Always fun, Aereo edition
It's always fun, in a clinical way, to diagnose the strange brains of Cooool Techie Types.

You can see the symptoms nicely in their response to a court decision about the Aereo cable service. Aereo is a common carrier. Copyright laws, while fucked up in many ways, correctly require common carriers to pay royalties to content providers. Common carriers are like publishers, picking up one 'manuscript' and distributing many 'copies' of it for money.

Aereo doesn't pay those royalties, using a Secret Ingredient that nobody has actually seen. Supposedly each subscriber is connected (through multiplexing) to his own little teensy antenna. Supposedly each subscriber is just receiving an individual signal, as if he had an antenna on his own roof.

The judge correctly decided that the trick is irrelevant. Even if this matrix of antennas exists, which nobody outside the company knows, it's not functionally different from a single antenna with multiplexed frequency channels. In other words it's the same as any other common carrier.

Techies hate the judge's decision because they're Libertarians. Or so they say.

Ideally, what should a tech-minded libertarian favor? (1) He should favor strong copyright laws, because strong copyright laws encourage creative people to produce. (2) He should favor careful regulation of the Commons (in this case the airwaves) because without regulation a single company can snatch all of the Commons. This actually happened to the airwaves before the radio regulations of the late '20s. A few super-high-power AM stations drowned out other stations. (3) He should want to pay for everything he receives. Expecting everything to be free is EXPLICITLY socialist.

Modern Techies are on the opposite side of each issue. Thus they are not Libertarians or even capitalists. They're a strange mix of inaccurate Marxists and inaccurate Monarchists. Or in simpler terms, they're spoiled infants. They assume that the whole world should be instantly available to them without charge any time they want something, and they must never be required to obey Uncool people. They must be free at all times to slavishly and robotically follow the fashion of the Cool Royal Court.

In this case the real reason for the Techie opinion is blatantly obvious. The suit against Aereo was brought by Fox News. Nuff said.
  ¶ 6:01 PM