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JohN Perry Barlow
bottles their lackeys design.
And so it has been for the last thirteen years. The companies
that claim the ability to regulate humanity’s Right to Know have
been tireless in their endeavors to prevent the inevitable. They
won most of the legislative battles in the U.S. and abroad, having
purchased all the government that money could buy. They even
won most of the contests in court. They created digital rights
management software schemes that behaved rather like com-
puter viruses.
Indeed, they did about everything they could short of seriously
examining the actual economics of the situation — it has never
been proven to me that illegal downloads are more like shoplifted
goods than viral marketing — or trying to come up with a busi-
ness model that the market might embrace.
Had it been left to the stewardship of the usual suspects, there
would scarcely be a word or a note online that you didn’t have to
pay to experience. There would be increasingly little free speech
or any consequence, since free speech is not something anyone
can own.
Fortunately there were countervailing forces of all sorts, be-
ginning with the wise folks who designed the Internet in the first
place. Then there was something called the Electronic Frontier
Foundation which I co-founded, along with Mitch Kapor and
John Gilmore, back in 1990. Dedicated to the free exchange of
useful information in cyberspace, it seemed at times that I had
been right in suggesting then that practically every institution of
the Industrial Period would try to crush, or at least own, the Inter-
net. That’s a lot of lawyers to have stacked against your cause.
But we had Cory Doctorow.
Had nature not provided us with a Cory Doctorow when we
needed one, it would have been necessary for us to invent a time
machine and go into the future to fetch another like him. That
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