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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.

-Esther Dyson

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Well, Take The Evolution

Esther Dyson

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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.

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I Think We Really Made A Mistake In Separating The Internet From Capitalism In A Certain Way That Is Bad For Our Country.

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From The Business Point Of View—not To Overstate It—intellectual Property Is Dead; Long Live Intellectual Process. Long Live Service; Long Live Performance.

I Believe In Markets Doing What They Do Well, Which Is To Develop Technology, And Letting Citizens Do What They Ideally Do Well, Which Is To Set Policy.

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.

When I Was A Young Student, I Thought Grow-ups Would Come And Make Things Work. Now I Realize That Grown-ups Are Just Kids With Wrinkles.

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.

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Owning The Intellectual Property Is Like Owning Land: You Need To Keep Investing In It Again And Again To Get A Payoff; You Can't Simply Sit Back And Collect Rent.

It Looks Simple To Come Up With A Tablet That Works, But It Is Not, ... In Order To Have The Power And Portability You Need, You Need Power. The Screen Is The Part Of The Device That Uses The Most Power.

Always Make New Mistakes.

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.

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Listening To Others

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.

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