Forkbeard

Rochard, that is indeed what gets interesting about comparative cultural studies. If you want to get judgmental about other cultures, you can ... but a lot of times, it makes you blind to what the people who have those other cultural views are likely to do. And that's deadly if you are competing with them or trying to influence them. So even if you think they are stupid or depraved, a lot of times it makes sense to try to understand how they think or where they are coming from.

And anyway, the blogging culture doesn't see the internet as a tool for sharing "other people's" information; they just have a sort of pragmatic understanding that once a thing has been posted anywhere on the web, it is liable to be copied, it in fact already has been copied by numerous other somebodies, and whatever the law says about that or the owner thinks, you can't unring that bell or gather up that spilt milk.

Two things follow logically from that, to the blogger way of thinking.

1) If you don't want your shit copied, you ought to keep it on your hard drive. Only an idiot puts something on the web and expects that it won't be copied all over the place. (This is not an objectively stupid observation; it's true in fact, whatever the law says.)

2) In light of #1, the blogger therefore assumes that if a thing has been posted to the web, the person doing the posting is inviting it to be be copied. I'll express an editorial comment on this one; it's nerd logic. If #1 is true, #2 ought to be true; the fact that it isn't true is a bafflement to logical nerds everywhere.

Thus it's not quite right to say that people inhabiting this meme-structure view the internet as a device for sharing other people's information. By their lights, the "other people" already shared it when they published it in the first place. And everything that follows, in this meme-structure, happens by natural law and as a consequence of the way the internet works; people like the ones in this this thread who are angry with the results are just so many King Canutes standing in the surf trying foolishly to command the tides.

To anybody with a lot invested in the old-school concepts of intellectual property law, it's a bizarre and destructive worldview that creates an enormous amount of angst, anger, and terror. I get that; I even share some of it. Hell, it's directly responsible for killing a huge chunk of my annual income in recent years, so of course I'm not defending it.

But it's still a reality. Tens of millions of people think like this.

And I'm not convinced that "dumb" is a reasonable adjective to apply to it. As meme structures go, it currently appears to be out-competing ours. A huge part of why blogger culture ignores intellectual property law is that to them and to many allied internet cultures with "sharing" mentalities, IP law appears ancient, obsolete, irrelevant, clueless, and out of touch with reality. And by ignoring it, they are quite cheerfully killing the economic structures that it supports. (That would include many of our businesses.)

Is that a good thing? Not for us, certainly. But if we want to survive, we have to understand and adapt, not just point and laugh and call "dumb" the memes that are destroying us.

The old military adage is: "If it's stupid and it works...it isn't stupid."

Y'all just keep pointing and laughing and calling names. Keep your head in the sand and pretend these people don't exist, or are too stupid or dumb to matter.

Let me know how that works out for ya, long run.

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