I’m the co-teacher of a class, called Internet & Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control, at Harvard Extension School with Urs Gasser. Urs is talking right now, so I thought I would blog his lecture a bit. It’s Class 3, the Misuse of Copyright.
Urs says that there are big changes wrought by enabling technologies:
* changes in the way we produce info (Wikipedia)
* changes in the way we distribute info (p2p)
* lower access barriers (relatively cheap access)
* changed usage barriers (mash-ups, creative re-uses, fan fic).
These changes are both opportunity and threat, depending upon whose perspective one adopts. The goal for businesses, he says, is to emphasize the opportunities and to focus on developing new business models to exploit them.
Urs concludes by talking about the tension between the net as an “enabling, liberating technology” and “the use of technology to gain back control that has been lost.” Lawmakers, around the world, have generally aligned with the content industry. “Challenge: how can we find a new equilibrium, balancing the conflicting interests in a fair way?”
Urs is also telling the Ed Felten/SDMI story and the Dmitri Sklyarov/DMCA story. There’s some confusion about how US law would have applied to the Russian programmer Sklyarov in this case. I suspect that confusion is reflected in how the US DOJ ultimately resolved the matter.
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