4.28.2004
Internet enables AND silences speech
"The New Surveillance" is an important study by Sonia Katyal of Fordham Law School (Pub-Law Research Paper No. 46 / Case Western Law Review, Vol. 54, No. 297, 200). You can find it online at SSRN. I quote only the opening salvo:
"A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual property owners - such as record companies, software owners, and publishers - were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet, today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression - a virtual marketplace of ideas - alongside an insurmountable array of capacities for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and silences speech, often simultaneously."
If you want a PDF copy of the paper, you can download it from the SSRN site, and a copy is stored locally for you too, here (1.13MB).
"A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual property owners - such as record companies, software owners, and publishers - were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet, today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression - a virtual marketplace of ideas - alongside an insurmountable array of capacities for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and silences speech, often simultaneously."
If you want a PDF copy of the paper, you can download it from the SSRN site, and a copy is stored locally for you too, here (1.13MB).
