Digital imprimatur
|
|
Digital imprimatur is a term widely associated with John Walker, due to his article of the same name. Imprimatur refers to the circumstance under a state of official censorship, wherein approval of a publication is necessary. Thus digital imprimatur refers to a system of digital, or internet, censorship.
John Walker argues in his article The Digital Imprimatur: How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle, that there is increasingly a crackdown on the ability for internet users to voice their ideas, as well as an upcoming official state of internet censorship on the horizon. Walker claims that the most likely candidate to usher in the digital imprimatur is digital rights management, or DRM.
Similar scenarios have been predicted by others, including Richard Stallman, in his article and essay The Right to Read.
Other people predict establishing of a dynamic equilibrium between repressive official and commercial and more free but in some cases illegal technologies, resulting in the emergence of darknets and anonymous P2P systems, together with alternative networking systems (including but not limited to sneakernets and both fixed and ad-hoc wireless mesh networks), and vivid underground culture and black market centered around them, in accordance with the Iron law of prohibition.
See also
External links
- The Right to Read (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html) by Richard Stallman.
- The Digital Imprimatur: How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle (http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/)