Archives: Expert Predictions

Initial efforts to protect digital copyright by copy protection contributed to the current condition in which most otherwise ethical computer users seem morally untroubled by their possession of pirated software. Instead of cultivating among the newly computerized a sense of respect for the work of their fellows, 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.

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.

Direct interaction will provide a lot of intellectual property protection in the future … Interactivity will be a billable commodity even in the absence of authorship. As people move into the Net and increasingly get their information directly from its point of production, unfiltered by centralized media, they will attempt to develop the same interactive ability to probe reality that only experience has provided them in the past … Control will be based on restricting access to the freshest, highest-bandwidth information … In most cases, the defining technology will be cryptography.

It may be unnecessary to constitutionally assure freedom of expression in an environment which … “treats censorship as a malfunction” and reroutes proscribed ideas around it. Similar natural balancing mechanisms may arise to smooth over the social discontinuities which previously required legal intercession to set right … Companies that trade in information are likely to find that their increasing inability to deal sensibly with technological issues will not be remedied in the courts, which won’t be capable of producing verdicts predictable enough to be supportive of long-term enterprise.

As we return to continuous information, we can expect the importance of authorship to diminish. Creative people may have to renew their acquaintance with humility … Soon most information will be generated collaboratively by the cyber-tribal hunter-gatherers of cyberspace. Our arrogant legal dismissal of the rights of “primitives” will soon return to haunt us.

If we continue to assume that value is based on scarcity, as it is with regard to physical objects, we will create laws that are precisely contrary to the nature of information, which may, in many cases, increase in value with distribution. The large, legally risk-averse institutions most likely to play by the old rules will suffer for their compliance. As more lawyers, guns, and money are invested in either protecting their rights or subverting those of their opponents, their ability to produce new technology will simply grind to a halt as every move they make drives them deeper into a tar pit of courtroom warfare. Faith in law will not be an effective strategy for high-tech companies.

Software piracy laws are so practically unenforceable and breaking them has become so socially acceptable that only a thin minority appears compelled, either by fear or conscience, to obey them … Against the swift tide of custom, the software publishers’ current practice of hanging a few visible scapegoats is so obviously capricious as to only further diminish respect for the law. Part of the widespread disregard for commercial software copyrights stems from a legislative failure to understand the conditions into which it was inserted. To assume that systems of law based in the physical world will serve in an environment as fundamentally different as cyberspace is a folly for which everyone doing business in the future will pay.