After all, it
did immeasurable damage to western civilization
to have unfettered access to the intellectual property of
Shakespeare, Newton, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Babbage.
We ceratinly wouldn't want to make the same mistake with
Mickey Mouse and Excel.
(Said dripping with bitter sarcasm...)
You DON'T think that Weird and Excess have damaged civilization?
Heaven forbid! That would just be crazy talk :) (There's
a good reason all of my writing is done in TeX.)
A little more seriously though, this does highlight the
fact that the value of the information and the value of
free access to the information are two different things.
Like everyone else, I can point to those ideas and expressions
thereof that in my opinion are braindead. But free access
to all the Kibo-isms, just as to all the Einsteinian musings
is the sine quo non of an enlightened culture. If anything
is kept secret, and if it is illegal to figure out how
to read the secret writings and to tell others how to read
them, then only outlaws will be literate in any meaningful
sense of the word. The inclusion of the word "millennium"
in the DMCA is telling. For it is the mindset behind
that kind of thing that is most likely to produce another
thousand-year dark ages.
BLS