Yesterday I managed to install the Sempedia reader on my wife’s cell phone. It’s amazing and at the same time frightening to see how concepts from digtal space (unique identification of physical objects through Semapedia tags) are entering physical space while at the same time people are trying to transfer concepts from logical space (ownership of content through DRM) into digital space.

Now that devices, services and networks are finally independent, the second phase of Convergence will start: physical space, logical space and digital space will become dependent on each other. Finally it will not make anymore much sense to distinguish between the different spaces – legal ownership (a concept from logical space) will imply that physical objects are protected by machine readable licenses pointing to trusted authorities in digital space. A very straightforward DRM application – let’s call it ‘Open Ownership’ using two-dimensional barcodes could be to connect street art with a tag pointing to a Creative Commons license.