It is remarkably how an outfit that imagines itself so deeply committed to free trade is so incredibly oblivious to protectionism when it has the effect of redistributing income upward. The court order telling Google to hand over the Internet viewing records of tens of millions of people might be a good time to discuss the economics of copyright.
The point is that we incur enormous inefficiencies in the form of monopoly pricing and extraordinary enforcement costs, and now this invasion of individual privacy, all in order to get a relatively small amount of money into the hands of creative workers. We can think of much better ways to finance creative work. It would be difficult to imagine a worse system -- will the NYT ever talk about the issue?
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