Another example of this US-centric myopia is his statement, "When music is free, wireless bills get expensive, insanely so."  Sorry, I see no direct cause and effect, especially since there are numerous studies, with data, showing that US customers pay much more for wireless and other network services than other countries around the world.

I'd say from experience that it is the other way around, when cost/online commincations goes down, file-sharing goes up. Of course, that just changes the medium, before that copying was done by burning CDs and before that was the era of home taping.

Lanier

A more incremental path to security would not answer the hard philosophical questions about such concepts as copyright, but it would make them less contentious.  In a world in which a person starts to earn royalties on tens of thousands of little contributions made over a lifetime of active participation on the 'net, it will matter a little less if there is a conflict about attribution in some minority of those cases.

Hm, he reminds me of Galambos.

Galambosianism - RationalWiki

Other libertarians quickly found Galambosians to be obstinate cranks. Reportedly, Andrew Galambos and Ayn Rand once met and within five minutes each had declared the other insane. Also reportedly, Galambos would keep a jar or coffee can next to him when speaking in public, into which he would drop a nickel or dime any time he mentioned the name of another person, or mentioned an idea or phrase attributed to another person, to symbolize he was paying "royalties" to them for his use of their intellectual property. He went so far as to drop a nickel in "royalties" to the long-dead Thomas Paine every time he used the word "liberty", on the mistaken belief that the word was invented by Paine. Also reportedly, he was born Joseph Andrew Galambos, Jr. but legally changed his name to Andrew Joseph Galambos so he wouldn't infringe on his father's intellectual property rights. Jerome Tuccille's humorous history of the early libertarians, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, includes several such anecdotes of interactions with the Galambosians.^[1]

Galambosians themselves were not allowed to discuss any of Galambos' ideas with others. This, you see, would be a violation of Andrew Galambos' intellectual property rights. Any attempt to discuss Galambos or his ideas with a follower would get a response of silence, an answer like "yes I'm a Galambosian, but I'm not allowed to say what that means", or the question "have you taken V-50?"

In general, I would place Lanier with other supporters of conservative economics. Technological change is changing the society and as always conservative plans are trotted forth in order to create money streams that retain the existing order. The main thing that is different in today's debate compared with the one the 19th century is that the economic liberals won that one so hard that the conservative case today is stated in economic liberal terms, in particular regarding the concept of intellectual property.

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Perhaps he deserves that for not showing any data, but the repeated counting of Apple Store employees, Canon employees (who were employed back when Kodak was at 140,000) and others as "proof" that there has been no contraction has not impressed me.

Now it's fair to point out that fewer people employed in farming has not meant immediate unemployment. Rather people moved from the land into industry.

However, I think that masks an important point that Lanier has noticed, new industries have not arisen that provide mass employment the way the old ones did - and this is changing the nature of our economies and societies.