When Barlow had a chance to speak, he expressed his own surprise at being on the panel, “because I don’t think I’m from the same planet, actually.” He then proceeded to trash the foundational assumptions of everyone who had just spoken.
I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call “intellectual property.” I don’t regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don’t have it, somebody else does.
Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost.
In Barlow’s view, the e-G8 has been about “imposing the standards of some business practices and institutional power centers that come from another era on the future, whether they are actually productive of new ideas or not.”
He added that he was more interested in talking about “incentivizing creativity by people who create things, and not large institutions who prey on them and have for years.”
Part of the audience, at least, loved it—to Barlow’s obvious surprise. “This is a different audience than I thought it was,” he said after some applause and scattered cheering.
This quickly awoke the somnambulant panel, especially when Barlow concluded by conflating copyright issues with free speech and attacked efforts to “own” that speech. (via Copyfight: EFF co-founder enters e-G8 “lion’s den,” rips into lions
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