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Peter Wayner On The Spread Of Information
The demonization of people who think for themselves continues. Here's a quote from Amy Harmon's piece from Sunday's New York Times examining what software like Napster means for the world. The article itself covers a wide variety of view points and suggests that there's little the law can do if the people don't believe that something is wrong. But it contains a certain amount of worrying and handwringing, courtesy of Esther Dyson:
"We're very much looking at a biological model of an epidemic," said Esther Dyson, publisher of the technology newsletter Release 1.0. "On the Internet, a product doesn't require a central host and it doesn't require central distribution, it just spreads. It's new in business. It's been going on a long time in viruses."
It may not be fair to judge the quote outside of the larger context of Dyson's thoughts, but it still possible to focus on the dangerous assumption that this age is much different from the ones that came before. Products without central hosts and distribution are not new in business. They're old in business. The centralized, one-corporation economy is what's new. In the past, there was competition. Everything was not run by central planners of big corporations.
Consider the food business. It used to be quite local. Small companies and local producers competed with each other. Farmers sold to whomever stopped by their stands. Stores bought from multiple farmers. Now the business section of the same Sunday edition reports that Coca-Cola is gradually squeezing out all competitors from stores in the South. Coke used to fight for the best placement, now they want everyone else off the shelf completely. Should we be surprised that Ben & Jerrys is now just another brand in a big company's portfolio?
Of course, there were plenty of other products that didn't require central distribution or a central host. Almost all of the devices produced in the past lived without reporting home every few seconds because it simply wasn't feasible. Guns produced in the East empowered virus-like settlers, homesteaders, 49ers, and everyone else to swarm over what became the western states. Cars spread just as effectively. People drove them where ever they pleased and fixed them when they broke down.
Books were printed, sold, shared, and loaned without strict copyright laws. In fact, unauthorized reprinting was common. Plus, once they left the store, the newer owner was free to use the book as he chose. The law specifically granted only to the copyright holder the right to extract money from the book, in the form of its first sale.
Even software spread quickly -- and in a virus-like manner -- before the Internet came along. Plenty of software was free before the 1980s, and shareware continued the trend after that. People swapped disks and gave to their friends. It was coming of the Internet that gave rise to the centralized archives of shareware and freeware.
Dyson's words were used to imply that people who think for themselves and do not check with some central host for permission are acting like viruses. It's pretty sad to hear that the free flow of people, capital, and information is something that's scary and bad.
That's when Farmer Jones (next door) realizes that ... hey, wait a minute ... there might be some money to be made here. So, he calls us over, and says, "Tell ya what, kids. I've got some new fruit here. $20 a head, all you can carry. Take it or leave it."
Some of us take him up on the offer. Clones of the new fruit invariably get passed around, and pretty soon, everyone gets tired of that, too. We come back to Farmer Jones...
A couple years later, he's President and CEO of Farmer Jones Novelty Fruit, incorporated.
Meanwhile, Farmer Fred wakes up one day and notices Farmer Jones' new fruit-funded ferrari. "Damn," he says, "I gotta get me some of that Fancy Fruit action..."
Farmer Fred pulls the tarp off his old freezer truck, and starts loading it with clones of Jones' newest products. He drives out to outlying areas, offering Farmer Fred's Fancy Fruit -- FRESH!
Other former farmers also start to get interested. Some of them go into competition with Jones, making custom fruit, trading seeds and rootstock with each other. Others go into competition with Fred.
Jones' revenues dip a little, but by this time, he's become a trusted name, and people like his new work. Reason enough to go to him instead of the competition, in most cases.
Fred just keeps on truckin', although he's now a subsidiary of Farmer Clark's Cool Cantaloupe Express Delivery Service.
Related service markets spring up, to, including bulk fruit duplication, while-you-wait, and people developing fruit theming kits.
Pretty soon, the farming industry explodes into a vibrant marketplace. THE END
You're right, this is a good metaphor...
DNA just wants to be free...
The centralized, one-corporation company is new, because until the advent of the telephone, it was difficult -- if not impossible -- to run a company larger than a few dozen to 100 people. If you couldn't be in the same room with them, managing them was very difficult.
The telephone (and now, by extension, the Internet and networks) allows a large corporation to exist in the hundreds of thousands -- because you now have instantaneous communications between West Undershirt, Nevada and Gstaad, Switzerland.
Be careful of easy analogies -- they are easy for a reason. The "next big thing" will be (IMHO) a change in attitudes about what the networked world will do for individuals, not companies.
Personally, I believe that once a company reaches more than one billion in revenues (not market evaluation) it takes quite a bit to un-seat them. There's quite a lot of inertia in a billion dollars...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I've read some of her stuff, it's bland, vague prognisticating.
One day when you feel hyper-active, compare "Release 2.0" to our own Bill Gates' "Business @ the Speed of Thought". See if it rings a bell.
And people shell out triple digits to subscribe to this, and pay lots of money to go to her seminars.
Even worse - she's the Big Boss of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and thus effectively the Absolute Monarch of the Internet! Under Queen Dyson's rule, the state of the Internet worldwide has gone from already bad to downright catastrophic.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Actually, there is a parallel between biological viruses and the internet, and I think that's what the original article was getting at.
The parallel is the spread of ideas, not files. Memes, if you like that word. The particular idea in this case is "I can get music for free... I should get music for free!".
That is the idea that Napster "infects" people with. I'm not saying if it's good or bad, but it's sure an infectious idea!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
I resent the Internet-as-virus analogy. It is inflammatory. And somewhat in-accurate.
Sigh. Did you even read the couple of sentences that got you so resentful? Here they are:
"We're very much looking at a biological model of an epidemic," said Esther Dyson, publisher of the technology newsletter Release 1.0. "On the Internet, a product doesn't require a central host and it doesn't require central distribution, it just spreads. It's new in business. It's been going on a long time in viruses."
I'll try to explain in simpler words. The biological model of an epidemic describes how something spreads. Its main characteristic is that once that something reached a certain point, this point becomes a source for further spreading. Obviously, this was developed by studying the spread of infectious diseases through human population. Ester Dyson pointed out that the same model is applicable to Napster-type file sharing mechanisms. This is a valid and correct (IMHO) observation. And yes, viruses did it first, although the model was AFAIK based on the spread of non-virus diseases (like plague and cholera).
No matter how hard I look I cannot see anybody here making an analogy between Internet and viruses (or virii). Perhaps you could enlighten me?
Viruses, bacteria, fungii and other parasites live off the strength of the host organism. They weaking it in order to grow, a negative net sum game since they die when the organism succumbs.
You didn't listen carefully at your high school biology lessons. Successful parasites do not kill their host, since this is counterproductive. The most successful even help their host and then it is called symbiosis. The bacteria living in your intestines are a good example of this -- without them you'd get into trouble fast.
Parasites that kill their hosts and do it quickly are at evolutionary disadvantage -- they tend to die out together with whatever part of their host population they got to.
The Internet is not a negative net sum game.
And who
But the Internet is like a living process in that it is robust and fault-tolerant. In this way it is like viruses. And very unlike the vulnerable centralized large-corporation model that still prevails. said it is?
I don't like these analogies, but let me point out to you that Internet is fairly centralized. Destroying a dozen buildings (starting with MAE East, etc.) will severly cripple the 'net. Shut down the DNS root servers and the 'net will grind to a halt very quickly. Sure, it will recover at some point, but today's internet is a far cry from the virus model: a mob of simple, self-sufficient units that replicate very quickly and do not need to communicate.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
And this is what is meant by "information wants to be free". It doesn't mean "information has a brain and certain desires". It doesn't mean "should be released to everyone at no cost". It means "information, like heat, tends towards a state of maximum diffusion".
Unlike heat, however, information is easy to make copies of. Imagine a cold room with a hot corner. Eventually the whole room is just warm. The heat covers the whole volume, but at the cost of becoming less detectable. Now imagine a information-less network with a information-source attached. Since information spread is by making copies, not by diffusion, eventually the entire network is as "hot" as the original source. There is no diffusion. In other words, a net gain for every node, instead of nodes gaining at the expense of the source.
Another parallel: You get work done when you make heat do something while it diffuses. For instance, you heat up a pot of water (spreading heat throughout the container) which creates steam. The steam escapes the spout (spreading the heat throughout the room). If you put a pinwheel by the spout you harness some of that heat escape as physical force. Same with info: Put an "information engine" at the bottleneck between the information source and the rest of the network and you turn information into money. But, just like you can't get the heat from the escaped steam back to re-heat the pot, you can't get a network node that already bought the information to pay for it again later. Copyright laws are an attempt to legislate mathematics/physics and Napster is proof once again that that doesn't work.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Warning: THis is a rant!
... Sometimes the whole mess makes me want to go around kicking these sleazy people in the brains...
There is nothing worse than centralized informaiton. Most of the news stations/papers/magazines/websites/etc... are owned by one or two giant for-profit conglomerates... That is a large part of the reason the news is boring, and fails to pick up on many truely important things, instead focusing on non-issues.
The more centralized information is in your system, the more easily a government, company, or powerful individual can successfully censor data that reaches individuals.
For similar reasons, centralized computing is not always a good idea, because it takes away control from the individual, and it also creates a single point of failure, and some great opportunities for Big Brother to poke through your files/programs/core space/whatever...
When people create products that phone home, i start to worry. I believe that software should be like a book, in that once you buy a copy, you can use it, and the company who sold it to you HAS NO RIGHT to know or care where/when/how you are using it. Otherwise large companies who know they have a large enough installed base by the balls go and do evil stuff like charge per page for their PDF encoders, or other such sleazy things that do not benefit the users, but they can't switch because they are trapped on the upgrade treadmill...
Then there is the whole thing where the less control the user has over their computer/software/etc... the better. It creeps in from all sides. UI's with fewer and fewer "confusing options" (read FUNCTIONALITY), more crippleware (think of connection/processor limits for commercial OS's (mainly NT and Digital Unix spring to mind...)). Buncha bastards if you ask me.
I much prefered the software environment before the majority of computer users had internet access, because programs didn't require, try, or expect to be able to phone home. Goddamn it!
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Play Six Pack Man. I
Like most things, there are two ways to look at this. Central Hosts, as Dyson so, um, 'accurately' put it, are made so by the fact that they are better. Why is Coke #1? Why is Microsoft #1? Before the flaming starts, realize that there is NO software more easily installable (it's grandma-approved) or application-supported than Windows. If there were a better coke, or a friendlier OS, would those monopolies be there?
The other side is this (and basically spouted by all those against big-corps): "Big corporations are heartless! They could care less about the end user and they just want profits profits profits!" And in some companies, this is very true. The dollar is numero uno and the shareholders just want to see the numbers go up. They are greed. They are everywhere.
What most of us (I'm speaking to the geek and geek-friendly alike) think the latter. That these huge conglomerates want big business, and they don't care what little people they have to stomp on to get it. But it's not so much identifying the problem as it is finding the solution. Think about it: What if Debian or Redhat or Slackware just so happen to get so user-friendly, so installable (grandma-friendly) and so supported that THEY (that distrobution) were in 95% of the computers in the world? What would our thoughts be then? Would we turn our back because they were successful? Because they made money using a kernel that everyone worked on? What kind of ironical hypocritical situation would that be?
People such as Dyson don't think as much about the big picture as they do about the paycheck they go home with.
People like us don't think about the paycheck as much as we do the big picture.
In the middle is the internet, torn between huge conglomerates, and those who want it to be completely open and free to anyone who wants anything. There are two sides, and Dyson so wonderfully forgot the other side of that coin.
Seriously, how did she get to be a wealthy spokesperson/trendsetter for the tech set?
I've read some of her stuff, it's bland, vague prognisticating. And people shell out triple digits to subscribe to this, and pay lots of money to go to her seminars.
I guess she got in the right place at the right time, but she sure doesn't impress me.
Now Freeman of course, was another story.
George
everyday it gets harder to be an indevidual, I get questioned about wearing all black, wearing a cape or trench coat, more times then I care to think about, and most inquireys are less then polite.
But this isn't new. Perhaps it's new to you, but wearing all black and a black cape would have gotten me dirty stares in high school some 20 years ago. And I suspect it would have gotten people dirty stares 50 years ago.
It's not getting more dangerous to be different--it's always been dangerous to be different. In fact, I'd suggest that this is the first time in history that people who have been different have demanded respect from others, rather than hiding in the underground and pretending to be normal to anyone who wasn't their closest friends and/or families.
By demanding respect, the popular culture is fighting back by answering with a resounding voice: "No!" Do you blaim them? Only 40 years ago, teenagers who got pregnant were shipped off to "homes" on the outskirts of town and everyone pretended she was "visiting relatives" rather than being shuffled off to the shadows so no-one would know that things weren't picture perfect.
In fact, I would even go so far as to suggest that what we are seeing now is a rebellion by an older generation who was raised to believe that a centralized command and control system was the only way to do things. They were raised to believe that centralization, conformity, and central planning were the only ways to crack the nut of happiness and prosperity--and they're scared shitless that we're quickly migrating to an Internet Just-In-Time decentralized technological economy which can support individuality and efficiency simultaneously. A world where short manufacturing runs allow us to cost-effectively produce goods we never thought we could before. Efficient logistics which allow us to ship goods from tribes in Puru to shops in middle America. Virtually free information exchange.
Scary stuff.
We've taken away the need to centralize in order to achieve efficiency, and we have created the technology to support radical individuality where differences are not only prized, but sought out by a young generation who are sick and tired of a pre-processed white-paste "culture." Now it's just a matter for the older people of the last "command and control" culture to either adopt, or die out.
Frankly, I'm excited to be living in this age!
Esther has a lot of her father's intelligence. Much of what she comes up with does have some thought put into it. She makes her money from being very energetic and passing some of that energy to people in her talks and seminars. She is very dynamic and can think circles around most people in a discussion.
But quoting her out of context makes for better headlines. Isn't there a dilbert line "if it weren't for lack of context, there woudn't be any news"?
As Peter says, It may not be fair to judge the quote outside of the larger context of Dyson's thoughts. It is the Times article which takes a statement and turns it into an emotionally charged story. Reporting facts and bland opinion doesn't sell more newspapers, only preying on people's emotions sells more.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I resent the Internet-as-virus analogy. It is inflammatory. And somewhat in-accurate.
Viruses, bacteria, fungii and other parasites live off the strength of the host organism. They weaking it in order to grow, a negative net sum game since they die when the organism succumbs.
The Internet is not a negative net sum game. New value is being created in myriad, often unrecognized ways. The economy as a whole benefits, even if some fat parts don't like the pressure of competition.
But the Internet is like a living process in that it is robust and fault-tolerant. In this way it is like viruses. And very unlike the vulnerable centralized large-corporation model that still prevails.
It would appear that Ester Dyson is a corporatist. This is a rather tenuous position, since large organizations are a recent development (~100 yrs) and are known to suffer of very real diseconomies of scale that can overpower the advantages of size.
and so is the entire universe that we live in.
Yes, we had decentralization in the pre-1900's. Yes, software also spread in the 1980's. Then we got the Internet, and the same thing happens... ten time faster. Can you imagine millions of people every day trading mp3s via sneakernet (pretend they fit on a disk)?
Consider this:
It took billions of years for the Earth to form
It then took millions of years for humans to arise.
It then took thousands of years for the invention of electricity
It then took ~100 years for the first mainframe to be invented
It then took 30 years until the internet, 20 years until the web, and then we arrive at the present.
It hasn't happened yet with space flight, but then too will spaceflight achieve the same rapid growth.
Yes, the free flow of information was slightly tapered by the rise of corporatism. This will only be a blip in history; already, the flow is beginning to resume its exponential course.
So therefore, the article was correct as far as it went. What it failed to release is that these sorts of trends are natural, and the dramatic information explosion and indeed the growth factor of the internet is not anything new. It is just yet one more pin being knocked down in technology's, the universe's, and indeed life itself's ever-increasing acceleration.
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Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Cars are centralized. They get produced, thier producers extract money, they are then owned. Sure no one cares later if that care broke down or if the person hit something but that doesn't make them decentralized. Granted a leased car is more centralized.
Books are centralized. They are sold and produced and mostly distributed by the same people [publisher/author cooperation implied]. Temporary use is usually regulated by libraries. Okay so when you're done with a paper back you can give it to a friend. Its nice that that's not illegal but it also makes sense since you didn't just copy it for a friend, you gave it up. Now you could copy parts of a book, but its normally really really inconveinient to copy the whole.
Guns were mostly like cars, or ploughs or toasters or lightbulbs for that matter. How about All non-perishable goods.
Shareware is indeed different in one respect. When someone decides to pass it on, they don't have to give it up for themselves. That's very usefull for wide distribution since a person is not truely "sharing" it they're just copying and distributing it. Money is handled in a mostly centralized way; media can be charged for. It cannot be changed though to send money elsewhere (legally/ethically) without permission from the copyright holder/author (if only those were always the same actual people).
SO: MP3s and Files are just plain distributed, and there isn't a method in place to ask for money, in return for a $12 registration of the album files you get the full color process Album booklet. That would be so cool... huge full color album "jackets" with poster and t-shirt options (gold, platinum, executive/groupie registration).
So I don't think that the article was thoroughly worded to get the idea accross. I think I'm missing why centralization is "new" (think british empire, or just rome).
-DanielUnfortunately, since some people have decided that THEY know what's best for other people, they make every effort to use the power of government to deprive people of things THEY disapprove of, be it tobacco, alcohol, or guns from the economy, or porn, MP3s, and strong encryption on the internet. The people against letting others have access to things they disapprove of (for shorthand, we'll call them the "virtuecrats,") usually try to make use of the three branches of government to enforce their dictates, and frequently at the higest (federal) level. For a while the virtuecrats used the legislature to pass laws against the things they hate, but increasingly they've been using Executive Orders and lawsuits to destroy the industries they hate.
Of course, theses ideas are anathema to both the idea of federalism, and to the Constitution of the United States itself. [Those who always complain that Slashdot is an international community and we shouldn't be talking about U.S. specific issues may start their ranting now. ;-)] Most specifically, the Tenth Amendment sates quite plainly: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Simply put, since none of these things (with the exception of guns in the Second Amendment) were mentioned in the Constitution, the right to regulate them does not, and should not, reside with the federal goverment. It resides either with the individual states, or with the people themselves. (I would argue that in almost all cases it is better that it rest with the people.) Also note that, coming after them, the Tenth Amendment modifies the Commerce and Establishment clauses (the two clauses that have probably be used to wreck the most judicial mischief).
This is not to say that there aren't occasionally real issues of individual rights involved. But unless they deal directly with issues explicitly laid out in the Constitution, they should not be be handled by the federal judiciary.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
The examples given apply better to the USA than elsewhere, although Europe after the Black Death is a far good fit as well.
Guilds were earlier forms of "centralized" sourcing. You could only buy certain things from the guild's members, not just anyone.
The early copywrite laws grew out of laws intended to allow printers to stomp out competition, supposedly just those reprinting the printers' books. While unauthorised printing was common, it wasn't blessed, just hard to stop given slow communications and lack of international agreements (remember that many of the pirates were privateers, authorised by one government to attack ships sailing under another's flag.)
IP wasn't an issue in the modern sense. Patent often meant that the state was giving you an exclusive right to make or sell something, sometimes with no time limit on the restriction of others.
The "open" model seems to exist when there is fresh, uncliamed, and mostly unexplored, territory to move into. In the past this meant land, in the last 150 years it has come to include market and information, the Internet being an extreme example of this. These new territories allow for small providers, alternative methods, and isolation from the mainstream that helps differences come into being and grow.
Once enough individuals and institutions have carved outa fair size slice of the new land, those alternatives become a threat. There's little more open space, to grow you need to take away from others. Tribes form, social standards evolve, strangers are unsafe because they might be there to take from you.
The new territory of information is different in that we're a long way from running out of room. It's cheap to clone information, so cheap that broadcast media just throws information into the air without any idea of who is receiving it. Yes, a TV station cost money to run, but compare that to the cost of making 10s or 100s of thousands of films or videos. Some of the rules have changed, yet we - individuals, businesses, governments, haven't really adapted to those changes. No, this doesn't mean "copyright is wrong" or whatever, just that costs have taken a great drop and there's lots of room for alternative ideas. Consider the joke about cable or satellite TV - now you can watch I Love Lucy reruns on 500 channels! That's the old style - multiply the existing product, not create new alternative products.
Change scares most people, differences worry most people. It's tough to get them to see otherwise.
At least, it's worth nothing economically. There are values other than economic value. For example, if this book has been bursting inside you, the writing might provide you with contentment and peace. If Farmer Brown loves making apples and creating varieties, then he might draw emotional benefit from his new Fine Fruit. Does the world also have to pay him money on top of this? No, it doesn't.
Sure, it might pay him -- if he is contributing something worthwhile and hard to acquire. But in the world of the easy replicator, he doesn't have to work, and so his "work" is an act of joy and creation. Whatever, if anything, he gets monetarily is a bonus.
Especially in the world of the easy replicator, there is no economic incentive to create, but there is no economic penalty for it, either. Since you don't have to "support yourself", you don't have to either be paid for creating or find some other job.
It's a whole new ballgame, people. The digital world is seeing it first, that's all.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
People using Napster are replicators. They take an object and reproduce it, in no way reducing the availability of that object to its "owner". They do undermine the unnatural economic value of the song (or whatever), but, that value derives from an artificial monopoly and has no a priori justification. So you really have to argue that Napster, etc., lead to an actual diminution of creative output and value. The jury is out on this -- some studies find a correlation with declining sales, some a correlation with increasing sales.
Key point: If you -- like most big corporations -- claim to believe in "free enterprise", then you must admit that according to all that is holy in Adam Smith, digital recordings have no intrinsic economic worth. Since the supply is effectively infinite, the price drops necessarily to zero. As such, the entire intellectual "property" scheme is an artificial restriction on the market. Now, I personally have no problem with such a thing -- but it must serve the public good, if it's going to back up with governmental force.
I am always amazed at the number of laissez-faire, free-market libertarian yahoos who somehow claim that IP is nonetheless valid.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
This is a classic addition to where our future's history is going. People will look back upon this era and notice that there was a revolution, just like when computers first came in.
We are now moving away from what computers were initially only designed for (massive libraries, databases, computations) and moving into a home-appliacance, easy accessibility mode.
Rules are changing. Business models are changing. If you want any power, you have to be part of the collective of a large company and climb through the ranks. There soon won't be any independent companies. What's happening to the food business is very similar to what's happening to the computer business. All of the small companies are being bought out by the giants.
People might be scared that the future will turn out very bitter, but people are always scared of change. People get scared whenever technology goes ugly, but it usually passes and people adapt.
The article does have valid point, though.