Thursday, January 7, 2010

Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic defends Bono on Twitter, etc.


Here's an excerpt from Krist Novoselic's blog on Seattle Weekly:
When I logged onto Twitter yesterday, I discovered U2's Bono going down in Tweeted flames. Turns out the singer/philanthropist wrote a forward-looking Top-10 list for The New York Times in which he states, "A decade's worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators." Bono just ripped the lid off the tension between a free and open Internet and the natural course of commerce that drives our information revolution.
I love Twitter, and it's disappointing to see the service manifest itself as a lynch mob. Bono is the latest in a line of good people who get trashed in the continuing file-sharing controversy. Hilary Rosen, Lars Ulrich, Prince, and Howard King are some of the most prominent of those who've gotten flamed by rhetoric more suited for the revolutions that brought in the 20th century.

Venture capital, risk, and the promise of wealth is what makes our networks expand and our processors speed up, to provide all the wonderful free content available at our fingertips today. Remember the old song "Working in a Coal Mine," with the line "How long can this go on?" The song alludes to the toil of the working man, but I'll put it another way: How long can free Twitter and YouTube go on?"


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