08 Feb 2012
Story
There's been a lot of talk about copyright and censorship issues on the intertrons lately. SOPA, PIPA, ACTA ... people are angry that governments are trying to censor them. They don't want to be censored, and have provided a lot of arguments to argue why censorship is a terrible idea.
One argument that pops up a lot goes like this:
'Regardless of how bad it is, copyright enforcement through censorship won't work because geeks will find a way around it'.
And it certainly is true that there are a lot of smart people around to invent new ways of circumventing censorship. But this misses the real point. It doesn't matter if you can build a way to circumvent censorship - in the grand scheme of things, it won't matter. The rest of this post explains why this is the case.
One argument that pops up a lot goes like this:
'Regardless of how bad it is, copyright enforcement through censorship won't work because geeks will find a way around it'.
And it certainly is true that there are a lot of smart people around to invent new ways of circumventing censorship. But this misses the real point. It doesn't matter if you can build a way to circumvent censorship - in the grand scheme of things, it won't matter. The rest of this post explains why this is the case.
