Cognitive Dissident: Interview with John Perry Barlow

Bob Hellbringer writes "Mother Jones Magazine has an online interview with John Perry Barlow of the EFF, on the things that all slashdotters love: 'the Total Information Awareness project, online activism, file sharing, and the prospect of a digital counterculture.'"

Comments

Re:speak for yourself

[Twirlip of the Mists]

1. Political? What the fuck, dude? There's absolutely nothing political about Union Carbide or Dow Chemical. They're commercial concerns, not political.

2. The Dow Chemical case involved the unauthorized use of the "Dow Chemcial" trademark and the associated logo. If the offending party hadn't used the name (if they'd called it "Cow Chemical" or some other similar but noninfringing name) and logo, they'd have been in the clear.

3. The reason the issue was escalated to the Verio level was because Thing.net didn't have any sort of AUP against this kind of illegal activity. Verio, fortunately, does. So Dow went to Verio and said, "Hey, Verio, your client is violating your AUP." And Verio said, "You're absolutely right. Bad boys!" And that's that.

4. Before you cry "chilling effect" again, you might want to see the big point that's staring you right in the face, here. The creators of the so-called parody site were breaking the law. Their unauthorized use of the Dow Chemical name and logo were not protected speech. If they had said, "Dow Chemical is bad," that would have been fine. If they had said, "We're Cow Chemical, and we're bad," that would have been fine. But because they said, "We're Dow Chemical, and we're bad," they got their pee pees smacked. See?

5. This is exactly what I'm talking about. Thanks for providing an example of my point.