[josh2600]

But hardwiring micropayments would probably be an equitable distribution of wealth, at least more so than what we do now. And it resolves the privacy concern; if I can pay you for access to your information and I want it, I can, but if you price your information beyond what I'm willing to pay you get privacy.

That sort of system of consent for spying is one potential equitable way to distribute wealth.

The most quixotic thing about Jaron is that stance on copying, because you can tell from an engineering perspective it still vexes him. His viewpoint is that when someone "copies" something over a network, you're not actually copying as there's only one logical copy (Apps in iTunes all deploy from one master copy, there aren't 500Million individual copies of the Facebook app, there's one app and 500Million caches) but that's playing with semantics as far as I can tell. I believe Jaron still wants to enter a socialist utopia, but only if we can all go at once instead of just the rich folk.

Again, I don't necessarily agree with what he has to say BUT I do want to help clarify his arguments, because I think they're worth exploring.