 In order to calculate a decade in internet time, you almost have to use light years because 1994 is a place that is very, very far away. It seems impossible that ten years ago most of us had no idea what a browser was, or a search engine, or email, for that matter. And it seems especially impossible that just a decade ago there was no battle being waged over the future of intellectual property in the digital age. But it's true. The first shot was fired in March of 1994 when Wired magazine published John Perry Barlow's essay The Economy of Ideas. With this essay, Barlow laid down a gauntlet, everything you know about intellectual property is wrong, he said, and with that he boldly pressed us to charge into the future with his rallying cry of, information wants to be free. I'm Charlie Nessen, and this is Audio Berkman. It's been ten years since the publication of John Perry Barlow's essay The Economy of Ideas, and to mark the occasion, Berkman radio producer Ben Walker went to New York City to visit with him in his noisy Chinatown apartment to talk about what the visionary Barlow saw a decade ago and what he sees now. You know, I have to admit that at the time I wrote this I was not expecting to spend a significant chunk of the rest of my life defending its principles. I mean, I felt like much of what was said there was so obvious and true that as soon as a lot of people got it, they'd set about to make the necessary adjustments. I felt like everything I was saying was really pretty obvious, but for some reason not many other people had gotten this. You know, this was going to be a truly catastrophic problem in terms of how economy gets managed and what happens to the law and what happens to freedom of expression, which was my paramount concern. Really, it was astonishing. I mean, you look around now and everybody knows that this is an issue and everybody's got opinions on it. But at that point, nobody knew that it was an issue. Nobody could see that it was supposed to be and people didn't particularly want to talk about it. So your article comes out and what happens? Then suddenly it was an issue. As soon as I wrote this, then suddenly there was a general shudder in the system. You drive in a fence post out in the countryside and suddenly you realize that the whole countryside is shaking because you're actually driving the fence post into the back of a living thing. I felt like I was in a surreal movie at first, because what do I know about copyright? I'm a retired cattle rancher. But see, this is exactly what many lawyers were asking. Well, and sometimes it takes somebody who's not inside the system to see. I mean, I think usually it does. Over the past ten years, John Perry Barlow has lost his outsider status. Since the publication of The Economy of Ideas, he has participated in virtually every single important conference relating to the Internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization he co-founded, is famously patrolling cyberspace, fighting injustice and protecting the rights of users. He has his own blog now, and he's even easy to find on social networks like Orcut and Frenster. His writings on intellectual property have also become central seminal texts for the debate over the future of digital media. The Economy of Ideas is still being taught in law schools all over the world. But even with all this, Barlow still sees his influence as limited. This is very interesting. I mean, I think that most law schools would be, you know, Barlowvian in their viewpoint, if I can sound pretentious for a second. What's fascinating is that even though there are lots of law students passing through law schools and being indoctrinated in a set of ideas that, you know, originally originated with me, as soon as those young lawyers go out here into the workplace, the old paradigm still rules. They may feel as they feel about it, but when they go to work on Wall Street or in Hollywood or wherever, they are trained in a different method and a different point of view. And that's going to be the case for a while. I mean, there was something very idealistic about the way I thought about cyberspace back in 1994. I was a pure techno-utopian. And, you know, to a certain extent, I still am. You know, I feel like some of these things that I predicted then in terms of social contracts being developed in cyberspace will ultimately take place in some form. But the idea that they would take place overnight was incredibly naive. I think I had too much faith in institutional malleability. But still, we are now living on Internet time. And so, while institutions may crawl along at a slug-like pace, technology is pushing us into the future at breathtaking speeds. Walker asked Barlow if he sees the technological advances of the past decade facilitating the changes he advocates for in the economy of ideas or, instead, hindering them. The changes that have taken place in technology are, to a very large extent, facilitating the things that I was talking about. I mean, you know, I was writing about this. The worldwide web existed, but there was no web browser at that point when I wrote that. 14,000 kilobits per second was considered a hot transmission rate. There was no such thing as a peer-to-peer network. You know, now we have all of those things. We also have digital rights management systems. We also have digital rights management systems. We also have much stronger encryption. And we also have laws on the books that make it a criminal offense to break the encryption code that surrounds bottled information. I mean, it's all about stopping this from being true. I don't see any reason to think that it's not true yet. I mean, in spite of all of the frantic efforts that have been made to, as I said, rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Nothing is changed about the inherent ease of duplicability of information in a digital age and then the ease of sharing and transmission. It's getting easier to share and easier to transmit and easier to duplicate. The main thesis of Barlow's economy of ideas is his belief that because of digital information's inherent, incorporeal nature, it simply cannot be accorded the same rights and privileges that real property has enjoyed in the past. But even a cursory study of internet law since 1994 suggests otherwise. Over the past ten years, we have seen much of our traditional understanding of property rights carried forward into the digital age. But Barlow remains unmoved. He still believes that digital information is intrinsically immaterial. Walker pressed Barlow on this. But still, over the past decade, we've seen a lot of lawyers get involved with sort of trying to refute that and trying to give weight to these zeroes and ones. Well, of course they will, but I think that they're fighting a losing battle and we can see that the battle is being lost on the ground. Now why is that? I mean, if their concept of this is correct, then it ought to be relatively easy to contain this stuff as it was relatively easy to contain books. I mean copyright worked fine as long as it was difficult to manufacture the physical objects that were the primary repository of thought. And copyright has quit working now that those physical objects no longer exist, which was my point all along. The objects had gone away. The wine bottles were disappearing and the wine was extremely liquid. And I don't see that there's anything that's happened since that makes that less true. Today it is not uncommon to find the digital media debate framed not by the law or technology, but rather by ethics. The recording industry and Hollywood are both now committed to serious outreach and educational programs aimed at instilling ethics into the consuming public. Politicians and technologists are also speaking more and more about ethics in cyberspace. But back in 1994, it was well out there to suggest that the problem of digital media could be solved with an ethical code. But that is exactly what John Perry Barlow was saying. In the economy of ideas, he compared cyberspace to the frontier of the Wild West and suggested that it would be most prudent to allow the Internet to develop its own code, its own ethical code. Well, and everybody laughed at me at that point. Sure, that's hippie mysticism. The guy used to write songs for the Grateful Dead, so he naturally thinks that everybody's going to fall into line with some golden age of ethical awareness. The problem is that you have two completely different ethical considerations that are being brought to bear here and they don't have much conversation with each other. One of them is the ethics of property. And I believe in property, at least as regards physical material. I think that that's sort of the basis of an orderly society and a healthy economy. Make no mistake. But the other ethical consideration, which is my primary consideration, is one that they're not thinking about at all, which is the right to know. And I believe that there is a fundamental human right to know and to have access to knowledge and that every human being has this right. And that society needs to be organized in a way that will maximize access for all human beings. I mean, I have a dream, which is that at some point in the not terribly distant future, anybody anywhere on this planet who wants to know something will be able to find it and learn it from the best possible source. I don't think that's a ridiculous dream, but it is a ridiculous dream if we allow ourselves to assume that intellectual, quote, property, unquote, is no different from other property and that the primary ethic that we need to be maintaining is maintaining that definition. One of the holy grails of digital media is the Internet hit song, a song that owes its success not to the music industry, but rather holy to the Internet. Barlow believes that this myth has blinded many people to the truth about how the Internet really works for creative people. In 1994, Barlow suggested that the free flow of information could only work to the benefit, not the detriment of artists and musicians. In other words, a business model where out of plenty comes plenty. Today, ten years later, Barlow believes that there is plenty of proof that this business model is working. It's working just fine, but it doesn't see, it's not working in ways that fall neatly into the expectations of the traditional music industry. There are a lot of people who wang away on a guitar, who've been able to quit their day job because of peer-to-peer file sharing. There's no question in my mind about that. None of them have had huge hits of the sort that the music industry considers to be useful because they're not making the music industry rich. They're out on the other side of the music industry. They're able to make a living being musicians, which is primarily what they want, but they're not helping some fat cat in Bel Air by his latest Ferrari. Why is it that so many people misinterpreted that, though? Oh, I think there was a lot of intentional misinterpretation. And also the fact that I had a relationship with the Grateful Dead made it easier for them to misinterpret because they could say, well, yeah, all right, this worked with the Grateful Dead, but the Grateful Dead is sui generis and it's not like anything else. And to say that what works with the Grateful Dead is going to work for anybody else is ridiculous. I mean, eventually people are going to see that I was not completely wrong economically in my belief that when you spread information, you create demand for it. Throughout Walker's conversation with Barlow, both were struck at how strange it was that this piece of writing from a decade ago could remain so current, so crucial. In many respects, a reading of the economy of ideas in 2004 makes it clear how little progress we've made in regards to harnessing the transformative power of the Internet. With sirens going off in the distance, almost as if to emphasize the urgency of the moment, Walker asked Barlow what he would change if he were to write the piece again today. God, you know, the depressing thing is that I wouldn't change much. That's the terrible truth. I mean, I think that really just about everything I said there is still true. At least I'm not the only person out there that thinks this way now, by any means. John Berry Barlow is a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And since May of 1998, a fellow here at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. This episode of Audio Berkman was produced by Ben Walker for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. Thanks to Mary Bridges, John Palfrey, and special thanks to John Berry Barlow. I'm Charlie Nesson. Thanks for listening.