[A2k] Extract from official IGF transcript on discussions on IP in the
context of "Openness"
Thiru Balasubramaniam
thiru@cptech.org
Wed Nov 1 04:26:03 2006
Here below are extracts from the Athens IGF discussions on the theme of
"Openness" (held on October 31) which touched upon issues related to
access to knowledge. Participants on the panel included:
Session Chairman: Theodoros Roussopoulos, Minister of State of Greece
Moderator: Nik Gowing, Main Presenter, BBC World
* Carlos Afonso, Technical Director of RIT (services and
capacity-building network of ICTs)
* Anriette Esterhuysen, Executive Director, APC
* Hanne Sophie Greve, former judge at the European Court of Human Rights
* Joichi Ito, Creative Commons
* Jamie Love, Director, CPTech
* Senator Paschal Mooney, Government Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs
(Ireland), broadcaster/ journalist
* Andrew Puddephatt, OBE, various human rights organizations
* Art Reilly, Senior Director, Strategic Technology Policy, Cisco Systems
* Richard Sambrook, Director BBC Global News
* Fred Tipson, Senior Policy Counsel , Microsoft,
* Catherine Trautmann, Member of the European Parliament
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http://www.intgovforum.org/IGF-Panel2-311006am.txt
<SNIP>
>> NIK GOWING: Jamie, quickly, because I want to move on to IP and copyright.
>>JAMIE LOVE: I think there is sort of a deep hypocrisy of surprise when these
instruments of surveillance are used as government surveillance or even
corporate surveillance. There is this massive development technology that's
designed to track information, put fingerprints in information, know who does
what, on a scale that we have never had in the history of mankind. And so then
people are kind of shocked when people sell those things as products and people
actually use them in ways that are just completely predictable. I have been in
discussions with the State Department about digital rights management systems
where we said don't you think this is going to be used in a certain way? And
we have mentioned China, but other countries as well. And how can you, like,
sort of not -- how can you sort of not sort of think through the consequences
of developing these kind of monitoring technologies outside your border? And
the same thing is in the efforts to try to restrict access to encrypted,
secured communications. There is sort of an opposite thing to protect
technologies that actually promote privacy and anonymity and stuff. A lot of
it is related to intellectual property rights. In order to protect
intellectual property rights we are creating a world that creates opportunity
for political (inaudible) because it's hard to disconnect the two technologies
in a way. And I think that's part of the direction that we are heading. But
it's not really -- it's not as if countries in Europe and the United States
don't have a hell of a lot to do with the way things are going because they
push things in a certain direction.
>> NIK GOWING: Right. I am going to pause this discussion of at this point,
otherwise we are not going to cover any of the other issues. I think what we
have done is we have mapped out the differences. Hopefully we have exposed
some new lines, and we're building on that shopping list from Anriette about
how we move forward. Our job here is to at least show the way things are
moving and help define on openness. We're not going to agree here. That --
that can't be achieved in this. I want to move on to copyright, intellectual
copyrights. Particularly copyright in IPR. Who would like to intervene on this
one? Joichi, how about you, on the challenges of IPR, intellectual property
rights.
>>JOICHI ITO: I think Jamie started out and I tend to agree with most of what
he said but I think it's very important to understand the repercussions that
laws and technologies that we are creating to protect assets have on other
countries. And so I'm not going to go into a long discussion here but in the
United States, we have -- the United States has a strong lobby both in
software, for software patents, and also Hollywood in terms of content and
there are many, many laws and technologies being put in place that will inhibit
the ability for people to freely share content. And it starts leaning into a
kind of world where, for instance, if -- for instance, right now, because of
the U.S. law, if one person -- if two copyrights -- if a copyright holder says
to another person I would be happy for you to take this DVD and turn it into a
classroom project, it's illegal to take that information off of a DVD because
you are circumventing copyright technology. And that's one of the basic things
inside of the DMCA for instance. So it's very important that, back to Jamie's
point, a lot of the laws that we think of as rational because of the context of
the United States have severe repercussions when they are implemented in other
places. And also the identification relates to the copyright as well. It's
very difficult in some of these developing countries and emerging democracies
to have free speech without some level of anonymity and it is very difficult to
implement digital rights management and copyright without anonymity. This is a
difficult discussion but I think the key point is to think about the rest of
the world when thinking about copyright. And that it encompasses everything.
It's open source software, it's scientific journals and their availability in
other developing nations, because journals currently control the copyrights and
it's very expensive and that hinders science. Just about every aspect of free
flow of information is now encumbered by laws, patents, and technology.
>> NIK GOWING: Can you see laws catching up with the speed at which things are
changing?
>>JOICHI ITO: The biggest problem I would like to point out is originally
copyright law primarily was concerned with the business of publishing. And it
was about copying. So whether you read a book, how -- if you slept on a book,
if you gave a book to somebody else, this was not under copyright. The problem
that we have with the Internet is that every time you view something, you are
copying it. And so when Google scans a book in order to make an index, that's
a copyright violation. When you download something to view in your browser,
that's a copyright violation. Suddenly, the sphere of influence of copyright is
everywhere. And so now, for instance, I am not saying this is good or bad but
Amazon is thinking about selling books by the page. And eBooks are saying
books per view. And publishers in the United States are now saying secondhand
bookstores don't pay us royalties and we have more control now on the Internet
over content. Maybe we should try to get the physical world to act like the
Internet. And we see this coming around to more and more control. In many
businesses, unless somebody puts it in check, it will go to excess, and I think
we are seeing that. And so the answer is the laws right now, I don't see it in
any way helping, and in fact, getting worse and worse.
>> NIK GOWING: Do you see openness being constrained by the threat of action
at some point?
>>JOICHI ITO: It's already severely constrained, and it's just getting worse.
The solutions we have, I think there are two fundamental solution directions.
One is to re-look at copyright law in the context of multimedia and then
creative commons, which is my non-profit, we are trying to work within the
constraints of copyright law to at least allow artists to give choice. And we
are engaging with people like rights collection agencies. But it's still very
difficult because the economic interests of the past push against the economic
interests of sharing.
>>NIK GOWING: Anriette.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: I would add a third one to that, and that is to
requesting or challenging the public sector to rethink what is the commons,
what is the public domain in the world of the Internet. Most responsible
governments used to have public libraries where citizens could read the
newspaper, access box and journals. And these are absent in many developing
countries. But the Internet presents an opportunity where, for example, all
scientific research that's publicly funded can be made freely available. So I
think it's about what you said, about rethinking copyright, looking for
alternatives like creative commons, which gives the owners of content an
opportunity to decide how they share it. But I think it's more than that. I
think we need to make very sure that in terms of access to knowledge and access
to information, the Internet is conceived of and regulated as a space that can
provide access to a public -- to a commons. Information commons.
>> NIK GOWING: I've got two interventions here from Francois Pelligrini.
Could you take the microphone. And also Divina Frau-Meigs. Can I go to
Richard Sambrook of the BBC on the issue of who is pinching our content or who
is trying to pinch our content given the enormous capacity we have now to
project globally. How much is an enormous organization like the BBC concerned
about this and how can we at least make sure that the copyright of everything
that is paid for and produced on the net then at least has a value which is
respected right around the world?
>>RICHARD SAMBROOK: Well, two things, I think. First the public service
broadcaster probably has a slightly different take on this to a commercial
organization because public service broadcasters are primarily interested in
reach rather than generating revenue necessarily. Therefore, if people take use
of our content, as long as we get some credit for it in some way, I think
that's fine. And increasingly with -- YouTube is a classic example, but in
many other ways, in terms of building participation around content, we are
actually seeking to encourage people to take our content and use it and do
things with it. And we have a creative archive where people can take our video
and repurpose it as they wish. Because again as a public service broadcaster,
the public have already paid for that content and invested in it so I think our
position is slightly different from the commercial interests of some other
organizations.
>> NIK GOWING: Yet the BBC has to protect its editorial integrity and you
don't want people fiddling around with the stuff. How can you protect it?
>>RICHARD SAMBROOK: There are limits to it, clearly. But I think as long as
there is a link back to the original content on our site, or there is --
obviously, we would try to take action against anybody who we think was using
it improperly or inappropriately, if they were using it in an obscene way or in
some way that was seeking to be harmful or damaging to other groups and so on,
then we might want to take action against it. But as a broad principle, people
should have some access to our content and be able to repurpose it. I think
there's a lot positive about that.
>>NIK GOWING: Do you think the BBC has achieved maximum openness for its
content yet?
>>RICHARD SAMBROOK: No. Nothing like it. Francois.
>> FRANCOIS PELLEGRINI: Thank you. I'd like to go back to a subject which I
presented earlier. The way we use our common products in order to allow
everyone on the Internet to create content themselves. Because there are
copyright problems. We also have the digital content act which is in use. And I
would also like to see what the behavior of the various patterns of this in the
world is. There's a European pattern, Germany's, the American. Access to the
information is becoming more expensive, and the equipment to avoid pinching
content is also every day more available. So access to information, to raw
information, is becoming more difficult. Is it necessary in that case for
governments to act to make access easier? How can we allow our citizens and the
citizens of poor countries to have access to information? 'Cause, otherwise,
we will live in an information -- in a feudalistic information society, where
only the very rich will have access.
>>NIK GOWING: Over there, please, yes.
>> I'd like to also just endorse what's been said by the previous speaker. And
certainly we have to think of what's happening in terms of online production on
the Internet, but also what happened with the actual ownership aspect in terms
of intellectual property. I think that what we see at the moment is that you
have a complete closing in vis-a-vis usage, especially for those in education.
And we don't even have a fair use equivalent here in Europe. And people are
criminalized in the class, parents in the house, and the children as well. And
most of the users of Internet and those who actually need to broaden their
knowledge therefor find themselves where they are running a risk by accessing
Internet. So let's look at free access and contents and how we can use
everything that is available and which Internet actually makes available to the
users. At the university level, we'd like to also look into the resources for
free access at all universities for noncommercial purposes thereby and to be
able to have access to the general public in the public domain. There is an
interoperability problem there. We have to try and identify what the sources
are. But we have to also make these visible and usable. I think this is
important for the reader, important for dissemination of information in a
shared society.
>>NIK GOWING: Thank you. The former French minister of culture and now in the
European parliament. How can you see this contradiction being resolved in the
immediate future?
>> CATHERINE TRAUTMANN: I think that this contradiction is quite difficult to
resolve, because we do find ourselves in a situation of flux in terms of law.
We have, of course, the production of intellectual artistic goods which are on
the Internet. So we have to, I think, actually change our very concept of what
our rights are. I think that it's important to bear in mind what the public
domain is on the Internet and you find that user's rights have changed. Often,
we mix and match and don't actually distinguish what's happening here.
Obviously, we can have a public domain recognized as such. But we may have,
perhaps, a paying service. When we talk about a free service, gratis, it may
not be a matter of the actual source; it may be a matter of the service that is
provided that is actually furnishing that. So we have to see whether access to
the service might be financed by publicity. It may be free overall, or you may
have a sort of pay-as-you-go principle. This might work for certain -- access
to certain types of information where you would actually pay for the service.
What about the author? Does the author renounce his rights? Is it a recognized
freedom here? But the other question is basically to know whether what we are
doing in terms of pure protection and what we are doing in terms of
remuneration of the authors. And the authors' rights would seem to be a binding
obligation, incumbent on us. Are we going to stem any creative or artistic
production here. That's the first point. The second point is that we must not
actually keep back or hold back information and access to it. So there are two
main questions being posed there. I think the European regulation on this is
only going halfway in terms of resolving this problem. What about the
patentability of software? That's important. We're talking about total openness
there. But I don't think we're going to achieve that. We are looking for a
route which will enable us to recognize in specific cases the possibility of
protecting patents or protecting the intellectual property, but also developing
at the same time open sources, open routes, financed by public resources with
public funds. And this would mean sharing knowledge. And as has been said here
already, where universities and other educational establishments would have
access, I think that we ought to perhaps change the law. Protections should
change here. We ought to agree as to what we mean when we say "pirating."
Pirating, in a sense, does make us face the issue of intellectual property
rights. I think that we need to look at the directive that was adopted and is
in the state of play today. But people aren't fully satisfied with this. And we
thought that perhaps we just should stop and think about this and see how
Internet is developed and how the various services on the Internet will develop
and see how consumers and users are actually serviced.
>>NIK GOWING: We're trying to get a balance between openness and rights now
and moving forward. But protecting that openness. I remind any of you who have
come in late that you can join this conversation hopefully by sending me a
piece of paper so at least I can scale stuff around and order it around to make
sure we're still focusing on this issue. Andrew, you wanted a word.
>>PASCHAL MOONEY: I also have been indicating.
>>NIK GOWING: Yes, I know, I know. Andrew.
>>ANDREW PUDDEPHATT: One of the things that always interests me is that
copyright's a relatively new invention in human history. I mean, Shakespeare
never had the copyright over his plays. The copyright belongs to the
publishers. And no one ever believes that Shakespear's creativity was impaired
by the lack of owning copyright to his own product. But leaving that aside, we
are now moving into a different era where, say, in the past, restricted
information could be much more open and available to people. There have always
been copyright libraries in the United Kingdom F you're a student at Oxford or
Cambridge, you have certain privileges at the British library, you can go in
and read any book published within the United Kingdom. There's no reason why
countries couldn't take responsibilities for that so their population could use
it. You have access to the information and sources that have always been
available to a certain number of scholars and a certain privileged group. We
need to look at the positive benefits of a the new technology. The danger is we
will see the growth of the Internet as an excuse to privatize even more
information. I know professors at the London School of Economics, where I'm
based, who no longer give out their reading lists to courses to general
enquirers, because they take the view that if a student pays to come on their
course, the student should have sole access to the reading list, let alone
their lectures and the content. And that seems to me to be a terrible
derogation of responsibility of a university to promote awareness and promote
knowledge and promote the resources that ought to belong to the commons. Simon
Qobo, are you out there, still? I'll come to you in a moment on this issue.
Paschal, you wanted a word.
>>PASCHAL MOONEY: Only brief, because the point was made earlier by the two
speakers and also one of the panelists.
>>NIK GOWING: Do you need to repeat it?
>>PASCHAL MOONEY: No. But I think there is definitely a need for a wider
debate on making more available on the Internet, free, free of any copyright
restrictions, information and material which is already in the public domain.
And I would have liked Richard to have perhaps expanded a bit more on what I
understand the BBC has been leading on this in the public service area, which
is about making available freely archive material on the Internet, because it
is already in the public domain.
>>NIK GOWING: Well, we can get an answer now.
>>PASCHAL MOONEY: I'm saying that this is a peculiarly European concept of
public service broadcasting. There is a vast amount of material that is already
within the archives of very many broadcasting organizations. And I'm curious to
know whether, in fact, if there is a wider debate on this issue, because
certainly I know the BBC has started it. It was only to make the point in
general that there is a lot of material in the public domain that governments,
I believe, have a responsibility to ensure is put out into the Internet free of
any copyright restrictions. Because, primarily, the concept of public service
libraries, which, again, is unique to Britain and Ireland, that has been there,
as you know, Nik, since about the 1950s, was essentially to disseminate
information to those who were not in a position to access it because they
didn't have the money or resources. And there is nothing changed today.
>>NIK GOWING: Can you clarify? The issue -- is it capacity for the BBC or is
it the rights issue?
>>RICHARD SAMBROOK: Well, there are clearly some quite complicated rights
issues around it. We make available the material to which the BBC owns all of
the rights. Clearly, a lot of our programming and content has other material
embedded in it to which we don't have the rights. So we need to sort that out.
But the principle is that because we are publicly funded, the public is
effectively already invested in that material, and that the Internet allows us
to make it more widely available, and, indeed, allows us, under certain terms,
like in the Creative Commons license, not repurposed for commercial gain and so
on, for people to reuse that material if they choose to do so. And the
justification for that, really, is partly the education, if you like, we think
there's an educational benefit to it. We think there's a creativity and
innovative benefit to it, that it helps to spark innovation. And, as I said,
the principle is that we should make this material, which has already been paid
for by the public, more widely available. But there are rights issues around
it.
>>NIK GOWING: Simon from South Africa.
>> SIMON QOBO: Thank you very much, Mr. moderator. In fact, since (inaudible)
Internet governance for development, I would like to know how we find a right
balance between intellectual property rights in terms of copyrights, and -- and
technological advancements subsequent to development. We are in an environment
where we're not getting a (inaudible) of copyright infringement. It's just more
than a mouse, so just click and you can get everything. But the how do we find
the balance. Most of the information is in the form of digital rights
management systems. And then we have witnessed that all the, if not most of the
exceptions and limitations (inaudible) reporting, teaching, scholarship,
research, which are (inaudible) innovation, have been, if not completely
(inaudible). So I hope we find the right balance. It's a concern for us in the
developing world. Because information, knowledge, is (inaudible) to our
development. Or maybe you can look at operating (inaudible) access to knowledge
(inaudible) something like that. But we need to do something about it. Thank
you very much.
>>NIK GOWING: Thank you. (saying name) are you out there? Still? I can see a
hand out there. Jamie Love.
>>JAMIE LOVE: Maybe one practical thing that can come out of this is every one
of the panel members could express their commitment to the proposal that Simon
just mentioned about elaboration of a treaty on access to knowledge, to lay
down a kind of a baseline. This is something that south Africa and more than a
dozen other countries have put down in the, and it's received a lot of support.
But there's a lot of influential people on this panel. And perhaps some of the
other people can express their support for elaboration of a treaty for access
to knowledge on WIPO.
>>NIK GOWING: You have just been nodding your head.
>>HANNE SOPHIE GREVE: I would definitely want to endorse it immediately.
>>NIK GOWING: How achievable is it?
>>HANNE SOPHIE GREVE: I think it is very achievable. But also, I want to raise
a slightly different issue, but on the same. I think you were asking earlier on
the bargaining power of corporate entities. I think also when it comes to
copyright, and, in particular, when it comes to research, there is some
bargaining power that we might want to look at. I'm thinking of the fact that
when you use public funding for research, I think it should be an issue that
this should be made available to everyone and there should be some commitment
to have this on the Internet and distributed widely. And, second, I think that
in many -- particularly in many developing countries, people are asked to
contribute, giving informed consent, say, to medical research. And when the
study has been carried out, they may not have access to that particular
research. I think giving informed consent, for instance, to medical research or
other elements of research should also mean that you would have an impact on
the copyright that should be made available to those who participate. I think
we should look at what is the entire content of what's being sort of published
and presented. Of course, there are rights for the authors. There are
copyrights, et cetera. But there are rights for many others. And I would very
much welcome a situation in which it was made accessible on a very, very broad
basis. I think that is really the way forward for better governance, for
bettering the situation of people in the world. Thank you.
>>NIK GOWING: Arturo (saying name).
>> Hello. So I would like to ask to Joichi Ito and the European representative,
how big is the treaty posted to the free flow of information by technologists
like digital rights management and (inaudible) computing. Of course, we know
everybody that less privacy doesn't mean more security. Thank you. Bye.
>>NIK GOWING: Joichi.
>>JOICHI ITO: I'd like to make one small point that relates to this, which is
--
>>NIK GOWING: Pick up on that.
>>JOICHI ITO: But I want to make sure that we understand that when you write a
book or an article and somebody quotes you in length and criticizes you and
uses it in some way that you don't like, you do not have the right to tell that
person they can't do that. In our current social discourse, it is allowed for
somebody to quote you and tear you apart. But in things like music and artistic
works, we have a lot of more rights that say, well, I don't like -- I wouldn't
want that person to use it in that way. So many documentary producers are being
prohibited, for instance, from using videos of the President of the United
States for copyright reasons because of the intellectual property. And this is
-- and I would throw some of this -- would like your reaction from the BBC on
some of this. But now that we can use little personal computers to edit video
and edit sound, the editing and modifying of multimedia is just as much a part
of the public discourse as text was. And so I think we have to really
understand that sometimes we give up rights. We give up the right to be able to
protect our written work from being used against us, and we need to think about
what are we doing in terms of the video and so on. And so to get to the point
of this answer, digital rights management, we really need to understand that
sometimes you have to give up rights in order to better society. And one really
key thing that we -- I'd like to tie into the earlier part of this panel is
that the free speech element of being allowed to share in remix video and audio
content is really, really important and is separate from just education.
>>NIK GOWING: Do you have a strong view yourself?
>>JOICHI ITO: I have a strong view that right now, we are -- the youth, the
young generation, are using music and video in very, very creative ways and
remixing this in a new culture. And if you look on the Internet, there are many
interesting political documentaries being done by amateurs which are not legal
because of the copyright restrictions. And I think we're inhibiting a
completely new type of free speech that would emerge right now like crazy on
the Internet if we didn't have digital rights management and we didn't have
lawyers going around shutting down sites of people who are making these amateur
videos.
>>JAMIE LOVE: If I could just add to that. WIPO right now has a proposal
before it that's been pushed by the European public broadcasters for the WIPO
broadcasting treaty, which they also want to extend to the cable organization.
And it has the practical effect of -- in some of the proposal, certainly the
proposal that Chairman Euklides, that I think is here in this meeting, has
proposed, to create an intellectual property right over 50 years for
transmitting information, and to associate technical protection members,
digital rights, and it's coming right at the time where, just as Joi mentioned,
there's this explosion of creativity about how people use video for commentary,
for political reasons, to create new social works. You see this take-down of
the YouTube site from Comedy Central, where a lot of the downloads are
political downloads about the Kobe Report, or -- YouTube right now has become a
huge source of political criticism. And, in fact, it's changing the way media
works, because media right now, they'll say something on television, then
they're ridiculed in blogs and people have taken little bits of what they say
on television and they annotate them and juxtapose them. And it's actually
improved in some ways the way people report on things. Because there's this
sort of instant feedback taking place off the Internet. The problem is the
intellectual property laws, the lawyers are way ahead of in one world, and then
people are in a different world. And they're like not very close together. WIPO
has to sort of get the message that, you know, the people are right and the
lawyers are wrong on some of this stuff and kind of move things back in the
other direction.
>>NIK GOWING: Anriette, you're nodding. [ Applause ]
>>NIK GOWING: Vigorously.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: I agree vigorously. I think that, yes, I think there's
definitely a new concept, a new right. And I think the right to share, in fact
ABC has just put in our Internet rights charter the right to share. And I think
we need to look at how people can do that creatively on the Internet, and not
just from the point of view of freedom of information, but also new business
models, new ways of innovating. Piracy creates jobs, but open source and open
standards create opportunity, create entrepreneurs. And I think that's the
challenge for the IGF as well, how to look at it is a public interest forum,
the Internet is a public space, and how can we facilitate maximum sharing,
maximum creativity, peer production, new models, innovation. And I have a lot
of respect for Microsoft's efforts to provide educational content in developing
countries. But as long as they copyright and limit the right of teachers and
learners in those countries to reuse and change and share that information,
then there's very limited value to that. So I think, yes, sharing and openness
is absolutely essential if we're going to use the Internet for development.
>>NIK GOWING: But what about the constraints? Because one of the questions, I
can't remember quite who it was from, which I noted down at the beginning, is
about free content and free access. There are several questions about free
access. That session is tomorrow afternoon, so I won't go down that road this
morning. But this expectation of free content and free access, those days are
now numbered?
>>JAMIE LOVE: I don't think so. I think the ability of -- Look at what's
happened with Wikipedia. I mean, okay, you can't get access to -- you used to
have to worry about could you get a commercial encyclopedia. People just create
their own encyclopedia.
>>NIK GOWING: Yes, but some of us have an experience where what is written in
Wikipedia --
>>JAMIE LOVE: Is often --
>>NIK GOWING: Is often wrong, it's inaccurate, and you want to correct it very
quickly.
>>JAMIE LOVE: And it's more often to be more contemporary and more
illuminating than what you get in a published book. I think the quality is
quite good, myself. But I think the sort of role of people in creating content
is quite important. That's what the free software movement's about. People are
concerned about monopolistic problems, lack of transparency in the code, all
kinds of confusion about the software, the security of software. And what do
they do? They basically have taken over a very strong position in the mid-tier
server market by creating their own industrial-strength server. The Internet
was based on people creating their own applications that they couldn't even get
from commercial companies in a lot of cases. And it's worked well with
commercial software. So I think that there will be free content. I wouldn't
sort of suggest that the public's going to be ruled by -- entirely. But DRM and
things like that, software patents, they represent threats, threats to this new
surge of movement of openness and people doing -- creating their own products.
It tries to kind of legislate out what people are doing. We have a listserve
that is illegal under the copyright law because we routinely publish
information. That has meant that developing country negotiators and NGOs and
citizen groups and people all over the world organized on access to medicine
issues. It's been a great movement. The glue that holds it together is the
sharing of information. A lot of it's copyrighted information. If we were to,
like, abide by the actual law or if companies could put DRMs to prevent us from
doing it or things like that, then you have to subscribe to these really
expensive services. You wouldn't be able to keep up with what's going on.
People would not be as well informed. And a lot of big decisions go wrong when
people don't have information. It's just -- there's a cost that society plays
when people do stupid things and do things because they don't have information.
So I think that there's a lot riding on keeping people informed and promoting
these norms of access to knowledge.