First Monday Sleepless in Belgrade: A Virtual Community during War

"In this paper the results of research on the role of a virtual community during wartime are presented. A virtual community within the Belgrade-based online system, SezamPro, was explored in the periods before, during and after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. This research found that the community had gone through significant changes during the War, including a) number of participants increased; b) users spent much more time online; and, c) reason for communicating changed dramatically. During war, online efforts focused on information gathering, social interaction and the expression of political opinions. In a period of crisis strong interpersonal relationships were established within the studied online group. Furthermore, in such state of affairs the Internet became an important source of information."

redux [09.13.01]
The New York Times Web Becomes Global Support Forum
[requires 'free' registration]

"Internet discourse revolved Wednesday around trying to fathom, cope and communicate. Web sites and discussion groups urged blood donation, posted prayers and debated whether civil liberties may be curtailed.

"The Internet has proven to be a remarkably good way to form relationships and communities," said Steve Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "We go online to try to make sense of what happened, who to blame, who's in charge, et cetera."

redux [12.22.00]
3rd Annual ARCUS Award for Arctic Research Excellence Inuit in Cyberspace: Practising and Constructing Computer-mediated Space

"Research on the use of Internet or Cyberspace in relation to off-line space and sociality is uncommon to address in Arctic anthropology. The general research that does actually deal with Cyberspace, however, focuses more on strict on-line behaviour without much concern for dynamics between on-line and off-line space and sociality. Thus, naturally avoiding the physicality of the Arctic regions, it leaves the research reported in this paper to approach a rather new area. While most of the on-line Cyberstudies undertaken deal with American or European users, they unintendedly create and sustain universal ideas that, however, do not necessarily apply to all Internet-users. Often they focus on Cyber-space as if it was a single social vacuum without any recursive bonds to Lifespace and physical space; operating in a mental paradigm, that assumes people to be without cultural differences in Cyberspace.

However, as this paper will argue, the world, the conceptions of it and use of space within it, be it Cyberspace or physical space, are clearly more than vacuums of mental space."

The Washington Post Who's Holding Back Broadband?

"Consumers are slow to adopt broadband because, while there may be an infinite number of channels, there is still nothing on. "Broadband-intensive content," the chairman said, "is in the hands of major copyright holders." These copyright holders have been hesitant to free their content to the net. Their slowness, in turn, has slowed broadband technologies in general."

"But piracy is not the most important reason copyright holders have been slow to embrace the net. A bigger reason is the threat the Internet presents to their relatively comfortable ways of doing business. "Major copyright holders" have enjoyed the benefits of a relatively concentrated industry. The Internet threatens this comfortable existence. The low cost of digital production and distribution could mean much greater competition in the production of content."

redux [11.08.01]
Bob Frankston Beyond Telecom

"By shifting the focus to providing connectivity rather than telephony and television, it becomes obvious that there is a conflict of interest between the current service (and content) providers and connectivity providers.

As long as we allow the incumbents to use their control over both connectivity and services/content to thwart competition in services/content, we will suffer economically. And we will also have a system that is fails to enhance our security because traditional systems are brittle rather than resilient.

The good news is that there is a simple solution that requires little regulation."

redux [10.30.01]
Fortune Great Leap Forward: Techies vs. Telcos

"It's been a grim time for the tech industry. Executives from companies that sell hardware, software, and Net services watched their stock prices and company sales fall off a cliff. Now, increasingly, they're starting to point fingers at one group they think is responsible for their troubles: the giants of telecom. At the usually upbeat Agenda conference held this October in Scottsdale, Ariz., Bob Metcalfe, the legendary network pioneer, took the stage and summed up the undertone of discontent when, on a panel about networks, he described the big regional telephone companies as "scumbags." Nobody objected or disagreed."

redux [06.01.01]
MIT Technology Review Web Behind Walls

"At stake is the future and form of the Internet for millions of Americans whose access to the online world comes through the set-top portals of cable television. Instead of the multivaried pathways of the World Wide Web, these users will be provided easy access to a much smaller subset of items and options that reflect the network owner's online programming, as well as the offerings of its content partners. Dubbed "walled gardens" by supporters and skeptics alike, these new "managed-content areas" will therefore offer the illusion of online choice, while leading subscribers down well-worn paths of proprietary content and affiliated programming?in stark contrast to the great diversity of expression the Web seemed to promise in its heyday, way back in, say, 1997."

redux [05.25.01]
Bob Frankston Content vs. Connectivity

"The consumers' connections to the Internet are controlled by companies who are in the business of delivering content and services funded by advertising. Consumers who wander the Internet represent lost revenue. Customers who use IP telephony no longer make phone calls. Customers who experiment with creating new services are called abusers.

As long as these companies control connectivity, we do not have a marketplace for the connectivity services vital to the growth of the Internet and necessary for innovation and the benefits we have come to expect.

We must allow for a marketplace by preventing players with interests opposed to connectivity from controlling connectivity. It is a dramatic case of conflict of interest and antitrust violation. We cannot afford to tolerate such behavior. It is allowed and abetted by accepting the self-serving fallacies of the existing players. We must challenge their claims and create the opportunities so necessary for our continued prosperity."

redux [06.06.01]
Gilbert & Tobin Internet Connectivity: Open Competition In The Face Of Commercial Expansion

"As a consequence, the rules for Internet interconnection are still in the process of being worked out - and in this uncertain environment, Internet interconnection is an inherently risky business. The new technology presents its own interconnection complexities, with multiple layers of virtual networks built one over the other - so that an operator at any layer of the infrastructure will have its costs determined by the prices charged by the virtual network below it, while its prices, in turn, will determine the cost structure of the layer above. Furthermore, while commercial principles would suggest that money should flow towards those operators which produce value, this does not always happen in practice (a hangover of the historical expectation that Internet access should be free for all). The uncertainties of the environment are aggravated by the fact that there is currently no consensus on the issue of how to attribute "value" to the various elements of Internet interconnection."

MIT Technology Review In the Weeds

"The problem isn’t figuring out how to get people to become more “innovative”; it’s figuring out how to get people to accept and apply innovations more productively. The glut of new ideas has paradoxically created a critical shortage of the human ingredients that determine just how quickly and cost effectively they get used.

So instead of celebrating the “heroic brilliance” of innovators, this column will explore innovation from a different and more important perspective. After all, it is customers and clients—not innovators—who determine how great ideas become successful innovations."

redux [10.25.2001]
MarketingProfs.Com Will and Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets

"Everybody thinks that it's the market pioneers who have the best name recognition, the highest market share, and the most enduring market leadership....Right?"

"Our discoveries may surprise the business community. After exposing the limitations of prior studies that extolled the success of pioneers, we find that pioneers mostly fail, have low market share, and are rarely enduring market leaders. In addition, we found that the current trend of staking everything on getting there first all-too-often leads companies to embrace a disastrous strategy of rushing to market with incomplete, inferior, and flawed products."

redux [05.03.01]
Fast Company Hard Cell

"In many ways, the Smartphone's evolution is a classic story of high-tech innovation within a big company. It starts with a small team of engineers at Qualcomm Inc. in San Diego, who were given a hazy but intriguing mandate. Gradually, they came to believe that they could produce a breakthrough product -- even if outsiders were dubious. Repeated crises erupted along the way, including a near-death experience in February 2000 when their division was sold to the San Diego subsidiary of Japan's Kyocera International Inc. For a while, it appeared that no one wanted the Smartphone project to continue. Yet the engineers pressed on in skunk-works fashion, improvising solutions as needed, until they emerged with a product that attracted enthusiastic mobs at trade shows, media events -- and even the passenger lounge at Chicago's O'Hare airport."

strategy+business Top 10 Innovation Themes

"Does history repeat itself when companies seek ways to innovate? Are there patterns among the business strategies chosen by successful companies from one decade to the next?

To find out, we studied nearly 200 business strategies, most from the past 20 years, but some from a century ago. From this research we identified 10 essential “innovation themes,” which are repeated and proven over time."

redux [03.06.01]
First Monday Intermittent Aberrations: Can Mature Companies Innovate?

"A whole literature has grown up around the apparently intractable hostility between innovation and bureaucracy, between those who create and those who control. Smart and speedy start-ups blindside mature companies with their inventiveness then grow up into mature companies and are outsmarted in their turn. The only way for innovation to survive in mature companies is to isolate the creators from the managers in protected enclaves. If this is true, it means that it is virtually impossible for sustained innovation to be built into the everyday operation of mature companies; it can only ever be an intermittent aberration."

redux [11.07.00]
BusinessWeek The Innovator's Dilemma

"This chapter summarizes the history of the disk drive industry in all its complexity. Some readers will be interested in it for the sake of history itself. But the value of understanding this history is that out of its complexity emerge a few stunningly simple and consistent factors that have repeatedly determined the success and failure of the industry's best firms. Simply put, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons--they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers' next-generation needs. This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

The history of the disk drive industry provides a framework for understanding when "keeping close to your customers" is good advice--and when it is not."

LA Times CDs That Block Copying May Herald a Revolution

"For years, critics have warned that movie studios, publishers and record labels would someday use digitized media to enforce restrictions that the courts refuse to impose, limiting what consumers could do with film, print and music.

"More Fast and Furious," from Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, underscores how near that day is."

redux [10.23.01]
EETimes PC industry girds for copy-protection fight

"A PC industry executive said a range of copy-protection technologies are available to prevent video piracy and that a single solution will not work and won't be embraced by consumers. "It's a myth to say that there is a magic bullet out there" to protect all content, said Jeffrey Lawrence, an Intel Corp. executive and member of the Copy Protection Technology Working Group, a cross-industry group working on copy-protection standards.

The Hollings bill is "an unwarranted intrusion by the government into the marketplace" that would mean a "snap-shot approach" to digital rights management, added Ken Kay, executive director of the Computer Systems Policy Project, a PC industry group based here. "It will freeze technologies in place.""

redux [10.09.01]
Dan Bricklin Copy Protection Robs The Future

"Copy protection, like poor environment and chemical instability before it for books and works of art, looks to be a major impediment to preserving our cultural heritage. Works that are copy protected are less likely to survive into the future. The formal and informal world of archivists and preservers will be unable to do their job of moving what they keep from one media to another newer one, nor will they be able to ensure survival and appreciation through wide dissemination, even when it is legal to do so."

redux [09.04.01]
First Monday Copyright in a Frictionless World: Toward a Rhetoric of Responsibility

"In this paper, the author reviews the history and application of copyright and concludes that, although promoted as being in the interests of authors, it is designed in such a way as to be primarily a right which benefits distributors and publishers. The author identifies a number of difficulties faced by distributors and publishers in enforcing their rights in an age where the various sources of "friction" which once limited infringement are being constantly reduced. In particular, in the emerging frictionless world the typical targets of the holder of a copyright monopoly (distributors pirating for profit) are being overtaken by a new breed of target (individuals with a cost reduction motive) and it is uneconomical for a holder of a copyright monopoly to pursue this new breed. The author argues that recent extensions to copyright monopolies add little to the illegality of the infringing acts nor any stigma to the performance of those acts. Instead, they exacerbate one of the main causes of infringement - consumer cynicism as to the benefits to society of the copyright monopoly. The author argues further that, rather than driving further cynicism through more expansive rhetoric relating to rights, holders of a copyright monopoly should instead seek to mollify consumer sentiment and encourage compliance by emphasizing a rhetoric of responsibility in the exercise of those rights. The author proposes three possible principles of responsibility that copyright monopoly holders might evaluate and endorse."

redux [06.08.01]
ZDNet Technology and the corruption of copyright

"Interestingly, with the onslaught of technology and promises of greater opportunity to share and communicate, copyright is now a hindrance to these ideals, serving only the moneyed interests of owners."

"Historically, copyright protections were afforded to promote expressive discourse fundamental to a democratic society. Today, the very notion of intellectual property serves to commoditize expressive ideas, rather than fostering their dissemination. Whereas initially the provision of an economic benefit was secondary to the promotion of original works, modern copyright inverts this ideal in a continuing effort to establish a marketplace for ideas."

redux [01.23.01]
Cryptome What's Wrong With Content Protection

"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."

redux [12.17.00]
Bad Subjects Beyond Copyright Consciousness

"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."

MSNBC ‘Borders’ prompt fears for Net future

"FOR MUCH of its life, the Internet has been seen as a great democratizing force, a place where nobody needs know who or where you are. But that notion has begun to shift in recent months, as governments and private businesses increasingly try to draw boundaries around what used to be a borderless Internet to deal with legal, commercial and terrorism concerns.

“It used to be that a person sitting in one place could get or send information anywhere in the world,” said Jack Goldsmith, a professor of international law at the University of Chicago. “But now the Internet is starting to act more like real space with all its limitations.”.""

redux [08.18.01]
The Economist Putting it in its place

"On the face of it, the Internet appears to make geography obsolete. But the reality is rather more complicated. If you want a high-speed digital-subscriber line (DSL) connection, for example, geographical proximity to a telephone exchange is vital, because DSL only works over relatively short distances. Similarly, go to retrieve a large software update from an online file library, and you will probably be presented with a choice of countries from which to download it; choosing a nearby country will usually result in a faster transfer. And while running an e-business from a mountain-top sounds great, it is impractical without a fast connection or a reliable source of electricity. The supposedly seamless Internet is, in other words, constrained by the realities of geography. According to Martin Dodge of University College London, who is an expert on Internet geography, "the idea that the Internet liberates you from geography is a myth"."

redux [04.02.01]
eCompany Does Geography Matter Online?

""All politics is local," the late Massachusetts congressman Tip O'Neill once quipped. It turns out that the old saw is also true of e-commerce.

Cruise by a Nordstrom in Seattle on a misty spring day and the beige mannequins might be wearing yellow raincoats and duck boots. Three thousand miles away in Boca Raton, the Nordstrom window might showcase dolls dressed in floral-pattern bikinis and sunglasses. But at Nordstrom.com you get the same sell whether you log on from soggy Seattle or sunny Boca.

That's because, in our rush to get online, we've forgotten that some of the rules of real-world selling still apply on the Web. Geography matters -- online and off."

The New York Times E-Commerce: Borders Returning to the Internet
[requires 'free' registration]

"But for auction sites, gambling sites and others, geography is becoming increasingly important, because they must treat people from different locations differently, as is the case with the French government's barring the sale of Nazi-related items to its citizens.

Online advertising companies, too, are increasingly desperate to use geographic targeting tools to reinforce their clients' faith in Internet marketing. In short, for a growing number of companies, this will be the year when the borderless Internet economy becomes an outmoded concept.

"Our customers told us over the past six months or so that it was an absolute requirement that we have geo-targeting," said Mark Joseph, chief technology officer for MediaPlex, an advertising company based in San Francisco."

Marketing Computers IPMapper Literally Targets Online Users

"Caimis Geo's IPMapper service permits web sites the ability to accurately identify IP addresses to geographic locations.

Online marketers can know exactly where their customers are, says Daniel Westrick, director of Caimis Geo. "Right now people have crude web logging applications," he adds, which only identify obvious foreign codes on domain names.

IPMapper permits sites to discern a users location accurate to the city. "It gives you a pretty good idea of where your traffic is coming from," he says."

redux [10.07.00]
Internet Geography Project: Putting place back in cyberspace Overview

"This project arose in response to one of the great myths or the Internet age, i.e. the coming of cyberspace heralds the end physical constraints which will eventually lead to the death of cities. In fact, the exact opposite is occurring. The largest concentrations of Internet users and producers are located in urban areas and many of the most innovative firms in the Internet space are housed in downtowns. There should be nothing surprising about this since, cities have always been the primary source of innovation and will continue to play this role in the future.

Although the power of the Internet does opens up new possibilities for long-range collaboration and even new spaces of interaction within cyberspace it also exhibits much of the traditional unevenness that has characterized urban and economic development throughout history. The fact that information can be easily and widely distributed is often mistaken for an indication that the production of this information is also diffused. In fact, there is a much more complicated dynamic involving the connection of specific places to global networks resulting in a system of production that is both place-rooted and networked at the same time.

NPR: All Things Considered What Went Wrong?

"In the summer of 1683, the Ottoman Turks laid siege to Vienna, Austria, but were repelled and later defeated by an alliance of Christian European states. Historian Bernard Lewis calls that defeat a turning point for Islam -- and the beginning of centuries of culture clashes between Europe and the Middle East.

Lewis, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, explores the decline of Islamic culture in a new book, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response . The central premise of the book is likely to stir fierce debate, because it describes an Islamic world trying to catch up with the Western world for 400 years."

redux [10.31.01]
Lingua Franca Why the West?

"The issue that has occupied macrohistorians over the past generation can be stated quite succinctly: Why Europe? Why did a relatively small and backward periphery on the western fringes of the Eurasian continent burst onto the world scene in the sixteenth century and by the nineteenth century become a dominant force in almost all corners of the earth? Until recently, two responses have dominated. The first is that something unique in the European past lay behind its eventual economic development and power. This something unique is often seen as a universal good - such as reason, freedom, or individualism - that first developed in Europe but ultimately relates, or should relate, to all human beings."

"The second response is that there was nothing particularly special about Europe until at least 1500, and probably not until 1800. In this view, Europe's rise to dominance was due not to any exceptional qualities but to its ability to seize vast amounts of gold and silver in the New World and create other forms of wealth through colonial trade."

redux [10.05.01]
The American Prospect Terror and Liberalism

"The pattern of war in the twentieth century, the pattern that long ago became old and familiar, was established in the aftermath of World War I. For a hundred years before that war, the Western countries had indulged in a comforting sentiment of historical optimism, serene in the conviction that rationality and order were steadily progressing and would go on doing so into the future, and modernity was going to be good. Even the crimes and massacres committed by the Western imperialists in distant places could be pictured as part of the greater landscape of worldwide progress, or at any rate could be kept out of sight. But World War I was an outbreak of something other than rationality and order, and the outbreak took place in the heart of civilized Europe. That was a shock. And a series of extremely powerful movements rapidly arose, each of which rested on the idea that the premises of liberal rationalism and modernity had turned out to be a lie and that modernity in its conventional Western version was a horror."

The Nation Against Rationalization

"Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon."

The New York Review of Books Notes on Prejudice

"Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be & do - & that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: & need restraining or suppressing. It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: & that others cannot be right if they disagree."

"The only cure is understanding how other societies - in space or time - live: and that it is possible to lead lives different from one's own, & yet to be fully human, worthy of love, respect or at least curiosity. Jesus, Socrates, John Hus of Bohemia, the great chemist Lavoisier, socialists and liberals (as well as conservatives) in Russia, Jews in Germany, all perished at the hands of "infallible" ideologues: intuitive certainty is no substitute for carefully tested empirical knowledge based on observation and experiment and free discussion between men: the first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas & free minds."

Salon The impossible calculus of loss

"Is the life of an investment banker who died in the World Trade Center worth $1.65 million in taxpayer money? What about $3 million? Is the life of a firefighter worth more than that of the janitor he tried to save? How about the life of a woman who died in the Oklahoma City bombing?

These sound like rhetorical questions, the kinds of queries we hope never to have to answer. But they are the questions that the administrators of private charities and federal compensation funds must consider -- and answer to the satisfaction of an entire nation -- as they begin to divvy up and distribute enormous sums of money to the victims of the Sept. 11 disaster."

The New York Times: College Federal Plan for an Aid Formula Is Criticized
[requires 'free' registration]

"The Justice Department has provoked a sharp debate among lawyers by asking whether it should use formulas to help determine awards from the federal fund for victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks."

"A grid approach is essentially the opposite of the traditional case method of American courts, where individual determinations are made on issues like the value of a person's suffering. Proponents say a grid could calculate damages through formulas that would include factors like the age, earnings and number of children of each victim."

George Street Journal Economist Feldman takes different route toward assessing value of a life

"Although this economic model - willingness-to-pay measures - has been adopted by most economists, the courts use the human capital model to determine damages in cases of wrongful death. "This views people as a machine - a stream of income," said Feldman. "To make [the plaintiffs] whole, they look at what the deceased would have earned and passed on to them."

Feldman believes there is a certain logic to this when widows and children go before the courts to seek justice for a family member who has lost his or her life through another's negligence. But such an approach "implies that someone who is 65 years old or is retired is worth nothing," said Feldman. "A younger person's life is going to always be more valuable using this model.""

David Friedman WHAT IS 'FAIR COMPENSATION' FOR DEATH OR INJURY?

"Compensation for death or bodily injury involves two quite different problems. The first is the problem of how much' damage there is to make up for. The second is the problem of in what coin damages can be paid. One might imagine that someone would be willing to give his life in exchange for a sufficiently high price--five years of ecstasy, perhaps. Faust, after all, traded not merely life but eternal bliss for a finite payment. More mundanely, we observe that people are willing to enter dangerous professions (driving dynamite trucks, for example) in exchange for somewhat higher pay, thus in effect trading life--a small increase in the probability of getting killed--for income. Both examples suggest that the reason it is impossible to 'fully compensate' someone for the loss of his life is not that the value of his life to him is infinite--it is not--but that the value of compensation to a corpse is in most cases small."

News.Com Freed programmer returns to Russia

"A Russian software programmer, freed in November after escaping prosecution under controversial U.S. copyright laws, returned home Monday and praised the support he received from campaigners while in detention.

Dmitry Sklyarov, 27, told NTV television after arriving at a Moscow airport that his release had defied the long odds of trying to defeat the U.S. authorities in legal proceedings."

redux [08.13.01]
The New York Times Software Double Bind
[requires 'free' registration]

"Call it the digital copyright equivalent of having your cake but not being able to eat it. The case of Dmitri Sklyarov, a Russian computer programmer arrested last month in Las Vegas, is drawing attention to a double bind in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that some legal experts say extends rights to consumers even as it effectively prevents them from exercising those rights.

The law of which Mr. Sklyarov ran afoul makes it illegal to manufacture or distribute a device designed to bypass technology that protects copyright material."

"The law also makes it illegal for individuals to use such a program - even to make a back-up copy of a book or movie or song for themselves, the type of copies traditionally allowed under copyright law. That is where the double bind comes in. Actually making such copies for personal use is not illegal. But it is against the law to break through the copy-protection measure to make the legal copies."

OpenP2P.Com The End of Innovation?

"The Internet under its original design built a platform that induced lots of innovation in applications and content. And it did this by embracing an end-to-end principle, which meant that the network would remain as simple as possible and push all of the intelligence and, therefore, innovation to the end. This is the vision that is now enabled by a peer-to-peer architecture, and it's the environment that has inspired the greatest amount of innovation around the Internet in its history.

Now this architecture threatens existing interests, business interests and Hollywood interests, and in response to that threat there have been a number of changes that have occurred in both the technical and legal environment, aiming to undermine this platform for innovation, aiming to change it into a platform where it's easier for certain interests to exercise control over innovation on that platform. And the changes at the technical level include changes to the architecture, enabling network owners to exercise more control or discrimination over content that flows across their network or for applications that run on the network. And in the legal environment, the change is brought about by changes in copyright law essentially -- also patent law, but let's start with copyright law -- that radically increase the extent to which copyright holders can exercise control over their content."

redux [07.30.01]
The New York Times Opinion Page Jail Time in the Digital Age
[requires 'free' registration]

"Dmitri Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who, until recently, lived and worked in Moscow. He wrote a program that was legal in Russia, and in most of the world, a program his employer, ElcomSoft, then sold on the Internet. Adobe Corporation bought a copy and complained to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the program violated American law and that, by the way, Mr. Sklyarov was about to give a lecture in Las Vegas describing the weaknesses in Adobe's electronic book software. Two weeks ago, the F.B.I. arrested Mr. Sklyarov. He still sits in a Las Vegas jail."

Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America."

redux [06.08.01]
ZDNet Technology and the corruption of copyright

"Interestingly, with the onslaught of technology and promises of greater opportunity to share and communicate, copyright is now a hindrance to these ideals, serving only the moneyed interests of owners."

"Historically, copyright protections were afforded to promote expressive discourse fundamental to a democratic society. Today, the very notion of intellectual property serves to commoditize expressive ideas, rather than fostering their dissemination. Whereas initially the provision of an economic benefit was secondary to the promotion of original works, modern copyright inverts this ideal in a continuing effort to establish a marketplace for ideas."

redux [01.23.01]
Cryptome What's Wrong With Content Protection

"Converting the whole world to operate without scarcity is a huge task. Such a large economic shift would take decades to spread through the entire world economy, making billions of new winners and new losers. We will be extremely lucky if by 2030 we are prepared to end scarcity without massive social turmoil, including riots, civil unrest, and world war. If we are to find a peaceful path to an era of plenty, we should be starting HERE AND NOW, transforming the industries we have already eliminated scarcity in -- text, audio, and video. Companies that can't adjust should disappear and be replaced by those who can. As these whole industries learn how to exist and thrive without creating artificial scarcity, they will provide models and expertise for other industries, which will need to change when their own inefficient production is replaced by efficient duplication ten or fifteen years from now. Relying on copy-protection now would send us in exactly the wrong direction! Copy protection pretends that the law and some fancy footwork with industrial cartels can maintain our current economic structures, in the face of a hurricane of positive technological change that is picking them up and sending them whirling like so many autumn leaves."

redux [12.17.00]
Bad Subjects Beyond Copyright Consciousness

"Today's received ideas about intellectual property can be distilled into two major threads: technology killed copyright, and copyright is anachronistic in networked culture. Both of these notions are simplistic and ahistorical, and I'll try to argue that they're shortsighted. What we really ought to be talking about is access to works. Access is related to copyright, but is really more fundamental to our freedom to think and experience. I'd like to propose an expanded access scheme and offer an example of small steps that are being taken in that direction."

The Christian Science Monitor After the dot.com crash

"On the surface, it was a bad year for the Internet.

The dot.com bust left hundreds of companies out of business, thousands of people out of work, and millions of investors out-of-pocket.

But as investors and the economy tried to avoid being sucked down in the whirlpool created when dot.com companies and their stocks capsized, the actual, everyday world of cyberspace continued to transform the ways we live, work, study, play, and just, well, waste time.

The O'Reilly Network 2002: The Carpetbaggers Go Home

"The Community Wireless movement is a fantastic example of how something unreliable can be cool, useful, self-sustaining, and utterly devoid of revenue potential. Wireless ISPs like Mobilestar charge a small fortune for network access at airport lounges and Starbucks in a handful of cities, and are still going broke, while a ride in a taxi through midtown Manhattan with an iBook will yield a new open network at every stoplight. Mobilestar's $60/month gets you a service that is only slightly better than what a mass of public-spirited (or security-impaired) WiFi users have accomplished without even trying. It's just too damned expensive to provide the kind of reliability that stress-feeding mobile execs demand. Meanwhile, the cranky, kludgey world of open 802.11 base-stations gains ground every day. It'll never be good enough for people who use phrases like "mission-critical," but it'll be just fine for the rest of us."

redux [10.08.01]
Business 2.0 Peter Drucker Interview

"But it is reasonable to expect that we have not yet really discovered what the Internet is best suited for. Mind you, the steamship was not a great improvement over the first sailing ships. Up until the end of the 19th century, most of the world's ocean freight was still carried by sail. What eliminated the sailing ship was that it takes several years to learn to be a sailor, while it takes 10 minutes to learn to shovel coal into the steamship boiler. The sailing ships died because they couldn't get crews and the steamship crews are unskilled. You need only a very few skilled people on a steamship. To furl and unfurl sails is highly skilled? But the railroad immediately created mobility, on the land, which had never existed.

Today, the Internet eliminates distance for communication."