I think the advice is very good to consider the long term ramifications of choosing impermanent means of accessing digital information, including pictures, books, music, blog posts, and whatever other materials one typically finds and stores online. More people should be aware that they have options when it comes to the file formats that store information and the so-called digital rights management that encumbers them, and that different providers may provide significantly different options when it comes to access to the materials for which one has bought a license.

Going further, people might also do well to learn more about how they can acquire unlicensed books, musics, video, and other files should they be willing to take matters into their own hands when it comes to maintaining access to information. There’s nothing immoral about actively resisting permission culture.

That said, the essay falls off the rails a bit once it turns needlessly ideological. For profit companies aren’t all bastions of evil, and blaming Bush for the ills of the world has been passé for years. The uncomfortable reality for advocates of free culture is that most people are happy to trade privacy and permanence in exchange for convenience. It’s not our place to decide for them that they’re wrong to do so, but even if we see that a better world is possible if most people took these concerns more seriously, that’s a cultural problem, not an economic one.

And I say that as someone who favours cooperative development of shared resources, both as a contributor to the open educational resources movement and a cheerleader for the open source software movement.