Don’t be surprised if we start seeing “look and feel” Web page cases in the courts in the next few years, bringing this intricate set of copyright questions out of their software ghetto and into the wider world of mass publishing.
The Web publisher’s rights in magazine-like Web pages and sites will be very similar to the print magazine publisher’s rights in the printed page.
Exon’s proposed national legislation does have a possible silver lining. It can be used to perform some judo and achieve needed unification of varying state laws on adult materials.
These academic renegades, like everyone else, will find their own refuge in private, moderated online services. Once they congregate on such systems, what’s to stop them from enacting new “acceptable use policies” banning all commercial uses? These people can recapture the Internet as they knew it in the past, a legendary place where commerciality and the rules of the outside world did not apply, and which no one in the outside world really cared about.
We should … see more public spaces reappearing within private service areas, such as community-based bulletin boards, in order to keep the noise down in public meetings and discussions. The public will be private in order to function at all. Act up in such a place and you’ll be tossed out on your virtual ear.
The only thing that will prevent the FCC from rising like a Red Tape Phoenix in the highly noisy Net scenario will be voluntary cooperation among Net users and businesses to keep the noise levels down.
Many people just won’t involve themselves in the public Net at all. They will stay away from Usenet and stay away from new models of public discussions that will follow Usenet, such as large-scale public MUDs. They’ll sail through cyberspace in little capsules with hard encryption-generated shells, like they were driving through a dangerous neighborhood with the car windows rolled up.
The Net has many more and far dirtier jobs in store for software agents. For example, copyright owners, including every entertainment and publishing company enormous or small will deploy agents to seek out infringing copies of their property wherever it resides on the Net. Marketers of every stripe will have agents on the Net as their eyes, ears and fashion calipers, monitoring online pop culture continuously. Cops will welcome the multiplication of their efforts by software agents, using them lavishly to even the odds against hackers careening through cyberspace, drug dealers, and of course their self-declared main target, online pedophiles. Look particularly for the IRS to use agents to scour the Internet thoroughly
Noise and the need to escape from the noise will drive development of the public Net. Forget infrastructure, forget superhighways, all that hack political vaporware. Feel the noise: buzzing static, fitful low rumbles, the clamor of excited mobs.
Cognitive skills are going to be permanently more valuable and unskilled labor permanently less valuable.