Notes from Cory Doctorow's EFF talk

My own paraphrase/rough notes of Cory Doctorow's talk tonight at an EFF event in NYC. Any omissions or errors are mine - here goes:

Let me start by saying where I got something wrong. The Internet isn't a copy machine. I used to think so, but it's not. The Internet is indeed very good at making copies, and in fact there have been past legal attempts to regulate every single copy that gets made... from the hard drive to the RAM, from the RAM to the frame buffer, to the router, to the switch, and so on. Even today there's legislation on the table, "three strikes you're out," which would turn off any citizen's Net access if they're accused of making improper copies three times.

With all that said, a copying machine is not really what the Internet is. Instead its main function is zeroing the cost of collaboration and organizing new institutions. The role of any institution isn't primarily to run the state, or make refrigerators or cars - it's solely to get people marching in the same direction. The Internet enables us to create institutions of all sizes and types, and EFF is the organization that helps protect our rights to do just that.

The Internet makes it so easy to do this that we're doing it all the time without even knowing it. When you went online today, you were using - either on your computer or on a Web server - the Linux operating system, which was built by volunteers in a decentralized effort. Try building a skyscraper that way. But it doesn't require writing an operating system; just create a hyperlink on a page. When Yahoo launched, they had paid employees manually categorizing every single site on the Web, and then Google came along and used the knowledge built into those hyperlinks by millions of individual Web users, and they won - their margins were so much higher than Yahoo's. BoingBoing has more readers than Wired and our margins are higher than theirs, too.

See also the transcript of Cory's recent Cambridge lecture.

• Aug 20, 2008
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