PS ACTUALLY WAIT I hope this doesn't sound like I'm trivializing the scary stuff that went down yesterday, but the more I think about it the more this debate about what we should do about web censorship in China et al seems analogous to concerns that our government/the RIAA is going to stop the sharing of copyrighted music and video over the internet. Despite using - successfully! - all the legal tools at their disposal, shutting down Napster, Grokster et al, and suing a bunch of 12 year olds or whatever,
WE ARE SWIMMING IN AN OCEAN OF FREE MUSIC, and the ocean is getting bigger and deeper all the time.
And sharing music, like sharing information, is capital-G Good - as we come to know a wider and weirder variety of people, the more we realize how similar people are. The closer I look at you, the more I see myself, and the more I listen, the more I hear my own voice -
(More in this earlier post on the Grokster ruling and why the majors' strategy can't stop filesharing and, most importantly, why the music industry can shrink in nominal terms while providing increasing amounts of value for music listeners.)