I’ve struggled for years with my opinions on intellectual property issues, especially with respect to software and music piracy. On the one hand, they strike me as a form of stealing, which – most thinking people will agree – is morally wrong. On the other hand, though, I don’t think that the publishers – especially the music and movie publishers – have taken the right approach in lobbying for laws that treat all consumers as potential thieves.

I ran across this article today by publisher Tim O’Reilly which makes a lot of sense. A couple of quotes:

Piracy is a loaded word, which we used to reserve for wholesale copying and resale of illegitimate product. The music and film industry usage, applying it to peer-to-peer file sharing, is a disservice to honest discussion.

We don’t have a substantial piracy problem in the US and Europe… What we have is a problem that is analogous, at best, to shoplifting, an annoying cost of doing business.

Now if only some of the folks in Hollywood will listen to O’Reilley…

We subscribe to Time, and this week’s cover story is some of the best reporting they’ve done for as long as I can remember. (For news, I actually prefer The Economist, but it is darn expensive.) It is a story filled with greed, corruption, and scandel in so many ways that I hardly know where to begin. First, there is the appalling poverty in which many Native Americans live. Then, there is the very ugly idea that the way to help them is by allowing them to build casinos. Finally, there is the reality that the proportion of Native Americans making money off of these deals is very, very small and that most of the profits are being pocketed by investors. The story doesn’t provide any good solutions, and I don’t have any to offer. It’s a bad situation, though, and steps must be taken to improve it.