Technology and the Corruption of Copyright (Joshua Bauchner)

[TankGirl]

Mike4947, Drakonix, thinker, Mazer, Ramona_A_Stone, JackSpratts - thank you all for your interesting feedback and input.

I also enjoyed John Perry Barlow's essay a lot ( Ramona!). So many inspiring viewpoints and ideas there...

John Perry Barlow:
Think of the Net as an ecosystem. It is a great rain forest of life-forms called ideas, which, like organisms - those patterns of self-reproducing, evolving, adaptive information that express themselves in skeins of carbon - require other organisms to exist. Imagine the challenge of trying to write a song if you'd never heard one.

As in biology, what has lived before becomes the compost for what will live next. Moreover, when you buy - or, for that matter, "steal" - an idea that first took form in my head, it remains where it grew and you in no way lessen its value by sharing it. On the contrary, my idea becomes more valuable, since in the informational space between your interpretation of it and mine, new species can grow. The more such spaces exist, the more fertile is the larger ecology of mind.

I can also imagine the great electronic nervous system producing entirely new models of creative worth where value resides not in the artifact, which is static and dead, but in the real art - the living process that brought it to life. I would have given a lot to be present as, say, the Beatles grew their songs. I'd have given even more to have participated. Part of the reason Deadheads were so obsessed with live concerts was that they did participate in some weird, mysterious way. They were allowed the intimacy of seeing the larval beginnings of a song flop out onstage, wet and ugly, and they could help nurture its growth.

In the future, instead of bottles of dead "content," I imagine electronically defined venues, where minds residing in bodies scattered all over the planet are admitted, either by subscription or a ticket at a time, into the real-time presence of the creative act.

John Perry Barlow:
It's captivating to think about how much more freedom there will be for the truly creative when the truly cynical have been dealt out of the game. Once we have all given up regarding our ideas as a form of property, the entertainment industry will no longer have anything to steal from us. Meet the new boss: no boss.

We can enter into a convenient and interactive relationship with audiences, who, being human, will be far more ethically inclined to pay us than the moguls ever were. What could be a stronger incentive to create than that?

We've won the revolution. It's all over but the litigation. While that drags on, it's time to start building the new economic models that will replace what came before. We don't know exactly what they'll look like, but we do know that we have a profound responsibility to be better ancestors: What we do now will likely determine the productivity and freedom of 20 generations of artists yet unborn. So it's time to stop speculating about when the new economy of ideas will arrive. It's here. Now comes the hard part, which also happens to be the fun part: making it work.

I haven't yet read Nick Arnett's essay but I trust it will be interesting as well... thanks again to you all!

- tg