The New York Times ran four letters today criticizing its earlier editorial on the Protect IP Act currently in Congress link here. All four were written by the minions of the copyright industry who railed against the injustice of copying or as they prefer, piracy.

I had intended to write on the original editorial when it appeared link here, but Mike Masnick did such a masterful job that I decided to refrain link here. Take a look, if you haven't already.

We need a better vocabulary. They call us opponents "pirates" and "robbers" and we can only respond, "monopolists." Those monopolists are the real thieves with their government created and enforced monopolies who use an artificial shortage to raise prices and throttle innovation under the guise of protecting private property when it is neither property that you can see and touch nor private but the creation of a long discredited and dead king who extracted rents for his own preservation.

"Rent-seekers" would be an accurate description.