The arguments against intellectual property are, first, that people are naturally creative, and they create more efficiently when they are free to build on previous work, and, second, that intellectual property laws can be used to stifle freedom.
The latter point is most troubling to me. As our economy evolves, we expect information products to become every bit as much necessities of life as food and shelter; in fact, in many cases we expect information products to displace physical goods as necessities of life. With physical goods the economy has always worked on the principle that once you buy it it's yours, and the seller has no further say in what you do with it. Not so, intellectual property. Intellectual property is governed by a license which binds you to an ongoing commitment to the seller. Vendors of intellectual property would have us believe that the terms of these license could be literally anything: a continuing financial commitment, refraining from using competing products, and disclosing sensitive personal information are all terms that have appeared in intellectual property licenses, and we can only expect the license terms to grow bolder.
To me, finding a balance for intellectual property law is the single most important challenge facing our civilization today. What good are the guarantees of liberty we have worked so hard to build (literally centuries of human endeavor) if we and our posterity are going to have to license ourselves into bondage just to participate in the digital economy? A fair and equitable balance must be found. I don't pretend that that balance will be found in "information wants to be free", but there's a lot less danger in that than in the "mine, all mine" espoused by the intellectual property industries and their apologists.
-rpl
The first time I read Stallman's manifesto, the first thing that popped into my mind was, "Information wants to be free?" Now, FSF advocates under close scrutiny will admit that this only works as a figurative statement, but the fact of the matter is that Stallman uses it as base for his ethics of intellectual property.
What people need to realize is that information is such (vis-a-vis white noise) because someone put effort into creating it; to say that information has some intrinsic quality, or worse desire, to be free is ascribe behavior that is downright anthropomorphic to well-defined, abstract concept. That it is infinitely duplicable does not mean that there is not compensation due; a person is providing you a service, and you should reimburse that person for his time and effort. I like the author's charge: If you don't like the pay music, create and distribute free music.
To this end, I like Stephen King's revenue model: Honesty. He writes "Don't steal from the blind newsboy;" he has successfully gambled that people will pay the small one time fee to experience his work, not just out of grace ("patronage"), but due to a sense of ethics ("captialism").
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring epicurean ***
I for one would be interested in helping fund (with my cd buying money) a label that plays a part similar to that of the Free Software Foundation. Such a label would require the artists signed to them to release their music under an open-content license. In exchange the label would provide the normal features such as production, distribution, publicity, etc and only take their royalty from those sales up to the point where they've made back their costs. This would allow artists to keep a lot more of their own money and still provide the community with free music. Since free music drives sales (I for one bought far more CD's since MP3's) their should still be a lot of money to be made. A lot of new artists would also be interested as they'd have a lot more options with our FreeMusic Label.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The phrase "information wants to be free" is a description of how the system functions, not a moral judgement. People naturally tend to spread information. It takes a lot of work (encryption, propretary formats, restriction on the production of various types of hardware or machines, vigorous prosecution and enforcement of a host of laws, etc) to prevent it from happening. And despite the best efforts of the multi-million dollar companies involved, info continues to spread. You can argue about the morality of the situation all you want. But you can't argue with the reality of the situation. Information tends to spread. It "wants" to be free.
As for Napster, the real issue isn't whether distributing copyrighted material is wrong. The real issue is - should a technology with perfectly legitimate uses be restricted because it is used by some for morally questionable purposes? Should Napster be held responsible for the uses to which their users put the system?
Finally, I have no problem with someone being compensated for their efforts. In the case of the music business, however, this isn't happening. You have a situation analagous to feudal England. The "lords" (ie, the record companies) collect all of the produce (music) from the peasants (artists), who get next to nothing for their labor. If you take a bit of that produce, the lords are screaming that you're heartlessly stealing from the poor, pitiful starving peasants.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
It doesn't matter whether or not the RIAA is bad--and I'll be right there with you saying that they are. The problem is that whether you like it or not, the music shared on Napster is someone else's property. And taking that property makes you a thief.
If I write a piece of software that I want to sell commercially, I don't want the l33t skr1pt k1dd33z spreading it all over the net. I want my money's worth. Sound greedy, immoral, and ineffective? Think of it another way.
If I write a piece of software that I want to distribute under the GPL, I don't want Microsoft to take, modify, and resell it as proprietary software. I want the users to get their freedom.
If you're going to argue against rights to control your own media, then you're going to have to get rid of the good as well as the bad. You can't have it any other way.
Visit the
I think Nick's missed the real meaning of the (over-used) phrase.
"...wants to be free" doesn't mean that everyone has a right to copy any information. We still, now, mostly respect the idea of old-school copyrights with all their in-built fair-use provisions.
What it means is that it's very difficult to stop people copying information. To do it would require not only complicated and annoying copy-protection and licensing schemes that kill the traditional copyright-based rights we have, but also an insanely harsh set of laws against circumventing them. To effectively stop copying, you have to build what is more or less a fascist state. Most people consider this sort of effort to counter information being free far too much hard work, if not simply unnatural.
Of course this is exactly the action the MPAA, RIAA, and other DMCA proponents are working on right now. They'd happily screw up the world to protect their right to make a buck from someone else's work. Because the world owes them a living, you see.
--
This comment was brought to you by And Clover.
The fact is our current system entitles us to some free information, and it requires us to purchase or license other information.
Why? Why should that be? Why is that morally right? There have been lots of systems, and they have had lots of different rules. Some have been better then others. I don't accept what The System entitles me to. If you have a problem, go cry to you're precious system, see what they do to me
But what they shouldn't do is license or buy existing information that is not free and then cut it loose without permission. That's just plain wrong
I'm sorry, but because The System believes something doesn't mean its true, and if you take that statement as fundamentally true, then you should seriously reconsider you're criteria for fundamental truth. WHY Is it 'just plain wrong'? Why should ideas be controlled? Saying simply that huge corporations loose money if it isn't observed is certainly not going to convince me.
This paper is seriously lacking in foundation, if this paper had been turned into my freshman English class at ISU, it would have been returned with a big fat F. I've heard this idea repeated with an almost religious air. And while there maybe economic reasons for this, I really don't get the moral ones. I'm not a religious man, and pirating is a lot more fun then not pirating.
And as far as his incendiary 'crookster' challenge, its 'gnutella' and win2k isn't exactly hard to find out there.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
"Information wants to be free" really should be "Informations can be free." No other property can be given away without loss by the owner. You give away a physical thing, you don't have it any more. You give away information, you've still got it.
What Napster has done is encourage others to break the law. Is the law just? Depends on whether it's right to create artificial scarcity of information (i.e., copyright). How do we determine what's right? Look at the consequences of making it legal versus making it illegal.
Case 1 (copyright): Copyright exists so that information can be shoehorned into traditional economic systems that are based upon scarcity, supply and demand, etc. If copyright is enforced, it's business as usual. If it's poorly enforced, you get the chaos that's happening now in society (a Bad Thing, since it discourages content creation and encourages the lawyers). How to enforce copyright in the *gag* "information age" is the big problem.
Case 2 (no copyright): Without copyright, traditional economic systems fail, and information creators are not rewarded. Thus, production of information decreases. This is a Bad Thing. The only solution is to find an alternate economic system. Just as a quick reminder, communism doesn't work, and all those other cool-sounding systems (street performers' protocol, etc.) haven't been tested in a large-scale economy. There's nothing that's known to work.
In other words, behind door A, we have chaos and uncertainty, and behind door B we have uncertainty and chaos.
I personally would like to see a system where all artists get accounts on PayPal or something like that, and we can just donate whatever we feel like for each MP3 we download (preferably off of the artist's high-speed, high-quality site). Of course, people will rationalize their way into not paying: "they're already rich", "musicians get all the chicks", "they suck too much to deserve to get paid for this MP3 that I'm keeping"... Nobody really knows if enough people will pay to make it worth while for artists. And before you start yelling about indie bands giving away their work, remember that a lot of them are doing that to build a fan base so they can start charging for it.
Finally, remember that what's right and wrong (and legal) is decided, to some extent, by society. Copyright is currently part of our social contract. For it to be right to ignore copyright would require a fundamental shift in the public viewpoint. This shift seems to have already begun, but it hasn't happened yet.
Do we have to abide by copyright until such a shift happens, or are we morally justified in ignoring copyright since we are leading the charge into this new economics of information? That's the real question.
Bullshit. The central problem here, which this article makes perfectly clear, is that someone who owns and creates something has every right to sell it under any terms they want. If those terms suck, no one will buy it. Just because people want something does not mean they deserve to have it- especially not on terms THEY choose. Piddling about what file format the music comes in is just plain cheap. It's like saying that just because a car doesn't come in red, you have the right to steal a car and paint it red. Now obviously Intellectual Property is a whole different ballgame. But the issue there is that it's very hard to regulate and define- NOT that people have any moral right to what they want. Metalica wants to sell their music in Cd format only? You think that bussiness model sucks? Fine- drive them out of bussiness with your own wussy rock band and its leet online distribution. But you don't have the right to change the terms of their sale just because you don't like it, or because you think they're behind the times. And seriously, it's maddening how little anyone knows about the real costs of the music industry anyway. People go on and on about Cd pressing as if that was even a drop in the bucket of what it takes to make, market, and promote a hit band (plus lots of bands that never get a hit). Now I hate the way the commercial music biz works and degrades musical spirit, but the fact is, musicians trade their song rights and autonomy for that chance that the record comapny can make them famous and rich. You may think that's sickening, but it's a choice they make, and the legal terms they agree to. If you don't like it, well, no one is forcing you to buy their music. Downloading it off the internet for free and claiming you're "freeing" it is a thin lie to conceal that you DO want the music produced in that way- huge promotional charges, slick studios- it proves that you want that, and like anyone else, you just want it for free. So: here's your high horse, and here's "off." I'd suggest "off."
Maybe it isn't fair to pin this on most open source advocates, but there are certainly interesting dichotomies in what Slashdot considers "news for nerds." On the one hand, any license that isn't strictly free is shouted down. Borland C++ is branded as free-as-in-beer and therefore unacceptable. Any story that mentions freedom of speech gets hairtrigger responses. Stories about The Man (i.e. Microsoft) are snickered about in a frenzy of populist hooplah.
At the same time, there's a worship of corporately created pop culture: The Simpsons, X-Files, Hollywood movies, big budget anime, The Cartoon Network. Now wait, this isn't corporate-fed culture, it's special stuff created only for geeks in the know, right? Not like other crap, like Friends. That's for the masses.
I think quite a few people would like these to collide, so everything they are interested in can be free of charge. But they are two completely different things, the second of which is created by a system that arguably would not exist if free everything was the order of the day. If you're really anti-corporate, then you should stop watching TV, stop buying CDs from major labels, and stop watching anything but indie films. That's much better than whining about how corporations should spend millions of dollars entertaining you for free.