Monroe H. Rosenfeld, âFinnegan the Umpire,â courtesy of Library of Congress
âDid you know that 87% of all conversations about blockchain technology are nonconsensual?â
Itâs already an old joke, but itâs sure aged well.
Hardly a day goes by without someone demanding that I listen to their explanation of their blockchain idea. A lot of times, I listen. Look, a lot of people I consider to be smart and thoughtful are really excited by this stuff, and I know them well enough to believe them when they say theyâre not excited about the possibility that they can get in on the ground floor of a Ponzi scheme and exit with a bunch of suckersâ money.
But because of a small oversight in old versions of the licenses created 12 years ago, a new generation of legal predator has emerged to wage a new campaign of legal terror.
To make matters worse, this new kind of predator specifically targets people who operate in good faith, only using materials that they explicitly have been given permission to use.
Even today, I canât tell if the entertainment execs and their tech collaborators that I sparred with in the DRM wars were brilliant schemers or overconfident fools.
When these menâââalmost all menâââset out to create laws that would give their corporations a collective veto over which programs all computers could run, and which real-world data could be captured by computers, were they really doing it all for the sake of controlling how we watch TV? Or did they grasp just how this power over our digital tools would translate into control over our lives in an increasingly digital era?
I still donât know. Itâs easy to believe in unlimited corporate hubris, but itâs just as easy to believe in unlimited corporate foolishness. Whatâs more, itâs possible that some of the players were along for the ride, while others had a very precise understanding of the stakes.
What were those stakes?
Well, for starters, how about the definition of âthe family.â
