“Since England’s ‘Statute of Anne’ in 1710, the rentiers have been fighting increasingly dubious battles to maintain and profit from the fiction of ‘intellectual property.’ Even at a time when printing presses were rare and electronic media non-existent, enforcement was impossible. The best they could hope for was to discourage copying by ‘making an example’ of a few of the most prominent scofflaws. The dawn of the Internet Age was the Appomattox of the ‘intellectual property’ wars. The equipment for copying data and channels for distribution of that data are now cheaply and globally available. They represent a nearly trivial investment in ‘advanced’ nations, and doable even in the ‘Third World.'”
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