Being a big fan of Grant McCracken's “This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics” I was a little startled to see a post snippet pop up in my feed reader that said,
I was talking in Vancouver yesterday. The slide that everyone seemed to like the best has “shoot the lawyers” as its title.
Fortunately, when you go to the full text, the above is immediately followed by,
My argument is that we have to be much more free with our intellectual property.
I'm OK with that, and in time it should be possible to explain to Prof. McCracken that current IP policies are not primarily the fault of lawyers but rather of incumbent content-provision industries trying to protect their business models. Yes, they often hire lawyers (and Senators) to do their dirty work, but those are just the means not the sources.
Between shooting the lawyers, content conduits, and the Senators:
The content conduits are most deserving, but the Senators are the least in number, and so the utilitarian principle suggests it would be most economic to sacrifice them.