This video of Street Tech pal Cory Doctorow’s keynote address at Toorcon 8 is definitely worth checking out. Entitled “Owned: Hollywood’s War on Security,” it is a very well delivered talk on the evolution of the user’s relationship with the computer/network, the content on it, and ownership thereof, from the mainframe/special purpose network to the homebrewed & personal computer/general purpose network to the ubiquitous computing, and increasingly over-regulated, user-licensed technologies, of today — the drift back to specialty purpose networks. Here’s a snippet:
“The worst practices of the technology industry are now being exported to other industries. Software is kind of the birthplace of a terrible Frankensteinian monster called the EULA, the End-User Licensing Agreement. It was the first time that anybody thought you could do this terrible violence to the legitimate and noble agreement — that thing that happens when you and I sit down at a table and start with what we want and walk away with what we need — when you can take that and violate it and turn it into something so trivial that you can form an agreement merely by looking at a sticker or having a screen of text flashed in front of you, and that that agreement somehow constitutes something binding, a waiver of the rights that were set out by statute and practice and custom, in the service of enhancing someone else’s business model, at your expense.”
[Via hackAday]
