Notes from Cory Doctorow's WebGuild Talk

Cory Doctorow gave a talk tonight at the Silicon Valley WebGuild Meeting. I had the oppertunity to attend, and take some notes, which follow. Overall this was a standard talk about EFF issues, it was a good introduction to what the EFF is doing, and Cory is an entertaining speaker. However, there wasn't a lot of new information, and the audience didn't seem very engaged. The roundtable after the meeting was very disappointing. Below you'll find my notes. Mostly they are a summary of what I heard and thought. The places where you see quotation marks are where I was trying to write down exactly what Cory said. Notes from Cory Doctorow's Talk at the Webguild on 2003-06-11 Cory is the Outreach Coordinator for the EFF. Started off with basic history (info also on EFF site): 1. Email Privacy 2. Crypto Wars Tonight is about Civil Liberties and the Web. Walled gardens are bad. The web has been a fantastic success. The web is the greatest repository of human knowledge ever created. Today our freedom is being threatened, as the consequence of some very poorly thought out security policy. Primarily due to the Patriot and the Homeland Security Act. Today: A high school principal can go directly to an ISP and convince them to hand over a user's email. Copyright is the really sneaky way that we are loosing our freedoms. 80% of people who are talking about copyright don't understand it. In Europe copyrights are just like property rights. In France, if you paint a painting and I buy it and I hang it next to a bad painting you can sue to have it moved. WSJ article last year talked about every successful country in the world spending about 100 years ripping off other country's stuff (IP). The tragedy of the commons. "In the Napster world you had a commons where the sheep shit grass". Bit Torrent, Tornado Network are both doing interesting things with p2p networks that enhance the publics use of networks. Ben Franklin quote about knowledge being like a torch. If I light a torch from yours you don't end up with half as much light, together we have have twice as much light. Copyright has been extended 11 times over the last 40 years. Four Factors: Commercial Use the Whole Work Disrupt the Authors Monopoly Betamax case from 1976 to 1984 (8 years!!!) The Supreme Court ended up saying any device that is capable of a substantial non-infringing / lawful use is not illegal. Sony got chased out of the walkman business because they made the wrong decision, with regard to MP3. Superbit DVD = 10X the resolution of normal DVDs. "If you are a software hacker, you can be a hardware hacker too." Read Bunny's book on hacking the X-Box. "The idea that a business would pay engineers to make their product suck more is astonshing." DMCA: anti-circumvention etc... Berne and Copel bill "Right of Revenge" This is an astonishing concept given that rape and murder victims don't get a similar right. There is a guy asleep behind me, he's actually snoring. What's at stake here: Freedom to make a link Freedom to create a large database of data (google) Freedom to develop the tools that make the internet work People can make a difference. This is the future of democracy.