Schlagwort-Archive: re:publica09

“This is not a feature. It's a bug.” 

 _ FNFW-Autorin Barbara Hofmann über Cory Doctorows Auftritt auf der re:publica09 in Berlin

Cory Doctorow ist ein rasant sprechender kanadischer Science Fiction Autor und Journalist, der mittlerweile in London lebt, regelmäßig bloggt (unter anderem auf BoingBoing) und Vorträge zu aktuellen UrheberInnenrechtsfragen hält. Erst kürzlich war Cory Doctorow auf der re:publica09 in Berlin zu Gast, einer Konferenz, zu der rund 1.400 BloggerInnen und andere NetzbewohnerInnen pilgerten. In einem unterhaltsamen, rund fünfzig minütigen Vortrag brachte er sämtliche aktuellen netzpolitischen Fragen anschaulich auf den Punkt. Bereits innerhalb weniger Sekunden redete er sich über die regelmäßigen Einspielungen der Filmindustrie zu Beginn eines jeden Kinofilmes in Fahrt:

close second behind in the Olympic race for dumbest commercial strategy is calling the costumers thieves, … You know, you spend 15 euros to go to a movie and you sit down and you put your hand in your popcorn. And a giant advertisement appears saying ‚You are all thieves. I know you are thieves. You download your media without permission and if you see any one in this room who has got a camera held up to their eye if you see that camera come out of their pocket tell on them. Go and find a police man and tell on them‘, because of course we all know that telling on your neighbours is one of the great characteristic of a free society. …” Weiterlesen

Und rasch ging es weiter zu den “three strikes out”-Diskussionen quasi der Internetabschaltung bei UrheberInnenrechtsverletzung, wo Doctorow mit ironischem Unterton Internetabschaltungen für Bertelsmann und Co forderte, sobald diese drei Mal UrheberInnenrechtsverletzungen begehen.

The entertainment industry claims that these sorts of measures like notice and take-down, termination, filtering and so on, that have all these terrible effects that assist censorship, that cut of people from their governments and families, that these are requirement if we are going to continue to have media in the twenty first century. They say ‚Here is a loaded gun. You can either shoot three million dollar movies or the internet‘. And if it’s that choice I would say shoot the movies.

Auch auf das Digital Right Management (DRM), Verfahren zur Kontrolle der Nutzung digitaler Medien wie DVDs ging er näher ein:

This is not a feature. It’s a bug. Designing devices to allow remote policy to be set on them against the owner’s wishes and knowledge is not a good design for technology-companies to pursue and that’s the other problem with it …

Einen der gewichtigsten Punkte in seinem Vortrag bildete die Möglichkeit des Internets zusammenzuarbeiten. In netzpolitischen Diskussionen wird allzuoft nur die UrheberInnenrechtsfrage gesehen, aber nicht die Chance der Zusammenarbeit::

The internet copying power is not its main attraction. …  The main attraction on the internet … is its power to allows us to collaborate. … The internet is the best collaboration machine we have ever built and that is an even more important human dream than universal access to all human knowledge, which is what we get from perfect copying. What we get from perfect collaboration is the ability to be literally super human, that that much we could do on our own is merely human but when we get together with other people and we do more than any one of us could do on our lonesome. We do something that is literally super human, something that is more that anyone of us could do on our own. This has been the core task of everyone who has ever tried to organize a political movement or religion or corporation or cooperative or conference or even to get a bunch of people together for dinner, is to do more than one person could do. And in 1937 Ronald Coase, who was the first chief economist of the american federal communication commission published a paper called “The Nature of the Firm” for which he won the Nobel prize in economics in which he proposed that collaboration cost. The cost of getting people to work together was in fact the most important characteristic of any enterprise be it a religion, be it a coporation, be it a terrorist group, be it a group of authors collaborating on an anthology and that the mechanism that groups of people found to enable themselves to collaborate more cheaply where those mechanism that determent how much they could get done. …

Schließlich unternahm er einen kurzen Ausflug zu Wikipedia, dessen Glaubwürdigkeit und vor allem einen Vergleich mit den Medien, der zum Schmunzeln verleitete:

Wikipedia is amazing. There are sceptics on wikipedia who say “Oh, not everything is as true as I thought it would be. Or I look at the discussion page and I see that people disagree about the truth of it.” But, you know, I worked in newspapers and I know that there are lots of days when there are stories published on the front page that most of the people in the editorial room think are bullshit but it is rare that you look at the front page of the International Herold Tribune and see a little box next to the headline that says ‚The editor published this though even nine of ten reporter think it is garbage‘ .

In einem Futurezone-Interview auf der re:public endete er wohl über seine eigene Lebensphilosophie:

Viele Geeks haben diesen Nerd-Determinismus. Sie sagen: „Unsere Technologie ist besser als eure Gesetze.“ Sich in die Politik einzumischen ist wohl der wichtigste Punkt. Denn wenn sich jemand nicht in die Politik einmischt, heißt das noch lange nicht, dass sich die Politik nicht bei ihm einmischt.

Sein Vortrag “How to survive the Web without embracing it” steht unter http://make.tv/republica2009/show/18685 frei zugänglich im Internet. Nur am Rande zur Person Doctorows: laut englischer Wikipedia waren seine Eltern trotzkistische LehrerInnen.