This is a nice article that looks at the rhetoric behind the debate over file sharing and compares it - successfully - to cold war rhetoric. That said, I'm not completely satisfied with the result. Comparing the deliberately crafted rhetoric of record company industry representatives to occasional outbursts of hackers and posters on Slashdot seems a little unfair. And in the author's attempt to find common ground at the end of the article, he makes several points that file sharers would oppose. Indeed, he argues that file sharers should not be called file sharers because file sharers are not the owners of the material they share - but this is exactly the point in dispute. I think that had he compared the rhetoric of the RIAA with the more articulate defenses of file sharing, such as those offered by Lessig or even myself, his article would have taken a different form.
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