The copyright system will see a ’sudden and surprising’ collapse ...
The copyright system will see a “sudden and surprising” collapse by 2012 akin to the Berlin Wall’s fall, Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Barlow said at the hacker- led Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. That outcome demands “civil disobedience”…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
on a massive scale, he added, encouraging Internet users to flout private “locks” and copyright laws to give authorities pause in enforcement. Interviewed via video blog by Netzpolitik.org after debating Stanford U. law Prof. Larry Lessig, Barlow said he and Lessig have a “really good symbiosis.” Leading “free culture” advocate Lessig voiced pessimism at the conference that copyright can be transformed within 20 years, in contrast to former Grateful Dead lyricist Barlow, who calls himself a “pathological optimist” on the subject. “If we keep pressing the system where it breaks, eventually the system is… so obviously broken that there’s no choice but for people to start evolving another economic model [for copyright], and that’s actually what’s already happening rather rapidly,” Barlow said. Physical and virtual copyright are separate, non-overlapping realms, he said: “When it’s become obvious that it’s simply not going to work in cyberspace, I think you'll see a collapse that will be as sudden and surprising as the thing that took this wall down over here,” referring to the Berlin Wall. “I think it will happen sometime in the next 5 years, if not less,” he said. Barlow urged that copyright violations be done “ethically,” giving attribution to creators so they get an “enhanced reputation and thereby greater economic return.” But “pay no attention to these people” -- presumably legislators and rightsholders -- “when it comes to being creative,” he added: “Every time they put a lock on, break it. And every time they pass a new law, break that. Sooner or later they're dealing with such a massive level of civil disobedience that they have to address it, and that’s where we're headed in a hell of a hurry.” Look at Silicon Valley’s Highway 280, where the legal speed is 65 mph but drivers average closer to 85, including police cars, Barlow said: “What are you going to do, arrest the entire highway?… People have asserted the freedom to drive as fast as they think is reliably safe under those circumstances, and we have to do the same thing.”