Martin Weller at The Ed Techie and Ray Corrigan at B2fxxx engaged in an exchange on open content quoted in part below. Their discourse catches the understanding that a grand new era is emerging from open content in the Internet. What Weller and Corrigan are talking about in the following exchange is the futility ahead for content industries as they try to control of what happens in networks:
[Weller:] But ultimately the ability to bypass the very need for such industries will mean that all their restrictive DRM will only make them weaker because people will have better alternatives elsewhere. Once the online MP3 and iTunes becomes the main place and format people use to obtain records, the very point of a record company becomes obsolete. So whether they have restrictive DRM and savage lawyers becomes irrelevant, they will be disintermediated. It then becomes in their interest to be open, to seek alternative revenue streams, for example giving music away free but selling merchandise and promoting concerts.
[Corrigan:] The architecture of the Internet or cyberspace is programmed in the code, the logical layer and protocols that determine how it operates …The Net – an entirely artificially created entity. . .
[Weller:] This is true, but it doesn’t mean it’s an entirely controllable or predictable entity. I heard Robert Cailliau, a colleague of Tim Berners-Lee, once argue that we were reaching the edges of our understanding of the complexity in the net. He joked that maybe it was using us to get built. Just as artificial life simulations are artificially created they can still produce patterns and activity that are entirely unpredictable, so the net is better viewed as an ecosystem than a piece of code that can be tweaked to make it do what you want.
