"Soap does not kill germs. A bar of soap is a great medium for growing germs. The surfactant action of soap helps the running water flush the germs away. That's how it works. It's purely mechanical. Antibacterial soap is a waste of time and money, and just helps breed antibiotic-resistant bugs."

These are scientific claims. People who include such claims in their blogs need to learn to attribute their sources, preferably from case-controlled, double-blind studies from a peer-reviewed journal.

If these statements are true, and I am pretty skeptical of the claim that "a bar of soap is a great medium for growing germs", actually laughably so, then it shouldn't be that hard to cite empirical evidence.

Otherwise, this is just garbage information.

If you read the Guardian essay, it's clear he's both asserting that copy-protection and internet-blocking technologies have been unsuccessful and are inevitably futile, and advocating for the free sharing of information as a means of creating new economic activity; both "how things are" and "how things should be."

I think Cory makes many good points but it's not clear to me how the same kind of wealth creation and commerce opportunities the internet has created from information sharing in the form of, say, Google Maps allowing me to find a hairdresser, can similarly be found in the kind of information sharing involved with P2P file exchanges of copyrighted material, and that you can argue for changes in public policy on the basis that these two forms of information are essentially the same.

The example of bottled water is interesting:

"Like a bottled water company, we compete with free by supplying a superior service, not by eliminating the competition."

But if you're, say, Adobe Corporation, "competing with free" means trying to sell a $200 copy of Illustrator vs. a $0 "cracked" illegal copy on a P2P network. Exactly what could Adobe do to compete with a free copy of its own product?

If you feel "well, that's Adobe's problem and if they can't think of a new business strategy and go extinct, it's their own fault", then the eventual result may be that content will be created with the expectation by the creator that they may not receive any money for it. It seems to me that that may not be a desirable end result, especially for those of us who appreciate using a good SVG program.

Thanks for the interesting article. If "traditional" public policy strategies of attempting to "protect" intellectual property are inevitably futile (and they may very well be), I'd be interested to hear specifically what kinds of changes Cory advocate be made.