In the context of the copyright debate I always found that the people on the side of removing and reducing copyright in order to “de-criminalize” unlicensed distribution forget about the employment and workforce components of the media business.

This article brings those two points together very well!

As she (Amanda Palmer)  told the New York Times, “If my fans are happy and my audience is happy and the musicians on stage are happy, where’s the problem?”

This is a time-honored dodge, which might be called “the Oompa-Loompa defense.” It goes something like this: outsourcing labor to people who will work for less is fine because they are “happy” to do it. Such practices and accompanying rationales have been continually refined—think the helpline that dials a tech in Bangalore. But the fantasy of the happy worker has taken on newer and more mind-bending aspects, as has work itself. It now includes things like the unpaid microlabor of providing content for Web sites. It includes the amateur photographer who provides her images of, say, the police killing a young black man to the local news as an “iReport” for nothing but a credit and a T-shirt. Or a music lover scratching out a review on some hip site for a byline alone. Or consider the subtlest and arguably the most exemplary case: how, in wandering the byways of Facebook and Google, you are diligently rendering gratis a host of information about the preferences and habits of you and your friends—data they sell to advertisers. This, too, is unpaid labor.

The Amanda Palmer Kickstarter Scandal : The New Yorker.