This one surprised the heck out of me, particularly because it uses one particular word, “boycott,” that I’d never expect to see in this particular venue, the Wall Street Journal.
Here’s the link, directly to a Freedom to tinker post, directly to Walter Mossberg’s column.
Lest you think Edward Felten is distorting Mossberg’s view, here’s the column itself.
What Mossberg is advocating, at least in this area, is what I’d consider a reasonably balanced view of copyright. I tend to agree with Felten (who, after all, spends much of his professional life studying this stuff) that the kind of “benevolent DRM” Mossberg wants isn’t feasible, but that’s another issue.
My own feelings on this are pretty clear, and posted recently, in C&I: There’s no music that I need so badly that I’d buy a pseudo-CD. I never lend CDs; I never sell a CD and retain ripped copies; I never rip CDs that I borrow from the library. But I reject efforts to control how I produce mix CD-Rs for my own use.
