Mike G wrote: > The US is giving very mixed messages on this...probably reflecting a > significant difference of opinion betweeen the commercial elites and > the political elites... The commercial elites are looking for a > strict enforcement of copyright and IP laws but and for commercial > tiering of access.
The problem, for the media industry, is that anything that can be digitized now belongs to everybody, can be anywhere more or less instantly. Their business model is over. Unless they can exert fine-grained, totalitarian control of the pipes. > The political folks are promoting the use of the Internet for > political change and thus open access. Which "political folks"? The professional political folks are, essentially, owned by the commercial folks, are they not? >From Privacy Forum (http://www.vortex.com) mail: If it weren't for the fact that I'm on the CFP 2011 program committee, I would have thought that I was reading a satirical report from "The Onion" or some such. I've just learned that (first I've heard of this) Senator Patrick Leahy will be keynoting at the Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference on June 16. The Senator has done an enormous amount of good work over his very long Senate career. But there's no getting around the fact that his enthusiastic pushing of PROTECT IP -- the "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property" Act that he himself introduced, is a travesty. PROTECT IP is among the most dangerous, perverse, anti-privacy, anti-freedom legislation related to the Internet that has ever been proposed, particularly due to its extension of liability to linking, search engines, and other "intermediary" concepts and entities. The Kafkaesque nature of Leahy keynoting at CFP while actually engaged in the active promotion of PROTECT IP -- a nightmare of his own creation -- is decidedly intense. This note and a bunch of related links at: https://profiles.google.com/u/0/lauren4321/posts/EG7ZARNSfa8 Corey Doctorow wrote: The futurists were just plain wrong. An "information economy" can't be based on selling information. Information technology makes copying information easier and easier. The more IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information. The information economy is about selling everything except information. The United States traded its manufacturing sector's health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The United States bet wrong. http://www.informationweek.com/news/199903173 or blogged all-one-page here (near the bottom of the web page): http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17937 where there are comments as well. -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
