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Freedom of information is only useful to those who can use it. Most people do not gain much from free information, as they can't make money with it and they're not interested in learning from it. They gain more from the entertainment Transformers provides. In the world we on Hacker News live in, freedom of information is much much more valuable than it is to the vast majority of mankind. Because of its value to us, things like open source and wikipedia exist, where people share things freely because everyone benefits so much from that ecosystem. I'm commenting here right now because I benefit from this ecosystem and want to do my part to keep it going. The beauty is, as I said before, that this can all exist in spite of copyright. Louis C.K. can make a ton of money without needing to use DRM or enforce his copyrights. People can choose not to use the system, and do so to great success. But some things require the system to exist, and those things don't need to be sacrificed. Vote with your dollars not by pirating but by supporting content that is open source, or that doesn't use DRM. Pirating more convinces the powers that be that it's a growing problem, supporting content made by people who aren't draconian hoarders of information will encourage more to be open with their content.


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