I have just given a talk at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Confernece called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, which is something of an anomaly for me in three ways:

1. I wrote out this talk, word for word, in advance of the presentation
2. I am releasing that written text as a free, public domain file, right now, moments before I get off the stage

So here’s the text of that talk, dedicated to the Public Domain, for you to do with what you will.

This isn’t to say that copyright is bad, but that there’s such a thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a bad thing. It’s like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.

From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is its “democratic-ness” — the ease with which it can reproduced.

(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about how the Internet’s copying model is more disruptive than the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ’s sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had *one hundred percent* control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible — next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts)

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has been integrated into the coursework at a Stanford university Information systems course:

Choose one of he following projects, or devise something of your own by Jan 15th, and let us know….

3) Reputation systems: this is the most speculative of the three project suggestions. Identify what kind of reputation systems would be important in the context of online communities and market places of the future, what their vulnerabilities are likely to be, and how these vulnerabilities can be tackled. Alternatively, read the science fiction book by Cory Doctorow, “Down and out in the magic kingdom (available for free or on amazon.com, bn.com etc)�, and architect the reputation system used in that book. Remember to address the issues of whether data needed to compute the reputations is stored centrally or in a distributed fashion. In the absence of any real currency, how would you provide a guarantee to the average Joe and Jane that the “system� does not shortchange them in terms of their reputation? If you decide that the reputation system used in this book is not realizable or has significant internal flaws, then make a cogent argument to this effect.