Give a Tweet... About Digi-space!

Cory Doctorow's Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing delves into the issues we currently face in keeping the web and PC "free and open." In light of the copyright battles currently in place, and in response to proposed bills like Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, HR. 3261), Doctorow's article is puissantly relevant -- restrictive, uninformed, and/or misguided legislation poses a threat to the future of general purpose computing, as well as online speech. Under SOPA, corporations and individuals would posses unprecedented power to squelch online speech, government would have even greater power to censor and blacklist websites, and yet, still likely fail to stop online piracy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has an educative one-pager on the bill: "What's Wrong with SOPA?" A closer overview of the SOPA and PIPA bills is provided by Jason Harvey on Reddit in "A technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP." In this analysis, he touches upon why both SOPA and PROTECT IP will likely not stop the piracy they are targeting but will, instead, "introduce regulation and enforce censorship on what should be a free and open internet." In turn, generativity in technology, a principle that Jonathan Zittrain discusses in length and generally favors in his The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, will suffer due to these restrictive regulations. Generativity, the concept that highlights the ability of some technology to allow for innovation in ways the designer never initially predicted, is thought to be integral to the wild success of the general-purpose PC and the Internet. Without the open nature of the Internet, technological innovation may slow down due to regulations and legislation that raise barriers for entry into creating something "new," encumbering future business.

Although the Internet is decentralized and distributed, speech and communication via the Internet requires a series of intermediaries, each one susceptible to some form of muzzling from external pressures. These suppressions may threaten freedom of speech, as a whole. EFF has an informative page depicting the notion that "Free Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Link." In Lockdown, Doctorow discusses how the rule of thumb regulators generally abide by when  passing laws, the idea that "special-purpose technologies are complex, and you can remove features from them without doing fundamental, disfiguring violence to their underlying utility," does not apply for the Internet. He writes,

"There are, suddenly, numbers that we aren't allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we're not allowed to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the Internet is the mere accusation of copyright infringement. It fails to attain the goal of the regulation, because it doesn't stop people from violating copyright, but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright enforcement -- it satisfies the security syllogism: "something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done." As a result, any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn't go far enough, rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset." (Doctorow, Lockdown)

He goes on to say that regulators who fail to realize their usual rule of thumb for passing bills does not apply easily for the Internet are not necessarily evil or idiots, but rather, "part of that vast majority of the world, for whom ideas like Turing completeness and end-to-end are meaningless." That's fodder for thought, and as we explore further, we'll likely find that the threat to general-purpose computing lies deeper than legislation. Our increasing familiarity and reliance on tethered appliances like smartphones, tablets, and game consoles, for one, changes the previous landscape of general-purpose PCs as the norm. Perhaps a large chunk of users are okay with the trade-off of some freedom and functionality of their restricted devices for increased "security" (as dictated by the provider of the service or product) or "better functionality" in the intended use of the item? And as such, another problem comes to light -- perhaps users are indifferent to general-purpose computing. As Doctorow stated, perhaps to them, "end-to-end" and other abstract concepts simply fail to elicit action from individuals that translate to laws that are in the best interest of generativity and a free and open technological realm.

James Doyle delves into the aforementioned sweeping lack of knowledge by the public on the significance of the public domain in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Boyle argues that individuals should have an understanding of intellectual property law because intellectual property rights are integral to the foundation of our information society, and as such, our current policies and laws are often a hindrance to freedom of speech, innovation, and cultural access. In Chapter 4: "The Internet Threat," Doyle delves into more specifics of digital copyright. He indicates that the "Internet threat" is:

"... beguilingly simple. The Internet makes copying cheaper and [thus, Big Media] must meet the greater danger of illicit copying with more expansive rights, harsher penalties, and expanded protections. ... [W]ithout an increase in private property rights, cheaper copying will eat the heart out of our creative and cultural industries." (Doctorow, The Public Domain)

But at the same time, he indicates that this line of thinking fails both in painting a complete picture of the situation and in championing cultural and individual expression. Although new technology enables greater potential for cutting into copyright holders' rights, it also allows for the potential to skew the benefit to the copyright holders. If particular corporations or industries, for instance, feel threatened by new technologies, they may want to control the technology that they deem a menace. But since the technology may also be used for legal and legitimate causes that may, in keeping with the history of generativity, it may produce wholly innovational and novel technologies. Thus, there's a fine line between protecting copyright holders and stagnating an emerging and currently, ever-expanding realm of digi-space.