RobF

I read the second article. It didn't help my understanding of Doctorow's position all that much.

The problem, as always, is in the details. I want to understand what Doctorow thinks are the essentials of this putative "age-old normative consensus" which he finds so compelling.

Just stating that such a thing exists doesn't get me any farther along to understanding the intellectual framework which he wants to use in order to make the trade off between the creator's interests and those of society at large.

Doctorow's article is all well and good. He doesn't like the term. I get that; he's said it before.

But I never quite manage to understand exactly what he proposes to substantially replace the existing legal and semantic structure. If I make something that doesn't have a particular physical manifestation, what rights and obligations do I have to that creation?

I think that, when pressed, many people who sympathize with Doctorow in this debate would assert that a thing that has no physical manifestation conveys no rights to its creator. But I wish they would come out and say that directly, instead of dancing around the issue while making essentially content-free semantic arguments.