[00:01.520 --> 00:04.730]  Everybody's working fast and furious, trying to get the lights and so forth going.
[00:04.730 --> 00:07.320]  This is the keynote for today.
[00:08.120 --> 00:13.100]  The gentleman sitting to my left is Siva Vaidhyanathan.
[00:14.860 --> 00:18.100]  He's a professor of culture and communication at NYU.
[00:18.660 --> 00:21.920]  He's author of a book that has caused some noise.
[00:21.920 --> 00:24.640]  It's called Copyrights and Copy Wrongs.
[00:25.520 --> 00:29.740]  He's been featured on numerous TV shows, radio shows.
[00:29.860 --> 00:35.560]  He's actually going to be selling and signing his book downstairs at a severely discounted price.
[00:36.060 --> 00:38.780]  So if you want to check that out, it's an excellent book.
[00:39.220 --> 00:40.920]  Without further ado...
[00:40.920 --> 00:41.320]  When?
[00:42.620 --> 00:43.100]  When?
[00:43.100 --> 00:44.360]  When are you going to be selling the book?
[00:44.460 --> 00:44.920]  After this.
[00:45.440 --> 00:46.160]  After this.
[00:46.600 --> 00:49.780]  It actually starts going to be at 2 in the morning, so we'll see you there downstairs.
[00:52.440 --> 00:53.440]  Siva, take it away.
[00:53.440 --> 00:53.660]  Thanks.
[01:01.640 --> 01:02.120]  All right.
[01:02.180 --> 01:04.160]  We have too many microphones here, right?
[01:04.480 --> 01:05.060]  Are we all right?
[01:05.440 --> 01:05.960]  Is this all right?
[01:06.100 --> 01:06.320]  Good.
[01:07.220 --> 01:07.540]  Hi.
[01:09.240 --> 01:09.680]  Hi.
[01:09.980 --> 01:10.140]  Hi.
[01:10.340 --> 01:10.800]  All right.
[01:14.180 --> 01:15.060]  All right.
[01:15.380 --> 01:16.260]  How's it going now?
[01:18.580 --> 01:19.220]  Very good.
[01:19.460 --> 01:19.820]  All right.
[01:19.960 --> 01:20.940]  Well, thank you very much, Laszlo.
[01:21.000 --> 01:21.880]  That was nice.
[01:21.880 --> 01:36.680]  I had the pleasure of working with him at the last one of these gatherings a couple summers ago when the buzz around the world was all about Napster and this new format called MP3 that all the kids were into.
[01:37.020 --> 01:41.640]  And we had a great time talking about it in the other room, the room that's now called B.
[01:42.320 --> 01:45.740]  And for me, it was a special treat because I got to sit next to Jello Biafra.
[01:46.420 --> 01:49.620]  So it was certainly one of my heroes from way back.
[01:51.040 --> 02:00.920]  But it's also an extreme pleasure to have this stage today and have this opportunity, especially because I've become quite a fan of 2600.
[02:02.200 --> 02:03.380]  not because I'm a hacker.
[02:03.540 --> 02:04.060]  I'm not.
[02:04.900 --> 02:06.160]  I suppose I could have been.
[02:06.360 --> 02:16.420]  But I dropped AP Pascal in high school and started down the road of actual English sentences as my means of communication.
[02:16.640 --> 02:18.980]  And I've never lived that down.
[02:20.700 --> 02:23.290]  I also never learned to hit a curveball.
[02:23.600 --> 02:25.170]  So those are my two great regrets.
[02:25.390 --> 02:26.290]  I could have been a hacker.
[02:26.350 --> 02:27.260]  I could have been a baseball player.
[02:27.260 --> 02:32.010]  But no, I'm just a professor and an author and so I'll have to make do with that.
[02:32.210 --> 02:38.850]  So please forgive me if I sound sort of technologically fuzzy as I walk through the issues I'm discussing today.
[02:39.830 --> 02:50.760]  I first became aware of 2600 through the EFF when the DeCSS case was going through the district court in New York.
[02:50.760 --> 03:13.240]  Robin Gross from EFF called me up and asked me if I wanted to submit an amicus brief as someone who teaches about film and teaches about media in a way to sort of talk about how the anti-circumvention provision was very likely to stifle scholarship research and free speech in academia.
[03:14.090 --> 03:15.900]  So this was, yeah, this was two years ago.
[03:16.140 --> 03:17.040]  I wrote the amicus brief.
[03:17.150 --> 03:22.080]  I contributed to a second one for the appeals court hearing.
[03:23.030 --> 03:26.110]  So I am also 0 for 2 in the U.S. courts.
[03:26.380 --> 03:31.380]  But more importantly, just about everything I wrote in those briefs turned out to be true.
[03:31.820 --> 03:39.240]  Since then we've seen some horror stories about DeCSS, I'm sorry, about the anti-circumvention provision stifling free speech.
[03:40.740 --> 03:42.830]  Is there anything we can do about this noise?
[03:43.400 --> 03:44.430]  Am I over mic'd?
[03:44.600 --> 03:45.960]  Am I...
[03:48.790 --> 03:49.470]  All right.
[03:50.590 --> 03:51.190]  Thank you.
[03:51.630 --> 03:52.310]  I'll try...
[03:54.430 --> 03:59.150]  It's so much better if you can just be annoyed by my words rather than turn around my words.
[03:59.290 --> 04:06.090]  So what I'm going to talk to you about today is something sort of abstract and sort of out there.
[04:06.090 --> 04:11.350]  It's another one of those, you know, many things you've heard or read about the nature of the internet.
[04:11.690 --> 04:12.930]  But it's my shot at it.
[04:13.150 --> 04:17.050]  You know, all academics who study the internet have to take a shot at trying to make sense of the whole thing.
[04:17.490 --> 04:19.690]  So this is my attempt.
[04:19.890 --> 04:26.730]  You can actually read a version of what I'm presenting today if you go to a website called Open Democracy.
[04:27.250 --> 04:28.630]  And the address is real simple.
[04:28.770 --> 04:31.910]  It's www.opendemocracy.net.
[04:32.110 --> 04:33.510]  That's one word, Open Democracy.
[04:33.830 --> 04:36.090]  If you're not familiar with the site, it's really good.
[04:36.190 --> 04:41.650]  It's a collection of writings that deal generally with globalization and global politics.
[04:41.830 --> 04:45.910]  It's run by a bunch of folks in London and they have contacts all over the world.
[04:46.090 --> 04:47.950]  So there's some really fascinating pieces up there.
[04:48.130 --> 04:52.950]  They're running a series of articles right now about copyright and about digital issues.
[04:52.950 --> 04:57.490]  And this talk that I'm giving today is featured on that page right now.
[04:58.210 --> 05:03.190]  Also included in that package, though, are two pieces to which I will refer in this talk.
[05:03.770 --> 05:17.870]  One is the testimony that Jack Valenti, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, made before a congressional committee in which he was trying to argue for even stronger technical protections of copyrighted works.
[05:17.870 --> 05:23.090]  And the other is a response to Valenti's statements made by Richard Stallman.
[05:23.230 --> 05:26.330]  So it's a pretty interesting back and forth between Valenti and Stallman.
[05:26.430 --> 05:31.750]  And I will refer to those particular works in this talk.
[05:32.330 --> 05:32.990]  All right.
[05:33.110 --> 05:33.670]  So here I go.
[05:33.750 --> 05:34.450]  This is the real stuff.
[05:37.090 --> 05:42.310]  I call this Hacking the Currency, the Rise of Cynical Technology.
[05:43.510 --> 05:54.550]  Diogenes of Sinop, who lived between 412 or 403 BC and 324 or 321 BC, was infamous in Athens for masturbating in the marketplace.
[05:56.610 --> 06:04.030]  Diogenes wandered the streets of Athens and later Sinop after he had been exiled for defacing the currency of Athens.
[06:05.030 --> 06:08.470]  He would wander the streets wearing a shabby robe.
[06:08.750 --> 06:13.490]  He engaged powerful people in playful debate, often exposing their hypocrisy.
[06:13.910 --> 06:22.090]  He was once asked which city-state he claimed as his own, and he responded, I am a citizen of the cosmos or universe.
[06:22.590 --> 06:29.290]  He used the word cosmopolites, from which we get our notion of cosmopolitanism.
[06:30.530 --> 06:33.130]  Diogenes was a master of satire and parody.
[06:33.130 --> 06:34.970]  He was playful and critical.
[06:35.350 --> 06:40.690]  He loved all of humanity, but refused to grant it the slightest bit of authority over him.
[06:40.870 --> 06:42.190]  And he was shameless.
[06:42.570 --> 06:43.930]  He knew no manners.
[06:44.190 --> 06:46.050]  He lived by his own moral code.
[06:46.510 --> 06:50.350]  If Diogenes wrote anything in his life, it's been long lost.
[06:50.530 --> 06:59.530]  But his legend and his teachings lived on through such thinkers as Crates, Seneca, Diogenes Laertes, and Marcus Aurelius.
[07:00.490 --> 07:02.830]  Diogenes was the founder of the Cynics.
[07:03.410 --> 07:15.770]  Now, the Cynics had no canon, no schools, no academic lineage, but their teachings flowed like memes through the cultures of Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Rome.
[07:15.770 --> 07:21.210]  They ultimately influenced Christian monasticism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.
[07:21.810 --> 07:42.050]  By the way, if you look up Diogenes in a search engine, you'll find something called Diogenes, all caps, which is, it says on the website, composed of FOI Services Incorporated and Washington Business Information Incorporated, it is the name of a database service that contains full text and citations of the U.S.
[07:42.170 --> 07:46.670]  Food and Drug Administration regulatory information needed by the healthcare industry.
[07:46.670 --> 07:50.630]  So it's actually a trademark now, something Diogenes himself would have freaked out about.
[07:51.430 --> 07:51.710]  All right.
[07:51.910 --> 08:00.390]  The conventional... it's a trademark for a database system that controls and sells, resells public information that we all paid for.
[08:01.130 --> 08:01.570]  All right.
[08:01.630 --> 08:06.290]  The conventional wisdom about cynicism is that it was and is corrosive.
[08:06.550 --> 08:10.370]  It's rude and unworkable, uncomfortable and nihilistic.
[08:10.370 --> 08:21.310]  When I teach about cynicism, and it's usually in the context of globalization or talking about patriotism and loyalty to one's nation, I often ask my students what they think the word means today.
[08:21.570 --> 08:29.010]  And I ask them to name a popular character who might embody their assumed definition of cynicism.
[08:29.470 --> 08:32.510]  They always cite George Costanza of Seinfeld.
[08:34.170 --> 08:54.210]  Well, what I'd like to do is actually work our way from that very cold, self-serving, thoroughly, selfishly detached vision of cynicism into a much more generous and engaged and, for lack of a better word, loving version of cynicism that was embodied by Diogenes.
[08:54.210 --> 09:09.550]  The beliefs that Diogenes and his followers proliferated included a sort of default belief in radical freedom, a deep suspicion of sophistry and theory in general.
[09:09.790 --> 09:12.690]  They were very pragmatic before the word pragmatic existed.
[09:14.030 --> 09:16.290]  They believed in discipline or mastery.
[09:16.290 --> 09:23.070]  They believed that the highest success you could achieve in life is to master a set of skills, to be really good at something.
[09:23.070 --> 09:33.250]  They believed in self-sufficiency, living according to nature, not having to depend on others to fulfill the deepest, most important things in life.
[09:33.850 --> 09:39.390]  And this notion of living according to nature, it wasn't what we think of as sort of proto-environmentalism now.
[09:39.950 --> 09:49.410]  But it meant to live according to nature was to avoid being twisted or guided or limited by social convention or cultural power.
[09:50.650 --> 09:55.410]  And the political side of cynicism was essentially cosmopolitanism.
[09:56.350 --> 10:07.990]  A notion that you don't owe a loyalty to a particular state or a particular city or a particular community, but you owe your loyalty first and foremost to the human beings on Earth in general.
[10:07.990 --> 10:11.490]  It's an anti-polis, a polis being a political body.
[10:11.730 --> 10:20.150]  They were dismissive of the local sense of a polis and wanted to create a global polis.
[10:20.290 --> 10:24.070]  Of course, the cynics had no such technology to do this.
[10:24.210 --> 10:27.310]  They had, you know, ships and occasionally pieces of paper.
[10:27.630 --> 10:33.110]  But it wasn't even within the realm of possibility for the cynics to create a global polis.
[10:33.110 --> 10:34.290]  But that was their goal.
[10:34.770 --> 10:36.690]  They wanted a polis of all humanity.
[10:37.310 --> 10:41.950]  We can imagine what a state might look like if the cynics got to run it.
[10:42.550 --> 10:44.970]  For better or worse, the cynics never got a chance.
[10:44.970 --> 10:50.530]  So we couldn't really test their theories out against the realities of human nature and interaction.
[10:51.470 --> 10:53.370]  But imagine a cynical state.
[10:54.250 --> 11:07.930]  Imagine a place where members of a borderless polis enjoy total freedom, where they can misbehave, they can rant, they can parody, they can disrupt, they can deface currency at will.
[11:08.970 --> 11:16.770]  What could be a more ideal environment for a cynic to live in, to live well and happily, than what we now call cyberspace?
[11:17.770 --> 11:21.170]  Cyberspace is the ethereal realization of cynical politics.
[11:21.830 --> 11:23.470]  Diogenes was a hacker.
[11:23.470 --> 11:26.230]  The internet is a cynical cosmos.
[11:26.630 --> 11:33.830]  It was designed along cynical principles and serves cynical ends better than it serves any others.
[11:33.990 --> 11:37.730]  That doesn't mean that cyberspace is exclusively a realm of the cynics.
[11:37.850 --> 11:41.830]  It doesn't mean that cyberspace was exclusively built by and for cynics.
[11:41.930 --> 11:52.430]  It just happens at this point in time to better serve the goals of cynics than to serve the goals of those who would like to create different sorts of order.
[11:52.430 --> 11:54.930]  And as we all know, that may not last.
[11:55.650 --> 11:56.390]  All right.
[11:58.650 --> 12:04.670]  In addition, and this is sort of my grand clever evidence for comparing cyberspace to a cynical polis.
[12:04.830 --> 12:16.310]  As we know all too well, nothing represents the overall nature and substance and primary use of the internet better than the phrase masturbating in the marketplace.
[12:16.750 --> 12:22.390]  When I heard that phrase, I thought, you know, that's exactly what goes on on AOL, for instance.
[12:23.850 --> 12:25.850]  But also, I mean, on the internet in general.
[12:25.970 --> 12:29.250]  I mean, you're masturbating or you're looking in the marketplace, right?
[12:29.350 --> 12:33.170]  And occasionally you do something else, but that's what most of the commerce is all about.
[12:33.170 --> 12:34.050]  All right.
[12:35.150 --> 12:51.030]  Where else but the internet may one book a plane ticket, purchase a book about the history of American copyright, available on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, order a bouquet of flowers, write a letter to the editor of the New York Times, all the while wanking to one's heart's content.
[12:51.970 --> 12:56.410]  The word cynic comes from the Greek word for dog-like.
[12:57.170 --> 13:06.190]  Diogenes, Crates, and other Greek cynics were accused of living and often barking like dogs, shamelessly and uselessly.
[13:06.330 --> 13:09.530]  They, of course, embraced the canine imagery.
[13:09.750 --> 13:16.570]  As soon as the general population of Greece called them cynics, said you were dog-like, they were happy to go barking along with it.
[13:16.850 --> 13:18.350]  That was a great image for them.
[13:19.570 --> 13:30.290]  My association of the cynics with the nature of the internet, of course, gives new meaning to that classic cartoon from the New Yorker, in which a dog sitting at a computer says to another dog on the internet, no one knows you're a dog.
[13:32.410 --> 13:32.890]  All right.
[13:32.990 --> 13:34.790]  Well, this is all very clever, I'm sure you're saying.
[13:35.350 --> 13:40.730]  But do I have a serious or relevant point about cynicism and digital technology?
[13:41.490 --> 13:42.170]  Well, maybe.
[13:42.310 --> 13:43.130]  And I'll try to make it.
[13:43.210 --> 13:43.930]  We'll see how it goes.
[13:43.930 --> 14:01.690]  By taking account of cynicism, by imagining cyberspace as a cynical medium, as a thought exercise, we can assess the challenges facing us if we decide to try to temper what we might call the troublesome behaviors that infect the internet.
[14:03.270 --> 14:12.270]  So, many people in the world are asking the question, why can't we limit access to pornography to adults who would view it in public?
[14:13.050 --> 14:17.690]  Of course, plenty of other people are saying, why should we bother limiting that access?
[14:18.650 --> 14:23.790]  Another question people are asking, why can't we prevent massive denial of service hacks?
[14:24.170 --> 14:26.670]  Then there are plenty of people saying, what are you worried about?
[14:27.290 --> 14:30.170]  Why can't we seem to protect consumer privacy?
[14:30.570 --> 14:33.290]  Why can't we seem to protect privacy in general?
[14:34.230 --> 14:38.450]  Why do I keep getting these invitations to invest in a business opportunity in Nigeria?
[14:41.190 --> 14:44.890]  Why can't anyone seem to make any money in this space?
[14:45.730 --> 14:51.390]  Why can't we seem to forge a rich and lively polis out of this powerful communicative technology?
[14:51.690 --> 14:53.410]  And this is, of course, one of the great questions.
[14:53.590 --> 15:07.390]  You know, we always assume that real democracy could work when we connected a lot of people and gave them a lot of substance, a lot of raw material, and, you know, just sort of threw it all in, turned up the heat, and watched democracy boil out of it.
[15:07.730 --> 15:11.610]  Well, it's not quite happening, and so this is one of the great challenges that a lot of people are asking about it.
[15:12.010 --> 15:18.150]  And why can't we seem to be able to convince people to respect copyrights in an electronic environment?
[15:18.550 --> 15:20.550]  Now, of course, I've chosen these questions very carefully.
[15:20.590 --> 15:29.930]  These are the questions that are, I guess the best way to express it, coming out of the dominant voices of leadership, both in the United States and globally.
[15:30.130 --> 15:37.210]  They may not be the questions that people in this audience are asking about these very subjects, and they may not be the questions that I'm asking, but these are the dominant questions.
[15:37.210 --> 15:38.770]  Why can't we seem to do this?
[15:38.990 --> 15:51.550]  Well, my answer is, you know, if you start looking at the nature of the Internet as the ephemeral embodiment of everything Diogenes wanted out of a polis, at least then you have a starting point.
[15:51.710 --> 16:01.930]  If you have certain goals, you have to admit certain limitations, certain structural aspects of the medium, and then work from there.
[16:01.930 --> 16:11.490]  Once we recognize that regulating the Internet would be like trying to regulate Diogenes himself, we become much more modest.
[16:12.290 --> 16:21.690]  We must concede that each of these problems can only be approached through deliberation, discussion, debate, and dialogue.
[16:22.330 --> 16:27.870]  Every attempt to guide behavior on the Internet must emerge from a discussion of ethics.
[16:27.870 --> 16:40.330]  Any other method, technological or legal, may denature the very medium and destroy the radical freedom that makes the medium so attractive, and I would argue, so essential.
[16:40.930 --> 16:56.180]  However, since the rise of cynical technology, those who are threatened, uncomfortable, or merely unaware of the nature of cyberspace have been trying to deny or reconfigure or reign in the more radical aspects of these technologies.
[16:56.840 --> 17:02.240]  Now consider the following statements from some leading critics of cyberspace freedom.
[17:03.040 --> 17:18.150]  The first one I'm going to read to you is from Thomas Friedman, the columnist in the New York Times, who is sort of at the apex of his worldwide reputation right now because he's one of the few reporters for the New York Times who speaks Arabic and spends a lot of time in the Middle East.
[17:18.350 --> 17:25.950]  And so he's shooting off these 500 to 1,000 word pieces that are trying to make sense of the Arab mind at this time.
[17:26.890 --> 17:28.290]  So this is what Friedman wrote.
[17:28.810 --> 17:30.390]  It must have been about two months ago.
[17:31.330 --> 17:51.010]  Ever since I learned that Muhammad Atta made reservations for September 11th using his laptop and the American Airlines website and several of his colleagues used Travelocity.com, I've been wondering how the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley were looking at the 9-11 tragedy,
[17:51.010 --> 17:58.370]  whether it was giving them any pause about the wired world they've been building and the assumptions they are building it upon.
[17:58.970 --> 18:09.210]  Well, of course, when I read this, I immediately thought, well, why didn't Friedman ask executives of Boeing how they felt about the terrorists using their inventions to kill 3,000 innocent people?
[18:09.850 --> 18:11.430]  Why didn't... thank you.
[18:15.340 --> 18:21.380]  Why didn't Friedman ask the stockholders of Stanley Tools how they felt about their box cutters being used by these murderers?
[18:22.660 --> 18:36.260]  Now, terrorists also used automobiles, photocopy machines, and telephones to execute their plans, but only the cynical technologies attract this level of scrutiny, as if they were the only devices capable of fostering abuse.
[18:36.800 --> 18:41.660]  This is a fundamental problem with examining technology through political lenses, of course.
[18:41.840 --> 18:55.200]  The notion that there's some sort of technological exceptionalism about these technologies that people haven't quite been able to fold into their daily lives in a comfortable way, and therefore there's a sense of moral panic about all of these issues.
[18:55.720 --> 18:57.080]  Now, here's my second example.
[18:57.180 --> 19:00.540]  And this one's going to be, I think, a bigger hit in this crowd than Thomas Friedman.
[19:01.360 --> 19:04.400]  Richard Clarke... you know who Richard Clarke is?
[19:04.660 --> 19:04.960]  All right.
[19:05.260 --> 19:05.760]  Some of you do.
[19:05.860 --> 19:14.160]  Richard Clarke, Special Assistant to the President of the United States for Cyberspace Security, made a speech at a meeting held by the Business Software Alliance.
[19:14.520 --> 19:18.080]  I should have hit a couple of really good keywords here in this sentence, right?
[19:18.820 --> 19:20.520]  The meeting was called the Global Tech Summit.
[19:20.640 --> 19:22.500]  It was held in December in Washington, D.C.
[19:22.640 --> 19:30.380]  And for reasons that neither one of us has been able to figure out, both Mike Godwin and I were invited to share the stage in one of these panels.
[19:30.900 --> 19:39.400]  I guess they just like patting us on the head and saying, you know, isn't it cute that we can bring in some people of different points of view to the Business Software Alliance?
[19:39.720 --> 19:40.760]  And it actually was cute.
[19:40.900 --> 19:42.060]  And Kevin Mitnick was there, too.
[19:42.060 --> 19:44.440]  It was like, you know, me and Godwin and Kevin Mitnick.
[19:44.540 --> 19:49.460]  It was a... and then, you know, Steve Ballmer at the next table.
[19:49.580 --> 19:51.040]  You know, it was a very strange process.
[19:52.660 --> 19:56.600]  So in many ways, it was one of my favorite sort of weird events of the last five years.
[19:56.860 --> 20:07.540]  But at the same time, it was deeply disturbing, mostly because everybody who worked for the Business Software Alliance or for Microsoft was incredibly confident, which is really disconcerting.
[20:07.640 --> 20:11.180]  You know, we would have these arguments in the bar and they would just sort of go, ha ha, that's very nice.
[20:11.320 --> 20:12.840]  That's very cute that you would say that, you know.
[20:13.280 --> 20:17.420]  Just, you know, and that whole time I'm thinking, well, what do you know that, you know, my arguments don't seem to matter to you?
[20:18.060 --> 20:19.780]  And, of course, we'll soon find out.
[20:21.160 --> 20:23.860]  So anyway, this is Richard Clark speaking at the Global Tech Summit.
[20:24.120 --> 20:33.300]  At the Global Tech Summit, Clark told the audience of software executives, our enemies are well prepared to use our technology against us.
[20:33.620 --> 20:39.820]  They understand our technology as well as we do, which is actually a statement that should give everybody pause.
[20:40.600 --> 20:45.920]  Now, of course, I'm sitting in the audience of this and I hear, I'm thinking, this is the Global Tech Summit.
[20:46.100 --> 20:52.080]  So it was not immediately clear what our technology was, or in fact, who we were or they were.
[20:53.280 --> 20:58.160]  But, of course, this was a common refrain in the weeks immediately after the terrorist attacks.
[20:58.420 --> 21:09.920]  And such statements seem to draw ethnocentric lines, meaning to distinguish those who invent things meant for good from those who would exploit those same tools for bad purposes.
[21:10.480 --> 21:19.340]  But, of course, such statements ignore the extent to which we and they are intertwined, interdependent, and in many cases, identical.
[21:20.680 --> 21:30.040]  Several of the perpetrators of the attacks of September 11th were educated engineers, trained at institutions in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
[21:30.280 --> 21:41.260]  If technologies ever have national or cultural pedigrees, they lose them as soon as they are sold or sent to other places and adapted for similar uses.
[21:42.260 --> 21:46.440]  Clark did not enumerate which technologies were our technologies.
[21:46.440 --> 21:53.240]  We can assume he was referring to tools much broader than the list that Friedman was concerned with.
[21:53.380 --> 22:07.760]  He was probably referring to everything from the World Wide Web to email to telephones to fax machines, photocopy machines, credit cards, published airline schedules, which might have been in paper form, box cutters and jet aircraft.
[22:07.760 --> 22:17.780]  The terrorists, again, used all of these things, but Clark meant to focus attention on the least governable, communicative technology available, the Internet.
[22:18.180 --> 22:25.860]  By the way, he went on from that statement to explain that we really need to come up with something better than this troublesome TCP IP thing.
[22:26.100 --> 22:26.780]  You know?
[22:27.060 --> 22:33.700]  So here he is, like, speaking to the most powerful and rich software executives in the world, saying, why can't we come up with something better than TCP IP?
[22:33.900 --> 22:34.880]  And I'm thinking, better?
[22:35.060 --> 22:35.900]  What do you mean better?
[22:36.020 --> 22:38.080]  In this room, better doesn't mean better to me.
[22:38.380 --> 22:47.360]  You know, imagine what would happen if these guys in this room all got together and said, you know, let's think of a protocol that can work at all the hinges of the Internet that would work better for us.
[22:47.520 --> 22:48.000]  You know?
[22:48.120 --> 22:51.760]  So this is, like, my paranoia was at maximum during this meeting.
[22:52.280 --> 22:52.820]  All right.
[22:52.920 --> 22:54.320]  Well, here's the last statement I'm going to throw at you.
[22:55.180 --> 23:02.400]  Here's what Jack Valenti, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in congressional testimony in May.
[23:02.920 --> 23:07.920]  Of course, this testimony is available, as I said before, on opendemocracy.net.
[23:08.400 --> 23:09.940]  Again, a very valuable website.
[23:11.020 --> 23:12.620]  And please check it out when you get a chance.
[23:12.740 --> 23:17.020]  Here's what Valenti said, right, when he's talking to Congress about piracy on the net.
[23:17.020 --> 23:19.600]  He says, the facts are these.
[23:19.600 --> 23:25.560]  The copyright industries are responsible for some 5% of the GDP of the United States.
[23:25.820 --> 23:34.140]  They gather more in international revenues than automobiles and auto parts, more than aircraft, more than agriculture.
[23:34.680 --> 23:39.660]  They are creating new jobs at three times the rate of the rest of the economy.
[23:40.020 --> 23:45.380]  Of course, I wanted to point out that the jobs the motion picture industry is creating are all in Canada, but that's another problem.
[23:45.380 --> 23:59.140]  So, brooding, this is Valenti continuing, brooding over the global reach of the American movie and its persistent success in attracting consumers of every creed, culture, and country is thievery.
[23:59.920 --> 24:04.300]  The theft of our movies in both analog and digital formats.
[24:05.160 --> 24:08.380]  Valenti went on, of course, to blame the usual suspects.
[24:08.700 --> 24:12.380]  Actually, some of these aren't so usual, but it's interesting who he's citing as his enemies.
[24:12.380 --> 24:13.600]  Hackers, of course.
[24:14.900 --> 24:15.420]  Universities.
[24:15.640 --> 24:17.400]  Universities are apparently a big problem now.
[24:18.120 --> 24:19.220]  And the Chinese.
[24:21.740 --> 24:24.720]  For the woes of the American film industry.
[24:25.460 --> 24:31.380]  I don't know what woes they're talking about, because it's doing rather well, but nonetheless, this is the axis of evil, right?
[24:31.460 --> 24:34.600]  It's hackers, universities, and the Chinese.
[24:35.860 --> 24:36.900]  All right.
[24:39.020 --> 24:51.680]  Well, Valenti is, of course, making nationalistic claims and demanding government protection against the perils of a free market and the perils of global flows of information.
[24:52.480 --> 24:59.180]  Specifically, Valenti was asking Congress to consider two policy moves that would protect his clients.
[24:59.460 --> 25:03.680]  The notorious Consumer Broadband and Digital Technology Promotion Act.
[25:03.960 --> 25:09.480]  Not realizing that nobody gets high-speed internet unless they can use peer-to-peer systems.
[25:10.160 --> 25:15.440]  Which, of course, would require hardware manufacturers to prevent unauthorized digital reproduction.
[25:15.440 --> 25:27.260]  And then the second proposal, an as-yet articulated move to embed watermarks on analog signals that emanate from digital content.
[25:27.980 --> 25:33.740]  And forcing hardware manufacturers to prevent the unauthorized recording of these analog signals.
[25:34.280 --> 25:37.080]  This is to close the analog gap, as they say.
[25:37.620 --> 25:40.420]  Valenti, of course, wants to use the power of the U.S.
[25:40.580 --> 25:45.420]  government to restrict the machines that Americans can make, sell, and use.
[25:45.420 --> 25:48.420]  All to protect his little industry.
[25:50.460 --> 25:56.680]  Now, I'm not going to get into what really would have been a very fruitful subject to discuss.
[25:56.940 --> 26:02.640]  In the wake of the notion of viewing the internet as a cynical technology.
[26:02.920 --> 26:06.220]  And raising these questions about governability within that context.
[26:06.620 --> 26:13.340]  Because the events of the last few weeks at ICANN, I think, are probably better examples to make this sort of case.
[26:13.340 --> 26:16.680]  But we have other opportunities to discuss ICANN at this meeting.
[26:17.280 --> 26:21.960]  And so when we discuss ICANN and the ways that it's changing itself.
[26:21.960 --> 26:25.980]  And obviously the ways that it's going to affect the way we all use the internet.
[26:26.200 --> 26:29.560]  And, I think just as importantly, the potential of the U.S.
[26:29.880 --> 26:32.500]  government stepping back in to try to take control.
[26:32.640 --> 26:34.720]  And this is, of course, a very uncomfortable set of events here.
[26:35.120 --> 26:38.960]  Please keep in mind the sort of metaphors that I'm trying to offer here.
[26:38.960 --> 26:42.400]  Because they may lend some clarity to the debates about ICANN.
[26:42.600 --> 26:44.500]  But I didn't want to talk about ICANN for a couple of reasons.
[26:44.640 --> 26:47.100]  One, I'm not an expert and I'd rather talk about copyright.
[26:47.360 --> 26:50.200]  It makes me feel a lot more comfortable in a situation like this.
[26:50.440 --> 26:53.460]  But also because I wrote this before the ICANN changes.
[26:53.620 --> 26:55.240]  So, I didn't want to rewrite it.
[26:55.380 --> 26:55.500]  Alright.
[26:56.780 --> 27:02.780]  Now, please consider Richard Stallman's response to Jack Valenti, which is on that website, Open Democracy.
[27:03.800 --> 27:05.740]  I'm just going to summarize Stallman's arguments.
[27:05.900 --> 27:07.280]  You've heard them in many forms and many ways.
[27:07.480 --> 27:10.020]  But basically, Stallman's invoking global concerns exclusively.
[27:10.680 --> 27:13.520]  He's not asking what's good for the United States.
[27:13.780 --> 27:17.180]  He is not even asking what's good for Europe and the United States.
[27:17.320 --> 27:19.240]  He's asking what's good for the globe.
[27:21.300 --> 27:24.780]  Stallman appeals to values such as freedom and progress.
[27:25.040 --> 27:26.320]  As universal values.
[27:26.500 --> 27:29.180]  Not as things that might help the American economy.
[27:29.360 --> 27:31.340]  But as things that are good for human beings.
[27:31.340 --> 27:39.040]  He expresses his position in such a way that those concerned with the greater good might agree with him.
[27:40.600 --> 27:42.440]  Richard Stallman is a cynic.
[27:42.740 --> 27:48.420]  And as a person who strictly lives according to his beliefs.
[27:48.620 --> 27:51.520]  A man who values freedom over convenience.
[27:51.880 --> 27:53.340]  Freedom over commerce.
[27:53.840 --> 27:54.800]  And freedom over control.
[27:55.360 --> 27:59.620]  Stallman, in many ways, lives and acts and writes like Diogenes.
[27:59.620 --> 28:02.460]  In fact, he dresses a little like Diogenes as well.
[28:04.960 --> 28:07.540]  I'm pretty sure he's not here, but I'm sure he would laugh at that too.
[28:09.400 --> 28:10.020]  All right.
[28:10.260 --> 28:18.220]  More importantly, Richard Stallman lives according to the principles expressed by people such as William James and Francis of Sissi.
[28:18.220 --> 28:23.440]  Both of whom incorporated aspects of the cynical life into their own.
[28:24.060 --> 28:28.120]  Like Diogenes, Stallman is sometimes very disagreeable.
[28:28.480 --> 28:30.000]  He's ill-mannered.
[28:30.000 --> 28:31.040]  And he's blunt.
[28:31.580 --> 28:36.800]  But like Diogenes, Stallman is deeply concerned with the health of a global polis.
[28:36.960 --> 28:39.880]  And the freedom of individuals within that polis.
[28:39.880 --> 28:43.260]  And he revels in exposing hypocrisy wherever he finds it.
[28:43.360 --> 28:48.920]  And these are the sort of rhetorical moves he's making in this dialogue on open democracy.
[28:49.780 --> 28:50.080]  All right.
[28:50.580 --> 29:06.300]  Now, one of the things that strikes me about comparing Richard Stallman's relationship to cynical technology and the ways he's dealing with it, both professionally and as a political figure, and then contrasting it with the rhetorical moves Valenti's making,
[29:06.500 --> 29:10.400]  and Valenti's business models, the businesses for which he's responsible.
[29:10.840 --> 29:19.360]  It occurs to me that the internet, as it is now and has been since its inception, is a much more hospitable place for Richard Stallman than for Jack Valenti.
[29:19.360 --> 29:20.760]  And this is the fundamental problem.
[29:20.960 --> 29:28.520]  That the space works better right now for a Richard Stallman than a Jack Valenti makes Jack Valenti very nervous.
[29:29.020 --> 29:29.200]  All right.
[29:29.680 --> 29:33.420]  But let's look at the changes Jack Valenti has wrought.
[29:33.560 --> 29:41.920]  Let's look at what has happened to copyright in the past decade as digital technologies and networking have radically changed the terms of discussion.
[29:42.720 --> 29:45.080]  Copyright used to embody a balance of interests.
[29:45.080 --> 29:52.460]  Within American copyright, there used to be four democratic safeguards that mitigated the censorious power of copyright.
[29:52.920 --> 29:56.880]  These, I'll just sort of list for you, and we can discuss them at length if you'd like.
[29:57.440 --> 30:01.220]  Fair use, just going away at a remarkable rate.
[30:01.580 --> 30:09.580]  First sale, the notion that you have a different set of rights and controls over the object than over the text itself.
[30:09.820 --> 30:14.820]  Now, of course, that's being collapsed because the object and the text seem to be the same thing in digital format.
[30:14.820 --> 30:25.620]  The idea-expression dichotomy, the notion that you can't protect facts and ideas, and that facts and ideas are uncontrollable under copyright, whereas the specific string of text is controllable.
[30:25.800 --> 30:28.020]  That's under threat in various different forms.
[30:28.160 --> 30:36.860]  And, of course, the most important one, the continuous shrinking of the public domain through the continual extension of the copyright term.
[30:37.800 --> 30:52.880]  And these efforts to control and extend copyright are occurring within this moral panic of a cynical technology, a cynical communicative technology that finally grants the potential for global communication and global democracy.
[30:52.880 --> 30:56.000]  It doesn't grant the realization of global democracy.
[30:56.100 --> 30:57.440]  We're far from that.
[30:57.600 --> 31:02.440]  But the very fact that it gets us anywhere close to it threatens some very important interests.
[31:02.620 --> 31:12.720]  And what they're doing is trying to expand copyright protection along two axes, through global standardization and through technocratic regimes to regulate use and access.
[31:13.560 --> 31:20.420]  They're moving from a system guided by protocols to a system guided by rough and harsh controls.
[31:21.100 --> 31:31.140]  Of course, I'm talking about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the European Union Copyright Directive, both of which were guided by the 1997 World Intellectual Property Organization Treaty.
[31:31.140 --> 31:35.040]  You can get all these details, plenty of other places, including that website or my book.
[31:36.840 --> 31:41.680]  The last things I want to talk about, though, because I've certainly taken up quite a bit of time.
[31:43.400 --> 31:48.820]  At this point, I go on to basically declare the Digital Millennium Copyright Act a complete failure.
[31:49.500 --> 31:59.100]  It hasn't done what it intended to do, because everybody knows it hasn't stopped the digital distribution, unauthorized digital distribution of copyrighted files.
[31:59.100 --> 32:01.440]  There's no shortage of them anywhere.
[32:01.760 --> 32:11.080]  On the other hand, it's done plenty of bad things that it wasn't supposed to do, like censor research, censor scientists, send Russian programmers to jail.
[32:12.760 --> 32:21.840]  I was then going to go on and describe the events surrounding the legal threats to Professor Edward Felton at Princeton.
[32:22.140 --> 32:24.180]  I hope you're familiar with that.
[32:24.180 --> 32:35.500]  Basically, he's a computer scientist who was threatened with a lawsuit from the recording industry because he was able to figure out how to get past one of the watermarking schemes that the RIAA had put out.
[32:35.940 --> 32:42.960]  He wasn't allowed to present a conference paper because he had messed around with anti-circumvention in some abstract way.
[32:43.700 --> 32:44.460]  All right.
[32:45.280 --> 32:54.180]  What this comes down to is that in 1997 and 1998, Jack Valenti and his cohorts in the various content industries abandoned real copyright.
[32:54.380 --> 32:57.880]  They decided it was no longer relevant or optimal for their business.
[32:58.480 --> 33:06.280]  So with minimal public input and reflection, they convinced the U.S. Congress to scrap copyright in favor of technological regulation.
[33:06.560 --> 33:09.920]  They still summon the gumption to defend the ethics of copyright.
[33:10.680 --> 33:12.660]  They want to have it both ways, of course.
[33:12.940 --> 33:18.000]  They want to abandon the democratic safeguards of copyright, such as fair use and a rich public domain.
[33:18.260 --> 33:23.400]  Yet they want the public to romantically embrace the prohibitions embodied in copyright.
[33:23.400 --> 33:26.120]  And I have to say that we are having none of it.
[33:27.060 --> 33:29.740]  Valenti's vision is oligopolistic.
[33:30.240 --> 33:35.580]  He wants a handful of companies and states to dictate the terms of exchange for digital content.
[33:36.400 --> 33:42.560]  Stallman's vision is not quite, but it's sort of moving toward being an anarchistic vision.
[33:42.860 --> 33:49.800]  He wants freedom first, and convention, stability, and predictability come soon thereafter as values.
[33:50.680 --> 33:57.720]  Now, I hope that the future of copyright lies somewhere between the extremes of oligarchy and anarchy.
[33:58.200 --> 34:15.020]  In a perverse way, Valenti's technocratic abandonment of real copyright, which I think is cynical in a George Costanza way, in a selfish way, undermines the social contract that supports the copyright system.
[34:15.020 --> 34:31.180]  And until we come up with a set of reasonable and ethical protocols, an ethical cynicism, cynicism in the Diogenes sense, not the George Costanza sense, we will find ourselves losing all of the benefits of a reasonable copyright system.
[34:31.180 --> 34:38.900]  And this is a canary in the coal mine of the communication networks that people have worked so hard to build for the last 10 years in general.
[34:39.200 --> 34:40.720]  Last 30 years in general, right?
[34:41.640 --> 34:43.180]  What happens to the copyright system?
[34:43.180 --> 34:50.760]  The battles in the copyright system are simply the first salvos in the war over control of the flow of information.
[34:50.760 --> 35:10.120]  If you view copyright as information policy, and you start linking it to other aspects of information policy, like privacy, like security, security in both the private and the public sense, and of course to encryption battles, restrictions over the exportation and distribution of strong encryption,
[35:10.340 --> 35:21.340]  all of these are basically boiling down to a notion that there are some powerful forces that are either private actors or nation states that are very, very nervous.
[35:22.620 --> 35:28.640]  In most cases, I think we can all agree, when we look soberly at it, they're unnecessarily nervous.
[35:28.960 --> 35:31.700]  In some cases, they're justifiably nervous.
[35:31.920 --> 35:49.580]  But we haven't been able to have a rich and sincere and open and honest public debate about this because of the moral panic, because of the stereotypes that fly through people's heads about these technologies and the people who have created them and the people who use them the best.
[35:50.560 --> 35:53.300]  This is a challenge that I think we all have to recognize.
[35:53.500 --> 35:55.220]  It's a challenge I don't have the answer for.
[35:56.080 --> 35:59.740]  But I'm happy to continue talking about it because that's the only thing I know how to do.
[35:59.940 --> 36:05.160]  I can't hit from the left side of the plate or hit a curve ball, and I certainly can't put together a bunch of code.
[36:05.960 --> 36:07.060]  So thank you for your time.
[36:07.060 --> 36:12.960]  I'm glad we had this chance to share these ideas, and I'd love to answer some questions.
[36:13.440 --> 36:23.800]  And I know that in the spirit of Diogenes, who, of course, is against all forms of shame, I would like to participate in some shameless self-promotion.
[36:24.040 --> 36:25.800]  I'll be, of course, selling my book downstairs.
[36:26.400 --> 36:27.360]  Please buy it.
[36:27.420 --> 36:28.000]  It's fun.
[36:28.340 --> 36:28.680]  Thanks.
[36:45.820 --> 36:50.480]  To someone like myself, I actually have a copy for Google, which I didn't pay for.
[36:51.340 --> 36:53.840]  And, in fact, I wanted to review copies.
[36:53.960 --> 36:54.180]  Yeah.
[36:54.500 --> 36:55.260]  I don't have to.
[36:59.840 --> 37:03.960]  You know, you all have copies in your book that you just have to pay for.
[37:04.440 --> 37:07.880]  You know, how does copyright work for you as an author?
[37:09.780 --> 37:10.260]  Sure.
[37:11.120 --> 37:12.380]  Copyright works for me.
[37:12.560 --> 37:13.560]  Can you review the question?
[37:13.640 --> 37:13.900]  Sure.
[37:14.200 --> 37:27.760]  The gentleman said that he, among many others in this country, actually in this town, New York City is the used and review copy capital of the entire world, have... he has a copy of my book that he did not pay for.
[37:28.200 --> 37:37.200]  And he's wondering how I view that part of the dynamic of distribution regulation in terms of, in this case, books.
[37:37.740 --> 37:46.060]  And I would have to say that if it weren't for the free part of the book economy, there would be no paid part of the book economy.
[37:46.060 --> 37:58.620]  If people couldn't review my book for free, if people couldn't check my book out of the library, if people couldn't take chapters of my book and hand them out to their classes, then a lot fewer people would be interested in actually buying the book.
[37:59.860 --> 38:01.060]  Most of... thank you.
[38:05.430 --> 38:09.950]  I've given a lot of talks at a lot of meetings such as this, a lot of professional meetings and academic meetings.
[38:09.950 --> 38:20.310]  The best sales push I ever had came in mid-June at the American Library Association meeting, where I was able to sell 50 books in an hour.
[38:20.930 --> 38:25.510]  Sell 50 books in an hour to a community of people who never have to pay for a book?
[38:26.350 --> 38:27.550]  I mean, think about that.
[38:27.730 --> 38:29.890]  These folks can get the book for free anytime they want.
[38:29.970 --> 38:31.990]  They can get their libraries to buy the book and they can read it.
[38:32.150 --> 38:34.010]  They don't even have to pay fines most of the time.
[38:34.130 --> 38:35.070]  They're librarians, right?
[38:35.330 --> 38:36.290]  They have their ways.
[38:37.410 --> 38:38.570]  But they did it anyway.
[38:38.710 --> 38:40.910]  They bought the book because they wanted to have the book.
[38:41.190 --> 38:42.590]  It wasn't that they wanted to be generous.
[38:42.670 --> 38:43.450]  They weren't tipping me.
[38:43.930 --> 38:51.830]  They just felt that this was part of the economy because whether they articulated it or not, they know that ethically there are times to borrow and times to buy.
[38:51.990 --> 38:54.450]  There are times you can't buy and you have to borrow.
[38:54.590 --> 38:56.150]  There are times you can't borrow and you have to buy.
[38:56.270 --> 39:01.290]  And that's just the way it is because we have a diverse and porous information regulatory system.
[39:01.650 --> 39:02.930]  I'm sort of in the same situation.
[39:03.150 --> 39:05.970]  I work for a major research university with a major research library.
[39:06.150 --> 39:09.050]  There's not a book in the world I can't get for free within two weeks.
[39:09.470 --> 39:12.810]  Not a book in any language, anywhere in the world, in print, out of print, doesn't matter.
[39:12.810 --> 39:15.030]  Same goes for music, same goes for film.
[39:15.730 --> 39:18.170]  Yet, I spend way too much money on books.
[39:18.730 --> 39:19.830]  Why do I do that?
[39:19.910 --> 39:23.470]  That's pretty stupid, if you think about it, in a purely rational sense, right?
[39:25.030 --> 39:25.470]  Yes?
[39:26.250 --> 39:26.250]  If
[39:30.900 --> 39:35.180]  your book was commonly available for nothing...
[39:35.180 --> 39:35.700]  Ah, right.
[39:35.840 --> 39:38.440]  As an author, you're not actually...
[39:38.440 --> 39:39.020]  Sure.
[39:39.400 --> 39:44.460]  Well, so he asked how I would feel if the book were commonly available for nothing.
[39:45.240 --> 39:47.800]  It is in every public library in this country.
[39:48.040 --> 39:50.700]  There are, by the way, more public libraries in this country than there are in McDonald's.
[39:51.780 --> 39:54.660]  It's not actually in every public library, but it's in a lot of them.
[39:56.580 --> 40:01.400]  You can also get manuscript versions of the first two chapters on my website, if you feel like it.
[40:02.640 --> 40:04.420]  And you can, of course, borrow it from a friend.
[40:05.800 --> 40:08.600]  And this is the way it should work, because you know what?
[40:08.760 --> 40:14.140]  I couldn't have written that book if I didn't have access to free books through libraries, free books through friends.
[40:14.140 --> 40:18.780]  And a handy photocopy machine in my departmental office that I could run for hours after dark.
[40:20.940 --> 40:22.940]  It takes a library to write a book.
[40:23.120 --> 40:30.500]  And no creator in the world created without relying on some part of the free side of the distribution.
[40:30.720 --> 40:33.420]  Now, what if it were just out there?
[40:33.500 --> 40:39.300]  What if you walked into this room and found photocopies or even CDs with my manuscript just laid out for you?
[40:39.300 --> 40:42.980]  Somebody went through and took the trouble to give you all CDs of this.
[40:43.100 --> 40:49.760]  Well, I would have to step back and say, I don't think that each of those CDs is a lost sale.
[40:49.940 --> 40:52.240]  I don't think each of those photocopies is a lost sale.
[40:52.460 --> 40:56.040]  Some of them are, but I can't tell.
[40:56.300 --> 40:57.580]  There's no way to measure it.
[40:58.680 --> 41:04.260]  So there's really no way I can justify and equate a free copy with a lost sale.
[41:04.840 --> 41:11.740]  For the same reason that when I was 15 and I couldn't afford to buy The Clash is London Calling, I copied it from my friends.
[41:12.300 --> 41:14.220]  And then when I could afford it, I bought it.
[41:14.600 --> 41:16.540]  Of course, I bought a used copy, but that's another story.
[41:16.540 --> 41:16.880]  All right.
[41:17.740 --> 41:17.840]  Yeah.
[41:20.220 --> 41:22.460]  I imagine most of this audience really appreciate it.
[41:23.140 --> 41:29.900]  One of them, for someone who's asking about the book that he buys, that he goes and scans in it tonight and puts it up as a PDF on the web.
[41:30.300 --> 41:30.540]  Yeah.
[41:31.760 --> 41:32.780]  That's a danger.
[41:34.220 --> 41:35.620]  But I don't think that...
[41:36.060 --> 41:39.080]  He asked, what happens if someone scans in every page of my book as a PDF?
[41:41.120 --> 41:42.960]  Man, that's showing a lot of love for me, isn't it?
[41:43.080 --> 41:43.980]  To spend all that time.
[41:44.120 --> 41:45.740]  Okay, but that's one part of it.
[41:45.740 --> 41:53.960]  Again, I don't think that the availability of the entire text as a PDF necessarily limits the sale of the book.
[41:54.160 --> 41:56.800]  It would probably limit the sale of the book in some corners.
[41:57.120 --> 42:11.780]  You know, if I had an Adobe eBook version of my book up for sale for some ridiculously high price, as they all are, it would directly affect the sale of that because you're talking about basically the same process, right?
[42:11.780 --> 42:15.760]  Screen, screen, one computer versus many computers.
[42:15.980 --> 42:18.660]  The PDF would work better than the Adobe eBook format.
[42:19.180 --> 42:32.900]  But I don't... I purposefully... I actually asked my publisher not to put up an electronic version, not to limit those sales, but basically because I politically disagree with the encryption and protection schemes that the eBook publishers demand.
[42:33.920 --> 42:35.220]  But that's the thing.
[42:35.680 --> 42:38.860]  That sort of replacement, that only replaces that segment of the market.
[42:40.160 --> 42:48.220]  If you were to get a tape of this speech, and this speech were to make it into my next book, that wouldn't be direct competition either.
[42:48.360 --> 42:53.060]  Because a book and a voice file and a book and a PDF are not the same thing.
[42:53.280 --> 43:10.240]  If you were to make copies of my book and then bind them into a book, or even come up with paper copies that are a reasonable, sturdy format that directly competes with the printed book, then I have a problem with that.
[43:11.240 --> 43:14.360]  Now, legally, all of this copying could be a problem.
[43:14.460 --> 43:18.060]  And if I wanted to sue because I have exclusive rights...
[43:18.060 --> 43:19.900]  Actually, NYU Press has exclusive rights.
[43:20.020 --> 43:26.140]  But for the sake of argument, I have exclusive rights, I could track down people if I felt it was worth my time.
[43:26.260 --> 43:38.500]  But you know the transaction costs of tracking down people, threatening to sue them, and ultimately suing them is so high that we don't bother in most of our communicative worlds to track down every potential infringer.
[43:38.500 --> 43:41.920]  Because we agree that not every potential infringer is a real problem.
[43:42.560 --> 43:43.260]  Does that make sense?
[43:43.460 --> 43:43.940]  I hope so.
[43:44.380 --> 43:45.520]  We can talk more about that later.
[43:46.100 --> 43:46.460]  Yes?
[43:46.620 --> 43:48.080]  I'd like to add to that as a book publisher.
[43:48.360 --> 43:53.100]  Our company, No Starch Press, was the first company in the U.S., I think, to come out against the DMCA.
[43:54.240 --> 43:57.240]  We released the book, Linux Cookbook, by Michael Stutz.
[43:57.620 --> 43:59.200]  Michael Stutz has his own license agreement.
[43:59.200 --> 44:00.540]  I don't know if you're familiar with it.
[44:00.760 --> 44:05.720]  It was actually written with, I think, Larry Lessig, called Design Science License Agreement.
[44:05.720 --> 44:09.540]  And so the entire book is out free as a postscript and PDF.
[44:10.220 --> 44:11.420]  It hasn't hurt sales one bit.
[44:11.460 --> 44:12.880]  In fact, it's one of our best-selling titles.
[44:13.080 --> 44:17.720]  And my feeling as a publisher is, frankly, if an author would like to do that, we'll do it, and I don't worry about it.
[44:17.920 --> 44:25.140]  What I look at is a book, for example, like a book we publish that sells 50,000 copies a year.
[44:25.140 --> 44:26.600]  It's called Steal This Computer Book.
[44:26.900 --> 44:27.720]  It's a rip-off, right?
[44:27.820 --> 44:27.980]  I know.
[44:28.180 --> 44:35.900]  But anyway, the fact is we could probably sell 3 million copies if I went door-to-door presenting it to people, because everyone that sees it likes it.
[44:36.260 --> 44:45.980]  So I look at it, and I've thought about putting all of our books out as free PDF, unlocked PDF, by the way, not Adobe eBook PDF files, for people to read and enjoy, because most people will buy the printed book.
[44:45.980 --> 44:51.540]  So I'm a little more extreme in that I'll give it all away, because I think people will still buy the books.
[44:51.820 --> 44:55.520]  Yeah, but the thing is also, this opens up all sorts of interesting things.
[44:55.620 --> 45:15.460]  If we recognize that every free use of copyrighted material does not equal a lost sale, at some point we should try to quantify that formula, because what if it's so extreme that it renders the incentive assumption irrelevant?
[45:15.860 --> 45:18.460]  And I'm not saying the incentive assumption is irrelevant, right?
[45:18.620 --> 45:19.540]  I'm saying what if.
[45:20.200 --> 45:33.300]  Copyright is based on the idea that without copyright, the price of every book would drop to zero, because there would be instant competitors who did not invest in the production and editing of a particular item, and they would compete in the marketplace.
[45:33.300 --> 45:41.780]  So with almost no upfront cost, the competition for copyrighted material, for what would have otherwise been copyrighted, would drive it to zero.
[45:43.300 --> 45:45.420]  But we're not so sure about that anymore.
[45:46.040 --> 45:55.240]  Because you can get almost every song and many, many movies through other media for free, yet we're still buying CDs and we're still going to movies.
[45:55.680 --> 45:58.080]  I think we have to start answering the question.
[45:58.160 --> 45:59.040]  Anyway, I think my time's up.
[45:59.720 --> 46:01.680]  Enjoy the rest of the conference, I know I will.
[46:01.760 --> 46:02.380]  Thank you very much.