The Madrid Summit was outside my usual realm of intellectual property law, but the change served to remind me that while the copyfight is but a small part of the picture, the principles we're fighting for are more than music.

The conference logo, pictured, was a circled "D", often used in the same place a (TM) or (R) would indicate trademark status. Since it's not quite so easy to instill and protect democracy as to register a trademark, all of us who care about democracy face a big task.

At least a part of that task is communication -- communicating with other democratic citizens and with other people seeking democracy. The Internet is not a panacea; none of us is naive enough to assert that. It is, however, a powerful medium for two-way communication and that communication can promote human rights (including by reporting on abuses), support understanding of democratic alternatives to terror, and help communities to make their own, non-terror choices. I don't think it's stretching too far to say that protecting against abuses of privacy, copyright or trademark online strengthens these tools of democracy.

Thanks especially to Martín Varsavsky, Joi Ito, and Marko Ahtisaari for making this happen and for inviting me to participate.

On the anniversary of the Atocha bombing, we met in the train station for the Atocha Workshop to discuss and debate creative approaches to terrorism. Debate was lively, with a strong subtext of concern that the U.S. response to terrorism is exacerbating the problem. Also helpful, the whole workshop was reported by blog.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan spoke with a committment to human rights I wish I saw reflected by U.S. leaders. "Terrorism is in itself a direct attack on human rights and the rule of law. If we sacrifice them in our response, we are handing a victory to the terrorists." (full speech). Along with denying terrorists their physical means of attack, the Secretary-General would deny them much of their psychological weaponry by refusing, as a society, to overreact by cutting back on the rights of citizens. He also spoke about helping states to develop strong infrastructures, including education, to resist teh internal growth of terrorism.

I was encouraged by the discussion of our working group at the Safe Democracy summit. Although we're still refining the statement, the group agreed relatively quickly that the open Internet was a tool of democracy, and that broad restrictions in the name of stopping terrorists from using the Net, such as restrictions on anonymity and privacy, would be counterproductive by reducing the Net's democratic uses. That response is both technical and policy: We cannot stop determined terrorists from being anonymous on the Internet, so we should not try in ways that stop the human rights activists from doing so.

We must not let policy be driven by fear of terrorism, or as FDR put it, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." See also Joi Ito, David Weinberger, Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman and others.