downer96

  We need someone young, naive, with stars in their eyes 
  going gaga over internet fame about a website they'll 
  never have any creative input on, unless they swear a 
  blood oath to never take credit for an idea that already 
  aligns with our PG rated middle school sense of humor.

This one feels dangerously close to the classic power struggle between underdog music artists and the rotten record labels that have a habit of steam-rolling over their creative sensibilities so they can bastardize an artistic work in the name of selling more spaghetti sauce.

This whole intellectual property thing has always, always, ALWAYS been about the individual's fight against the slippery oligarchy of private companies and corporations. It's almost impossible to paint a corporation as the poor, defenseless victim. The Beastie Boys, in this respect are more individualistic than the company.

In this case the Beastie Boys are not sell-outs. Their position rings truest.

It's funny to see this slight change in power differential augment the perception of the conflict. Does this mean that information wants to be free, if and only if it's being freed into the hands of a private individual and not a faceless profiteering company? Yeah, kind of.

Sorry, EFF. You are pretty much entirely wrong on this one.

...well, maybe fractal demos too.

I say again: Why is this guy more evil than anyone else? Why is he worse than, say, Steve Ballmer? Why is he smeared, but other corporate parasites, not so much?

Let's say you get fired, due to a blazing inferno of inter-office politics at IniTrode. Let's say you are wrongfully fired. Let's say there was a damning e-mail sitting in your inbox to prove it.

Whoops! When you got fired, you lost access to your e-mail login. All your mail sits server-side now, and you have no proof of your transgression.

With an IMAP client, you can stay in the habit of retaining a stale cache of messages on your local machine. But if you drop that habit, in favor of a web interface, well ...beware of political lightning strikes. You might find yourself the victim of a lockout.

Everything disappears with a lost login, when it comes to the web interface. Not so with traditional e-mail clients.

  Blah blah blah, he's fat. 
  Blah blah blah, music thief. 
  Blah blah blah, copyright law.

I'm still not clear on what it is about his website, and all the implicit data transfer it's responsible for, that's so radically different from any other website that hosts massive amounts of any data I want, shared with the world.

Flickr, for example, let's me share Terabytes of data, if I should choose to do so. Why isn't flickr villified like some genocidal dictator?