[kwlug disc.] Microsoft in trouble for wanting Wikipedia edits

[Donald Tees]

Rick wrote:
> Chris Bruner <cbruner at quadro.net> writes:
>   
>> ... MS had the ability to rebuff the criticisms, just not
>> as directly as they would have liked. 
>>
>> Wikipedia doesn't allow fluff pieces with an obvious bias. MS believed
>> that the criticisms were written by IBM. Sounds like Wikipedia get's
>> to be judge and jury on their own site, and ruled that the original
>> articles didn't have an obvious  bias.
>>     
>
> Thinking about this situation a bit more made me think of the
> documentary _The Corporation_. The theme of that movie is about the
> nature of corporations. Apparently, corporations are, in legal terms,
> an artificial person with the full legal rights of a human, such as
> free speech. Then the movie goes on to argue that corporations are, by
> design, psychopaths. Psychopaths are purely self-interested people who
> are incapable of empathy.
>
> Anyway, I wonder if the growth of non-governmental public forums might
> start to strip corporations of some of their rights.
> Demoting corporations from being people and back to just being things.
>   

I am of the opinion that the above, coupled with the fact that 
corporations cannot die, have put us right back into a feudal state, and 
for the same reasons that it happened several hundred years back.  In 
effect, we have re-created royalty and a ruling class, as well as making 
ordinary people surfs.  People claim that unfettered market forces are 
the only way to wealth for the average person. Seems to me that it does 
more for the super-rich than for the ordinary person.

Donald