I point to this piece only to note what c–p it is.

‘In the face of the openness and honest labor of engineers, the priestly class closed ranks.’

So, authors and publishers were the ‘priestly class’ (Pharisees?) interfering with these yeoman engineers. Nothing at all about the fact that their intellectual property, which is also their economic property, was being put online to used however one like without the creator having any ability to control its publication nor receive compensation. And a (I don’t say the) reason, let’s face it, was for Google to make money. To make Google to source for one more thing (literature), thereby making their ad sales that much more valuable.

The essayist tries to create the unsubstantiated straw man argument that the ‘priestly class’ acted out of some kind of luddism, a refusal to accept change (some pointless crap about literature becoming data; correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t ‘data’ really just information, knowledge? and was there ever an argument that, Great Expectations, for example, contained words which conveyed information and knowledge?), when it was actually about something far closer to theft of future economic value.