From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Sun, 3 Apr 94 23:44:12 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re:  Cyberspace, Crypto Anarchy, and Pushing Limits
Message-ID: <199404040645.XAA04171@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


A thought-provoking essay as usual from Tim.  However, I see a contradiction
between:
> * Crypto means access to "regions" can be controlled by "owners":
> 
> - "my house, my rules" enforced locally, without central State
> authority

and:
> * Physical location of cyberspace locations will be increasingly hard
> to pin down. A vast "labyrinth of rooms and corridors" might be
> physically instantiated on a computer in Malaysia, while a "virtual
> gambling hall" is being run via cryptographic cutouts (remailers) from
> someone's bedroom in Provo, Utah.

The problem I have is that it is not clear that cyberspace is a space,
that one can identify regions which have boundaries, and which can be
patrolled by owners.  These physical, 2-D and 3-D concepts do not map well
to cyberspace.  Cyberspace is more of a mental conception, a meeting of
the minds.  It's not clear that it can be owned.

For a concrete example, who owns the Cypherpunks list?  Tim and Eric started
it, Eric keeps the software working, and John Gilmore supplies the machine,
as I understand it (apologies if I am leaving someone out).  Do they own
the list?  What about the role of the contributors?  Aren't they the ones
who give the list value?  (Granted, Tim, Eric and John have been some of the
best contributors, but that is separate from their role, if any, as owners
of the list.)

Suppose, as Tim implies, that the list someday evolved to be some kind of
virtual list, hosted on a flexible network of machines around the globe.
Who would the owners be then?  I would suggest that there would not nec-
essarily be any.  The list would be a voluntary meeting place for people who
had certain interests.  Its existance would be essentially defined by the
commonality of that interest.  It exists not in a cyberspace thought of as
machines on a net of wires and fiber, but in a conceptual space that
transcends the physical machines which support it.

The issue of the ownership of cyberspace has similarities more to the
ownership of intellectual property than of houses and roads and other
physical objects, IMO.  And the problems which arise when you try to
fence off part of intellectual property space will also be a part of
attempts to own cyberspace.

Just another view -
Hal