John Perry Barlows Auftritt auf dem eG8 hat für Furore gesorgt:
Als John Perry Barlow, Mitgründer der amerikanischen „Electronic Frontier Foundation“ zu einer Podiumsdiskussion geladen wurde, machte er aus seinem Unwillen keinen Hehl: „Ich weiß gar nicht, was ich auf diesem Panel soll. Die anderen Teilnehmer scheinen von einem anderen Planeten zu kommen“. Die von den Industrievertretern geforderten verschärften Maßnahmen zur Durchsetzung des Urheberrechts wies er zurück: „Man kann freie Rede nicht besitzen“.
Barlow hat das eG8 genutzt, um den vertretenen Lobbyisten und Politikern das Missverständnis hinter geistigem Eigentum zumindest an den Kopf zu werfen:
I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call "intellectual property." I don't regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don't have it, somebody else does.
Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost.
Zusätzlich führte Barlow aus, was grundlegend ökonomisch das Problem ist:
"Trying to optimize towards scarcity, as you are by all of your methods, is not going to be in the benefit of creation, I promise you," he said. "It's not IP enforcement that gets you guys properly paid." In his view, payment comes from building a product that people actually want to buy—and the movie industry's repeated record box office takes in recent years show that people have no problem coughing up the cash for something of value.
Das ist stark kondensiert das, worüber ich hier und an anderen Stellen seit Jahren rede.