In Silicon-Valley circles, Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch family of websites is known for encouraging entrepreneurial activity. In copyright-policy circles, TechCrunch is known for discouraging entrepreneurial activity. After all, Mr. Arrington published The Essential Guide to Piracy, which begins as follows:

“Piracy is an action sport. The ability to infringe copyright and steal valuable work induces a rush like no other. Whether you steal music, movies, books, applications, or whatever, it feels like breaking the law and it saves our wallets and purses from becoming empty.”

Gee, where do kids today get the idea that it is OK to engage in the sort of illegal free-riding that Justices Breyer, Stevens and O’Connor recently called “garden-variety theft”?

So TechCrunch thought that copyright piracy was cool. Then, it made a discovery: Hundreds of for-profit websites were “splogging”; they were selling advertisements by copying and re-posting TechCrunch’s original content without permission or attribution. In short, they were pirating from TechCrunch. TechCrunch thought this was not cool at all.

And that was very odd. According to Mr. Arrington, TechDirt should embrace “splogging”: After all, even if for-profit copying of TechCrunch’s original content destroyed TechDirt’s ad-based business model, TechCrunch could still cross-subsidize the production of its content by renting out Mr. Arrington for speaking engagements.

TechCrunch’s response to “splogging” indicates that it suspects that such cross-subsidization schemes are ill-considered utopian nonsense. It is difficult to disagree. Mr. Arrington can understand why our laws must encourage, support and protect the Silicon-Valley entrepreneurs who make the risky investments needed to bring us new gizmos. But he fails to understand why laws must also protect the entrepreneurs who make the risky investments needed to create the new content that makes new gizmos worth owning.