Clueless: NY Times Columnist David Pogue

Mr. Pogue is wringing his hands about how those meddling kids today don't respect IP.

He relates how he wrote an article about PyMusic, a piece of software that strips the DRM out of iMusic downloads, and how he received a sh#@ when he said, "To me, it's obvious that PyMusique is designed to facilitate illegal song-swapping online, nd therefore, it's wrong to use it."

He gets a bunch of nasty emails from readers (one of those things, it seems that upsets NY Times and WaPo writers) explaining how there are a myriad of legitimate uses for this, such as backup, using some other sort of MP3 player, etc.

So, he claims to get it, and recently he went before a young audience, and gave a number of examples, and asked if they were wrong.

The final one, and the one that shocked him, was when he only got 1 or 2 hands for, "You want a movie or an album. You don't want to pay for it. So you download it," and he gets 2 hands out of 500.

He's shocked, but he is shocked because people understand the issue, Patent and Copyright Law is at its Core Public Interest Law.

IP meaning intellectual product, not intellectual property, is not and was never intended to be property as we understand it.

Congress under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the constitution, has the power to, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

This is not property. After all, when I say, "Take my wife....please," Henny Youngman still has the joke.^*

IP is an infringement on a very natural state of creativity. Patents and copyright are not much more than 300 years old, but we have the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Gilgamesh, the Bible, the Christian Scriptures, and some really kick ass cave paintings, among thousands of other items.

These young students have looked at the world around them, and determined, for example, that record distributors steal from the artists and give them no money, so that their money does not "Promote ... the useful arts".^†

David Pogue does not understand the underlying principles of the current IP regime, and these wet-behind-the-ears kids in his audience do.

^*Of course his being dead for decades makes his being able to tell it academic.
^†Of course looking at modern pop music, there is a question as to whether any of the stuff in the top 40 rotation qualifies as, "useful arts", but that is a metaphysical question, not a legal one.