The IP war: apocalypse or revolution?

In the Foundation series, Asimov predicted a 1,000 years of darkness following the fall of the galactic empire. In the book Noir, K.W Jeter describes a world where IP is the ultimate war. Combine them together and you have likely scenario No. 1… The Internet era enabled communication and information exchange on a global scale. But it also opened the door to copyright infringement on a global scale. Music, books, movies, software, games, speeches, research papers – everything is now fair game. The only protection the movie studios ever had was bandwidth – and it is quickly evaporating due to faster network connectivity via broadband and smarter downloading technologies such as BitTorrent. Intellectual property, copyrights and the like are the key to a democratic, free-market civilization and greed is a prime mover – so if all is ‘free’ and we have a ‘constitutional right’ to ‘share’ – where is the future of innovation and creativity? This paper will describe the c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: DRM
• Authors: Tsvi Gal, Howard M. Singer, Laird Popkin
• Keywords: DRM 2003, Era Enabled Communication, Global Scale, Smarter Downloading Technologies