Viacom sues Google for letting copyright-protected material slip onto YouTube. Brewster Kahle sues the federal government over a public-domain policy he considers restrictive. The recording industry sues college students — and, some critics say, just about everyone else in sight — for downloading music illegally. Lawsuits are the lingua franca of intellectual-property debate, and that's not likely to change any time soon, says Larry Downes.
Mr. Downes, a technology consultant and adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley, draws parallels between the current information wars and the Industrial Revolution — which spurred the rise of communism and the progressive movement, both of them "rejections of a legal system that no longer functioned, and which could not adapt to changing realities." Much of that resistance was violent, he writes, and there's no reason why the battle over intellectual property should be any different:
The battles of the information revolution will be fought with just as much violence as their 19th-century predecessors, because the economic stakes are just as high. And in the end, whenever and however the end comes, the result will be a new legal infrastructure better suited to the new economic realities of information and the technology that spreads it…. And the creation of that new legal system will not be an academic exercise, it will be war.
It might be a war waged more in the courts than in the streets, but Mr. Downes's argument seems like a compelling one. –Brock Read
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