Rich but never bitter

Once again you lie to the American people to shore up your failed regime. You say you have made America safer, but in fact we are more vulnerable to threats. Your gutting of FEMA has made us less able to respond to natural disasters. Your misguided policy in the middle east has inflamed anger against America. My children's children's children will still be undoing the damage you have done. Shame on you, Mr. President.

You're Alice's Adventures in Wonderland!
by Lewis Carroll
After stumbling down the wrong turn in life, you've had your mind opened to a number of strange and curious things. As life grows curiouser and curiouser, you have to ask yourself what's real and what's the picture of illusion. Little is coming to your aid in discerning fantasy from fact, but the line between them is so blurry that it's starting not to matter. Be careful around rabbit holes and those who smile to much, and just avoid hat shops altogether.

Take the Book Quizat the Blue Pyramid.

A 12-year-old girl who was abducted and beaten by men trying to force her into a marriage was found being guarded by three lions who apparently had chased off her captors, a policeman said Tuesday.

Stuart Williams, a wildlife expert with the rural development ministry, said the girl may have survived because she was crying from the trauma of her attack.

"A young girl whimpering could be mistaken for the mewing sound from a lion cub, which in turn could explain why they didn't eat her," Williams said.

The government is thinking out loud about something that was unthinkable as short as five years ago, requiring ISPs to maintain log files of customer Internet activity. The rationale is simple: it's for the children.

"It was raised not once but several times in the meeting, very emphatically," said Dave McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, which represents small to midsize companies. "We were told, 'You're going to have to start thinking about data retention if you don't want people to think you're soft on child porn.'"

If insinuating that anyone who does not want a record kept of every website visit molests children is not bullying enough, just invoke the War on Terror. Officials posit that keeping records of all activity might possibly mean "successful criminal and terrorism prosecutions that otherwise would have failed because of insufficient evidence." Not to mention that other great terrorist threat, the trading of copyrighted works through file sharing."

But the economy of free software is still an economy. It produces wealth; it inspires growth; it spreads services broadly within a society. It functions differently than the economy of proprietary software--different scarcities are traded--but it is still an economy. And literally billions of dollars have been invested to make it flourish.

The same is true of free culture. Many read "free culture" to mean that artists don't get paid. But here, too, the difference is not that one approach (proprietary culture) builds an economy while the other (free culture) does not. In the way that I've use the term, free culture describes the economy that governed creative industries for at least the first 186 years of the American republic. More importantly, proprietary culture has never yet governed any creative economy, anywhere. No society has ever imposed the level of control that the proprietary culture of digital technologies and DRM would enable.