March 27, 2003

ICANN gives an iPod

I don't know if I am alone in this, but it strikes me as ironic that ICANN gave its outgoing president an Apple iPod as a going away gift.

The iPod represents the epitome and symbol of the fear of the mass-market music companies that "their" copyrighted materials are being improperly, even unlawfully, copied and traded.

And ICANN, if nothing else, represents an epitome and symbol of the efforts of the intellectual property industries to control the Internet so that the iPods owners of the world will be forced to refuel those iPods only from intellectual-property industry approved sources.

Given Stuart Lynn's penchant for issuing dogmatic statements restricting technology and the use of the internet, I would have thought that a more appropriate gift would have been a gilt edged copy of De impressione liborum[*], a decree of the Lateran Council in 1515 that required that those who wish to publish books using the then new technology of moveable type printing obtain, under threat of excommunication, permission from the appropriate church authority.

[*] Look for the string "On printing books"

Posted by karl at March 27, 2003 2:50 PM