Pluralistic: “Few debates invite more uninformed commentary than “IP” – a loosely defined grab bag that regulates an ever-expaning sphere of our daily activities, despite the fact that almost no one, including senior executives in the entertainment industry, understands how it works. Take reading a book. If the book arrives between two covers in the form of ink sprayed on compressed vegetable pulp, you don’t need to understand the first thing about copyright to read it. But if that book arrives as a stream of bits in an app, those bits are just the thinnest scrim of scum atop a terminally polluted ocean of legalese. At the bottom layer: the license “agreement” for your device itself – thousands of words of nonsense that bind you not to replace its software with another vendor’s code, to use the company’s own service depots, etc etc. This garbage novella of legalese implicates trademark law, copyright, patent, and “paracopyrights” like the anticircumvention rule defined by Section 1201 of the DMCA. Then there’s the store that sold you the ebook: it has its own soporific, cod-legalese nonsense that you must parse; this can be longer than the book itself, and it has been exquisitely designed by the world’s best-paid, best-trained lawyer to liquefy the brains of anyone who attempts to read it. Nothing will save you once your brains start leaking out of the corners of your eyes, your nostrils and your ears – not even converting the text to a brilliant graphic novel. Even having Bob Dylan sing these terms will not help you grasp them. The copyright nonsense that accompanies an ebook transcends mere Newtonian physics – it exists in a state of quantum superposition. For you, the buyer, the copyright nonsense appears as a license, which allows the seller to add terms and conditions that would be invalidated if the transaction were a conventional sale. But for the author who wrote that book, the copyright nonsense insists that what has taken place is a sale (which pays a 25% royalty) and not a license (a 50% revenue-share). Truly, only a being capable of surviving after being smeared across the multiverse can hope to embody these two states of being simultaneously. But the challenge isn’t over yet. Once you have grasped the permissions and restrictions placed upon you by your device and the app that sold you the ebook, you still must brave the publisher’s license terms for the ebook – the final boss that you must overcome with your last hit point and after you’ve burned all your magical items.”