From "Radical Extremism" to "Balanced Copyright" : Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda

Chapter Nine

Digital Locks and the Automation of Virtue
Ian Kerr

Of all the “lock and key” narratives in the western cannon, I think my favorite is the legend of the Gordian knot. Midas, the son of King Gordius, intricately tied the famous knot. It was initially fabricated as a physical lock. Woven in unfathomable complexity, the knot fastened his father’s famous ox-cart to a wooden post. As the Greek historian Plutarch de- scribed it, Midas tethered the ox-cart, “fastened to its yoke by the bark of the cornel-tree . . . the fastenings so elaborately intertwined and coiled upon one another that their ends were hidden.” Secured by the knot, Mi- das intended the cart to remain locked within the palace compound of the former kings of Phrygia at Gordium as an enduring legacy of his family’s rule. However, due to a prophecy of the oracle of Telmissus, the knot be- came known not so much for what it prevented as for what it would one day permit. Indeed, the multitudes that sought to disentangle it over the years never intended to steal the cart. Rather, they hoped to fulfill the oracle’s prophecy that, “was believed by all the barbarians, that the fates that decreed that the man who untied the knot was destined to become ruler of the whole world.”

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