A photo gallery from my trip to Comdex can be seen here.

I arrived at Comdex this year after visiting my mother and sister in North Carolina. The most memorable moment on that leg of the journey came when I visited the CompUSA store in Greensboro. No, it wasn't anything at the store that excited me. It was the banner hanging from one of the chain motels by the Interstate: "Free high speed Internet!"

This sign raised a persistent question I took with me to Comdex: What does it mean for the rest of the world when they're giving away broadband in North Carolina motels? Or, more briefly, Will freedom win?

My hotel in Las Vegas was the new Aladdin, which is huge and theme-y; they all are now. The room was nice, especially for the $79/night price. The location was relatively convenient, next to Paris and across the street from Bellagio on the Strip. It had broadband in the room, though it wasn't free. It gave you a choice between spending $9.95/day to use the dumb terminal with embedded Windows or spending $9.95 to jack your laptop into the Ethernet outlet. The two methods were charged separately, for some reason.

The Windows terminal didn't work. Both the complicated instructions and a call to the hotel's tech support folks made it clear that failure was the norm. The tech support guy advised me to ignore the box option and jack my laptop into the system. (Which I was going to do anyway, but I needed to see just how bad this mother was.)

[Hey, looking for a nice business? Sell dumb and reliable Linux internet terminals to big hotels in Vegas. Most, I'm told, don't have them. And new hotels open there all the time. The next (no kidding) may be the 10,000-room Moon Resort & Casino. (Given Nevada's lunar-like landscape, it kind of makes sense.)]

As I said in my first show report, this year Comdex was mostly a Microsoft show--a place where the company and its most compliant hardware OEMs could showcase the new Tablet PC. But in a larger sense, it also was an arena where marketing fought markets, where the hares of intellectual property raced the tortoises of internet protocol, where those that want to own the world confronted those that want to make a world that can't be owned.

As in the hare vs. tortoise contest, most of the attention focused on the showoffs. Bill Gates gave the opening keynote on Sunday night; Carly Fiorina followed the next morning. Both demonstrated Microsoft's new Tablet PC. The only other keynote attracting much attention was an hour-long attack on "digital piracy" by Peter Chernin, the President & CEO of News Corp. and Chairman & CEO of Fox Group. The title of his speech was "The Problem with Stealing". Comdex promoted the speech this way:

That call to join the Dark Side was substantiated when George Lucas himself showed up on stage to support Chernin and his arguments.

Declan McCullagh has a transcription of Chernin's speech. Jonathan Peterson, at Way.nu, rebuts the speech with an annotated version of the same transcription. Here's Chernin:

And here's Peterson's response:

Chernin continues:

Peterson responds by citing another Net-savvy source:

That was more or less the tone of the Great Debate that followed the keynote. Titled "The Gold Rush for Intellectual Property: Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley", it lined up three entertainment industry executives against free software guru Richard M. Stallman and John Perry Barlow, the EFF cofounder and self-described "cognitive dissident" whose own acquaintance with intellectual property derives largely from having served as lyricist for the Grateful Dead.

The topic was hot to begin with, but it was quickly raised past the boiling point when RMS jumped in. The man would not be silenced--or even held to the debate's protocols. At one point M. Scott Dinsdale, the Executive VP of Digital Strategy for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), turned to Richard (sitting to his left) and yelled "Will you SHUT UP?" Richard ignored him.

The moderator, Eric Lundquist, Editor in Chief of eWeek, opened the debate by giving the first turn to Richard. He opened by explaining that "intellectual property" was a deceptive catch-all label that included patent, copyright and other topics that need to be pulled apart and discussed on their own terms. He then added that this discussion was properly isolated to copyright. Over the course of the exchange that followed, Richard blamed the entertainment industry for overly narrow interpretations of copyright law, for leading Congress to expansions of copyright law and for creating a system that fails to compensate most of the artists it represents--in other words, for behaving like the controlling entities they have been for many decades. "For the marketplace to do anything meaningful, it must be a free market. Not one in which media companies control the marketplace."

When Ted Cohen, Vice President of Digital Development and Distribution with EMI, said his company "believes in making music available at a reasonable price, with reasonable rights for reasonable use", and that he simply wants to find a way for artists and record companies to continue making money, Richard came back with a long rebuttal accusing record companies of cheating both artists and customers. He also called peer-to-peer sharing of files a form of "civil disobedience", and he recommended that artists bypass their industry and deal directly with their own marketplace.

Jonathan Potter, Executive Director of the Digital Media Association (DiMA), admitted the industry has not kept pace with technology. He also seemed to have little regard for the record industry's preference for attack politics rather than a constructive approach to intermediating between the "two core constituencies" in the market, artists and consumers. If the record companies couldn't help, he said, they should "get out of the way".

Scott Dinsdale also said he thought the same two constituencies should find ways to work together, and he stressed the importance of "choice" by all parties. New technologies limiting choice, he said, were "wrong and pretentious". He also said the industry's old distribution system, which sells plastic discs containing "two songs you like and ten songs you don't" through retail outlets, was a doomed one.

John Perry Barlow took issue with the term "consumer", which everybody on the entertainment industry side of the argument constantly used. He also took issue with the term content. "I didn't start hearing about 'content' until the container business started going away", he said.

He also lamented the industry's success at lobbying both Congress and the largest technology manufacturers to not only require digital rights management (DRM) but to embed DRM schemes in future equipment--including PCs and their operating systems. He said both Intel and Microsoft are already moving ahead with exactly those plans, with or without regulatory encouragement. "I see them changing the matrix of the Internet to a model that's based on surveillance and control. That is in the long term advantage of those who want to control and surveil." He also expressed some disappointment that his own originally optimistic views about the ungovernable nature of cyberspace have failed to prevail against an industry that's hellbent to regulate it.

Potter and Cohen both tried to offer upbeat scenarios. Potter, for example, gave the record industry credit for finally embracing the idea of on-line music distribution and said he expected the marketplace to sort stuff out eventually.

RMS wasn't buying it. In one of the heated exchanges that followed, he called Potter a "troll". He also loudly instructed Cohen to call Linux by its "proper name". Dinsdale finally ceased trying to contribute, sandwiched as he was between Barlow and the irrepressible RMS.

Afterwards I had a brief conversation with John Perry Barlow. He said one of his biggest concerns was Intel's new LaGrande technology, which creates a way to embed supply-controlled DRM in what will likely become more than 90% of the world's computers. "It's already well underway", he said.

At the Intel Developers Forum on September 9, Paul Otellini, Intel's President and COO, explained what LaGrande is all about:

In "Intel - Another 432?", David Reed, one of the Internet's primary architects, compared LaGrande to the failed 432 microprocessor. It tried to embed a software idea--object oriented programming--in hardware:

Barlow is no less aware of the pitfalls for efforts like LaGrande, but he's still rather pessimistic for a basically optimistic guy. Worse, he suspects the leading companies in our own industry really aren't on our side either. He told me one of his (and our) biggest mistakes in recent years has been underestimating the Net-hostile resolve of the entertainment industry, with its armies of lawyers and enormous clout. He now believes Congress won't take technologists seriously until they organize themselves and "take out" one of Hollywood's elected lackeys in an upcoming election.

Even though we already know pretty much where Microsoft stands, it's helpful to read what Infoworld's Paul Roberts reports in "Comdex Discussions Focussed on Digital Rights":

Taking to heart what David Reed says about simplicity and about limiting complexity in the least elastic parts of the Network, it seems AMD and Linux will have an advantage in what they don't include, as well as in what they do.

There is nothing Intel or Microsoft can do to limit the market's ability to kick their tires. It's too late for that. Customers have too much access to information and too much power to inform each other.

It was interesting to me that Barlow and Stallman were the only panelists in the Debate who not only had laptops in front of them on stage but used them as resources in preparing their responses. They looked, quite simply, far more evolved.

Markets are naturally resourceful. In the long run, freedoms will outsell restrictions, no matter how embedded those restrictions may be. But unless we inform and organize our markets about what Hollywood is up to, that run will be a lot longer than we'd like.

Doc Searls is senior editor of Linux Journal.