Back in 2005, I threw away a book I was writing. Well, I didn’t exactly toss it in a garbage can or take a match to the manuscript; I just abandoned the project to work on other things, including a different book and a big law review article. I’m still mad at myself for never finishing it up because I think it put forward a provocative thesis: Censorship is dead. Specifically, as I argued in the first lines of the book, “A confluence of social, legal and, most importantly, technological developments is slowly undermining the ability of legislators and regulators, at all levels of government, to control the nature or quality of speech or media programming.” Accordingly, the running title for the book was: “The End of Censorship?: The Future of Content Controls in a World of Media Convergence.”
Anyway, I recently unearthed an old draft of this discarded manuscript and thought I might as well at least throw the introduction online. In it, I outline my thesis and the “5 Reasons Content Controls Will Break Down.” I also highlight how governments will fight back and discuss what alternatives are out there to address concerns about objectionable content. Someone out there might be interested in all this even though much of what I say here is now widely accepted or been said better by others. I’ve stripped out all the footnotes and cut out significant sections to make what follows more readable. So, here it goes…
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“The End of Censorship? The Future of Content Controls in a World of Media Convergence.”
Content regulation–at least as it has been traditionally defined and enforced in the United States–is doomed. A confluence of social, legal and, most importantly, technological developments is slowly undermining the ability of legislators and regulators, at all levels of government, to control the nature or quality of speech or media programming. Specifically, it is the distribution channel-based system of content regulation employed in the U.S. and many other nations that is breaking down. That is, the ability of governments to regulate speech and expression by regulating its distribution channel or provider (such as broadcasting), represents in increasingly ineffective and illogical method of policing content flows.
The demise of traditional content controls may take many years–potentially even decades–to play out, but signs of the impending death of the old regulatory regime are already evident.
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I’m reading Telephone: The First Hundred Years, written in 1975, and I found this passage striking:
The century of invention was at zenith. Robert Fulton’s first commercially successful steamboat dated from 1807, Mcihael Farady’s dynamo from 1831, Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph from 1835, the steam-driven electric generator from 1858; in 1875 Thomas A. Edison’s phonograph was three years ahead, his incandescent lamp four years, the skyscraper about a decade, the automobile and the airplane a generation or less. Behind them all was a persuasive idea; as Alfred North Whitehead would write, “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the method of invention.” Moreover, the economic rewards of invention under the U.S. patent system were great and well advertised; Bell and others like him knew well enough that the inventor and original backer of the telegraph had become millionaires, and his passion for secrecy about his experiments, along wit his early and intimate association with the Patent Office through Hubbard, suggest how well he realized he might be onto something commercially big. And he was urged on by both his philosophical background and the current social climate in America. The Scottish Calvinism of the nineteenth century made a primary virtue of material success achieved through hard work, and as an example Bell had his countryman Andrew Carnegie, twelve years his senior, who had come to the United States from Scotland in 1848 and by 1875 was already a millionaire in the process of consolidating the largest steel company in the world. As to the social climate, 1875 was the heyday in America of laissez-faire venture capitalism, when men had a kind of savage fury for fame and fortune that the more jaded twentieth century can scarcely conceive of.
I think that last sentence is fascinating, not so much for what it says about the 19th century as for what it says about the late 20th century. I find it hard to imagine someone writing that sentence today. We certainly don’t consider the pursuit of fame and fortune through invention passé these days.
A new paper from the Stockholm Network on developing countries and pharmaceutical patents. In a review of the empirical literature, the report finds, among other things:
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The patent reform debate continues with commentary on Sen.
According to Hal Wegner, the Intellectual Property Owner’s Association reports that
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) will attempt to pass a revised version of S. 1145 in the Senate in February. Major amendments likely will not be available more than a few days in advance of Senate consideration….If the Senate does pass a bill, it likely will be sent to the House for swift passage by the House without amendments, eliminating the need for a Senate-House conference.
Whether the votes are there is open to question.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.