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no. They are also symbiotically subject to the \"religious beliefs\" of those humans who feed in their upper elevations. 

Unfortunately, the guys (and they mostly are guys) who\'ve been running The Content Industry since it started to die share something like a doctrinal fundamentalism that has led them to such beliefs as the conviction that there\'s no difference between listening to a song and shop-lifting a toaster. 

Moreover, they dwell in such a sublime state of denial that they think they are stewarding the creative process as it arises in the creative humans they exploit savagely - knowing, as they do, that a creative human would rather be heard than paid - and that they, a bunch of sated old scoundrels nearing retirement would be able to find technological means for wrapping \"containers\" around \"their\" \"content\" that the adolescent electronic Hezbollah they\'ve inspired by suing their own customers will neither be smart nor motivated enough to shred whatever pathetic digital bottles their lackeys design.

And so it has been for the last 13 years. The companies that claim the ability to regulate humanity\'s Right to Know have been tireless in their endeavors to prevent the inevitable. The won most of the legislative battles in the U.S. and abroad, having purchased all the government money could buy. They even won most of the contests in court. They created digital rights management software schemes that behaved rather like computer viruses.

Indeed, they did about everything they could short of seriously examining the actual economics of the situation - it has never been proven to me that illegal downloads are more like shoplifted goods than viral marketing - or trying to come up with a business model that the market might embrace.

Had it been left to the stewardship of the usual suspects, there would scarcely be a word or a note online that you didn\'t have to pay to experience. There would be increasingly little free speech or any consequence, since free speech is not something anyone can own.    

Fortunately there were countervailing forces of all sorts, beginning with the wise folks who designed the Internet in the first place. Then there was something called the Electronic Frontier Foundation which I co-founded, along with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, back in 1990. Dedicated to the free exchange of useful information in cyberspace, it seemed at times that I had been right in suggesting then that practically every institution of the Industrial Period would try to crush, or at least own, the Internet. That\'s a lot of lawyers to have stacked against your cause.

But we had Cory Doctorow. 

Had nature not provided us with a Cory Doctorow when we needed one, it would have been necessary for us to invent a time machine and go into the future to fetch another like him. That would be about the only place I can imagine finding such a creature. Cory, as you will learn from his various rants \"contained\" herein was perfectly suited to the task of subduing the dinosaurs of content. 

He\'s a little like the guerilla plumber Tuttle in the movie Brazil. Armed with a utility belt of improbable gizmos, a wildly over-clocked mind, a keyboard he uses like a verbal machine gun, and, best of all, a dark sense of humor, he\'d go forth against massive industrial forces and return grinning, if a little beat up.

Indeed, many of the essays collected under this dubious title are not only memoirs of his various campaigns but are themselves the very weapons he used in them. Fortunately, he has spared you some of the more sophisticated utilities he employed. He is not battering you with the nerdy technolingo he commands when stacked up against various minutiacrats, but I assure you that he can speak geek with people who, unlike Cory, think they\'re being pretty social when they\'re staring at the other person\'s shoes. 

This was a necessary ability. One of the problems that EFF has to
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