Jonathan L. Zittrain (Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government; Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Berkman Center for Internet & Society; Harvard University - Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)) has posted John Perry Barlow's Call for Persuasion over Power (Dke Law & Technology Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
John Perry Barlow's insights were inseparable from his lyrical way of conveying them. Barlow's expression mates joy and canniness, and one of his talents in writing about new technologies was to flip our conception of the status quo in order to correct it. In 1994, the conventional sense was that the Internet and its champions were heedlessly upsetting a longstanding set of relationships and legal entitlements, with copyright as a signal example. And while that was superficially true, it wasn't the whole story. This brief essay examines the legacy of Barlow's work from the vantage point of today's markedly different digital world.