Re: [FYI] The Mouse blasting privacy

[Ulf Möller <ulf@fitug.de>]

Noch ein paar interessante Texte zum Thema...

Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 11:25:02 -0400
To: ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com
From: Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: IP: Re:  WHEN people can easily copy anything digital, who's going
    to make $100 million movies?
Sender: owner-ip-sub-1@admin.listbox.com
Reply-To: farber@cis.upenn.edu


>From: dakin@nationalpost.com
>Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 11:12:04 -0400
>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu
>
>
>>
>>
>>>  > >From: "Gillmor, Dan" <DGillmor@sjmercury.com>
>>>  > >To: "'farber@cis.upenn.edu'" <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
>>>  > >
>>>  > >http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/columns/gillmor/docs/dg061100.htm
>>>  > >
>>>  > >WHEN people can easily copy anything digital, who's going to make $100
>>>  > >million movies?
>
>
>William Gibson spoke last week at the TEDCity (www.tedcity.com) conference
>-- the Canadian version of the Monterey, etc. TEDs -- and, among other
>things, spoke about how he's trying to develop a new piece of fiction
>inspired by the example of Napster. (His son is a great Napster user and
>recently introduced dad to it.) He suggested cultural content producers
>may be heading back to an era when patronage was the means by which they
>supported themselves
>
>Here's a bit from a piece that ran in our paper:
>-----
>"We're at the end of a 90-year window where it was possible to make money
>selling recorded music," Mr. Gibson said.
>Seeing a future where the Napster model is extended to writing, movies,
>and any other cultural content that could be digitized, Mr. Gibson said
>people will soon not be able to sell consumer units of intellectual property.
>For a new work of fiction, he has been trying to imagine a method of
>marketing such works.
>"I find myself trying to come up with alternative models. Mind you, I'm
>lucky: Mine don't have to work," he said. "As far as I can tell, you're
>left with patronage."
>----
>
>Full story at:
>http://www.nationalpost.com/news.asp?s2=national&s3=reporter&f=000609/
>313072.html
>
>David Akin / Senior technology Reporter
>National Post / dakin@nationalpost.com
>AOL Instant Messenger: DavidAkin2
>VOX: 416.383.2372 / FAX: 416.383.2443
>300-1450 Don Mills Road
>Don Mills / Ontario / CANADA / M3B 3R5



Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2000 11:05:31 -0500
To: ignition-point@mailbox.by.net
From: believer@telepath.com
Subject: IP: Swashbuckling Anarchists Try to Eliminate Copyrights From
  Cyberspace
Sender: owner-ignition-point@mailbox.by.net
Reply-To: believer@telepath.com

New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/biztech/articles/10copyright.html

June 10, 2000

 Swashbuckling Anarchists Try to Eliminate Copyrights From Cyberspace

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

 There was some perverse pleasure to be had last month as the heavy metal
band Metallica sued the Web company Napster for copyright infringement.
Here is a band that invokes the hounds of hell and mocks gentility with
shrieking sarcasm, suddenly championing bourgeois values by insisting on
royalty payments. And here are legions of college students supposedly
championing Metallican values -- undermining corporate greed, attacking
propriety -- when what they are really after in downloading songs from
Napster is free music.

 Such is the bad faith of contemporary rebellion. But it doesn't end there.
Napster itself, the creation of a 19-year-old programmer, Shawn Fanning,
has already attracted $15 million in venture capital with its sly appeal to
freeloading music lovers. It claims to be innocent of copyright violation
because all it is really doing is arranging a match between one user who
wants a song and another user who has it.

 Napster might have been less coy and acknowledged that it is actually part
of a movement challenging copyright and intellectual property. Its goals
are shared, for example, by a new program called Freenet, which has been
described by its creator, Ian Clarke, 23, as an example of "near-perfect
anarchy." Freenet will trump Napster, also allowing free, anonymous
distribution of video, software and books. But isn't this stealing? Can't
information be seen as a form of property? Not for Clarke, who says that
idea will soon be considered as ridiculous as witch-burning.

 This challenge to copyright is made possible, of course, by advances in
technological piracy, but it also grows out of a set of ideas that have
been associated with the Internet from its earliest public years. Many
Internet visionaries were inspired by countercultural notions of the Net's
liberatory possibilities. John Perry Barlow, a Grateful Dead lyricist,
later became co-founder of the influential Electronic Frontier Foundation,
an organization dedicated to preserving the Internet's libertarian terrain.
He has argued that familiar notions of intellectual property become "towers
of outmoded boilerplate" when applied to online information.

 Stewart Brand, a creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, went on to found the
WELL -- Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link -- in which veterans of a California
commune helped build one of the first online communities. Brand famously
declared, "Information wants to be free," a mantra that has become a
rallying cry for copyright challenges.

 This romantic vision sees cyberspace as a realm fundamentally different
from ordinary life. And it has become increasingly difficult to separate
this belief from important political, technological and ideological debates
over copyright, privacy and security. There is a hint of its influence, for
example, in the Web pages of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at
Harvard University (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu), which argue that the
Internet should foster "open governance" and collaborative, public-domain
"open" software. It has proposed that a counter-copyright sign, (cc), be
used by authors willing to reject copyright.

 The most important intellectual defense of these views has been made by
Lawrence Lessig, a fellow of the Berkman Center and professor at Harvard
Law School. His recent book, "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" (Basic
Books) includes a closely argued brief for protecting the freedoms of
"original cyberspace" from the constraints imposed by commerce or
copyright. Far from being at risk, Lessig argues, copyright is "protected
far too well." In fact, he says, it is "more effectively protected than at
any time since Gutenberg."

 Lessig's concern is about software code that will protect copyrights by
rigidly metering usage and limiting access. The danger, he suggests, is the
shrinking of the "public commons," a realm in which intellectual work
becomes part of a culture's shared heritage. Lessig argues that copyright
law should itself be limited when applied to cyberspace.

 How, though, is cultural commerce to thrive? The publishing and recording
industries must be drastically recast to account for digital copying and
distribution. And even Lessig acknowledges that "some intellectual property
rights" are needed as an incentive to creators. This means that some form
of technological control is also required.

 But it is not necessary to imagine that everything will be controlled any
more than it is possible to envision that nothing will be. If privacy and
security can be protected, there will be a wide range of economic
arrangements, just as there are now. Some cultural products will be
publicly available. Some will be available only through subscription
payments. And some will be available in the familiar pay-per-view or rental
form that Lessig finds so disturbing in cyberspace.

 None of this means the constriction of the public commons. Cyberspace will
be just as fraught with complex mixtures of controls and liberties as real
space. Lessig may find the prospects so grim because his fears and hopes
are largely based on an idealized vision of "freedoms that were
foundational" in the origins of the Internet.

 That was a time (just over five years ago) when the Internet was public in
concept but limited in its scope. There was no commerce or banking, little
need to worry over security or privacy, minimal threat of mass piracy or
viral sabotage. Lessig treats that exceptional era as the model for
aspiration. In comparison, what reality won't seem threatening?

 A world without a public commons, though, will not come about from
copyright protection but from the opposite. Information doesn't want to be
free; only the transmission of information wants to be free. Information,
like culture, is the result of labor and devotion, investment and risk; it
has a value. And nothing will lead to a more deafening cultural silence
than ignoring that value and celebrating the "near-perfect anarchy" of
Freenet and Napster running amok.




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From: Somebody
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2000 12:44:08 -0800 (PDT)
Subject: Re: IP: Swashbuckling Anarchists Try to Eliminate Copyrights
FromCyberspace
To: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>

Well, the NY Times and Edward Rothstein are proof positive that
the geodesic economy, recursive auctions, and radically reshaping
the media industry are not yet mainstream.  You can rest easy in
your continuing role as evangist, rabble-rouser, and change-enabler.

These guys listen to Lessig, but still call the internet a "technological
advance in piracy."  They still see the post copyright future as
dystopian fringe idealism, not the inevitable result of technological
and economic reality.  They do not realize that they are neo-Luddites,
trying to turn back the clock by smashing the information revolution
into pieces, and that the RIAA and Metallica's lawyers are Pandoras
desparately and hopelessing trying to stuff those spirits back into that
mythological box.

I wonder when it will occur to these people that Napster was the weekend
creation of a 19 year old.  It is the simple application of the basic IP
infrastructure to create a new community.  gnutella, too, is a _very simple_
program.  Internet protocol is the revolution:  I can talk to you, you to
me, and both of us can talk to the rest of the world simultaneously.
Napster, gnutella and their ilk are only the sideshows of the moment.



<somebody's .sig>
--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'