[freshhawk]

What about the fact that infringing copyright is only going to get easier as technology improves while every conceivable method of policing the internet for copyright necessarily involves complete surveillance of all communication by citizens?

It's not being "rebranded" as a freedom of speech issue, it has become one by the nature of the only possible ways to enforce copyright laws on the internet.

I agree that a "right to share 3rd party artistic works" isn't freedom of speech, but protecting the ability of people to secretly transfer bits is abso-fucking-lutely the freedom of speech issue of our time.

It's the difference between a stance based on what you think "should be" and one based on the practical limitations inherent in designing legal constraints around online sharing.

We can give enormous surveillance powers to some central group to police copyright and destroy freedom of speech, we can have no way to stop copyright infringement except for cultural norms or we can reevaluate how we, as a society, compensate artists.

This has been reevaluated many times in the last thousand years and it looks like another one has been thrust upon us, since I'm not sure we can stop people from sharing files just by shaming them. Pirates spend more money buying artistic works than non-pirates so I can't blame people who feel that the honesty system will work, but I don't really think it will work. I'm too cynical perhaps.