Recommendations from someone that say the right things

Oscar Swartz once again writes what anti-pirates should read (again). He refer to what Niklas Lundblad has written in Svenska Dagbladet, What pirates and anti-pirates should talk about. Oscar does not agree with Niklas. Oscar think, and I agree with him, that Niklas writes a very politically correct article in the paper. An article that tries to be somewhat neutral. Try to say what this side is right on, and what the other side is right on etc.

But, what Oscar point out is that in reality there is no debate. The pirates try to question the traditional products regarding information, and specifically want to experiment with new products. They want to still share music the same way one could share music from LPs by copying music to cassette tapes and share with close friends. It is the anti-pirates that does not invent. It is the anti-pirates that are conservative and call pirates for things like thieves, filesharing for crime etc.

Oscar point out that the ones that do discuss the issues are people like Lawrence Lessigm, Hal Varian and Yochai Benkler. Those are the ones we should listen more to. They should be lifted to the podium so that a discussion could be held. Instead of having anti-pirates write article after article, often covered under the cover of an official journalistic work, when it in reality is just another text that point out one side of the coin.

I have btw myself been working with Hal Varian in a work regarding DNS that National Science Foundation hosted. It resulted in the report Signposts in Cyberspace.

Updated: It is of course possible to (like this comment) support Niklas in what he writes. That the two camps should meet. But, as I have written before in this blog, the anti-pirates has not shown any interest what so ever in changing their products and methods. There are though many many musicians, authors, publishers etc that try new business models. They are not the ones that I here claim are the anti-pirates. Not at all. My point is that the people on the publisher side that try new things are not heard at all. They are the ones that should talk with the pirates.

I also think one can read the report Digital Dilemma from National Science Foundation. Created in a similar way as the report I helped with about the DNS. It points out all the problems we now see people talk about on blogs etc, but it was published already in the year 2000.