Having finished the manuscript for his next novel, Zero History, William Gibson is taking a break from fiction by answering a wide-ranging set of questions from the readers on his blog. His answers are really good and interesting.

"The "Wellington Declaration" says that the world copyright treaties shouldn't be conducted behind closed doors in smoke-filled rooms, but rather in the full light of public participation at the United Nations, where copyright treaties are customarily made. The UN admits non-governmental organizations, journalists, and representatives from poor countries, while ACTA is only open to rich countries and lobbyists from powerful corporations.

The Declaration says that copyright treaties should preserve the flexibility to make unauthorised use for purposes consistent with the public interest, from criticism to education; it says that privacy should be protected in copyright law, rejecting the principle that we should all be spied upon in case we are infringing on copyright; that web-hosts and search engines should be protected from liability rather than charged with policing their users; that DRM is not part of copyright and shouldn't be in a copyright treaty; that Internet access is a human right and that disconnection from the net for accusations of infringement is disproportionate and unjust; and that damages for infringement should be reasonable. It asks that criminal sanctions for copyright be reserved for genuinely criminal acts, non casual sharing.

In short, the Wellington Declaration says a bunch of extremely sensible things that, if implemented, would give us a much better world. "

"The place to start is to consider IT’s role in the grand scheme of things. If we sidestep the idea that everything is going to the cloud, and consider a more realistic scenario whereby a business may own and operate a certain set of core services (processes with a degree of privacy / IP, customer data, etc) and look to outsource their services (certain software apps, server/storage capacity etc), it’s relatively easy to see an emerging role for IT as an orchestrator, rather than sole custodian.

You could argue that this is what many IT departments already do today and indeed, have been doing for a long time. Outsourced services were around long before 'the cloud' and will be around long after we stop using the term. Arguably the only thing that has really changed is some of the underlying technology and the packaging, allowing service providers and consumers more flexibility and choice."