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Well, here's a surprise. For the past few years, we've had one "critic" in our comments in particular who has been particularly active.

Yes, there is a small group of regular critics, but one has been, by far, the most active and most thorough in making sure to disagree with almost every post, often in somewhat ridiculous ways.

He will, no doubt, now accuse me of unfairly violating his privacy, but this is not true. His style is so clear and so easy to spot, I know his comments as soon as they show up and I have no clue who he really is.

I just can tell which are his comments.

One of the complaints that we hear often from various publishers is the idea that, without copyright, other sites could simply copy all content.

In fact, this is the big complaint we keep hearing from newspapers these days -- the idea that they do all this expensive "reporting," and then along comes some "blog" that just copies the work, with a bit of commentary and gets all the traffic.

I tend to point out that this is a silly position to take. The thing is I say that even though I've experienced being on the "other" side of this discussion, and not with a smaller site, but a larger one.

Chris Soghoian recently gave a talk where he reminded companies that it actually can be good for business to say "no" when the government comes asking for info.

He ran through a variety of scenarios (many covered here on Techdirt) when certain companies stood up to government requests and said no.

This sort of debate comes up every so often among folks who run news/commentary sites, and it seems to have boiled over again recently, as a bunch of newspapers/blogging folks got into a nice little discussion on the goodness or evilness of anonymous comments.

Not surprisingly, I side with Mathew Ingram on this one.

Freedom to Tinker : "A few weeks ago, I wrote about a deluge of DMCA notices and pre-settlement letters that CoralCDN experienced in late August.

This article actually received a bit of press, including MediaPost, ArsTechnica, TechDirt, and, very recently, Slashdot."