2. battles
No Electronic Theft Act, DMCA
SOPA/PIPA
European Copyright Directive
HADOPI (France); Digital Economy
Act (UK); Ley Sinde (Spain);
Section 92A (New Zealand);
Copyright Act (Korea); US "6
strikes"
ACTA, TPP
3. collateral damage
criminalisation of everyday acts
assumption of guilt
disproportionate punishments
extra-judicial punishments
collective punishments
loss of privacy
loss of freedom of speech
4. in the beginning...
first CD appeared in 1982
without any kind of copy protection
because it was impossible to copy
the CD's 700 Mbytes of data: the
1983 IBM PC XT had a 10 Mbytes
hard disc – less than one song
similarly impossible to share it
across the Internet: the Hayes
Smartmodem, released in 1981, had
a speed of 300 bits/s – about 400
hours to upload one song
5. ...and then...
Moore's Law
MP3 developed in early 1990s, just
as Internet was taking off
used computation to reduce music
file size to 10% of original
modem speed then 14.4 Kbit/s –
less than one hour to
upload/download one MP3 song:
slow, but possible
Napster (1999)
6. today
Mbit/s broadband connection mean
that entire films can now be
shared
P2P networks like BitTorrent make
it even easier to distribute
those files and share them in the
background
1 terabyte hard disc (1000
gigabytes) costs £/€/$50; stores
150,000 MP3s
7. tomorrow
a 1 petabyte (1000 terabytes) USB
stick will cost £/€/$50 and store
every song ever recorded in CD
quality (no compression)
a 1 exabyte hard disc (1000
petabytes) will cost £/€/$50 and
store every film ever recorded
ultimately be able to share
*everything* as easily as sharing
one MP3 file in 1995
then what?
8. war on digital sharing
is unwinnable
Moore's Law
is war on abundance
artificial scarcity
is a war on humanity
most people can't access most
knowledge
is a war on the future
a few of those people are the ones
who will save us
9. castles in the air
those who talk of "IP" compare
copyright infringement with
trespass
in 20th century, law on trespass
radically reshaped by new
technology
limited by taking away airspace
rights
10. taking flight
we need to allow knowledge to pass
freely through the digital space
"above" analogue objects
no digital copyright
logically inevitable
morally necessary
economically sensible
11. what's not to like?
glyn.moody@gmail.com
@glynmoody on Twitter/identi.ca
opendotdotdot.blogspot.com
