He used to write lyrics for the Grateful Dead. Now John Perry Barlow wants to stop global corporations colonising cyberspace

Owen Gibson
Monday November 11, 2002
The Guardian

To say John Perry Barlow has led a full life is an understatement on a par with saying that Roy Keane has a little bit of a temper. From lyricist for the Grateful Dead to Wyoming cattle rancher to founding contributor to digital publication Wired, he has lived a more varied life than most. But none of the challenges he has faced from particularly obsessive Deadheads (as the legions of Grateful Dead fans in the States are affectionately called) or obstinate cows has prepared him for his current battle with corporate America.

Since the mid-1990s, Barlow has been something of a figurehead for those who believe the future of the internet is in peril thanks to the heavy handedness of government and giant media groups such as AOL Time Warner, News Corp and Walt Disney. Through his organisation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he has become a focal point for a collection of disparate individuals and groups increasingly fearful that technical innovation and legislative intervention will create an online world that is the opposite of what they had hoped.

Rather than the global receptacle for ideas that was once hoped for, they fear that by tieing the internet up in red tape global media groups - and by extension the government - will make it simply another publishing medium like television or books. As Barlow puts it, "the internet, which was going to be a solution, turns out to be an exacerbating force. This has turned into a very serious fight and will determine, in my view, the future of humanity. To boil it down, it be-comes a battle between the global corporate state and free expression."

This is an issue that has been vexing Barlow for years, since he wrote a seminal article for Wired entitled The Economy of Ideas. In the piece, which is now taught in many law schools in the US, he asserts that: "In the absence of the old containers [books, CDs and so on], almost everything we think we know about intellectual property is wrong. We're going to have to unlearn it. We're going to have to look at information as though we'd never seen the stuff before."

But despite his protestations, he must have felt at times like a lone voice crying in the wilderness as the major corporations set about pouring billions of dollars into cyberspace in an attempt to colonise it and tie it up with rights. There are dark clouds gathering, he believes, that within three years could change the face of the internet as we know it. "Hardware companies are working on technology that will physically stop people downloading copyrighted material. And there is a law under discussion in the US that would exempt the content industry from laws that stop them invading computer users privacy. You have to remember that the internet itself is now in the hands of four or five companies who own the majority of the pipes. Under this law they could simply disable whole sections," he says.

His argument is one that has been endorsed by several film makers and musicians, who point out that the original central tenet of the copyright laws on both sides of the Atlantic - to protect the creator - has long been subsumed by large corporations using such rights as bargaining tools. "There is something fundamentally human about the desire to share knowledge and information. It's really what we want to do with the stuff," says Barlow.

"The central issue is whether or not we're going to embed systems of surveillance and control into the fundamental architecture of the internet that will serve the content industry but will serve any master that comes along afterwards," he adds, alluding to possible government use.

This may all sound a little too much like Blade Runner but when one recalls that home secretary David Blunkett was this summer forced to pull radical plans that would have allowed dozens of organisations to track individual surfers, it becomes less far-fetched.

Barlow believes that we are reaching a pivotal point in the development of the internet. "We're really talking about freedom of expression. You can't own free speech," he says.

It is tempting at times to dismiss him as a new media age hippy, with free information replacing free love. Certainly his San Francisco beard and leather trousers give you that impression, but it's belied by the persuasiveness and coherence of his argument.

But as with all who threaten to rock the boat, it's easy to pick holes and to pose the question - what's the alternative? "I don't think that property is the right model for the economy of expression anyway," he says, but concedes that short of the downfall of global capitalism it is unlikely that rights owners will all of a sudden return all of their rights to the public domain.

But given the right amount of pressure, he does believe that different economic models for the distribution of information, music and art on the web will emerge. To illustrate the point, he describes the way in which the Grateful Dead made their money from touring while allowing fans to make not-for-profit tapes of their shows. A huge community of fans built on swapping and collecting live recordings built up - and the band still made a living.

However, another worry is what will be lost in the meantime. "If we stick to this model for a period of time a lot of the work that we have done during the last 150 years is going to be lost if the content companies don't permit it being digitised," he says, pointing out that far from letting go of rights, media companies are using digital media to reclaim them. "If you download an ebook of Alice in Wonderland, which is in the public domain, it actually says in the small print that you can't read it out aloud."

"We saw a lot of this happening during the heyday of Napster. People were taking LPs and ripping the vinyl on to their PCs and a lot of those records I really want to see make the cut. The companies that produce those LPs hadn't sold any of them for years and had no intention of selling them but were stopping them doing it," he says.

Believing that the internet community has a three-year window to take the good fight to the content owners, Barlow doesn't intend to quit now. "What I do about it is go around and try and tell as many people as possible that something serious is taking place and they should be aware. Eventually, the truth will out. That's all I know to do," he says.