(response to a guy who complained about my pirating his blog content on another blog)
I understand your viewpoint, and I understand what intellectual property rights are. What is happening all around us is that the nature of intellectual property rights has changed. Asia, where about 1/2 the world’s population lives, doesn’t understand the concept. How can you own an idea? I am currently in Argentina, and we rent videos from a store down the block for about $1, sometimes they have the pirated content before it hits the big screen. Video game stores here put chips in video game players so they will accept copied games. It is an accepted fact in most of the world that you can’t pay inflated western prices for content of any kind.
Sure if you are microsoft and can hire lots of lawyers, you can enforce tort law in the developed western world. But 99% of bloggers are not in that position, most don’t even care (I think) and would prefer any incoming link to no incoming link. There is so much content, we are overwhelmed with content, and the google algorithms that favor frequent changes are making some idiot’s opinion in the blogosphere easier to find on the web than proven scientific fact, which doesn’t change all that often.