John Perry Barlow: “If you wanna share something – share it.”

[…]If you wanna share something – share it. If you wanna use something – use it. Try to do so ethically in the sense of don´ t take things without attribution.[…] Pay no attention to these people when it comes to being creative. Go ahead and do the stuff that Larry showed in the beginning of his talks and do lot of it. And every time they put a lock on – break it. And every time they pass a new law – break that.[…]

In an interview with Markus Beckedahl at 23c3 (which I couldn’t attend, damn it!) EFF founder John Perry Barlow gave a great rant about restrictive copyrights and called for massive public civil disobedience. Netzpolitik.org has put up the audio and video in the post.

I think it’s in both Markus’s and John’s interest to spread the interview as widely as possible, so here’s video and the whole transcript:


Link: sevenload.de

===================================== John Perry Barlow on civil disobedience in a digital world Interview with John Perry Barlow on the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3) Berlin, 29.12.2006 Interviewer: Markus Beckedahl Camera: Mario Behling
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NetzpolitikTV: John Perry Barlow über zivilen Ungehorsam
Transcript: Stefan T. Saffert January 2007 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/deed.de ===================================== John Perry Barlow: When I examine my life today and think about the useful things I’ve done with it so far, I’d have to say very high on that list is making a convert out of Larry Lessig. Because when I first ran across him, he was of a very different set of viewpoints on this than he is now. And he’s always gonna be, I think by temperament and nature, he’s always gonna be much more pessimistic than I am. I’m an almost pathological optimist. So, you know, we’ll always have that division and one thing about optimism is that it believes that people are inherently good and, you know, if freedom is allowed to prosper then good will will arise from below. Pessimism always believes that people are inherently rotten and must be controlled from above. That’s kind of the difference but, I mean, I think it’s been a really good symbiosis and as I said when I started to discuss this with him, I think that our disagreements have been fruitful. I mean the dynamic between his point of view and mine on these matters has been useful to a lot of other people as well. Markus Beckedahl: So let’s come to your view of the debate. The dialogue before was a lecture by Larry Lessig and while he’s a very pessimistic person who thinks we have 20 years no chance to change law and maybe technology, you have another view. What is your view? John Perry Barlow: My view is if we just keep pressing the system where it breaks, eventually the system is so broken and so obviously broken that there’s no choice but for people to start evolving another economic model. And that’s actually what’s already happening. Rather rapidly. I mean, it was interesting after that conference where I was talking to these, you know, usual suspects. It was suddenly for the first time friendly as [???], you know, where previously I’ve been the devil and now they’ve been regarding me as, you know, maybe somebody that could show them the way out of the darkness, which I thought was a significant shift. So I think that we need to continue. I think he’s being a little over-reactive when he says, you know, “acts of terrorism”. I just think we need to continue breaking their system. You know, what happens is exactly what happened not half a mile from here eventually. You know, it breaks and it breaks and it breaks and then one day the whole damn thing goes down. And when copyright in the virtual world – and I’m not against copyright in the physical world, I’m not against copyright as it pertains the actual copies of things, you know, books and CDs and things of that nature – but when it’s become obvious that it’s just simply not going to work in cyberspace, I think you’ll see it collapse. It will be as sudden and surprising as the thing that took this wall down over here. You know, I was in Germany in the summer of ‘89 as I expect you were, too. And nobody to my recollection thought there was the chance that that wall was gonna be down in 20 years, right? And, you know, everybody was just completely, you know, disconsolate about the irretrievable state of things. Right at the moment when, you know, we were sort of dropping the last crystal in the super-saturated solution that would cause things to go “Boom” and do a state-change and that’s what I think is gonna happen and I think it’ll happen a lot quicker than 20 years. I think it’ll happen sometime in the next five if not less. Markus Beckedahl: What can the people do to crash the system? John Perry Barlow: Go on and do… you know, if you wanna share something – share it. If you wanna use something – use it. Try to do so ethically in the sense that, you know, don’t take things without attribution, attribute. Make sure that the people who did create actually have the opportunity to get some enhanced reputation and thereby, you know, greater economic return. But, you know, pay no attention to these people when it comes to being creative. Go ahead and do the stuff that Larry showed in the beginning of his talk and do lots of it. And every time they put a lock on – break it. And every time they pass a new law – break that. You know. Sooner or later they’re dealing with such a massive level of civil disobedience that they have to address it. And that’s where we’re headed in a, I think, a hell of a hurry. I mean, you go to California and you drive down the 280, which is sort of the main artery of Silicon Valley and connects to San Francisco, and all those cars are going 85 mph where the speed limit is 65. But it’s a good road and there are good cars generally and they’re good drivers and there’s not a damn thing anybody can do about it. What are they gonna do? Arrest the entire highway? No. So the cops are right there cruising along with you at 85 mph. And that’s still against the law but nevertheless people have [asserted/???] the freedom to drive as fast as they think which is reliably safe under those circumstances. And we have to do the same thing. Markus Beckedahl: OK, thank you very much.

(Link)

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