Slashdot Mirror
Death Of The Global Information Infrastructure
Peter R. Kornblum writes "Under the title "Knowledge is Money", the German computer magazine "c't" has published an extensive discourse on how software patents, Digital Rights Management and the extended duration of the US Copyright law affects society at large.
The article argues that multinational corporations are shrinking the public domain at the expense of innovation. The Entertainment Industry is agressively trying to force other countries to implement copyright legislation similar to the DMCA and adjust their patent laws to current US conditions. And they are succeeding: The European Union has passed a resolution for all its member states to implement DMCA-like copyright laws by the end of this year. Regular Slashdot readers may not find too much new info in the article, but it does a good job of putting things into perspective -- and it paints a rather frightening picture of the current situation. Its conclusion: The public domain is shrinking at an alarming rate; fair use rights are agressively undermined by corporate industry. "Not much has survived of the Global Information Infrastructure, that euphoric liberation rhetoric about the Internet being there for everyone." And it's all part of a grander scheme. A translated, English language version of the article is available online at http://www.heise.de/ct/english/02/24/108/. The original German text can be found at http://www.heise.de/ct/02/24/108/."
The article is about the threats to the growth of the public domain. Only a small part of these threats are actually laws. The laws simply secure the technological barriers which will be under corporate control and are already sneaking their way into common PC hardware. If you think that musicians will much longer have the ability to simply offer their music for download without going through a digital rights broker, you're underestimating corporate greed. This isn't about stopping piracy. It's about making sure that consumers stay consumers instead of freeing themselves from their addiction to mass media. Future computers will simply not allow you to create. You'll have to prove that you're intent on making big money by paying extra for the special "producer" model.
Hopefully they're using the time to seriously consider the concerns raised and will actually come up with a vaguely reasonable implementation. Well, we can hope.