The IP war: apocalypse or revolution?

Abstract

In the Foundation series, Asimov predicted a 1,000 years of darkness following the fall of the galactic empire. In the book Noir, K.W Jeter describes a world where IP is the ultimate war. Combine them together and you have likely scenario No. 1.The Internet era enabled communication and information exchange on a global scale. But it also opened the door to copyright infringement on a global scale. Music, books, movies, software, games, speeches, research papers - everything is now fair game. The only protection the movie studios ever had was bandwidth - and it is quickly evaporating due to faster network connectivity via broadband and smarter downloading technologies such as BitTorrent.Intellectual property, copyrights and the like are the key to a democratic, free-market civilization and greed is a prime mover - so if all is 'free' and we have a 'constitutional right' to 'share' - where is the future of innovation and creativity?This paper will describe the current state of the great IP war (early stages of border unrest and some commando activity), outline potential futures, and make some suggestions as to how to help direct the world toward a reasonable future.In each case, we will cover the business, legal, and social implications of the scenario and we will discuss the various ways the computing industry can help to influence the future outcome.