In the epic war over Silicon Valley's intellectual property, Bill Gates was on the side of licensing copyright and robust protections for intellectual property. He wasn't on the side of the hackers, and he didn't want information to be free.
If you actually believe in free speech and not simply the free distribution of other people's intellectual property, you should let journalists, law firms, and investors exercise their rights to it alongside your own.
The Internet has been a blessing and a curse. The curse we know: A lot of people appropriating your intellectual property without paying for it. But I think it's important to realize the blessing of the Internet, which is that everybody has a voice and you can break through, even without a record company.
The IP system is an artificial construct that excessively rewards owners of intellectual property, granting them monopolies over inventions and ideas that, in many cases, are the product of generations of thinkers and/or publicly funded research.
Globalisation, technological change, and the move to flexible labour markets has channelled more and more income to rentiers - those owning financial, physical, or so-called intellectual property - while real wages stagnate.
I wish to note that intellectual property theft by a government represents the very essence of organized crime.
In the old days, you would have one lawyer to handle everything: speeding tickets, buying a house, contracts, litigation, real estate, copyrights, leasing, entertainment, intellectual property, forensic accounting, criminal offenses... the list goes on. Now, you have to have a separate lawyer for each one of those categories!
The British judiciary needs to support intellectual property.
Many rogue sites exist to make a profit and others are enormously expensive to maintain. If they don't have the resources to continue stealing intellectual property, they'll wither away.
I oppose piracy and want to see intellectual property protected because that is what fosters and rewards innovation. But SOPA won't accomplish a meaningful reduction in piracy and causes massive collateral damage to the Internet ecosystem.
