Will Copyright Laws Change due to Web 3.0 and data clouds???

This was a question I received recently and here is my response:

Regarding your question -- I think the copyright laws at both the U.S. and International level resist change - and if web 3.0 is developing as you say, I predict attempts will be made to stop it via the law - that is, there's lots of stakeholders with great economic interest in controlling information, and until the balance of stakeholders shifts from those who want to lock up information, to those who don't - I think the law will work very hard to maintain the status quo. For example, the DMCA was enacted in order to prevent folks from using technology to gain content -- so the technology use itself was blocked with a law.

If economic stakeholders who control the technology that encourages sharing of information gain the upper hand, then the laws might change. Generally, the law comes down on the side of whoever has the most money. I know this sounds cynical, but the US Sony case, back in
the 1980's held that taping TV shows on a VCR was "fair use." Yet in the last couple years, music file sharing and copying has been deemed illegal - not fair use. Back in the 1980's -- Sony and the VCR manufacturers had the economic upper hand. Nowadays, it is the music publishers, producers, and distributors that have the upper hand, not the distributors of filesharing software.

However, all that said, I think this web 3.0 you mention with change the culture the same way web 2.0 is changing it. "Remix" and transparency have become norms in so many other areas of life other than on the web. For example, our new employment contract at LCC posits administration and faculty on equal footing - wants to erase the top down culture we have traditionally had here -- this reminds me of folksonomy - of user participatory web activities, or wikipedia -- places were all can participate. I don't know if I said this very well, but web 2.0 is creating new ways of thinking that are reflected in places outside the WWW. It's changing the way we think. You have to think back to Walter Ong's argument about how writing re-structures consciousness, and then say, not so much how computers re-structure
consciousness, but how networked computers do.

So, the bigger question will be how will web 3.0 change our culture. First the culture has to change, then the laws change. Mostly but not always it is like this. [Not sure if this is true?? But maybe it is -- afterall, while Brown v. Board of Education changed things on the surface -- because some cultural shifts have not taken place, other changes that were anticipated did not take place -- you can't just make a law and expect people to blindly obey it - that's where agency comes in -- the agency of the law and the agency of the people].

That was one hellava long winded answer.