What magnificent horseshit. I'm gone for just a few days and you try to pull this crap on us?

No matter how much you distort the picture with your Libertarian pseudocolored glasses, this is stereotypical corporate behavior: an inability to compete in a free market because of technological innovations. It has nothing to do with your MSM bogeyman conspiracy, it is just plain old capitalism at work, the way it always works:
Pious paens to competition and property rights on the surface, legal maneuvers and activist courts to secure their monopoly below the waterline. We've seen it in the music industry and I've experienced it personally in the free-lance writer's market. It isn't enough that the medium gets a fair piece of your action because they produce and market it, they want to keep profitting from your work FOREVER.

And what is the typical, totally predictable, corporate response to fair competition from new media? Invest in new technology or business models, adapt and compete fairly? Noooooooooo. They use the law and the courts to protect and ensure their monopoly. And of course, our TB, viewing it all through his red, white and blue ideological filters, somehow manages to see it as another MSM vs the Sons of Liberty scenario. What a classic piece of conservative obuscation and misdirection, not to mention plain old flaming gargonzola.

And I'm just getting started, folks.

Intellectual property is an oxymoron. A writer or reporter sells his work and research to a publishing outlet and gets paid for it. So far so good. The buyer and seller both deserve to get paid for their contributions. But once the information is sold again (operative word here, money changes hands!) to the consumer, the reader, it belongs to the world to be done with as it sees fit. They paid for it, it is theirs, provided they credit the original author and do not resell it for profit.

Yeah I know, next you're going to tell me how this would mean the end of the world. Bullshit redux. For thousands of years of human literacy there were no copyright laws, and the world got along just fine. The writer sold his work to a publisher, who sold it on the open market and made his fair profit, and (in the olden days) subsequent publishers then moved in and sold new editions without paying royalties. They kept the proceeds, but they credited the author, too, they rarely plagiarized. I agree that a new outlet should not profit from the writer's or original publisher's investment, but I see no reason why it can't be disseminated for scholarly or other non-commercial purposes, provided it is properly attributed and credited.

As a contemporary writer, I expect to lose control over my work once I accept payment for it; what I don't expect is that my publisher can continue to profit exclusively from it while I cannot, or bury it if he sees it as having no commercial value. My long term success as a writer depends on my work being read as much as possible, even if I don't get paid for it in perpetuity. The implication for patent law is clear, too. Preventing manufacture of a device or process because someone else holds the patent is what really stifles innovation. The fiction that preventing manufacture of an idea by others will somehow stop people from investing in research is absurd. On the contrary, why should I make a better mousetrap if the basic design is owned by someone else who doesn't feel the need to improve on on it because he has no competition?

"Ownership" of intellectual property ends once it is published because the publisher has already had a head start on making a buck on it. This fairly repays him for the cash he paid the writer to do the work. After his readers, viewers, (or advertisers!) PAY for it, the publisher no longer has a moral right to claim any further ownership over what is essentially someone else's work.