[Infowarrior] - Compare File Sharers To 9/11 Terrorists

[Richard Forno]

Rewriting Copyright History, The Elitist Way: Compare File Sharers To  
9/11 Terrorists
from the stunning dept

When we first debunked Hank Williams' problematic attack on Mike  
Arrington for suggesting, reasonably, that copyright law had reached  
the point that it needed a serious rethink, someone told me that Hank  
Williams is trying to become "the next Andrew Keen." Keen, of course,  
wrote a book last year about how the internet is somehow destroying  
culture, with the basic thesis being that "culture" is defined only as  
professionally produced content. Effectively, his argument was that  
non-professionally produced content simply can't be good, so by  
competing with professionally produced content, all that amateur  
content was somehow damaging professional content. The logical errors  
in this thesis are pretty easy to spot, but we'll just mention the  
obvious one: if professional content is so much better than amateur  
content, what does it have to fear from amateur content? In fact,  
Keen's whole thesis is so ridiculous, and the book praising the  
reliability and accuracy of "professional" media is so riddled with  
errors, distorted truths and outright falsehoods, that some have  
suggested (credibly) that Keen is merely satire. Everything that Keen  
claims is bad about amateur media, he does -- repeatedly.

< - >

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080610/0259341363.shtml