Barlow Checks His Work

In a recent Telepolis interview, that I learned about via KairosNews, John Perry Barlow reflects on his now canonical article "The Economy of Ideas," and speculates on the degree to which Digital Rights Management may effectively obviate the need for copyright. I was most struck by this passage.

When Gutenberg created the massively reproducible book there was no model for the economic return on that product. And actually it was another 250 years before they came up with copyright. And they somehow managed to have books in the meantime. I would have been a lot happier if we would have stuck to that waiting period instead of going right through the door as we've gone.

One of the consequences of our rapid adoption of new communicative technologies is that we sometimes forget the degree to which our adoption of these technologies prompts cultural changes that are best measured in decades, if not centuries. Readers of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change . . . often mark how slowly the "revolution" Eisenstein documents unfolded. We'd do well to remind ourselves that every foray into cyberspace to date will, in time, be regarded as a baby step. Our efforts will ultimately be described (like the early print texts with typefaces mimicking script handwriting) as the actions of people struggling to understand the new medium without yet having recognized either its full potential or its true cultural consequences.