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Just as limited bandwidth was the
excuse for applying censorship to broadcast media, it
appears that the zealous protection of intellectual
property presents the greatest threat to free digital
expression. - 1990
~~~
The society we erect [in cyberspace]
will probably be quite different from the one we now
inhabit, given the fact that this one depends heavily on
the physical property of things while the next one has no
physical properties at all. Certain qualities should
survive the transfer, however, and these include
tolerance, respect for privacy of others, and a
willingness to the treat one's fellows as something
besides potential customers. - 1991
~~~
It is imaginable that, with the
widespread use of digital cash and encrypted monetary
exchange on the Global Net, economies the size of
America's could appear as nothing but oceans of
alphabet soup. Money laundering would no longer be
necessary. The payment of taxes might become more or less
voluntary. - 1993
~~~
Every time we make any sort of
transaction in the digital environment, we smear our
fingerprints all over Cyberspace. If we are to have any
privacy in the future, we will need virtual
"walls" made of cryptography. - 1994
~~~
That's the thing about
cyberspace. It's the last frontier and it will be a
permanent frontier. It's infinite and it's
continuously changing. - 1994
~~~
If our property can be infinitely
reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the
planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its
even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How
are we going to get paid for the work we do with our
minds? And, if we can't get paid, what will assure
the continued creation and distribution of such work?
Since we don't have a solution to what is a
profoundly new kind of challenge, and are apparently
unable to delay the galloping digitization of everything
not obstinately physical, we are sailing into the future
on a sinking ship. - 1994
~~~
While the Internet may never include
every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every
year and can be expected to become the principal medium
of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the
only one. Once that has happened, all the goods of the
Information Age - all of the expressions once contained
in books or film strips or newsletters - will exist
either as pure thought or something very much like
thought: voltage conditions darting around the Net at the
speed of light, in conditions that one might behold in
effect, as glowing pixels or transmitted sounds, but
never touch or claim to "own" in the old sense
of the word. - 1994
~~~
Humanity now seems bent on creating
a world economy primarily based on goods that take no
material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any
predictable connection between creators and a fair reward
for the utility or pleasure others may find in their
works. Without that connection, and without a fundamental
change in consciousness to accommodate its loss, we are
building our future on furor, litigation, and
institutionalized evasion of payment except in response
to raw force. We may return to the Bad Old Days of
property. - 1994
~~~
When the primary articles of
commerce in a society look so much like speech as to be
indistinguishable from it, and when the traditional
methods of protecting their ownership have become
ineffectual, attempting to fix the problem with broader
and more vigorous enforcement will inevitably threaten
freedom of speech. The greatest constraint on your future
liberties may come not from government but from corporate
legal departments laboring to protect by force what can
no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general
social consent. - 1994
~~~
Early reliance on copy protection
led to the subliminal notion that cracking into a
software package somehow "earned" one the right
to use it. Limited not by conscience but by technical
skill, many soon felt free to do whatever they could get
away with. This will continue to be a potential liability
of the encryption of digitized commerce. - 1994
~~~
Cryptography is the
"material" from which the walls, boundaries -
and bottles - of cyberspace will be fashioned ... I also
believe that a social over reliance on protection by
barricades rather than conscience will eventually wither
the latter by turning intrusion and theft into a sport,
rather than a crime. - 1994
~~~
Discontinuous upgrades will smooth
into a constant process of incremental improvement and
adaptation, some of it man-made and some of it arising
through genetic algorithms. Pirated copies of software
may become too static to have much value to anyone. -
1994
~~~
In most of the schemes I can
project, the file would be "alive" with
permanently embedded software that could
"sense" the surrounding conditions and interact
with them ... Of course, files that possess the
independent ability to communicate upstream sound
uncomfortably like the Morris Internet Worm.
"Live" files do have a certain viral quality.
And serious privacy issues would arise if everyone's
computer were packed with digital spies. - 1994
~~~
We're going to have to look at
information as though we'd never seen the stuff
before ... The economy of the future will be based on
relationship rather than possession. It will be
continuous rather than sequential. And finally, in the
years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather
than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of
which dreams are made. Our future business will be
conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns. -
1994
~~~
Notions of property, value,
ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing
more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians
first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored
grain. Only a very few people are aware of the enormity
of this shift, and fewer of them are lawyers or public
officials. Those who do see these changes must prepare
responses for the legal and social confusion that will
erupt as efforts to protect new forms of property with
old methods become more obviously futile, and, as a
consequence, more adamant. - 1994
~~~
Since it is now possible to convey
ideas from one mind to another without ever making them
physical, we are now claiming to own ideas themselves and
not merely their expression. And since it is likewise now
possible to create useful tools that never take physical
form, we have taken to patenting abstractions, sequences
of virtual events, and mathematical formulae - the most
unreal estate imaginable. In certain areas, this leaves
rights of ownership in such an ambiguous condition that
property again adheres to those who can muster the
largest armies. The only difference is that this time the
armies consist of lawyers. - 1994
~~~
What was previously considered a
common human resource, distributed among the minds and
libraries of the world, as well as the phenomena of
nature herself, is now being fenced and deeded. It is as
though a new class of enterprise had arisen that claimed
to own the air ... dancing on the grave of copyright and
patent will solve little, especially when so few are
willing to admit that the occupant of this grave is even
deceased, and so many are trying to uphold by force what
can no longer be upheld by popular consent. - 1994
~~~
Promising economies based on purely
digital products will either be born in a state of
paralysis, as appears to be the case with multimedia, or
continue in a brave and willful refusal by their owners
to play the ownership game at all ... It may well be that
when the current system of intellectual property law has
collapsed, as seems inevitable, that no new legal
structure will arise in its place. But something will
happen. After all, people do business. When a currency
becomes meaningless, business is done in barter. When
societies develop outside the law, they develop their own
unwritten codes, practices, and ethical systems. -
1994
~~~
Faith in law will not be an
effective strategy for high-tech companies. Law adapts by
continuous increments and at a pace second only to
geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks, like the
punctuation of biological evolution grotesquely
accelerated. Real-world conditions will continue to
change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further
behind, more profoundly confused. - 1994
~~~
Soon most information will be
generated collaboratively by the cyber- tribal
hunter-gatherers of cyberspace. Our arrogant dismissal of
the rights of "primitives" will soon return to
haunt us. - 1994
~~~
The "terrain" itself - the
architecture of the Net - may come to serve many of the
purposes which could only be maintained in the past by
legal imposition. For example, it may be unnecessary to
constitutionally assure freedom of expression in an
environment which, in the words of my fellow EFF
co-founder John Gilmore, "treats censorship as a
malfunction" and reroutes proscribed ideas around
it. - 1994
~~~
In any case, whether you think of
yourself as a service provider or a performer, the future
protection of your intellectual property will depend on
your ability to control your relationship to the market -
a relationship which will most likely live and grow over
a period of time. The value of that relationship will
reside in the quality of performance, the uniqueness of
your point of view, the validity of your expertise, its
relevance to your market, and, underlying everything, the
ability of that market to access your creative services
swiftly, conveniently, and interactively. - 1994
~~~
If the payment process can be
automated, as digital cash and signature will make
possible, I believe that soft-product creators will reap
a much higher return from the bread they cast upon the
waters of cyberspace. Moreover, they will be spared much
of the overhead presently attached to the marketing,
manufacture, sales, and distribution of information
products, whether those products are computer programs,
books, CDs, or motion pictures. This will reduce prices
and further increase the likelihood of noncompulsory
payment. - 1994
~~~
In the absence of the old
containers, almost everything we think we know about
intellectual property is wrong. We're going to have
to unlearn it. We're going to have to look at
information as though we'd never seen the stuff
before. The protections that we will develop will rely
far more on ethics and technology than on law. -
1994
~~~
Digital technology is ... erasing
the legal jurisdictions of the physical world and
replacing them with the unbounded and perhaps permanently
lawless waves of cyberspace. In cyberspace, no national
or local boundaries contain the scene of a crime and
determine the method of its prosecution; worse, no clear
cultural agreements define what a crime might be. -
1994
~~~
The Clipper Chip ... threatens to be
either the goofiest waste of federal dollars since
President Gerald Ford's great Swine Flu program or,
if actually deployed, a surveillance technology of
profound malignancy. - 1994
~~~
In five years, everyone who is
reading these words will have an e-mail address, other
than the determined Luddities who also eschew the
telephone and electricity. When we are all together in
cyberspace we will see what the human spirit, and the
basic desire to connect, can create there. - 1995
~~~
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl
bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl! - 1995
~~~
We are in the middle of the most
transforming technological event since the capture of
fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing
since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back
farther. There has been much written both celebrating and
denouncing cyberspace, but to me this seems a development
of such magnitude that trying to characterize it as a
good thing or a bad thing trivializes it considerably. I
also don't think it's a matter about which we
have much choice. It is coming, whether we like it or
not. - 1995
~~~
In order to feel the greatest sense
of communication, to realize the most experience, as
opposed to information, I want to be able to completely
interact with the consciousness that's trying to
communicate with mine. Rapidly. And in the sense that we
are now creating a space in which the people of the
planet can have that kind of communication relationship,
I think we're moving away from information - through
information, actually - and back toward experience. -
1995
~~~
There's a great Bill Gibson
line: "The future is already here, it's just
unevenly distributed." There's tension from
people who are on the (cyberspace) border. I'm afraid
it will result in violence before it's all over. I
want to see us thinking openly and seriously about how to
avoid bloodshed. Because blood will be shed over this
divide before it's over with. It's really just a
question of how much. - 1995
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