Last night, I did a panel on copyright (and more specifically, on bad copyright laws like the DMCA) at BayCon. I didn't find out until I got there that they'd invited Harlan Ellison to the panel as well. As a result, the talk ended up consisting mostly of Harlan bellowing obscenities and threats of physical violence, which may have been vastly entertaining, but left me feeling like a lot of important information and useful debate got drowned out by the histrionics. Harlan loathes the Internet (though he says he doesn't, I have the message he had Joe Straczinsky send to my Clarion class through GEnie, in which he basically calls us idiots for engaging in something as foolish at networked communication) and is proudly ignorant of its workings, features and underpinnings.
Nevertheless, he considers himself expert enough to go and say outlandish things ("My crew of leet hackers have the foolproof means to take down and Website in five minutes, bam!" "We don't need Brewster Kahle to preserve posterity, we have librarians!" "The EFF is only farting into the wind: It has a moral obligation to hunt down pirates and bring them to justice!" "There is no posterity. Take $FAMOUS_TWENTIES_AUTHOR, he is utterly forgotten today.")
It was rather tiresome, but thanks to Danny O'Brien of NTK and his 802.11-equipped laptop, we were able to channel the Internet into (and out of) the room quite a bit. If Harlan had been there to hear anyone else (rather than reinforce his superstitions), it would have been even more interesting, as, for example, Danny googled $FAMOUS_TWENTIES_AUTHOR and he and his wife Quinn began to recite all the various and useful ways in which the Internet has preserved him for posterity. Danny was on the #infoanarchy IRC channel, too, stenographing and discussing the panel; the chatter's pretty funny and may give you a sense of what we got instead of a panel.
