hutcheson - 1:33 am on Oct 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

>Nerds who screech about the RIAA make me laugh. They'd screech even louder if someone copied _their_ original work without permission e.g. "some ******** scraper's ripped off my website, what do I doooo?".

I think if you actually look at the techie community, you'll see a lot of, well, antiproprietary attitudes about bitstreams. It doesn't take much more than room-temperature IQ to see that some products and services are MUCH cheaper to exchange than to TRACK payment for. it's obvious, then, that everyone benefits if nobody bothers to track payments at all.

An example: the Open Directory has grown faster than Yahoo even without the resources provided by paying customers. Fact is, the payments, large as they were, were more than consumed by trying to manage the services provided. So, ironically, the OD was made more economically efficient and more productive, by ... foregoing the attempt to collect for services rendered. An academic journal published an interesting economic analysis of it (along with several other organizations that exhibited the same phenomena.)

Another example from my own experience: while looking for something else, I found some content I had prepared (several weeks' work) posted on, of all things, a promotional website for a movie.

To this day I have managed to remain utterly screechless, although I must confess to a bit of gloating here and there.