But now they *have* had contact, what with the plane buzzing over their homes, why aren't they now called "Contacted"?

Well, I think it's very literalist to jam on the idea of trying to hunt "where Lessig lauds the appropriation of intellectual property".

The point is, he has created a cloud around himself that incites this very appropriation. His disciples and defenders right in threads like this show you that.

His concept that old white dead guys or governments with old white dead guys in them hang on to copyright too long is at root, an "expropriate the expropriators" Bolshevik concept. Of course, it's dressed up very skillfully.

The idea that Creative Commons helped save IP and helped people protect their livlihoods seems hugely overstated, untested, and very misleading. I've written how disappointing it was in Second Life, where Lessig was consulted and was enthusiastically cited constantly, and where he is absolutely nowhere to be found now that his supposed invention is floundering and everyone's content is copied readily in a streaming world where you can copy everything you can see, and where aggressive opensource and reverse engineer movements threaten all IP, even of Linden Lab itself.

What's more important than trying to play gotcha with a quote from Lessig that would pin down what seems like his subterranean Marxism -- where you can't win because he's always going to be more cunning and erudite than thou -- what has to be done as the social challenge to Lessig is to ask him where he is really defending IP that he claims he doesn't undermine.

That place, among others, is Second Life. Where is he now that his CC-type experiment failed and he can't do a thing about it technically, morally or legally? The argument isn't "oh, progress means you have to get over your attachment to property and make everything stone soup and opensourced consulting business models", the argument is: why didn't your IP scheme work? You said it would. It didn't.

Oh, stop it with the whining about "our athletes". They are professional sports product endorsers and the whole Olympics thing has gotten way too commercialized and politicized and needs to be held just in Greece, and be done with it.

If people cannot bring themselves to boycott the Olympics because they are too mired in moral equivalency, they can do just this much: refuse to confer legitimacy on the government of China at this time.

That means calling on Bush and other world leaders not to attend the opening ceremony. We can do that much.