“historically laws created for once purpose tend to end being used for other things.”

Look at broadcasting monopolies and cableco monopolies? Originally, the FCC proclaimed that its government established broadcasting monopolies won’t be used to stifle speech because the FCC will ensure a minimal amount of competition. Beyond the fact that this didn’t really seem to ensure free speech, over the years the government started wrongfully requiring more and more licenses to communicate over public airwaves and they started wrongfully granting exclusive privileges to private corporations. Now we live in an era where private corporations wrongfully control most broadcasting spectra and the public can not use broadcasting spectra to communicate (beyond a very few designated frequencies with strict limitations, such as wifi) without going through a government established monopolist gatekeeper. Not only does the government wrongfully establish monopoly power over the communication channels (cableco infrastructure and broadcasting spectra), they even wrongfully establish monopoly power over the content distributed over those spectra (via copy protection laws). The government wrongfully establishes monopolies on both the communication channels and the content.

Despite how absurd and one sided our IP laws have gotten (ie: copy protection lengths, ridiculous patents, etc…) and despite the fact that the government wrongfully grants monopoly privileges over almost everything (ie: taxi cab monopolies among many many others) and despite how many of our rights have been wrongfully taken away from us solely to benefit private interests at public expense, the government established mainstream media abuses their monopoly privileges to censor IP and other such criticisms. Mike would likely never get the opportunity to criticize patents or copy protection laws on national television, yet the mainstream press is more than happy to broadcast and sponsor pro-IP propaganda. They know that, in the face of criticism, their position falls apart completely (yet Mike is more than happy to allow commenters on his blog, IP maximists simply can not defend their position).

The end result? Censorship. Even though this may not have been the alleged intent of these wrongful monopoly privileges, the laws are wrongfully being used to censor various positions.