Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged–which had a working title of The Strike–was about the men of the mind, the producers, going on strike against an increasingly oppressive and ungrateful government and society. They withdrew their services to show the world who really needs whom.
And this is essentially what happened in yesterday’s Internet blackouts and other protests against SOPA and PIPA by tech, Internet, and Silicon Valley giants such as Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and so on. And since SOPA and PIPA are just attempts to enforce copyright, the strike was essentially against copyright. Which is ironic, since Rand was completely in favor of patent and copyright, going so far as to maintain that “patents are the heart and core of property rights, with her followers saying that “all property is intellectual property”. And yet she would have admired the tech titans. Presumably she’d have been very horrified to see her heroes stage a mini-Atlas Shrugged strike–against copyright! The question is: would she have sued them for copyright infringement?
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