Code Eats Content for Breakfast

Lamenting developers' complicity in content piracy, marketing guru Mark Schaefer recently wrote, "Coding is cheap and fast and plentiful and we seem to be in a media world dominated by cleaning up unintended consequences."

Developers know they're killing creatives, the geese that lay the golden eggs. But, wantonly, they continue to pump out code that rewards content pirates.

There's no real news here, alas. Just old-fashioned avarice.

While encouraged by investors to "disrupt" moribund industries, developers continue to fleece creatives, as they have since the days of Napster.

The injustices they perpetuate make literal the economist's term creative destruction.

Market-oriented, Schaefer recommends a return to patronage, the "Renaissance monetization model," to support content creators.

Raised by parents who worshipped FDR, I recommend revival of the WPA (funded by taxing companies like Facebook.)

What's your idea?