have a poster in the background of a film about a frat party? Or scrambling
to get editors to remove an unsigned billboard? What leads us to build a
legal world where the advice a successful director can give to a young artist
is this:

____ I would say to an 18-year-old artist, you're totally free to do whatever you
____ want. But -- and then I would give him a long list of all the things that he
____ couldn't include in his movie because they would not be cleared, legally
____ cleared. That he would have to pay for them. [So freedom? Here's the free-
____ dom]: You're totally free to make a movie in an empty room, with your two
____ friends.[1-5]

///\\\

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas
that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs
no defense. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into
doubt. The "taken for granted" is the test of sanity; "what everyone knows"
is the line between us and them.

This means that sometimes a society gets stuck. Sometimes these un-
questioned ideas interfere, as the cost of questioning becomes too great. In
these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to
get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge
is to sow doubt.

And so it is with us. All around us are the consequences of the most
significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations.
This revolution has produced the most powerful and diverse spur to inno-
vation of any in modern times. Yet a set of ideas about a central aspect of
this prosperity -- "property" -- confuses us. This confusion is leading us to
change the environment in ways that will change the prosperity. Believing
we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual pros-
perity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution
lives. These changes will end the revolution.

That's a large claim for so thin a book, so to convince you to carry on, I
should qualify it a bit. I don't mean "the Internet" will end. "The Internet"
is with us forever, even if the character of "the Internet" will change. And I
don't pretend that I can prove the demise that I warn of here. There is too
much that is contingent, and not yet done, and too little good data to make
any convincing predictions.

But I do mean to convince you of a blind spot in our culture, and of the
harm that this blind spot creates. In the understanding of this revolution

[[5]]

p004 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p005w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p006

v?