A Vast Wasteland
I think it’s pretty much obvious to anyone with half a brain that information wants to be free—both free as in beer as well as free as in speech. If it weren’t for huge soulless megacorporations imprisoning content behind unreasonably high paywalls and fascist licensing terms, we’d already be collectively a lot richer than we are today. Anyway, it’s not like people would pay for most of their crap anyway, and since they never would have gotten that money, then it’s not like they’ve lost anything. Hell, chances are that by being able to preview merchandise in full, sales are actually improved.
What? Wasn’t this Talk Like A Pirate Day?
10 Responses»
Eric TF Bat wrote in to say...
Ha. Ha. Harrrrrrr.
Dustin Brewer wrote in to say...
Harr.
Will Kessel wrote in to say...
The New York Times just dropped their paywall — finally — because they realized exactly what you point out here.
The first thing I learned from NYT “after the fall of the wall”: pirates generally make lousy lawyers because they can’t pass the barrrrrrrrrrrr…
;-)
Andy Lester wrote in to say...
Laughter & applause & pasting of URL to friends.
Jeff wrote in to say...
Avast me boy oh’s… these pirate puns arrrrrghhh terrible! Although nowadays pirates you can still say that pirates work with bytes of eight!
Ralph Brandi wrote in to say...
Best. Talk Like a Pirate. Post. Ever.
zeldman wrote in to say...
Nice work, sir.
Eric the .5b wrote in to say...
I miss the old pirates who just admitted they wanted booty and didn’t go into endless rounds of justifying themselves. :)
Leo Klein wrote in to say...
Well, the endless extension of copyright is a form of piracy — from the Public Domain.
It’s amazing that we can legally make available material only from the early 1920’s or earlier.
That tells you a thing or two about what’s wrong with media ownership in this country.
Graphic Designer wrote in to say...
Salon.com learned their lesson, too, probably at great cost to their formerly loyal readers’ good will.