| USENIX Begins With a Chilly Warning |
by Malcolm Dean (June 13, 2002)
The chilly morning fog shrouding Monterey's picturesque harbor provided a suitable backdrop for USENIX's Annual Technical Conference, as the motherlode of UNIX geekdom opened its annual meeting with a warning from Stanford's Prof. Lawrence Lessig on the future of the Internet.
Over 1100 attendees gathered for a week of high-powered tutorials and a modest vendor exhibition, taking occasional email breaks in a terminal room full of gleaming Apple G4s sporting OS X. James Gosling, credited with design of the original Java compiler and virtual machine, along with an obscure little text editor called Emacs, received a Lifetime Achievement award at the opening ceremony. The Apache Foundation received a similar nod and cash prize from the Software Tools Users Group for its contributions to Open Source software.
Lawrence Lessig, Professor at Stanford's Law School and Founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, opened USENIX with a chilly warning entitled, "The Internet's Coming Silent Spring." There is a politics in code, says Lessig, and our blindness to this politics will mean the loss of values protected by Internet code.
Reminding his rapt audience that the history of patents and copyrights has been a march away from enlightened freedom, he told stories which illustrate the problems today's legislators are creating for tomorrow's innovators. In the 1930's, RCA fought against FM radio because it already had a substantial investment in AM. Recent judgments against hackers of Sony's Aibo robotic pet have made it illegal to teach the dog to dance jazz.
Lessig says the accelerating rate and amounts of extensions to copyright now threaten to throttle the fundamental nature of the Internet itself. "Architectures allow," said Lessig, "They build freedom. Cultures forbid." Lawyers are framing the dialog, says Lessig, and this is leading to a corruption of the nature of the Internet.
Napster was nothing new, Lessig told the audience. Early piano rolls essentially "napsterized" sheet music. The cable industry was a "napsterization" of broadcast television. And of course, the VCR "napsterized" film.
Large media corporations such as Disney, and Hollywood's Motion Picture Association of America have framed the situation as theft, but Lessig wryly pointed to one of his heroes, Walt Disney, who he says copied and extended a Buster Keaton performance by creating the character we know today as Mickey Mouse.
"There has never been such a time, when a small number of entities control culture," warned Lessig. "We must not allow the debate to be reframed to their sole benefit. Creativity always builds on the past. Creativity comes from a balance of the public and the private, the controlled versus the commons."
Lessig is going to the U.S. Supreme Court this Fall to challenge laws extending copyright. To "the bovine masses who can't change the preferences on their browsers," he said the issue may not appear important. But he challenged his audience by a show of hands, asking how many had contributed as much to the Electronic Freedom Foundation as they had paid their local broadband provider.
Pointing to his audience, and thereby the technical community, Lessig said, "'You' must change this. You must require the freedom to tinker, to 'Walt Disnify' previous creations. The increasing losses faced in court over the past few years, mean that your silence is destroying the environment for future development." To a standing ovation, he concluded, "You cannot allow the innovation to stop."
Despite the tangible concern displayed by USENIX attendees, it is clear from interviews that this is a community which has widely conceded to the presence of Microsoft technology, not only on the desktop but in areas such as Directory Services. If the question of freedom and innovation is not high on their list, neither is challenging the Redmond Monopoly.
"I don't think the future depends on the desktop," said Lessig. "It's more important how the basic architecture is preserved in the Internet. It's not really OS-specific. I'm not pessimistic about the continuing viability of Free and Open Source software. Maybe we won't see an end to the Microsoft domination of the desktop. I think the point is not that they have been dominating the desktop, but that they have been leveraging this domination over the next generation of technology."
In part, Lessig was addressing the wrong audience. Like many computer communities, most USENIX attendees are implementors, not strategists. It is the troubling disconnect between those most literate in technology and those who pay their wages and write their laws that may lead to Lessig's Silent Spring.
Copyright © 2002 by Malcolm Dean. Reproduced by DesktopLinux.com with permission.
About the author: Contributing Editor Malcolm Dean is a writer and IT strategist based in Los Angeles.
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