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/."

Comments

Balance in all things

[Isao]

One must also consider the new content that is being made available, like the MIT online course information, or the Usenet archive in Google.

The new forms that information will take may be quite unrecognizable to us "old folk."

The commons _IS_ growing, at an increasing rate...

[rthille]

Just not as fast as the 'pay to play' space. There is still a huge growth in the 'free information' space, or a least the 'free information with garbage adverts attached' space.

But the laws covering IP are still a problem when they affect what people can create themselves and give freely. Patents are worse than copyright in this regard, because if I've never heard of Word or Office or whatever, I can recreate it (or similar functionality) myself and give it away for free. With patents, I can't even give away code that I wrote having never heard of their approach to the problem.