We're in a situation where the solutions that we have are not good enough. The way to improve anything is to have a discussion about its flaws. To understand what the one or two or three things are about it that would help fix it. The DMCA makes it dangerous to have that conversation.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of open discussions to improve systems, highlighting how certain laws can hinder necessary debates.
Edward Felten expresses the idea that in order to enhance the existing solutions to problems, one must critically discuss their shortcomings. He criticizes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for creating an environment where such important discussions about flaws and improvements are discouraged, potentially stifling innovation and progress.
In practice
In a tech conference discussing copyright and innovation.
As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.
Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.
Each new tool we create ends an old relationship with the world and starts a new one. And we're changed by that relationship, inevitably. It changes the way we live, changes our patterns, changes our social organization.
About three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
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