Remainder of The Ethics of Modern Communication posted

I have finally posted the remainder of my essay, The Ethics of Modern Communication. With this I lift my previous request not to link to the work-in-progress.

This is the end of over three years of work for me, so I hope you enjoy it. Additions may be posted and I someday hope to clean up the Misc. chapter, but I believe it is ready to go. Mental note, since this is the summation of this weblog up to this point I really need to add it to the sidebar.

Arcane Copyright

NY Times: Music-Sharing Service at M.I.T. Is Shut Down. To Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director of the university's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, that incident shows that the world of copyright has grown so arcane that even the major players do not even understand it. [Tomalak's Realm]

I disagree. It's not the "arcane world of copyright" here, it's the "arcane world of music licensing". It is not copyright law in dispute here, it is what contracts have allowed whom to do what. The only copyright "fix" here is to somehow mandate simpler contracts and as neat as that may sound on first blush, it could only backfire. There's really no way to avoid this when you have contractual relations amongst that many entities.