Innovation Under Austerity: Discussion

In some respects, the Q&A section of the video identifies useful points of further discussion. But because the speech was given to what is obviously a "home town crowd," some important objections are not raised, as Mike Nelson suggests in his comments. One useful place to begin is with those objections, which I leave others to state below.

The analysis I offered in this talk is undeniably only a first draft. Many areas I touch upon remain to be filled in. There are basic questions about which I have tried an approach in the talk, where other approaches are also evident. The nature of the immediate situation is apparent, and so (at least to me) is the nature of the Free World's experience, which seems relevant. How to explain the bearing of the latter on the former, however, is not quite so evident, despite my effort here. I look forward to your suggestions.

-- EbenMoglen - 20 Oct 2012

If ~12:00 in speaks to you, please join my and Elvira's (very nascent) conversation over at GoogleNoAppleYes.

-- MatthewCollins - 25 Oct 2012

In your speech (~10:25-11:10) you discuss how the individuals involved in the creation of the internet made it easy to read (through such innovations as the browser and apache) but not easy to write. Was this a conscious and voluntary decision? If so, what was the rationale behind it?

You then mention that Zuckerberg made the internet easy to write and ultimately created social harm. But was making the internet easy to write a cause of this social harm, or just a means to an unfortunate end? Wouldn't it be possible that an easily writable internet could create substantial social good, much like the way in which accessible free software that anyone could “write” or use could have profound impacts around the world? I believe you touch on this between 12:00 & 13:00, but could you please expand on this further?

-- ConradJohnson - 31 Oct 2012

You seem to acknowledge in this speech that most of mankind’s knowledge is not protected by copyright (or at least not protected anymore). In class, however, you pointed out several times that copyright law remains an important barrier to spreading knowledge. In my opinion, guaranteeing free (and “neutral”) access to the net to everyone remains still a far more important issue in 2012 to fight ignorance than abolishing copyright law. I am not arguing that copyright does not represent a problem in this regard, but the unlimited and uncensored access to the net by everyone appears more important to me today.

My other question (linked to the above) concerns your suggestion that the European Commission should scan all books (in the public domain) in European libraries and enable anybody to access them via the net. I fully agree with your suggestion that Google offering the same service in return for the right to spy on all readers is a bad bargain and that there should be competition from the “free world” on the same service. However (as a citizen of an EU member country, perhaps), I do not see any necessity for such initiative to be conducted by a state body or financed by taxpayer money (even if the amount does not seem to be as high as one could expect). Don’t you think that the same result could be achieved even more efficiently by a decentralized initiative built by readers themselves (a kind of Wikipedia of books where anyone can submit a scanned and OCR-ed version of any work in the public domain)?

-- PeterLing - 01 Nov 2012