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cory doctorow
teeming millions of webcasters would be rendered economically
extinct, leaving behind a tiny handful of giant companies that
could be negotiated with around a board room table, rather than
dealt with by blanket legislation.
The razing of the rainforest has a cost. It’s harder to send a le-
gitimate email today than it ever was — thanks to a world of closed
SMTP relays. The cries for a mail-server monoculture grow more
shrill with every passing moment. Just last week, it was a call
for every mail administrator to ban the “vacation” program that
sends out automatic responses informing senders that the recipi-
ent is away from email for a few days, because mailboxes that run
vacation can cause “spam blowback” where accounts send their
vacation notices to the hapless individuals whose email addresses
the spammers have substituted on the email’s Reply-to line.
And yet there is more spam than there ever was. All the costs
we’ve paid for fighting spam have added up to no benefit: the net-
work is still overrun and sometimes even overwhelmed by spam.
We’ve let the network’s neutrality and diversity be compromised,
without receiving the promised benefit of spam-free inboxes.
Likewise, DRM has exacted a punishing toll wherever it has
come into play, costing us innovation, free speech, research,
and the public’s rights in copyright. And likewise, DRM has not
stopped infringement: today, infringement is more widespread
than ever. All those costs borne by society in the name of protect-
ing artists and stopping infringement, and not a penny put into
an artist’s pocket, not a single DRM-restricted file that can’t be
downloaded for free and without encumbrance from a P2P net-
work.
Everywhere we look, we find people who should know better
calling for a parasite-free Internet. Science fiction writers are
supposed to be forward looking, but they’re wasting their time
demanding that Amazon and Google make it harder to piece to-
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