Proudhon and the Social Media

Barely had I blogged at (ISC)2 about the Proudhonist contention that “(Intellectual) Property is Theft” than I came upon an article by Andrew Orlowski for The Register in which he uses a similar tag line (“Property is theft, man. So we're taking yours”). While both articles are concerned with breaches of copyright and IP abuse, it was, I guess, inevitable that I’d spend some time whining about the damage to my pocket from pirated electronic copies of most of my books.
Actually, I tend to assume that if someone is going to grab a pirated copy, they were never going to buy the real thing anyway, so I’m not as obsessive about it as you might think. But I do find it incomprehensible and exasperating that so many people feel that I (or my publishers) shouldn’t expect any financial return from the expenditure of my creative energy (such as it is) and the many and various costs involved in the publishing process. (This is only one of the many gripes I have about the popular perception of the writing process, but I'll save the others for a more suitable time and venue…)
Orlowski’s article is focused on a slightly different aspect of the problem. I'm not really a visual thinker, as you might deduce from the fact that I rarely use graphics in a (continue reading...)