Touché.

You may be right that this way of thinking is over the heads of the people currently helming the iceberg-ramming fleet known as the record industry. On the other hand, the Boing Boing/Creative Commons/Twitter/Flickr/Social Media crowd finds it is so native as to be boring and cliche. Tonight, I went to Ignite Portland 4, a local in-person gathering of the digital tribes and I bet the people there would find the shortsighted “return on investment” logic that lead to “sue ’em all” just as non-sensical as the record industry types find my talk of “network effects”.

The real questions are: how did these two groups get so far apart from each other and what can we do to bring them back together? A more partisan way of putting it might be: who’s right? Which of these ways of thinking is leading to more economic advantage and more social influence?