This decision is a quintessential instance of a self-fulfilling perception of the world.

One starts with an assumption that there are producers and consumers and that consumers are better off when producers have high incentives to produce.

One then creates a regulatory system that increases the incentives for commercial production but also increases the costs of becoming any kind of producer,³³ forcing producers to try to recoup these high entry costs by selling to wide audiences.

This results in a relatively small number of producers able to fund full-time authoring and pay licensing fees to use existing information, who attempt to recover their investments by capturing wide audiences.

Opposite these producers is a wide, passive audience of consumers constrained to select what they buy from a narrow, relatively homogenous menu of choices intended to guess what a large number of them will select under these conditions.

These producers, in turn, make up the political lobby for continuing the basic structure as it is.

This political economy is responsible for an extensive enclosure movement that has pushed our intellectual property law toward ever-increasing centralization, and has squelched concerns that this galloping propertization is attained at the expense both of innovation and of robust democratic discourse that a well-balanced intellectual property law could serve.³⁴
Yochai Benkler

ObuR:L http://www.law.indiana.edu/fclj/pubs/v52/no3/benkler1.pdf
"More from class: one student has stipulated that perhaps e-mail and IM and the like are not steps forward for communications among human beings. Others say it's neither forward nor backwards; just modernization. And another person says that these technologies are just about the best thing ever invented. Others break out e-mail from text-based IM from video and audio over IM clients and the like." Diversity huh. Who's right? "http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Keep+sowing+your+seed%2C+for+you+never+know+which+will+grow--perhaps+it+all+will.%22"

-- You must allow people to be right, because it consoles them for not being anything else. --Andre' Gide