Online Communites are embedded and intimately impacted by IPR. Currently as soon as text is written and sent via the Internet, as soon as a song or video is remixed, as soon as one tries to move a song from an Ipod to another appliance, IPR are used in the form of copyright, patents, Digital Rights Management, Broadcast Flag and other mechanism to control and restrict consumers.

Ultimately, there are corporate interests - Telecommunication, Motion Picture and Music giants along with dominant pharmaceutical and publishing conglomerates - fighting to maintain the status quo. They believe in stricter and stricter forms of IPR and Set Top Box control.

Then, there are Civil Society activists from around the first and third world who put a break to such efforts with incredible success at the international level like the Access to Knowledge treaty, which has stopped the United States' trade representatives' effort to enact the US-version of IPR at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). These efforts have crossed over to become broad-based initiatives in foreign countries that truly suffer from pro-Western country IPR like Brazil, Argentina, South African and South Korea.

In the US, the fight has been led by CPTech and people like Cory Doctorow. It's an interesting opportunity for APOC to broaden the base given the popularity of "Remix" culture with the hip-hop world and LA being the ent. "Hollywood" capital and all. When I interviewed Cory about his drafting part of the A2K, DRM-section of the treaty, he revealed to me how they were specifically tailoring the language to TREATY VOTERS, not the democratic base. This strategic mis-step is hopefully something that KEI is correcting with their re-organization (from CPTech to KEI), but we'll see. Either way, given our position in Los Angeles, this creates interesting opportunities for us.