iPlot

The Semantic Web Will Never Happen and The Internet Will Eat Itself

From the Experientia blog you can now download some of the great presentations held at the “The User Is The Content” debate that took place in Antwerp. The event discussed the implications of user-generated content on creativity, copyright, publishing, and the Internet in general.

Nine experts shared their future scenarios – from "Source-Generated Content to Blobjects" to “Centri-fugal Bumble Puppy." One of the most interesting contributions came from John Buckman, CEO and founder of Magnatune (company slogan: ”We are not evil”), Book Mooch & Creative Commons, who presented a “countdown to singularity” and claimed that “the semantic web will never happen” while arguing that the centrifugal power of the web would give rise to an increasing number of micro formats and P2P services (i.e. aftermarkets, consumer pooling, Group Buying) that will “traumatize Big Brick & Mortar and Big Web” business models. Buckman anticipated the emergence of the “free & libre” sphere: “With digital media, B2B will be all that’s left” (I actually think he gets the term wrong here – C2C will be all that’s left.)

One step further goes Cloe Willarts’s mesmerizing “The Internet Will Eat Itself” saga that calmly depicts the digital apocalypse in nine chapters:

1. Video killed the internet star
2. New protocols but no standards
3. Portable devices
4. Immersive connectivity
5. Presence and identity
6. Mood advertising
7. Urban Nomads
8. Syncing
9. The Analogs

Rip, Mix, Burn, and Sew – Copyrights in the Digital Age

The capacity of an intellectual mind can be judged by its ability to simplify complex matters. If this rings true, Professor Edward W. Felten's presentation about copyright in the digital age, held at Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati last week, gave testament to a legal super-brain.

Delivered with dry wit, Felton revisited the narrative of the copyright and its struggle to catch up with technological innovation – spanning the range from the Betamax case to Napster to the enforcement of digital rights management (DRM) in today’s online music distribution. Felton is wary of any attempts to regulate market mechanisms and pinpointed why the legal attempts to fight consumer-driven digital media distribution are fundamentally flawed. His view can be distilled to two basic points:

1. Technology gave us the universal media machine (a.k.a. the computer) that allows us to access digital content anywhere, anytime, and in any possible format.
2. Legislation to reverse this cultural and economic reality is an impossible mission.

Yet the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalizes the creation, sharing, or selling of any technology that can be used to defeat copy protection technology. The disconnect is pretty obvious: Individuals were arrested (and Felton himself was threatened with legal action if he released academic research that included a description of how to hack music-protection technology) for linking to source code for software (called deCSS) that breaks the CSS encryption of DVDs, but you just have to google for “deCSS” to see the market forces. While defending the moral and economic foundations of the copyright, Felton chastised some of the anti-piracy crusades as astoundingly naïve: According to the proposed legislation known as “Fritz Chip” even a sewing machine would have counted as a media device.

Interestingly though and somehow counter to his stand on music copyrights, Felten expressed concern about online voting. Based on a "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine," he argues that voting machines are essentially media devices capturing digital content and allowing malicious third parties to rip, mix, and burn votes as they might with music and video. Felton’s paper presents the first fully independent security study of a voting machine, including its hardware and software, but he didn’t want to say how he obtained the machine (“it was legal but adventurous – I will tell you the full story another day”). Felton’s perspective on voting machines views user-generated content in a whole new context: the vote mash-up, if you will. Other forms of exploiting unlikely sources of user-generated content come to mind: For example, the footage recorded by surveillance cameras in big cities.

Edward Felten: ”Napster discovered the power of file-sharing in distributing music. This was a relatively easy task. They realized that reaping the commercial benefits for the rights owners was far more complicated – so they skipped that part.”