But there is a difference from the older anticopyright tradition. Fleischer claims that copyright has become absurd in the age of digital technology because it has to resort to all sorts of fictions, like distinctions between uploading and downloading or between producer and consumer, which don’t actually exist in horizontal P2P communication. Pyratbiran rejects copyright in its entirety – not because it was flawed in its inception, but because it was invented to regulate an expensive, one-way machine like the printing press, and it no longer corresponds to the practices that have been made possible by current technologies of reproduction.

Perhaps the most important effect of digitalization is that it threatens the traditional benefactors of intellectual property since monopolistic control by book publishers, music labels and the film industry is no longer necessary as ordinary people are taking up the means of production and distribution for themselves.