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i guess i mean there are a few levels to the free culture crowd.
one level is those who run the torrent and file trading websites. they are businessmen first and foremost. they are there to use legal loopholes and grey areas to build up their websites to absurd degress of traffic and profit as much as possible from advertising. they probably only care about the details of the legal rationalizations as far as they allow them to profit as much and possible and squirrel away their weath into an arcane and untraceable business structure. they know the clock is ticking on their business model and i am sure they are preparing for the day whe they get shut down or legal expenses make it not worth it anymore. of course they affect a pose or penury or make the correct noises about free culture theory just as any business now has to do the same about the enviroment, but that is not their primary motivation.
then there are the thoreticians - academics, lawyers, science fiction writers, artists - who provide the intellect justifications for free culture. they profit from it to an extent as far as being able to move their product to the free culture crowd and with nice paying gigs, but generally their motivation is that they are hard leftists, socialists. not all, but generally. maybe you will find some libertarian strains. you can look into their backgrounds, it's not a secret.
and at the bottom is their file sharers themselves. for them free culture provides a mental justification for getting shit without paying for it as well as providing a david and goliath myth to make downloading a anime dvd into something heroic, even mythic.
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