AKMA has a nice rant about how little the RIAA gets it, in response to my Wired article. This is an issue that matters so much to so many people that occasionally I have hope that we’ll beat the bastards down.

And speaking of beating bastards down, AKMA is declaring victory (ok, I’m overstating Prof. AKMA’s position just a tad) in our battle long ago and far away about whether the Web is spatial. As I recall, my position was two-pronged (i.e., I speak with a forked tongue): The Web is a navigable set of places, and this is a metaphor that we can’t arbitrarily revoke even if we don’t like it. AKMA’s position is — and with any luck I’ll twist it beyond recognition in order to suit my own inimical purposes — that the spatial metaphor keeps us from coming up with new and better ways of understanding and using the Web.

AKMA points at a draft of an article by Dan Hunter, “Cyberspace as Place and the Tragedy of the Digital Anti-Commons.” The draft — every page marked “Do not cite” and with Copy turned off in the PDF interface — argues that we do think of cyberspace as a place, but that this shouldn’t guide how we legislate it; the rules of real space don’t necessarily apply. (I agree 100%. In fact, Chapter 2 of Small Pieces is about this.) Hunter goes on to argue that the law, by treating the Web as a place, is creating an “anti-commons,” by which Hunter means (roughly) a place in which “property rights” are over-asserted. His argument is long (118-pages), detailed and well-documented.

I got a lovely note from Dan Hunter. Sounds like he’s up to some good stuff.

He also explained that the “Do not cite” notice was required by the “dead tree” publishers. I happen to hate the way Acrobat can keep readers from copying selections because it just means we have to type it in ourselves, and, worse, it’s a harbinger of the future where “digital restrictions management” is enforced in software that wouldn’t know a fair use if it bit it in its constricted little ass.

Categories: Uncategorized dw