Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing tells of a talk by John Perry Barlow given at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:
Today at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, I attended the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s panel, “On a Brighter Note…”, a talk about why we should be optimistic about the future of technological liberty. I took a ton of notes and uploaded them.
John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder: I am still optimistic. I didn’t expect that the entire wealth of the industrial period would gracefully allow us to render them irrelevant. They’re putting up a spirited fight, but I don’t think they’ll win. Victory comes to the patient.
Cory concludes:
Can we come up with a regime for regulating the economy of ideas and the way of getting paid for work you do with your mind that doesn’t treat thought as a noun and therefore subject to being treated as property. The IP system is a gigantic kludge of patches that have been laid on in different regimes, as it all goes to bits, it needs to be harmonized with a regime that recognizes that this regulates the relationship of the creator and the audience.
I’m not sure this is the right question, but it’s at least worth thinking about.