I spend weekends, whenever possible, at our home in the rural County of Dorset.  The nearby town of Yeovil does not have a lot going for it but it does have a very successful football team which, over recent years, has enjoyed great success moving up the leagues and next weekend will be playing at the breathtaking new Wembley Stadium against BlackpooI for the right to move up to the Champions League - just behind the Premier League.  Quite something for this small Somerset town!

My reason for mentioning this is an item of recent news.  The Premier League is apparently about to sue video-sharing site YouTube for alleged copyright infringement.  The football organisation claims YouTube has "knowingly misappropriated" its intellectual property by encouraging footage to be viewed on its site.  Thankfully, YouTube has denied the claims, saying the suit threatens the internet.  Thank goodness YouTube can afford some good lawyers as this is clearly going to run and run.  The Premier League lawsuit states,  "The Defendants which own and operate YouTube have knowingly misappropriated and exploited this valuable property for their own gain without payment or licence to the owners of the intellectual property".

In my mind this raises some very interesting and important issues.  Through the collective Premier League, the great individual football teams of England such as Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool may well have 'sold the television' rights to a major broadcast company, but where does this leave them with that oh so important constituency, their supporters?  Are these clubs going to mount armies of inspectors on the gates of the stadiums each Saturday to confiscate the matchbox-sized, WiFi-enabled camcorder which the digitally connected sons of the nation will soon be taking into the game so as to provide the world with a real-time video blog of some aspect of their favourite team's performance?  I think not!  This notion that more and more of what goes on in the world can be legally protected, packaged and paid for before anyone's eyes are free to view it, seems increasingly absurd in this digital age of ubiquitous connectivity.  Maybe I should sell the exclusive audio/visual right to "Malcolm Matson" to some third party and then litigate any CCTV or tourist camera that happens to snap me in the viewfinder?   In this new age, is there really any difference between what I see with the optic disk at the rear if my eye and what I see with the SD Memory Card in my Nokia phone?   (Incidentally, I heard the other day someone claim that it took Nokia just 3 years to become the world's largest camera manufacturer!  An astonishing example of disruptive technology at play).

Next month, Al Gore's new book is about to be published, entitled, "The Assault on Reason" and I think it may have something to say about this broad topic if the extracts that have already been published are anything to go by.   Critiquing the way he believes American democracy, "...is in danger of being hollowed out" as a result of the "systemic decay of the public forum" which is resulting in a highly, "manipulative conversation about our future", Al Gore refers to the potential role and impact of the Internet.  He writes, "Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.

The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as Lincoln put it, "even we here"—are collectively still the key to the survival of America's democracy."

I can't say I am an unqualified supporter of the man who was once the next President of the USA, although I cannot help feeling that what he has done for the challenge of climate change through his video presentation, "An Inconvenient Truth" could well be done for "opening minds to open networks".  But if I get tickets to Wenbley Stadium to see Yeovil beat Blackpool, I will keep an eye open for the exciting moments, and if I have my Nokia to hand - share them with the rest of the world over what I hope will still be an Internet that is 'open and accessible to all citizens.'