Somehow I can't see an internet mob ganging up on someone who remixed a song (of an indie artist) and refused to see anything wrong with it.
This also shows that there are very, very weird people out there on the Internet. Who would bother to send the editor personal hate mail?
I wonder why anyone would use such a passive-aggressive construction in their writing.
Somehow I can't see an internet mob ganging up on someone who remixed a song (of an indie artist) and refused to see anything wrong with it.
See, I can explain this. Believe it or not, most people do not study copyright law for years in order to develop opinions about what activity should be infringing. Instead, they develop an ad-hoc set of intuitions about what sorts of activity copyright should regulate. Sometimes those norms happen to line up well with what copyright law actually says and sometimes they're in complete disagreement. In this case, the norms line up. In other cases, like a poor artist who earns basically zero dollars remixing, they don't.
In other words, what is legal often differs from what most people's intuitions about what is legal, and this difference is especially large in area of law that are complex and divorced from popular debate. The truth is that if you tried to explain copyright law to the average person, they simply wouldn't believe you because so much of it is so absurd. This is all explained in any of a number of good books, starting with Jessica Littman's Digital Copyright, which I highly recommend.
Believe it or not, most people do not study copyright law for years in order to develop opinions about what activity should be infringing.
Really?
Anyway, I don't think you can disregard the point by pointing out (quite correctly IMO) that copyright law is a pile of crap. I think in general, Internet mobs are pro-piracy of songs/movies, but in this case these people saw something massively wrong with what is basically piracy of someone's article. Staying away from the legal side, what moral/ad-hoc/intuitive basis do you think the people had for making this distinction?
It is a blend of the fact that the remixer was trying to make money off of the stolen content, and that the original writer had specifically told them to stop (which the remixer refused). I think it also sort of plays into people's underdog complex a bit, or wanting to stick up for the 'little guy'.