We like reading things that make our support of IP and markets look restrained and temperate -- so we enjoyed this letter to Wired.

New Media, Same Old Story The founders of YouTube put together a site that collects free content (tons of it illegal), then walk away with $1.65 billion. Meanwhile, the producers of Lonelygirl15 borrow money from their parents, and Lonelygirl herself is thrilled to get $500 a week as a “working actress.” (“You Tube vs. Boob Tube,” and “The Secret World of Lonelygirl,” issue 14.12.) It’s great to see that the “new media” treats the creative talent so much better than the old one did .

There are plenty of boobs around this tube: the creative people donating their talents to this insane system, the creeps who illegally post others’ work, and the greedy geeks claiming “we can’t control what people do on our site.” I hope you enjoy your two-minute Lonelygirl clips — for what the Internet pays for creative, that is as good as it will get.
Mark Easley Sr.
Morrisville, North Carolina

As Rough Type put it, in Sharecropping the Long Tail:

[B]y putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few.