Peter Frase in The New Inquiry:
There are those who want to defend an order based on intellectual property out of a desire to protect the livelihoods of working writers, artists, and other immaterial laborers. In a world where the likes of Google and Facebook are increasingly adept at extracting creative work for free, this defensive attitude is understandable. But if it comes at the cost of empowering a class of corporate rentiers and imposing pervasive surveillance on the internet, protecting a few meager royalty streams will hardly have been worth it.