The Coming War on General Computation (2011)

Cory Doctorow's 2011 speech at the Chaos Communication Congress argues that the real issue facing society is not copyright, but the future of general-purpose computers and how they will be controlled. He traces how copyright battles and digital rights management (DRM) technologies emerged as responses to easily duplicated software, using these conflicts as a lens to understand larger struggles over who controls computing technology. Doctorow warns that the lessons from copyright wars foreshadow coming battles over the destiny of general-purpose computers themselves.