• Midnight in the Garden of the Internet
  • Presenter
    • Jon Zittrain (http://www.jz.org)
    • Harvard Berkman Center
    • Talk somewhat based on: http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/July-August-2003/feature_zittrain_julaug03.html
  • Introduction
    • VCR - "Blinking 12 Phenomenom"
      • You can stare at it or hit it, but it won't do what you want
      • Internet has daunting effects, beyond our control, but not products of nature.
      • Internet = amazing opportunities that grew organically with no central control.
  • Exhibit A - Privacy
    • Scott McNealy says there's nothing you can do about it, cause it's a blinking 12.
    • Amazon screenshot - Buy the Official Lego Creator Activity Handbook with American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us today!
    • CityWatcher.com puts up WiFi cameras and you can watch 'em over the net.
      • If something bad happens, click the big red button!
    • How about changing prices based on who is buying with customer profiling?
      • We've got "rewards" cards - gross misuse of the word.
      • Amazon does "too low to display" prices to accomplish the same thing without getting people riled up.
  • Exhibit A' - Privacy + Security
    • We can't do anything about privacy, let's try to have some security limits.
    • The internet behaves like the phone system used to - the audio channel was also the control channel (exhibit: Captain Crunch whistle). So we have a problem here. The Internet controls itself.
    • Most worms don't do anything destructive besides replicate, but we can't count on the good graces of hackers forever.
    • Do we need automated defenses? Is that safe?
  • History of the Internet (Abbreviated)
    • (exhibit: a graph of people who set clocks. Standard bell curve)
      • Harvard Square on the left, no one does anything, MIT on the right, people who compulsively set the clocks. Everyone in the middle are sheep.
    • The internet's purpose was for people who wanted to talk about the internet to use the internet instead of using the phone. It was just some guys screwing around.
      • They got an NSF grant to do it, with no specified goals or end results.
    • Their biggest insight which they never bothered to patent was the hourglass.
      • At the bottom is any medium - copper, fiber, pigeons.
      • At the top is any task - email, web, phone.
      • In the middle is what holds it all together - the Internet Protocol.
      • The point is that the platform is content- and medium-neutral.
      • It is counter to every other network - MCI, AOL, CompuServe...
      • Intelligence in the ends, not in the network!
        • The power of the internet is placed in the hands of SHEEP!!!
    • The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) psychology
      • Keep it simple - get the data from point A to point B
      • Keep it open - growth can come from anywhere.
      • Technical meritocracy - anyone can submit an RFC (Request For Comment)
      • People are reasonable
      • People are nice
        • We don't need a central list of everyone on the internet, we can trust people to tell us who they are!
        • Why would anyone ever mess with this???
    • IBM, 1992 - "You can't build a corporate network out of TCP/IP."
      • Bees can't fly according to aerodynamacists, but then they go and sting you. Whoops, guess they can fly!
      • BUT - they can't fly when wet. They're unreliable. And the internet is getting wet.
    • Distributed Networks
      • Postal service - government controls tne network
      • Or, distributed network, I give it to you who gives it to him to her to the other side.
  • Two copyright regimes
    • Title 17
    • Reality
    • Another graph:
      • Things individuals care about vs. things the publishers care about. Bell curve, publishers on the far right, people own the rest of the graph.
      • Sheep on the left, pigs on the right. Zing!
    • But now:
      • Everything we does impacts the publishers bottom line (at least they say).
      • Reality was doing pretty well, but now Title 17 is trying to take over the graph.
    • Psychology war
      • Harvard wouldn't respond to Metallica's request to stop Napster from working on their network.
      • Next week, they limited Napster because of bandwidth concerns...interesting. And completely unrelated, of course.
    • Fairness in Music Licensing Act of 1988
      • NRA - National Restaurant Association - has to pay for people to eat burgers with the radio turned on. Congress said that they can play the radio in very limited circumstances with specific numbers of speakers and sizing. Neat.
      • Summer camps: "they buy twine and glue for their crafts...they can pay for music too," said ASCAP. So the NRA ran ads in the WSJ about this.
        • Girl Scouts now have to pay $1/year, and NRA got a nice exemption.
    • CARP (originally CRAP) - Copyright Arbitration Royalties Panel
      • Same crazy terms of compramise, if you'll pay for it in front of the LoC.
    • The solution is break out of the psychology Title 17 and return to reality - non-rivalrous goods! You aren't harming anyone!
      • When you hum a song to yourself, it doesn't feel like Les Mis, ya know?
  • Cultural Fight
    • Let's talk Eldred - Sonny Bono copyright term extension act retroactively increased copyright terms by 20 years to save Mickey from going into the public domain.
      • Passed by unanimous consent in the House and by voice vote in the Senate without a single nay.
      • Cultural - if we can get people to think copyright lasts forever, it becomes real property.
      • Went to Supremes and lost 7-2. Oh well. Congress says this is the last time they'll raise the dates anyway. Like they said the last ten times...
    • On the bottom IDT and others are trying to control the infrastructure bottom-up.
    • On the top Microsoft is trying to take over the software to control it top-down.
    • They have these levers, but why are they pulling them? Who is telling them to?
      • In China the DNS pointed google.com to Beijing U's search site.
      • In Germany Google filters white supremacy site. If you control the network (or the software) you can subvert the open protocol.
      • In Pennsylvania, they block child porn sites.
      • They are changing the fundamental architecture of the Internet.
      • Everyone needs a "drivers license" to be on the internet, and if they misbehave it will be revoked.
    • TiVo is taking the very hardware of the limitless PC and turning it into something very limited, controlled, safe.
  • Problem
    • No technical response can stop culture
      • He's not with Lessig on the "code as law", although that might be simplistic.
    • No legislative response can stop culture
    • So what is left???
    • Tim - distributed trust models?
      • A taxicab meter can be trusted as against the driver of the cab
        • The meter has blinking-12 difficulty
        • The meter has a "void of warranty seal removed" sticker on it
      • So are we gonna implement it centrally, or distributedly?
        • Well, who uses PGP, anyway?
        • But what if Amazon says only people we trust can shop here...
        • Is it what we wanted or what we didn't want?