Tom Guarriello at the excellent TrueTalk blog points to a fascinating dialogue about internet regulation between Andrew Keen the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy and Kevin Kelly, a founder editor of Wired magazine headed: "Can We Save the Internet".
Andrew Keen's book, which was published this month (June 2007) and which I haven't read, appears to be an attack on the internet and the online world. According to his publisher's website:
Our most valued cultural institutions—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content.
Our “cut-and-paste” online culture—in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated—threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labours. Further, advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Andrew Keen calls for new laws "to save the Internet".
So can the Internet be saved?
Yes, I think it can. But we need laws, a series of social contracts, to constructively regulate our behavior on the Internet.
Kevin Kelly takes a different view:
I am no anarchist. I think we need “some laws” as you put it. My problem with national laws for fixing Internet problems, at least in America in 2007, is that this is a very slow, overly broad hammer for problems that can be addressed faster and more effectively by rewriting, reinventing, and re-imagining the technological matrix that holds them. I think the laws that regulate our moral compass should be as few, concise, and minimal as possible. Like the Ten Commandments.
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