Is it any wonder that the web, with its ability to move, organize and reproduce information without control or oversight, has precipitated another crisis? Course not.

What is a wonder is that any number of otherwise bright and well-meaning lawmakers, geeks and businesspeople are behaving as though the proper response to a collision between copyright and technology is limits on technology -- imagine if recorded music had been “limited” to ensure that it didn’t disrupt the sheet-music business! (It almost was -- and recorded music was only rescued through a Hail Mary act of Congress that legitimized piano rolls in 1908)

Today, the notion that technology should “compromise” with rights-holders is a tremendous threat to the open Web. The recording industry is indiscriminately abusing copyright law to sue 70,000 American file-sharers into submission. The Hollywood companies are getting the FCC to regulate the basic components of the PC.

Worse still, the UN is working its way through a “Broadcast Treaty” that could make “unapproved” Web-browsers illegal in every country in the world with the wherewithal to provide reliable connectivity and power.

Find out what’s being done to your Internet and how you can help save it. The EFF has been saving the Internet for 14 years, winning the right of Americans to use crypto, to not have their email snooped on without a warrant, and the right of P2P developers to develop general-purpose file-sharing tools. Now we face out biggest fight yet -- and we need your help.

Presenter’s Bio:
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a staffer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a member-supported nonprofit group that works to uphold civil liberties interests in technology law, standards, treaties, and policy. He is EFF’s delegate to WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, worked on the US Broadcast Flag and OASIS XrML efforts, and is moving to London this spring to work on EU IPR and DVB efforts. He will also be working for Creative Commons UK on ambitious open licensing schemes involving large institutional rights-holders.

Doctorow is also a well-known science fiction writer and technology journalist, who won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugos and released his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, under a Creative Commons license simultaneous with the commercial hardcopy book release. His next novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, will be released under the same terms, as was his short-story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More. He is a frequent contributor to Wired Magazine, Business 2.0 and other publishers, and co-edits the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net).