Lots of bloggers covered the DigitalID World conference in Denver last week, posting live transcripts, notes, and reports from the front of what turned out to be a very exciting conference. However, Jon Udell’s post is the first one that really boils down the conference and extracts some interesting thoughts I could get my head around.
His essay this morning is a learned and imaginative discussion of the limits of “intellectual property” — and how sharing of information might actually generate more economic value than its protection. He also gives some serious thought to the notion that computers might not be very good at negotiating the fine gradations of sharing, secrecy, revelation, and concealment that human beings deal with every day. Udell quotes David Weinberger in conversation: “That’s the problem with DRM. Computers are too stupid to look the other way.”