As a rights-oriented libertarian I've pretty much pigeonholed this phenomenon as a bad thing - part of a broader trend towards decreasing accountability in governance (as well as undermining the rusty old rights paradigm). Already we have legislation where all the real decisions get made by administrative agencies when they draft their administrative rules, and increasingly policy is being determined by transnational bodies like the WTO and the World Bank. I've seen it as a new way for the stealth enactment of policy on the national level - the politicians can say that they didn't put the handgun industry out of business...it was those pesky lawsuits.
I don't have a link for it, but the Europeans are beginning to squawk about the NSA's "Echelon" program. There was also a "Jam Echelon" day organized on the Net a few weeks ago (people were supposed to put red-flagged keywords into their e-mail to clog up the NSA computers). So it would seem that public awareness and ire about the government monitoring of cyberspace is growing.
Open Source Movement:
Open Source methodologies are being applied beyond computing.
The only thing is, the contracts that form the basis of Open Source projects have never really had a strict test in a court of law. There are also other questions in determining when open source contracts have been violated. You aren't supposed to use take open source products and then use them in a proprietary product, but it's a pretty murky line. Can you modify an implementation, or use an open source idea as inspiration for a proprietary product? If open source gets more popular as a solution beyond the world of computing, the courts might have to deal with a whole range of issues.
Cult like Corporations:
In a previous posting I mentioned Built to Last - the book about the visionary companies. One thing what interested me was how one of their criteria for what makes a visionary company was that the workforce developed a mildly cult like attachment to the company. It would seem that companies are becoming more sophisticated in attempting to transform the belief systems of their employees to improve corporate productivity - creating a new issue to litigate in the courts.
This link is a bit stale, but is still a great overview of the phenomenon
Written by Mark Justman Copyright 1999 Posted 12/31/99 http://go.to/futureplex
