If piracy is wrong, why does it feel so right? - The Globe and Mail
When it comes to culture, says Myra Tawfik, a law professor at the University of Windsor, “we expect it to be accessible to us in the most convenient and easy way possible.” And if that access proves to be too expensive or onerous, consumers have demonstrated few misgivings about grabbing culture wherever they can.
That desire has dovetailed with the “free culture” movement, whose advocates are leery of the intellectual-property regime that has been evolving in the past half-century, placing more and more power in the hands of copyright owners (most of them corporations) as opposed to the public domain. Spearheaded by thinkers such as Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Creative Commons movement, they argue that restricting the way people can appropriate and recontextualize media deprives citizens of the ability to interact with their own culture.
