"Authorship is Censorship" - Shia LeBeouf

[alcibiades_mystery]

1. This is a fairly common argument among Free Culture types

At least at first. Then they discover "balance" (the principle of balancing the rights of individual creators against the common benefit of culture - the initial and guiding principles of copyright and similar provisions).

Of course, the copyright people have also completely abandoned "balance", seeking to extend the copyright indefinitely into the future, and suing over previously fair uses of material (previously allowed because they benefit the commonwealth and culture more generally). So there ya go. Radicalism on one side generated radicalism on the other. Nothing wrong with that, either, as the transformation in media (from print/analog to digital) probably does require fairly serious rethinking of the legal/ethical principles, which were rooted, for better or worse, in the form (of media) that cultural creativity took.