Cruising Google news, I stumble upon a Gizmodo blurb with a direct rip off of a celebrated Winston Churchill quote in the first sentence. The practice of plagiarism is wide spread though efforts are being made daily to discredit the "permission" culture. Proponents of the "remix"of content and "mashups' use intellectual "pretzel logic" (thank you Steely Dan) to justify their actions. Google's Open Source Program manager claims such sharing ("stealing"?) will "make the world a better place for us all" [Sometimes these Net utopians make me gag] The intellectual rationale for this is led by distinguished Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig who founded the 'Creative Commons" legal framework to justify the taking of other people's ideas. "Lessig presents this as a desirable ideal and argues, among other things, that the health, progress, and wealth creation of a culture is fundamentally tied to this participatory remix process". And others have pushed this concept to absurd feel good lengths.
I won't engage these zealots. But I don't think even Professor Lessig would accept a direct rip-off quote from one of the most important historical figures of the 20th century. Would he?
