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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.
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.
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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!
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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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).
-DanielThe 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.
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.
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