I like this essay for using a brilliant analogy to illustrate a hard problem. Despite painting such a pretty picture, though, it winds up not really addressing

I like this essay for using a brilliant analogy to illustrate a hard problem. Despite painting such a pretty picture, though, it winds up not really addressing any of the issues it brings up. What the essay proposes is the replacement of one nebulous standard ("property") with a few others: "not warping society," "when it works," and "common sense". From the point of view of PG or anybody else in the Valley, what the AA's are doing may feel like forcing everybody to breathe through tubes. And this essay will easily appeal to anybody else that has grown up with the internet, simply for eliciting such a colorful depiction of our emotions when confronted with end-user-hostile DRM and bills like SOPA. From the point of view of a media conglomerate, "warping" society is sort of their M.O., although they might more comfortably describe this as "advertising" and "developing consumer loyalty". It isn't common sense that a media company shouldn't change society to make money, because they've been doing this since radio and movies and television were invented. This goes double for new media and the internet. For instance, isn't Facebook undeniably trying to change people's expectations on what personal information they should be sharing with the world? So all that's left is the essay telling us what we already know: that technology is making certain kinds of property irrelevant, and society needs to adapt to this change. How, and when, and what we should actually be doing, are all left as an exercise for the reader.