John Perry Barlow used the eG8 to demolish IP monopolies claims. Other internet advocates backed up the critique of the repressive approach proposed by Sarkozy, see below.

Excerpt:

“Barlow was a late addition to a panel on intellectual property; his name wasn’t even included on the schedule. But he accepted the invitation even as colleagues begged him not to go and activists like Cory Doctorow turned down invitations to the event, which was seen as an industry/government cabal bent on regulating the ‘Net for its own ends.

Barlow made the most of his opportunity. On stage with the French culture minister and the heads of 20th Century Fox, Universal Music France, Bertelsmann, and a French publisher, he waited though 30 minutes of opening statements filled with comments like:

* “We do not believe that you can remove ‘content’ from the Internet, and if you do this, what is there left? Basically, the Internet then is a set of empty pieces and boxes.” (Bertelsmann)

* “When someone comes to you and says I need a few hundred million dollars to make a movie about 10 foot tall blue people on another planet, that’s not an easy decision to make. But if you do make that decision and it does turn out to be Avatar, then you’d like to be compensated.” (20th Century Fox; Avatar set the world box office record)

* “In France, there are still people who maintain their criticism of this [three strikes authority HADOPI], who view it as a repressive body, whereas in actual fact it creates momentum from a pedagogical standpoint.” (Minster of Culture)

When Barlow had a chance to speak, he expressed his own surprise at being on the panel, “because I don’t think I’m from the same planet, actually.” He then proceeded to trash the foundational assumptions of everyone who had just spoken.

I may be one of very few people in this room who actually makes his living personally by creating what these gentlemen are pleased to call “intellectual property.” I don’t regard my expression as a form of property. Property is something that can be taken from me. If I don’t have it, somebody else does.

Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet, which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost.

In Barlow’s view, the e-G8 has been about “imposing the standards of some business practices and institutional power centers that come from another era on the future, whether they are actually productive of new ideas or not.”

He added that he was more interested in talking about “incentivizing creativity by people who create things, and not large institutions who prey on them and have for years.”

Part of the audience, at least, loved it—to Barlow’s obvious surprise. “This is a different audience than I thought it was,” he said after some applause and scattered cheering.

This quickly awoke the somnambulant panel, especially when Barlow concluded by conflating copyright issues with free speech and attacked efforts to “own” that speech.”

Other internet advocates chimed in: (as summarized by Alex Howard )

“Over the course of the eG8, a succession of globally recognized authorities in Internet law and economies, including Harvard University professors Yochai Benkler and Lessig, publicly made it clear that there was not a consensus in the recommendations being sent to the G8.

Benkler acknowledged that President Sarkozy spoke eloquently but Benkler expressed concerns about Sarkozy’s emphasis on intellectual property. If one purpose is to come up with an output to the G8, said Benkler, then cutting people off the Net as a remedy for violations is a mistake. Benkler’s comments reflect the concerns of advocates who have emphasized the importance of protecting Internet platforms for expression and innovation.

Benkler highlighted one of the central conflicts of the conference, pitting existing global corporations against the disruptive force of online innovators. The conflict, he said, is between 20th-century content industries that try to capture value by putting it in containers, versus 21st-century companies that focus on capturing the flow.

“You can make the Internet safe for Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, or you can make it safe for the next Skype,” said Benkler “You have to choose.” Benkler noted that Skype, founded in Europe and recently acquired for billions of dollars by Microsoft, was a P2P program — a term sometimes associated with piracy.

“Technology will move faster than governments, so don’t legislate before you understand the consequences,” said Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google. “You want to tread lightly in regulating brand new industries. The trend is that incumbents will block new things … nobody who is a delegate here would want Internet growth to be slowed by some stupid rule.”

There are immense questions that will persists about how the Internet should be regulated. Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister (and potential head of the International Monetary Fund), observed that given the amount of e-commerce taking place online, some degree of regulation makes sense.

What was not in question was whether the Internet was a driver of economic activity, whether in autocratic states or market democracies. According to a new study on the Internet’s economic impact released by McKinsey and Company during the eG8, for every job lost from efficiencies and productivity gains caused by the Internet, 2.6 jobs have been created.

Citing Apple’s application store and iOS ecosystem, Schmidt noted “the development of these platforms is the way that great economic wealth is created in the world today.” It’s important for governments to do a hardcore analysis of barriers to entrepreneurship in their countries, he said, including building out broadband access to as many citizens as possible.

The power of online platforms lies in their generative nature, in terms of the innovation that they allow people to create, explained John Donahoe, CEO of eBay. “The real story of the Internet is not what the big platforms are doing — it’s what millions of people are able to do off of them,” he said. “An awful lot of innovation is being driven by young people who don’t know any better.’

Technology does have a bias, according to Schmidt: It empowers individuals. Whether it’s the nations that comprise the G8 or those in the developing world, governments are having trouble with the shift in power. Several attendees, many who had traveled from the United States, strongly questioned whether the Internet should be regulated in the ways that Sarkozy implied. The “value of internet is not just efficiency but also transparency,” tweeted Esther Dyson, “a much better regulator than government could ever be.”

The most public challenge to Sarkozy at the eG8 came when American journalism professor Jeff Jarvis stood up and asked him to take a “Hippocratic oath” for the Internet: first, do no harm. In response, the president of France said “of course,” but couched his reply in terms that address the need to protect security and privacy. “