It’s Comrade Lessig to you, bub. (Lessig Blog)

Lessig writes, “

Julian Sanchez has a piece in Ars Technica analyzing my recent outing by PFF as a communist. Or socialist. Or quasi-socialist utopianist. Whatever. I’ll leave the criticisms of the criticisms of my scholarship to the reader to judge. One perfectly framed point of the piece, though, is something I completely agree with: There is a divide in the libertarian camp about IP extremism. And when, as I’d put it, “libertarians … ‘start to defect’ from a strong-IP stance, copyright incumbents [will] be left with only their wholly-owned-subsidiaries as defenders.”

Then, I suggest, real progress will be made.”

Mostly in response to this interesting point by Ars: “The argument itself is frankly bizarre: Sydnor brands Lessig’s views on copyright as a species of “quasi-socialist utopianism,” and he peppers his critique with breathless invocations of Soviet dictatorship and Orwellian panopticons. But the piece also provides potent testament to a fissure within the contemporary right, as Lessig’s ideas find a friendly audience among some libertarian public intellectuals, leaving the content industry with a shrinking stable of credible defenders.”

Brilliant stuff, especially by the always on-point Ars Technica.