The Digital Imprimatur
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Digital Imprimatur is a term widely associated with John Walker, due to his article of the same name written in 2003. In the Roman Catholic Church, an imprimatur is a censor's official declaration that a work is free from doctrinal or moral error, but Walker uses the term "digital imprimatur" to describe a system of internet censorship.
John Walker argues in his article The Digital Imprimatur: How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle, that there is increasingly a crackdown on the ability for internet users to voice their ideas, as well as an upcoming official state of internet censorship on the horizon. Walker claims that the most likely candidate to usher in the digital imprimatur is digital rights management, or DRM.
Similar scenarios have been predicted by others, including Richard Stallman, in his article and essay The Right to Read.
Other people predict the establishment of a dynamic equilibrium between repressive official and commercial and more free but in some cases illegal technologies, resulting in the emergence of darknets and anonymous P2P systems, together with alternative networking systems (including but not limited to sneakernets and both fixed and ad-hoc wireless mesh networks), and vivid underground culture and black market centered on them, in accordance with the iron law of prohibition.
Walkers' prediction of micropayment systems being used on newspaper websites to supplement their income has been suggested by Google as noted by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
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