"For my part, I started Brain Pickings more than six years ago as what’s commonly referred to as a “passion project” (though I don’t like the fleeting noncommittal relationship this phrasing suggests) and didn’t have a business model — but I did have a crystal-clear editorial model, which remains the same today: get people interested in meaningful cross-disciplinary things they didn’t yet know they were interested in, and in the process empower their networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity; break out of the filter bubble, if you will, though conceived long before we had the very vocabulary to articulate it. So when an aggregator like the Huffington Post, a business-model wolf wearing an editorial-authenticity sheep’s skin, takes my (ad-free) content and regurgitates it on its (ad-plastered) site, it lives up to the term “parasite” at the heart of Levine’s argument, derived from the Greek parasitos and used to describe “someone who ate at someone else’s table without providing anything in return.”"

"With Box, the customers are businesses for the most part. That is a key difference to other challenges by the RIAA. And It sets up a conflict between service providers and their clients who now face a determined media industry with a historic interest in litigation to protect its copyrights."

"The spread of anti-filesharing measures across the United States and Europe appears to be accelerating at a somewhat dizzying pace. On an almost daily basis during the last few months stories about controversial and sometimes draconian measures to deal with online infringement have hit the headlines.

Say what you like about the big movie and music studios – they certainly know how to coordinate their lobbying to perfection. Timing like this, with legislation being mulled in many major markets simultaneously, sends a powerful message."