from the don't-miss-this-one dept.
Register ASAP to save $100 on the Foresight Gathering, Sept 8-10. Here's a sample: ever-controversial Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder and cypherpunk John Gilmore will speak: "I think I want to talk about how the prospect of nanotech is driving my work on intellectual property reform…If our economy is not to crash immediately after assemblers arrive (resulting in many hungry people rioting or warring), society needs to learn how to structure an economy to support the expensive part while letting the cheap part provide its benefits of broad distribution of the results…If even a third or a half of the economy is running on open source principles before assemblers start assembling more assemblers, we can probably avoid war and worldwide civil unrest." Read More for John's full message. "I think I want to talk about how the prospect of nanotech is driving my work on intellectual property reform:
Computers and pervasive communications have made it very cheap to copy information, though still expensive to create it. Business models which align with these costs provide for low or zero-cost copying and distribution "in the field", while recouping the costs of creation in other ways (besides the traditional one of artificially creating a scarcity of copies by legal restrictions). Still, most of the computer/internet industry doesn't understand these new business models, though open source software's success is teaching them. The entertainment middleman industry is particularly resistant, though the citizenry is teaching them via Napster, etc, what it wants.
Nanotech threatens to apply the same economics to physical goods — very cheap copying after relatively expensive creation. If our economy is not to crash immediately after assemblers arrive (resulting in many hungry people rioting or warring), society needs to learn how to structure an economy to support the expensive part while letting the cheap part provide its benefits of broad distribution. of the results.
Intellectual property law, and expected business practice, is being driven by the entertainment middleman industry in exactly the wrong direction: Artificially restricting computers and citizens so that they will not make the copies that they are very good at making. Following this path will lead the economy to a massive dislocation (much bigger than the record companies' dismay about Napster and MP3 — record companies' sales today are greater than ever). Almost nobody understands this yet.
If even a third or a half of the economy is running on open source principles before assemblers start assembling more assemblers, we can probably avoid war and worldwide civil unrest."
