The future of democracy?

Another aspect that is becoming clearer as the days go on is the use of networking sites as a quick and to the point method of registering your opinion on a wide range of social, economic and political issues that can arise from obscurity to a big deal with a number of hours. I mentioned the Canadian government backing down against introducing stronger copyright laws yesterday. I've also found a group on Facebook that is protesting the lack of rental controls for the province of Alberta (Alberta now has some of the highest rental rates in Canada).

Will this protest group be noticed by the Alberta government and will it be enough to influence policy? Maybe. But it may be that the federal government's backing down of the copyright laws were coincidental with the creation of the Facebook group - it was after all at the end of the fall sitting for parliament.

Democracy as it is known today is generally through a representative of some type. Direct democracy, although the most pure form is considered impossible and ill-advised. Ill advised because of "tyranny of the majority", but also because of the number of issues which are of low importance to an average citizen and often require the knowledge or experience of a dedicated professional to make an informed choice. And until recently, simultaneous or near simultaneous voting for anything larger than a village or small town was not technically possible.

However, with the modern telecommunications and virtual places that a person can casually drop in on, we have shifted substantially closer to a more pure form of democracy - but only if the politicians are listening...

"It's the end of the world as we know it..."

2008 is shaping up to be an interesting year in terms how society uses industries that rely on Intellectual Property (IP). So far, in just a couple of weeks into the new year, the traditional music recording industry is pretty much dead, the strike by television writers in the U.S. is still going three months later and already causing havoc with tv habits, and Facebook is again causing waves with Hasbro demanding that Facebook remove the Scrabulous application. Further, yesterday Apple's Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to attempt to move into online download-able movies through its ITunes store.

To me this is interesting - what we have here is the degradation of IP. Essentially, with the digitization of information and the means to rapidly obtain (legally or otherwise) free or nearly free copies of this information, the value of the information has plummeted.

What does this mean for the future? Hard to say. In some ways it is hard to feel sympethetic to many of the effected industries - I mean, what really is the "value" of a recording of music that has millions of copies around the world and can be listened to on the radio, in stores, or in someone's home? Value traditionally is derived from scarcity - but how is mass produced media scarce?

Likewise, Hasbro is making a stink about Scrabulous. Is it directly copied from Scrabble? Without a doubt. However, after more than 40 years on the market, sold around the world, is there really justification for holding the protection on a product that is really very basic - marked tiles and a board with squares on it. (Monopoly is worse in my mind - come on - after 70 odd years, shouldn't it be in the public domain?!).

I suspect there is going to be a revolution in the near future for IP - either courts are going to lock it so tight that use for individuals is tightly restricted, or IP will disappear on items that are meant for mass consumption (this doesn't include patents, although I think that will also need to be modified in the near future if patents are to remain relevant). This is pretty much in evidence after the Canadian government backed down from introducing stricter controls over IP in December after a massive protest group sprung up overnight on Facebook.

I think one result out of all of this will be the hardening of protection of information from being released to the public from government and corporate sources. As such, science fiction writers, in particular William Gibson, was prescient about this - information secrecy will be of utmost importance in the near future for things that are to be kept away from the public's eyes.