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A talk with cyber-rights pioneer John Perry Barlow about Digital Restrictions Management and the future of human knowledg

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Wrapped up in Crypto Bottles

Stefan Krempl 09.03.2003

A talk with cyber-rights pioneer John Perry Barlow about Digital Restrictions Management and the future of human knowledge

John Perry Barlow or JPB for short is maybe best known for three things: he was the song writer for the Grateful Dead and is still supporting music bands. He wrote the Cyberspace Independence Declaration seven years ago during a visit to the World Economic Forum. And he tried to define a brand new way of thinking about copyright in an well-received article that was published in Wired magazine. Recently, the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation came to Berlin to fight the German version of the Digital Copyright Millennium Act (DMCA) together with the civil rights organization privatkopie.net. Stefan Krempl sat down with him to look forward and back in the history of Cyberspace and copyright.

[...]

John Perry Barlow: There are three things at stake. The first is, extending a monopoly to a few large organizations about what people can or cannot know and express. This is really about the control of information and it has the potential to become over time a kind of private totalitarianism.

[...]

Secondly, I fear that Digital Rights Management today is Political Rights Management tomorrow.

[...]

Third, I am very afraid, that by wrapping a large amount of human knowledge up into bottles that can no longer be opened except at a price, much of it will be wrapped up in crypto bottles that in a very fairly short time cannot be opened even at a price.

[...]

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