[Free-sklyarov-uk] Reply to my letter to the Secretary of State re Big George's campaign

[=?iso-8859-1?q?Alistair=20Davidson?=]

 --- David Haworth <david.haworth at altavista.net>
wrote:
>
> Clearly the cultural aspects of the internet are
> lost on these
> people ...

The trend since the 80s (if not earlier) has been for
marketing men to see cultures and subcultures as a
means to sell their product (note the recent-ish
explosion of 12-year-olds in Nirvana hoodies). Where
that can't be done, you either sell *to* the culture
(in out case, thinkgeek, NTK and others have done this
with some success, and I welcome them) or ignore it
until it gets in your way (everything from Amazon to
Microsoft to the DMCA).

The old net culture is still there, despite the
complaints of some old-timers. In fact, it's larger
and more successful than ever. There are still
significant sections of usenet and IRC that aren't
troll- and flame- ridden, and there are a number of
excellent blogs and mailing lists.

But from the beginning of The September That Never
Ended to around y2k or so, hackers and geeks and other
net.people bitched and moaned about things, but mostly
we fought among ourselves over what are, *relatively*
speaking, silly things like Free Software vs. Open
Source, GNU GPL vs BSD, GNU/Linux vs Linux and so on
and so forth.

And so we largely kept out of the way while various
corporations, politicians, and special-interest groups
annexed large sections of the net. Occasionally we
fought back- the EFF and FSF both did sterling work,
there was Mitnick and that ridiculous US
anti-pornography law. But laws like the DMCA largely
slipped under the radar at first. So we went largely
unnoticed by the corporations

And then the implications of the DMCA became apparent
with DeCSS and Sklyarov. And there was the RIP over
here. And there was Napster's demise, followed quickly
by CD content-"protection"*.

Suddenly, the community realised that the EFF and FSF
had been right all along- if we didn't organise
politically, we might as well just surrender. Sure, we
can make our fancy interoperable /logiciel libre/, but
the politicians have the power to make those
interoperabilities illegal.

And so here we are. We have a culture. We have nascent
organisations. We have mailing lists on which folks
like me can make long, rambling, semi-offtopic rants
about our history. And I think what we're seeing is
that we're not alone. Programmers aren't the only ones
who care about copyright, so do musicians and
academics and hell, even oxfam care about drug
patents. The difference between us and them though,
what our culture can bring to the debate, is that
*our* culture has existed in a world without a
marginal cost attached to the distribution of
information for far longer than anyone else's, over 20
years.

Heinz Wolf theorises that due to the length of human
life, it takes 20-30 years for a culture to adapt to
large technological changes. I would suggest that the
internet's culture is just about old enough to have
adapted to a work of free interchange of information,
and that unfortunately it'll be another 15-25 years
before society as a whole catches up.

Fortunately internet culture is historically very
proficient at and very active in assimilating new
members, so we may well be able to educate our
politicans and fellow citizens before they do anything
too dumb.

Of course, I suspect that I, being only partially
submerged in a culture of free information, am not yet
capable of comprehending the issue in its entirety.
But I think too much anyways.

Wow, that's a lot longer than it was going to be when
I started out. Takes me several hours to write that
much when they assign me essays at uni... *g*

*implementing the new standard already ;)

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