Wired 8.10
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not
an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
The Next Economy Of Ideas
Will copyright survive the Napster bomb? Nope, but creativity
will.
By John Perry Barlow
The great cultural war has broken out at last.
Long awaited by some and a nasty surprise to others, the
conflict between the industrial age and the virtual age is now
being fought in earnest, thanks to that modestly conceived but
paradigm-shattering thing called Napster.
What's happening with global, peer-to-peer networking is not
altogether different from what happened when the American
colonists realized they were poorly served by the British Crown:
The colonists were obliged to cast off that power and develop an
economy better suited to their new environment. For settlers of
cyberspace, the fuse was lit last July, when Judge Marilyn Hall
Patel tried to shut down Napster and silence the cacophonous
free market of expression, which was already teeming with more
than 20 million directly wired music lovers.
Despite an appeals-court stay immediately granted the
Napsterians, her decree transformed an evolving economy into a
cause, and turned millions of politically apathetic youngsters
into electronic Hezbollah. Neither the best efforts of Judge
Patel - nor those of the Porsche-driving executives of the
Recording Industry Association of America, nor the sleek legal
defenders of existing copyright law - will alter this simple
fact: No law can be successfully imposed on a huge population
that does not morally support it and possesses easy means for
its invisible evasion.
To put it mildly, the geriatrics of the entertainment industry
didn't see this coming. They figured the Internet was about as
much of a threat to their infotainment empire as ham radio was
to NBC. Even after that assumption was creamed, they remained as
serene as sunning crocodiles. After all, they still "owned" all
that stuff they call "content." That it might soon become
possible for anyone with a PC to effortlessly reproduce their
"property" and distribute it to all of humanity didn't trouble
them at all.
But then along came Napster. Or, more to the point, along came
the real Internet, an instantaneous network that endows any
acne-faced kid with a distributive power equal to Time Warner's.
Moreover, these were kids who don't give a flying byte about the
existing legal battlements, and a lot of them possess decryption
skills sufficient to easily crack whatever lame code the
entertainment industry might wrap around "its" goods.
Practically every traditional pundit who's commented on the
Napster case has, at some point, furrowed a telegenic brow and
asked, "Is the genie out of the bottle?" A better question would
be, "Is there a bottle?" No, there isn't.
Which is not to say the industry won't keep trying to create
one. In addition to ludicrously misguided (and probably
unconstitutional) edicts like the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, entertainment execs are placing great faith in new
cryptographic solutions. But before they waste a lot of time on
their latest algorithmic vessels, they might consider the ones
they've designed so far. These include such systems as the pay-
per-view videodisc format Divx, the Secure Digital Music
Initiative, and CSS - the DVD encryption system, which has
sparked its own legal hostilities on the Eastern front, starting
with the New York courtroom of Judge Lewis Kaplan.
Here's the present score: Divx was stillborn. SDMI will probably
never be born owing to the wrangling of its corporate parents.
And DeCSS (the DVD decryptor) is off and running, even though
the Motion Picture Association of America has prevailed in its
lawsuit aimed at stopping Web sites from posting - or even
linking to - the disc-cracking code. While that decision is
appealed, DeCSS will keep spreading: As the Electronic Frontier
Foundation was defending three e-distributors inside Kaplan's
court last summer, nose-ringed kids outside were selling T-
shirts with the program silk-screened on the back.
The last time technical copy protection was widely attempted -
remember when most software was copy-protected? - it failed in
the marketplace, and failed
