Outrageous Corporate Fear Mongering
Freely sharing culture is only a crime when tyrants' profits are threatened, such as the prohibition of slaves learning to read. Now, corporate indoctrination has convinced people that sharing books, films, speeches, and music is the same as violently boarding a ship at sea, then killing, raping, and torturing anyone who gets in the way of depriving people others of their property. If you watch John Carter without paying Disney executives outlandish, unfair, and unearned piles of cash and investors' who take profits for doing nothing then YOU are the criminal. If that's not government oppression in support of plutocracy, what is?
The corporations which run our society have done this by secretly framing a discussion in which culture (information and experiences for example) can only be accessed with permission. People are treated as objects whose only value is in their ability to pay, an unfortunate, systemic side effect of modern corporate capitalism. Mr. Mount and SmartPlanet should be ashamed of this kind of one sided, economically poorly informed piece which reads like an IBM propaganda/PR release.
The introduction to Title 17 of the U.S. code prior to the corporate-written DMCA dealing with films, music, etc., made clear that "bona fide enthusiasts" of various forms of entertainment, especially film are protected, and for good reasons! I recommend reading the first page of the 5 book "Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith who observed that the degree of utilization of a society's resources improves that society's wealth. IP law taxing people by forcing payment for culture and using public funds to restriction their own access to culture is incredibly inefficient, and a drastic interference in free markets corporations claim they seek when it comes to dumping toxic waste in poor countries, or as in the past: use of slave labor, including child slaves. With the internet, these things can be distributed at nearly zero cost.
The depravities to which such "property" mentioned above has been historically put illustrate the amoral nature of limitless profit-seeking by non-human collectives. Justice used to be a societal goal, now its us-versus them profits in a predatory system which incurs massive, unnecessary costs and harm, a classic definition of "evil" in moral philosophy.
