Down in Houston, Robert Nagle writes a highly literate and readable blog called Idiotprogrammer: Musings on Culture & Technology by Texas Writer. He likes the TeleBlog overall but recently said one of my August posts was too harsh on Eric Alterman, author of an Atlantic article on Hollywood’s mostly liberal political donors. I’d asked why the Atlantic had run “9,000+ words on Hollywood money and not one bloody mention of copyright or Jack Valenti, the master lobbyist who has so brilliantly marshaled Tinsel Town’s millions even if he is an idiot about tech.”
“Eric Alterman is no nut,” Robert said of the writer of the Atlantic article, “and he is certainly not corruptible by influence-peddling (despite some tenuous relationships with the previous administration). Why did Alterman overlook the copyright issue? First, except for content creators (and libertarian-minded teens who download copyrighted material without guilt), many people just don
