In reply to John C. Welch.

Busted! This comment proves that you haven't been reading my blog, only the posts that get linked by Gruber or Ian Betteridge!

Really, though, I've complained about the "information wants to be free" mentality multiple times on here, at length (as is my way). And complained that Doctorow's approach is naive at best; it points to individual successes without taking into account how much of a built-in audience that people like Doctorow (and Wil Wheaton, and Louis CK, and so on) already have.

My complaints of abuse of the DMCA are purely anecdotal. 99.9% of them are following a link to a video that has been taken down because of rights violations, when it's clear from context that the video should've qualified as fair use. When so few parties (Universal, Sony, etc) control so much of the available content, it only takes a few of them to affect wide swaths of the internet.

I'd like to hear a better proposal as well. Fortunately, I'm confident that it's not as black-or-white, completely pro-DMCA or completely anti-copyright as it's made out to be.