'The Cloud as Enclosure 3.0' - David Lametti: CIPIL Seminar
Channel: Cambridge Law Faculty
Date: 2013-10-16

David Lametti, Associate Professor of Law, McGill University, a member of the Institute of Comparative Law, and of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy (CIPP), gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "The Cloud as Enclosure 3.0" on Thursday 24th May 2012 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law). This was the first of two presentations. 

The Cloud: it is a moniker that conjures images of fluffy white and weightless clouds in the sky appearing to float freely and boundlessly across an endless sea of celeste. But is the digital Cloud so benign? That is, does the digital Cloud float as freely, as the metaphor suggests, or are there in fact fences that limit movement in the digital sky? And how strong are the digital winds pushing the clouds around? And if these limits in cloud space are in fact real, do they represent other, even more serious consequences to the push for ever more digital capacity into the digital sky? Might the clouds in fact be storm clouds in the offing? 

In reality, the picture coheres more with the latter, negative imagery. I propose that in fact we may be witnessing another round of "enclosure" in Cloud space, a round of enclosure that might have serious deleterious effects on what we have come to expect in the digital age: autonomy, exchange, spontaneity and creativity, and all at a lightning pace. It has truly been the time of "the wealth of networks". The advancing Cloud may also have a negative impact on the very manner in which users interact or "interface" with the net, with rapidly decreasing relative power. This change may be, in the words of internet guru and popular author Cory Doctorow, part of a "war on general purpose computing". 

For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk