Many of you've already heard/seen this, and by now some of you have probably heard about the eff-up of epic proportions that Warner Music has made by issuing a DMCA takedown request of one of, get this, Lawrence Lessig's presentations about copyright and copyright law.

Well, if you haven't yet seen the lecture, now is as good a time as any. In fact, go ahead and forward it to your non-technical friends and relatives as payback for all those dancing hamsters. If you're lucky they'll watch it and they might learn something.

Notably, they might learn that this "copyright war" is seriously mucking up the human experience as a whole, and it's not the "pirates" who are exactly at fault. They might think about a few points like that the unwholesome arrangement we have at present is teaching children beyond a doubt that the rule of law is not to be respected, it's to be skirted around as long as no one important notices them. It's teaching them that they have no actual rights to anything at all, and that they can't usefully contribute to culture so they might as well just sit back and consume what they're given.

They might for a moment consider the effect these factors are going to have twenty years down the line, and whether or not they're going to want to be a part of that future at all.