For this lesson we were given a section of the article – The Economy of Ideas – by John Perry Barlow, in Wired. We where then told to find certain phrases and statements accordingly…

Now I’m not entirely certain of my answers, however the article was quite interesting, though a little confusing at times.

5 Key expressions about copyright in the digital age

1. “For all practical purposes, the value was in the conveyance and not in the thought conveyed.”
2. “the increasing difficulty of enforcing existing copyright and patent laws is already placing in peril the ultimate source of intellectual property – the free exchange of ideas.”
3. “when Jefferson and his fellow creatures of the Enlightenment designed the system that became American copyright law, their primary objective was assuring the widespread distribution of thought, not profit.”
4. “digital technology is also erasing the legal jurisdictions of the physical world and replacing them with the unbounded and perhaps permanently lawless waves of cyberspace.”
5. “Even in the most local of digital conditions, jurisdiction and responsibility are hard to assess.”

2 metaphors

1. “Legal efforts to keep the old boat floating are taking three forms: a frenzy of deck chair rearrangement, stern warnings to the passengers that if she goes down, they will face harsh criminal penalties, and serene, glassy-eyed denial.”
2. “In other words, the bottle was protected, not the wine.Now, as information enters cyberspace, the native home of Mind, these bottles are vanishing. With the advent of digitization, it is now possible to replace all previous information storage forms with one metabottle: complex and highly liquid patterns of ones and zeros.”

2 thesis statements

1. “While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one.Once that has happened, all the goods of the Information Age – all of the expressions once contained in books or film strips or newsletters – will exist either as pure thought or something very much like thought: voltage conditions darting around the Net at the speed of light, in conditions that one might behold in effect, as glowing pixels or transmitted sounds, but never touch or claim to “own” in the old sense of the word”
2. “That is, when the primary articles of commerce in a society look so much like speech as to be indistinguishable from it, and when the traditional methods of protecting their ownership have become ineffectual, attempting to fix the problem with broader and more vigorous enforcement will inevitably threaten freedom of speech. The greatest constraint on your future liberties may come not from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent.”

take 1 part of text and convert into a visual thing

This is what I came up with…

The article made me think about the laws and the fact that our government aren’t really doing anything to uphold them, so I took the metaphor about the sinking boat, with David Cameron giving the warning. I tried to make it look like he’s not really trying to give a warning, he’s saying it just because he says things. On second thought, it could be a lot better… ahaha! I’ll try harder for next time.

xox Much love Holly xox

http://www.wired.com/1994/03/economy-ideas/ <<< Access the article here <<<