From the business point of view—not to overstate it—intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.
Cyberspace still exists at the pleasure of the real world.
I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works - I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the integrity of the work, the attribution, that kind of stuff.
I think I have the right to know what Steve Forbes paid in taxes - I don't think there should be a law. I think there should be a presumption. I wouldn't vote for a guy who wouldn't reveal what he paid in taxes. That kind of thing.
New landscape of personal media has given us a vaster wasteland of cyberspace. But, luckily for us, there's some really wonderful stuff in it. And if history is any guide, as the media matures, the quality will continue to go up.
Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.
People have to understand that they can reject technology. They can turn off their cell phone. They can stop looking at their e-mail. It's there if they want it. It's not being forced on them.
The Net is not a single home. Rather, it's an environment where thousands of small homes and communities can form and define and design themselves.
Don't leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you're doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don't think about technology first.
I had a lot of successes, but what really made me fearless was my complete failure at Zidd-Davis. Once you've lived through that, you know you can survive, and you're not as scared... There's nothing to build confidence like real achievement, but also like real failure.
I would like to see us shake-in, instead of a shakeout, in the sense that it's true that there's a lot of junk online, and we have to filter it and so forth.
We had made a - sort of a national decision that we wanted to be this intellectual property country, where we would have things manufactured in China, but we would do the design, we would do the creative stuff.And now what we have done is, we have forgotten that that's what we wanted, and we're making the intellectual stuff more and more free. And, so, we're sort of left with less and less.
I think we really made a mistake in separating the Internet from capitalism in a certain way that is bad for our country.
The great thing is, Internet allows you to create your own job, not just look for jobs other people are going to give you. And that, combined with the American spirit, I think, is going to help us come out of the recession faster than other countries. And I think it's going to help Africa come out of, you know, a century of slump.
It's not that you have jobs on the Internet, but the Internet makes it possible for more people to build their own jobs. What it does is, it erodes the power of institutions. It used to be you needed an institution to have a job. But, if you look at the three of us on this show, I don't think any of us is really employed by an institution. We run our own lives.
The Internet is an incredible business tool. First of all, the Internet/the cell phone - the cell phone is just another way to get at it - I think is having a huge impact in Africa most particularly, where it enables people - suddenly, they know crop prices. They can communicate. It makes their lives more efficient.
People still have a choice, but, if they find it all too confusing, or they just want someone else to make a choice for them, there's a default that works pretty well. That's this concept of libertarian paternalism. And it's handy.
And the Russians certainly don't have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she's a crook. And that's me, the nice American. The assumption that you can't make money honestly is a killer.
Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers' rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody - government stay away.
There's almost no way of doing importing honestly, because if you do you're at such a disadvantage competitively. So people spend huge amounts of effort getting around stupid laws and not paying taxes.
Since I became chairman, I've tried to turn EFF into civil liberties and responsibilities.
Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it's the system - there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it's a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.
In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.
I've seen disgusting excess in business, and I've seen disgusting excess in Washington. But at the same time, I've certainly learned that Washington matters and that you can't ignore it, especially when you get into telecom.
The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.
