Fair use under assault

JOHN PERRY BARLOW is a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, co-founder of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), and an outspoken advocate for fair use of content. In an interview with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor, Barlow discusses his opposition to DRM (digital rights management), intellectual property law, and copyright extension.

InfoWorld: What is the message that you feel needs to be made about DRM?

Barlow: I think that anybody who cares about the future of technology -- anybody who cares about the future, period -- ought to be awfully concerned about this. But people who work in technology have been agnostic on the subject so far. They need to recognize that they're going to be faced with a fairly stark choice, which is a gradual concentration around certain trusted platforms that cannot be broken out of and are filled with black boxes that you can't code around and can't see the inside of.

You have to get politically active and stop it from happening, because Congress has been bought by the content industry. The choice is being made at a very complex and subterranean political level. It's being done in standard settings, with the FCC, in amendments to obscure bills in Congress, in the closed door sessions to set the Digital Broadcast Standard. It has very significant long-term effects [for] the technical architecture of cyberspace, because what we're talking about embedding into everything is a control and surveillance mechanism for the purpose of observing copyright piracy, but [it] can be used for anything.

InfoWorld: Don't you think it's ironic that the computer industry is going along with this?

Barlow: I think it's unfathomable. But Microsoft and Intel are going to make their pact with the Hollywood devil and they're going to create a huge, trusted platform that's going to be the institutional platform. Apple, every Linux publisher, AMD, Motorola, Transmeta, and various different hardware manufacturers are not going to sign on, and there's going to be another open platform. But there are efforts under way to make that unlawful. There's a bill being proposed that would forbid the United States government to use anything that was under a GPL [General Public License]. That's significant, and it's obscure. ... I'm not saying the GPL needs to be protected, but I think if you're going to have critical mass, technological mass around a set of standards, that not being able to have the United States government as a customer for those standards is a significant matter.

InfoWorld: You obviously feel strongly as an artist about the need to protect fair use of content.

Barlow: We can't be creative without having access to other creative work. [If] I have to make sure that the rights are cleared every time I download something or somebody wants me to hear something, it's going to cut way back on what I hear, which is going to cut way back on my capacity to create. Imagine what it would be like to write a song if you'd never heard one. Fair use is essential. But it is under assault.

InfoWorld: Why is it a difficult proposition to make this case?