We live in the age of machines, with everything from smart phones to smart refrigerators constantly chattering behind the scenes, and making decisions which affect us. This raises challenging questions about machine intelligence and decision-making, and about personal autonomy and liberty.
The immediate test case for this problem is captured in the self-driving car.
The former landmark legislation in copyright law was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which became effective in 1998. And as important as the DMCA has been for the development of the internet, the wheels are in motion for the passage of a new generation of copyright law.
What this means is that the time to have a conversation about what the future of American copyright law should look like is right now. There are powerful forces who want a more powerful regime of controlling information on the internet, such as creating a “notice and staydown” regime to replace the DMCA’s “notice and takedown” provisions. But in a world with internet, it is time to start thinking with a different set of tools than the old copyright adages which led to the development of the powerful industries of today.
Change is afoot, and it is vital that we adapt our legislation to take full advantage, rather than merely to safeguard old industries who may be displaced by that change.
In 2008, the Bitcoin paper unleashed a new idea on the world which, in hindsight, looks stupendously obvious, and in retrospect it seems surprising that nobody thought of it earlier. But more than the core concept behind a blockchain or a crypto asset, there is a fundamentally different underlying philosophy of the meaning of property being contemplated by decentralization.
The Machine Ethic 