EFF, "On A Brighter Note..." O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2008 Wednesday, March 5, 2008 Marriott Marina, San Diego, CA Notes by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- http://en.oreilly.com/et2008/public/schedule/detail/1412 Every year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation brings grim tidings to the brave hackers and entrepreneurs of Emerging Tech: government-mandated DRM, copyright expansionism, global Internet censorship, warrantless surveillance. And that’s just the fun stuff. This year, for a change, EFF lawyers and activists host a panel where they put on their rose-tinted spectacles, and describe in detail our best case scenarios: near-future technology that will help you defend your rights, real world policy initiatives that could help save the Net, and techniques and tricks that you can bake into your work now that will help preserve all our freedoms, for now and for good. The EFF’s team of IP, privacy, free speech, open government and global affairs experts will be at hand to spell out what we’re fighting for, and how to get there from here. -- Title born out of desperation -- the desperation in peoples' eyes at EFF talks * At OSCON, 3 years ago, talk on the general threats to OSS, afterwards, attendee said, "That was the most depressing talk I've heard in my life" * There's a U-curve to optimism -- you express all the horrific things, and then slowly try to climb out at the end * EFF doesn't do the U curve party -- and then the RIAA will eat your children's children * Stef Magdalinksi: EFF will never say, "It's all OK, stop sending us money, there's nothing left to spend it on except Champagne" * Limits to what EFF can talk about, because of obligations to clients, because opponents will quote out of context * But EFF is actually an incredibly optimistic group of people when they're not giving public talks * We live as though it's the first days of a better world * But try to hedge against the worst -- John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder: I am still optimistic. I didn't expect that the entire wealth of the industrial period would gracefully allow us to render them irrelevant. They're putting up a spirited fight, but I don't think they'll win. Victory comes to the patient. The content industry used to call me the devil, now the same people come to me for advice on how to make it work for them, they're abandoning their King Canute strategy. I don't think there's proof that downloading has cost the record industry billions, for the same reason that hearing a song on the radio doesn't cost a sale. There are lots of studies, but no one can say for sure. Last year I asked Cary Sherman if he'd co-design a study with EFF to give fair insight into what the losses or gains are from downloading. He said, "I don't think we can do that. I don't believe my constituents would allow that because it might turn out that you're right." Wouldn't they want to know? "No, I don't think it's like that with them." It's a matter of religious belief. They're near retirement, they can have any religion they want. They'll be replaced by the electronic Hisbollah they've created with their Draconian strategies, the wild-eyed 17-year-olds who hack DRM will beat the 55 year olds in posh cars in Bel Air. Can we come up with a regime for regulating the economy of ideas and the way of getting paid for work you do with your mind that doesn't treat thought as a noun and therefore subject to being treated as property. The IP system is a gigantic kludge of patches that have been laid on in different regimes, as it all goes to bits, it needs to be harmonized with a regime that recognizes that this regulates the relationship of the creator and the audience. -- Cindy Cohn, EFF Legal Director: We've won the free speech battle on the Internet. Since the Communications Decency Act, there's been a growing movement to squash those ideas. Wikileaks: a federal judge made a mistake, decided that because he couldn't get at the people who made a bank mad, couldn't get at the server, so he went after the domain name registrar. It's like someone being mad at you and getting your phone turned off. You can't stop the system from making mistakes, but look how fast it was fixed. There was a dogpile on the judge that forced the system to correct himself very quickly. Crypto: We're going to win the crypto wars. Crypto isn't illegal, we won that. Now we're fighting to win the war to make crypto ubiquitous. That's the best way to protect yourself against wiretapping by the NSA and AT&T. We'll win that because people want to fight surveillance. Privacy: You get privacy from crypto. There's a disconnect between interest in privacy and easy to use tools to get it. It's a strange world of business models where the current vogue in business models is "surveil customers and sell the data." This is unlikely to be a long-term business-model. It will be as weird as the business model that gives you 20% off if you donate a pint of blood. It's just creepy -- and in the world we're headed to, we'll all know how creepy it is. Today we keep data in the cloud -- but in the future, we can put it in the safe. The data's there, but it's kept secret for you. Barlow: I don't want to live in a world where the individual is transparent and the institution is opaque Cindy: I want a computer that's smarter and smarter about what I don't want to see and what I don't want to see They say kids don't care about privacy -- but it's not true. Exhibitionism is something you control, it doesn't mean that you don't value privacy and the lack of control over what you disclose. Barlow: There's plenty I don't want my medical insurer to know. Danny: We get more concerned about privacy from every Data Valdez, from AOL's deliberate disclosures. LiveJournal knows that some people want to keep information private among some friends, but not secret. The only way to do that is to give it to a third-party corporation like LJ. This sucks. Maybe the only way to solve this is to give the social networking stuff to the users. Me: What about taxing privacy-invading tech to pay for the data-losses it creates? Barlow: I've got 320GB in my computer -- laptops will get lost. You can try to impose ethics and consciousness on them, but data is going to get spilled. Cindy: We joke that we're an anti-logging society. This is heretical in a room full of techs. Sysadmin and packrattery go together. Data is the pollution of our era -- Schneier. We can't stop pollution -- but we use markets and regulation to stop pollution. There's regulation and market opportunities. Barlow: We should be able to force GMail to delete mail Emily: We have a "first to invent" patent system in the US, this is good, it means that you get the patent if you discover something, not if you go to the patent office first. But it means that you have to spend a lot of money proving who invented what first. One way to solve this might be to have an international wiki of invention. You could have timed crypto that disclosed it later. Tim: In the fight to use the web to prevent congress from immunizing phone companies for illegal spying, we're really kicking ass. The Prez has been talking publicly about this every day and still not succeeding. It's down to oversight and diversity of attention from bloggers and others. Bloggers: Talk more and blog more about DC, silicon valley and the beltway are colliding. We're the grassroots leaders that will shape tech policy. We have power and responsibility.On A Brighter Note...