Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

Strategies for a Generative Future 193
tercultural movement, like that of graffiti—part of the point of doing it is that
it is edgy or illegal. It may even make the products of amateur cultural innovation
less co-optable by the mainstream industrial information economy, since
it is hard to clear rights for an anonymous film packing in images and sounds
from hundreds of different sources, some proprietary.
But if prevention of commercial exploitation is the goal of some authors, it is
best to let them simply structure their licenses to preclude it. Authors can opt to
share their work under Creative Commons licenses that restrict commercial
reuse of the work, while permitting limitless noncommercial use and modification
by others. 80
Finding ways through content thickets as Benkler and his cohort suggest is
especially important if tethered appliances begin to take up more of the information
space, making information that much more regulable. In a more regulable
space the gap between prohibited uses and tolerated uses shrinks, creating
the prospect that content produced by citizens who cannot easily clear permissions
for all its ingredients will be squeezed out.
MAINTAINING REGULATORS’ TOLERANCE OF GENERATIVE
SYSTEMS
Individual Liability Instead of Technology Mandates
As the capacity to inflict damage on “real world” interests increases with the Internet’s
reach and with the number of valuable activities reliant upon it, the imperatives
to take action will also increase. As both generative and non-generative
devices maintain constant contact with various vendors and software
providers, regulators may seek to require those manufacturers to shape the services
they offer more precisely, causing a now-familiar wound to generativity.
One way to reduce pressure on institutional and technological gatekeepers is
to ensure that individual wrongdoers can be held directly responsible. Some
piecemeal solutions to problems such as spam take this approach. ISPs are
working with makers of major PC e-mail applications to provide for forms of
sender authentication. 81 A given domain can, using public key encryption
tools, authenticate that it is indeed the source of e-mail it sends. With Sender
ID, e-mail purporting—but not proved—to be from a user at yahoo.com can
be so trivially filtered as spam that it will no longer be worthwhile to send. This
regime will hold ISPs more accountable for the e-mail that originates on their