Howard Rheingold addressing Stanford Communication dept. graduates:

To those engaged in cultural production: thanks to your education, I don’t have to detail what I mean about the assault on your right to innovate. The extension of copyright law at the expense of the public domain and the tradition of using culture to create culture. The use of digital rights management to protect old businesses from new means of expression. The instantiation of tight surveillance and control of innovation in the “trusted computing” technologies that are being planned for the next generations of chips and PCs. The regulation of the electromagnetic spectrum according to the laws of the 1920s and the wishes of the incumbent license holders. All these regulatory battles are not so much about protecting property as they are about controlling innovation.

The whole transcript is available on Smartmobs, Howard’s blog. Howard also spoke in April at a panel in UC Berkeley – here’s the webcast of the panel, by the Berkeley Journalism department. And here’s the MP3 recording, courtesy of Dave Winer.