Mark Helprin anticipated that his 2007 New York Times op-ed piece about the extension of the term of copyright would be received quietly. instead, within a week, the article had generated 750,000 angry comments. shocked by his young critics’ breathtaking sense of entitlement and appalled by the breadth, speed, and illogic of their arguments, Helprin realized how drastically different this generation was from those before it. the Creative Commons movement and the copyright abolitionists have been educated with a modern bias toward collaboration, which has led them to denigrate individual efforts. Digital Barbarism is Helprin’s cogent, powerful, and passionate response to those whose selfish desire to “stick it” to the “greedy” corporate interests controlling the distribution of intellectual property undermines not just the possibility of an independent literary culture but threatens the future of civilization itself.
