John Gilmore: This is the worst sort of economic protectionism — beggaring your own society for the benefit of an inefficient local industry

“What is wrong is that we have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. We now have the means to duplicate any kind of information that can be compactly represented in digital media. We can replicate it worldwide, to billions of people, for very low costs, affordable by individuals. We are working hard on technologies that will permit other sorts of resources to be duplicated this easily, including arbitrary physical objects (“nanotechnology”; see http://www.foresight.org). The progress of science, technology, and free markets have produced an end to many kinds of scarcity. A hundred years ago, more than 99% of Americans were still using outhouses, and one out of every ten children died in infancy. Now even the poorest Americans have cars, television, telephones, heat, clean water, sanitary sewers — things that the richest millionaires of 1900 could not buy. These technologies promise an end to physical want in the near future. “We should be rejoicing in mutually creating a heaven on earth!” Instead, those crabbed souls who make their living from perpetuating scarcity are sneaking around, convincing co-conspirators to chain our cheap duplication technology so that it won’t make copies — at least not of the kind of goods they want to sell us. This is the worst sort of economic protectionism — beggaring your own society for the benefit of an inefficient local industry. The record and movie distribution companies are careful not to point this out to us, but that is what is happening.”

• Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore

John Perry Barlow: “Economically when you spread information you create demand for it.”

“Economically when you spread information you create demand for it.”

• John Perry Barlow

“Economically when you spread information you create demand for it.”

John Perry Barlow, co-founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation http://eff.org

John Perry Barlow: I don’t regard my expression as a form of property.

“I don’t regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don’t have it somebody else does. And, expression is not like that. And furthermore, the notion that expression IS like that, is entirely the consequence of a system of taking expression and transporting it around that was necessary before there was the internet which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost. And the very notion of content, assumes the presence of a container that no longer exists.”

• John Perry Barlow

We are going to have to recognize…

“…We are going to have to recognize that you cannot own free speech. That copyright, is the wrong model for monetizing the expression of the mind.”

“Thought is not a thing, it is a verb, it is an action. it is something that naturally has a different economy to other things because the more a thought is heard and understood, the more powerful it becomes. It is not like physical goods.”

“but because of the old model of thinking about things and that they must be regulated towards scarcity, there are many many things going on right now that are militating against our freedom of expression.”

• John Perry Barlow

John Perry Barlow: The Right to Know

“For the first time in human history. It is possible to convey eventually to every human being, the Right to Know. The right to satisfy his or her curiosity to the fullest extent no matter where he or she is. And the right to express him or herself, and have the entire human race, hear if it chooses to. This is a very important legacy to give to our children. And if we are going to deny them that legacy, on the basis of trying to preserve some institutions that may have outlived their usefulness, we will Not be good ancestors.

• – John Perry Barlow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu3efDQwULc 14:20

John Perry Barlow against a panel of hostile copyright maximalists who want to control the internet.

1) Creative Expression is not a form of property – the notion that it is, assumes the presence of a container that no longer exists (because of the internet).
2) Imposing old broadcast-era business standards on the future does not incentivise creators.
3) Imposing old broadcast-era business standards on the web, will break the web.
4) The control-structures demanded by the old broadcast-era businesses, are identical to those demanded by police-states.
5) We do not agree to the assumed need for:
a) IP law (at all)
b) increasingly draconian methods of imposing it on the internet
6) The people who are arguing for IP law are NOT creators, but the institutions that exploit them.
7) Optimising for scarcity in an economy where value comes from FAMILIARITY and ATTENTION, is insane.
8) The IP industry is not big or important enough to enforce mechanisms that break the web.
9) IP is a profoundly, architecturally counter-productive means of mediating the relationship between creators and fans – which is inherently memetic.
10) Creators who actually create, are better off today than they’ve ever been – and the reason is not intellectual property. It’s because of the web.

• John Perry Barlow against a panel of hostile copyright maximalists who want to control the internet.