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Information Doesn't Want To Be Free; People Want It
Captain Pooh writes "Nicholas Petreley expresses his opinion about how "Information Doesn't Want To Be Free--People Want It To Be". " Pretty provocative piece - although his reasoning is sound.
There is, of course, an intrinsic rate of decay in any physical representation of information - this is obvious to any high school student and isn't what we're talking about here. In these discussions, I am not refering to the degradation of the specific instances of information, but the temporal-spatial distribution of information, which is also subject to the second law (entropy increases).
If you still don't understand this, let me make it simple for you. Consider a collection of marbles on the floor during an earthquake. Each marble may be subject to chips and degradation - a more disordered state. But the collection of marbles as a whole is also subject to the statistical mechanics of entropy the promote their spread throughout the room.
So why do you hate the record companies? You buy cds at small independent stores. The music you like obviously still gets made. What have the record companies done to you exactly? Created an "environment"? Whatever. They promote their stars to make millions. But you can choose to spend you money on smaller artists instead. Where 's the problem? Where's the conspiracy?
Geez- even the real Napster zealots dont trot out this old argument. It isn't fair use to pass around music on a mass distribution system. IT's fair use to make copies FOR YOURSELF on different media. You can't have rights over property you don't own!
the very phrase "information wants to be free" makes the distinction. That's isn't a rallying cry to abolish Intellectual Property, it's a statement about something Else. The distinction needs to be made. And it needs to be made legally, else we will lose our rights. If the legal world thinks we mean "Content" when we really mean "Information" then judges like Marilyn Hall Patel will trample all over us and we lose. if you think all content is equal to information in the sense of "Information wants to be free" then you are wrong. And thats why judges rule against Napster. think outside the box
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
You are forgetting that by copying music and distributing it is breaking your agreement with the Cd vendor. Take the DNA cloning example. Let's say you go willingly into the machine, but you do so under the agreement that they'll only take certain chromosomes. And THEN they take samples of all of your chromosomes. Is that really any different than forcing you into the machine in the first place? They got you in their under false pretenses. THAT's a better analougy.
This is potentially incorrect, depending on WHICH Mill we're talking about. The younger one very much DID believe in natural rights- in fact he really founded the modern version of that school of thought. Kant did to, in a different sense- it's quibbling over opinion and slander to write him off as a mystic.
At a superficial level, it sounds like it may be a good thing to let musicians control their recorded works, but when you think through the ramifications involved, the complexity of licensing and enforcement, the slow unequivocal degradation of our fundamental freedoms that are needed to enforce IP laws - the ugliness of it all - I no longer think "intellectual property" is a good idea. I think our society and business environment would be much healthier without it. And I don't think a wholesale abandonment of IP, as I have advocated, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
But obviously, a lot of people disagree with me either because they don't want to open their mind (my opinion) or because I'm not thinking clearly (their opinion).
I never said information was *immortal*. My point is that it cannot be effectively *restrained*. If it lacks value, it will be lost. If it has value, you will not stop people from getting it.
MrJoy.com -- Because coding is FUN!
Why should this be true? Why should you be entitled to control the information once it reaches someone else's mind. You aren't entitled to mind control.
Information does exist in nature. It certainly can't exist independent of nature. And we are not independent from nature.
Sorry, don't understand. Do you mean the web as the IP transmission protocol or the http protocol. Any information that is going to be sent anywhere is going to be going over the web is it not?
While it is good for many things I do not think it is a very reliable source for distributing binaries.
Again, slightly confused. If you mean reliable as in trusting that the binary that you think you are downloading is really what you wanted then I agree.
A file-sharing approach allows you to mirror on a scale impossible to acheive with the web.
Yes you can mirror the information in many places, but this gives you no guarantee over the bandwidth that the end user will get when they download the file. For all you know, the mirror that you happen to choose to download the file is going to be sitting on someone's box with a single ISDN connection and 10 other people already downloading and its going to crawl. However, if your central legal service is working, ie enough people are choosing to buy the music that the digital distributor is making money (and therefore by definition the record company and the artist are also making money) then they can invest in a controlled distributed network of servers that are all offering the same services located at the right places in the net to maximise bandwidth to the subnets that are currently choking (a la yahoo).
The trick is to make digitally signed music that can be verified by the end-user as the original before downloading the music.
only necessary if you don't trust the site. place the site on an https connection with a signed certificate and the overhead of having to sign all the files individually disappears and your operating costs go down (more money ultimately to the artist (hopefully)).
Also I'm a geek and therefore it is in my nature to explore new possibilities. :)
New possibilities are always good. The trick is to find the new possibility that enables people to fight against the major labels while giving people what they want (ie access to music). The only way to build a sustainable system against the creatures of chaos with their law suits is to make something that is so legally airtight and not open to abuse that it can grow to its logical conclusion without having to factor in $120,000,000 dollar fines (or whatever the figure was). If the model works, then there will be plenty of opportunities to geek out on distributed download systems within the umbrella of the parent company. I'm quite sure that if someone started an open source project to run the site which was secure then the distributors would welcome it with open arms (less in house costs, probably better product etc etc).
Remember, when you write code, it is your choice as to what licence you release the code under. Same for musicians. All the artists at atrecordings must have given their permission to let their music be downloaded for free because they think that it is good for them and i totally respect that opinion. But, if an artist chooses to release their work under a 'closed' model then that is their right and your distribution system for 'open' works must be able to protect itself from license abuse.
Personally I would like to see a situation where it makes economic sense for all concerned to go for the open model. Only time will tell if this is the case and the only way you are going to buy time is by keeping it legal long enough for the momentum to build up.
The only Good System is a Sound System
Superficially, it may seem anthropomorphic. But it is essetially the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Nitrogen molecules do not want to gather in the corner of my room - they want to spread out. In the same way, information wants to be free. And it will be.
It's a law of nature. And if a government or corporation wishes to oppose a fundamental law of nature, then they must spend a proportionate amount of energy to maintain the highly ordered state of control or secrecy.
And the higher the temperature in thermodynamics, the more effort is required to maintain that ordered state.
The internet has raised the temperature in the information mileu by an order of magnitude. I don't think any company or government will have the resources to maintain the highly ordered and unlikely state of control.
Information wants to be free. Regardless of your moral position, it's a law of nature. This is what the author of the article fails to see or acknowledge.
Amen... I don't see many people arguing that doctors' advice should be free (well, there is that whole welfare state thing in Europe, but people do pay for it) or lawyers' counsel, or --much closer to home-- software consulting.
Information *doesn't* want to be free. Information is knowledge, and knowledge costs money; either through the experience of trial and error or through the time in education. The fact that some (a lot of) people offer information for free (on the web or as OSS) is great, but they *volunteer* to do so. On Napster, the artists (starving or mega-millionaires) *don't*. That makes it theft. If you're cool with theft, so be it, but making it sound like a revolutionary call or something, that's hypocricy.
Of course beer wants to be free. This was one of the motivations for humans settling down and becoming agrarians instead of hunters and gatherers. There was a time when every farmer worth his hops knew how to brew beer with the stuff he grew himself. What do you think the "Whiskey Rebellion" was all about? Whiskey wants to be free, too :)
Really!?!?! Then submit that to the Annals or Physics. Information does exist and it does not violate any physical laws.
It's easy for me to relate entropy and the spread of information. I don't see how entropy or any laws of physics impact the "usefulness" of the information though unless you are talking about degradation though lossy transmission. How do you quantify or measure "usefulness"?
The association of information=money cannot be valid. Money cannot be copied.
Information is simply a pattern that is subject to interpretation. Nothing more, nothing less.
The very large integer that makes up a representation of the sounds of a song in an AIFF or MP3 format triggers experiences in the brains of those who interpret that number with a suitable device (cd player or mp3 decoder). If I come across and enjoy this number, then it joins the fold of my experiences and I might want to share this interesting number with a friend.
If someone invents a memory/sensory scanner, then you have right to reproduce a perfect copy of your experience/memory of your exposure to the event (including any attendant tinninitus, frequency limitation in your hearing, memory problems, etc which you have).
This is similar to what an mp3 file does. It throws away most of the info and keeps only those sounds that have solid mental triggers. The scanner you refer to will be possible in our lifetime, IHMO.
What is the fundamental difference between recording my experiences with my brain only and using brain augmenting devices such as tape recorders, web browsers, video cameras, etc.? I don't think there is a moral difference.
Simply, you don't have ANY rights to my Intellectual (experiencial and expressional) Property which I do not grant to you.
Simply put, I do not believe that you can own a pattern or idea. I think such claims of ownership are are invalid prima facie.
I'm sorry, but I cannot make any sense of "theft of experience" since I fail to see how you could remove someone's experiences from them. If you just mean to say "theft of intellectual property", then we're back to square 1. You believe ideas and patterns can be owned and I do not.
Your rights stop where mine start.
Your rights stop where my body begins. Once a pattern leaves you, through whatever means of transmission you care to name, it is no longer part of your corpus. You have no right to tell me what I can and cannot do with my experiences. My right to self determination of thought and communication outweighs any right you believe you have to strictly control all the ripples of information spreading from your direction or elsewhere.
You completely missed the whole point of Nick's article. If you don't like proprietary information, stop whining and go create your own non-proprietary stuff.
Stop and think what the world would be like if a young Richard Stallman really behaved as if information really should be free. GNU would not have been created, and he would have instead created an organization devoted to liberating the existing software by urging the distribution of unauthorized multics, SV4 and other software.
Sure, it would have been against the law, but so what? Go read your Thoreau...
Don't whine, just do.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Okay, I'll accept your arguments, totally. The big question is, will you? Do you believe that you have the right to take GPLd software, combine it with incompatibly licensed code, and redistribute it? Do you advocate to RMS that he should put emacs and gcc into the public domain? Is all the code you write in the public domain?
If any of your answers were no, then you are being inconsistant. If information should not be owned, then it should not be owned by anyone. Any software/information that has a copyright notice is owned software. Anyone that sues, complains, or even demands begging for forgiveness, over copyright violations is actively affirming their ownership of the information.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The question of whether I or RMS should put things into the public domain is not my concern. The issue is can we put things into the public domain. There are many details about my life that I hope to never put into the public domain. Trying to keep a personal or trade secret is fine by me. Telling me what I can and cannot share with friends is not OK. I do not think that this is an inconsistent viewpoint.
I have written some software to do neurophysiological simulations, complete with a little parser and language made possible by C++/YACC. I will release that into the public domain. Before that I made a pre-web era non-networked hyperlinking program that stored text and pictures. I doubt anyone would want it, but I'll look for it and put it up. I have been working on some mod perl stuff for database backed object persistence and editing. I'll put that up too when I get it working. I haven't decided which license to use yet. All I care about is that it is not plagiarised.
And I will put my songs up on mp3.com when they are done.
I would much rather have my software and songs spread around as a testiment that I once lived than to hoard them away and allow only 216 paid copies (or likely less) to exist and then eventually become lost.
Creating information has a cost (in time at least), but duplicating it does not. You pay the doctor, or lawyer, or consultant to create information that you need. Do you think your doctor should be able to sue you if you tell your Wife what what the doctor told you? Should a laywer be able to sue the government for keeping cort records? If you pay a programmer to write a program for you, shouldn't you be able to distribute it however you see fit?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Are you saying that there is a natural right to control the thoughts and words of other humans?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
In many cases, looking at the rock would be far more entertaining that their putrid offerings.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The phrase information wants to be free. is not just an evocotive figurative statement, it is simple truth about information. It takes effort to prevent information from being freely exchanged. One can also argue that it takes effort to vigorously communicate it, however the fact remains that it is hard to keep a secret.
This is true not just figuratively but physically. A source of light can be seen unless blocked, and sound is heard unless absorbed. If you say something, you have to whisper if you want no one to hear it (and yell if you want everyone to hear it).
There is a strong ethical dilemna to be considered in keeping any secret (for instance a given secret might diminish the community while benefiting an individual and thus ethically good for the indivdual and bad for the community).
A priori, there is no moral reason why copying and sharing pure patterns, regardless of their origin, is immoral. I don't care if somebody spent a whole lifetime to create a pattern. I have considered several kinds of moral thinking - Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's utilitarianism, Chritianity, and my own intuitive ideas on what is moral. I simply fail to see how, in light of these moral theories, copying patterns could be immoral.
I believe it is immoral to unnecessarily limit the freedom of a human being. Copyright and patent laws seek to limit our freedoms in profound ways, and increasingly so. Does the benefit the we, as a society, gain from these laws outweigh the sacrifice of our freedoms? I say that the benefits are to very few while the freedoms of everyone are sacrified. I don't think it's good social policy.
I believe people have a basic human right to record and remember their life experiences as accurately as they see fit - using their brains or brain aumenting devices such as computers, tape recorders, or some day neural implants. I also believe they have the right to share their experiences with arbitrary fidelity. If you seek to limit these self-evident (to me, at least) rights, you had better have a damned good reason that benefits everyone more than it harms everyone. I can't think of such a reason.
If you don't want your information to be spread, the keep it in your head. If you send sound waves, text, or code in someone's direction, then that becomes part of their life experience which they then have the right to remember and share as they see fit.
However, don't place all existing record companies in the same categories. Smaller independant labels quite frequently do try their best to offer the best deal to the artists that they can, but they are currently fighting a losing battle against the majors because the record industry is geared to fast massive turnover of disposable music where people buy the currently hip tune each week and then move onto the next one. And who decides what is hip? The same people that control the advertising in the high street record chains and who dictate the playlists to the national radio stations and who also have interests in the distribution channels for the music: the major record labels.
In order to beat the RIAA at their own game it is necessary to change the rules because the economic reality of running a small record label is that it is quite often impossible to give a good deal to the artists, no matter how much you want to. Recording albums and pressing albums costs money and without the distribution and exposure, you are not going to cover your costs. A politically sound label is absolutely no good if it is a bankrupt politically sound label.
If atrecordings' business model works and the small and unheard of labels that they support sell more records than they would if they played the conventional game then you are in a position of power and you can afford to move some money back to the artists. Yes, a lot of people will download the mp3's and give nothing back, but if a large enough percentage of these people do purchase the music (if they like it), then everybody wins. Napster is never going to gain legal acceptance because people will always use it for distributing music that the labels (or artists) haven't given permission to be distributed, but if all the music is available directly from the labels themselves at no cost, then what is the advantage in Napster? And what can the major's do about it? Absolutely nothing. Who are they going to sue? And for what?
The only Good System is a Sound System
Saying "information wants to be free" is like saying "water wants to run downhill". Sure there's a force behind it (people want information). But IMO the saying just means that stored data will tend to become free.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Fair use is 'sharing with immediate family and friends.'
No, fair use is defined under 17 U.S.C. s. 107, and applicable case law. As between what you think it is, and what the Congress and Supreme Court think it is, well, let us let our colleagues decide.
In Sony, it was held that time-shifting was fair use, and precluded liability of the vendor of the VCR. In Diamond, it was held that space-shifting of MP3's is fair use, and precluded liability of the Rio. The Supreme Court has said that all that needs to be the case for Napster to prevail is that Napster be capable of some substantial noninfringing use. If so, it is irrelevant how much infringement is going on . . .
Ironically, in the Sony case, the Eleventh Circuit initially adopted a test very much like the one adopted here in Napster by the District Court -- the very test that the Supes rejected. While it is certainly an open question, and only time will tell, any learned student of the applicable law reading the briefs and the case law has to like Napster's chances.
2) It is only the injunction which has been stayed. It has not been remanded.
True. Time will tell how the Courts will treat the appeal. However, for an appellate court to stay a preliminary injunction, it must determine that the order below had serious questions both as to form and to the merits. And so the 11th Circuit found.
The concept of "owner" doesn't apply particularly well to ideas (even including music). How can you own an idea? Can you keep someone else from thinking thoughts that you've had?
Trading digital music or other information may be illegal, but it's not necessarily immoral -- it depends strongly on your moral views regarding imaginary property.
Laws don't make morality. They're a framework for structuring a society -- hopefully one rooted in some decent morals. There's certainly such things as bad laws.
--
Again you are confusing "must be shared" with "can be shared". Different things entirely.
By saying "must be shared", I am talking from the perspective of the information producer (and not information "horder", more below). That is, from the perspective of the information producer, once I've (as a producer) created information (in the form of a song, an essay, a computer program, whatever), in your world view I face the problem that the moment I release the information to someone, unless I hunt down everyone and deal with them on a one-on-one transaction (which is impractical for something which I may want to mass produce and sell), I must eventually deal with the fact that my information will be shared freely without my control or even consent.
That is because it is inevitable that, while not everyone may wish to share my information freely, some will--and in your world view, there is not a damned thing I can do about it.
Thus, from a practical perspective, it's "must be shared," not "can be shared."
And again, you're assuming that you have a right to make money on that information. Sorry, but in my book you don't have a right to make money by hoarding information.
Again, I am talking from the perspective of the information producer, not the information agrigator (or "horder.") In fact, I do have the right to "hoard" information that I may produce--I just don't publish. For example, I may have in my posession nude pictures of my wife which we took one evening when we had too much wine and nothing else to do. Am I a "hoarder" because I choose not to publish the information (electronic images) even though those pictures have already been produced?
So the question is, do I have the right to make money producing information? Do I have the right to sell naked pictures of my wife (say) in compensation for the embarasment she may feel about having naked pictures of her floating around? Or, do I have the right to make money selling computer programs I wrote?
The question here is not one of "hoarding"--I can do that by not publishing. The question is do I have the right to control who gets the information I produced when I publish it, and can I do so in a way which permits me to be compensated for the time and effort it cost me to produce that information?
Again, I say that if I do not have the right to get paid for my time in producing information that I may have otherwised wished to sell, my incentive to produce information (naked pictures, music, essays, computer programs, whatever) is singificantly less--if only because I need to do something else which does make money so I can continue to put food in my table. And that something else is time which I cannot devote to taking nude pictures, programming, or writing essays.
And again, the fact that lies are immoral has no bearing on this topic. Whether or not IP is allowed to exist, lies will still be immoral.
But lies are information, and it is clear that you do see limits on what sort of information may be propagated, and how they may be propogated.
So then the question is not one of if the free flow of information should be restricted (you just admited that "lies" are immoral, and perhaps should be restricted), but how and why information flow should be restricted.
Sucker bet anyways, as it's pretty obvious that only a damned fool would deny the stupidity of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded room. (The penultimate example of "free flow of information" which perhaps shouldn't be permitted.)
You have a right to make money by providing a good or service that I cannot or do not have time to provide for myself. If you aren't motivated to provide a good or service that is in demand, then you lose.
But this is completely at odds with your earlier assertion that information should be freely exchanged in a sort of "high fidelity" meme transfer. That's because as an information producer, if I am unable to control in any way when (not "if") information I produce will be shared, then I am unable to control any sort of income which may be generated by controlling how that information gets spread.
I want to see art created by people doing it because they are compelled to by something in their soul.
But we're not just talking about art, aren't we? We're talking about software, pictures, essays--a whole range of "information" that goes beyond some painting or little ditty about Jack and Dianne.
Besides, why should attempting to make some money off the art you produce be a bad thing, or even degrade the quality of the art produced? Michelangelo was commissioned (read: paid) to paint the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel, yet I think you would be hard pressed to find someone who would disagree with the notion that Michelangelo's work isn't a masterpiece of high art.
I'm sorry for you if you've bought into the corporate notion that sharing experiences in high fidelity is immoral.
As someone who actually produces information I have no problem with your desire for "high fidelity" memory sharing, except when you "share" work produced by me in a manner which prohibits or eliminates my ability to be compensated for my hard work and effort.
And that's what this whole argument boils down to: to what extent should my rights to make money off work I produced be taken away from me in order to better society. It's pretty damned clear that things like the DMCA is a really fscked up idea in that it stifles our Founding Father's notion of the ineffiable search for Truth by restricting the ability for people to build off each other's works.
On the other hand, it's pretty clear that this notion of "high fidelity" meme sharing, while in and of itself not inherently bad, does not justify posting Metallica songs on Napster. That's because you're not sharing your experiences that you may had when listening to Metallica (be it revulsion or just annoyance)--you're just publishing Metallica songs without authorization.
I've been accused of GIGO!
That's because when you did your "philosophical search", it appears to me you started with a bunch of assumptions: that (a) "high fidelity" meme sharing is a good thing, and (b) existing IP laws interfere with "high fidelity" meme sharing (like you can't invite your friend over and play your Metallica disk for him in person--that you can only engage in this transaction by publishing, without comment, Metallica).
Further, you assume (c) that "high fidelity" meme sharing is achieved through publishing Metallica without their permission (regardless if you need their permission to publish), or equivalently, (d) that publishing is a form of "high fidelity" meme sharing--dispite the fact that you are not sharing your experience, only the song itself.
These (and other) apriori assumptions are the garbage in--it appears you do not prove these assertions, only make them. What do you expect, but garbage out?
This problem is expanding fast, fueled in part by the technology that the more naively ethical among us thought would be used for the common good. Every significant corporation on earth is now trading in "customer profiles", information about you and me that they can use against us. That's not just spam -- that's employers being able to fire you over Usenet (or Slashdot postings), overzealous politicians using your purchases at Amazon.com to ferret out your private beliefs, and insurance companies discriminating against people on the basis of behavior and genetics. It's fair to say most people don't want that information getting out, much less distributed to the highest bidder, but they won't come to you for licensing fees -- they'll just take it and then get Congress to expand copyright law to protect their "right" to your most intimate details.
Intellectual property would be a good idea, except that more than in almost any other area, virtually any IP system favors the rich and powerful over the common man. Increasingly, it institutionalizes the plundering of common knowledge by corporations while depriving the public of the right to actually own anything they pay for. Opposing IP rights isn't communism or airy-headed idealism -- it's cold, hard common sense aimed at protecting the rights of private individuals and preventing the arbitrary abuse of corporate and governmental power.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
What it's saying is that the quiescent state of information is free (as in speech). Information locked up has to be kept locked tight; once it gets out in the open it can never be locked back up again. Ie, having information out in the open is the only stable state for information.
Information wants to be free in exactly the same way as a rock at a top of a hill wants to be at the bottom of a hill.
So property is... what? A rule/wall/convention/memething designed and implemented to preserve desirable resource flow patterns? A theory glued to a desire? An ought? One might say: "I uphold the convention of property because I think that the alternative would be to suffer deprivation at the hands of chaos". The theory of property binds resource-hunger to morality. Those guys who grabbed what I wanted aren't just competitors, they're thieves, so if I go retaliate on their asses I'm not just a dog versus other dogs, I'm a holy warrior. Justice is a stronger rationale than mere hunger. Property justifies. So what precisely is inherently negative about thievery?
Napster was a cute idea, not very original but they did a good job of promoting the service better than any previous file/music sharing service and making it easy enough for even a novice to use. File-sharing is here to stay and nobody will be able to stop it. Some of the files will be legal, others will be illegal. If a label that owned the rights to the music (or other content) provided a Napster-like service while itself dumping a lot of quality content into the service they'd gain a large market hold without nearly the hassles Napster had. You could still allow peer-peer file sharing that was unmonitored but you could also mark certain files that you proved yourself as known legal and of high quality.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Do you honestly believe that the amount of theft or unauthorized, uncompensated copying would decrease if the record
companies sold "ISO9660 CDROM with professionally encoded MP3's?"
Yes, I do. Try, for example, to download a good (that is, one which mpg123 returns no errors on) copy of the entire Mark Twang album by John Hartford. How long does it take you? How much is your time worth? How much money did it save you? Oh, but I forgot -- you can't buy what you just downloaded. It's literally priceless!
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I hear your credit card screaming, sitting captive in your wallet. "Free me post my number on the web where all the world can know me!" it says.
I don't think we've necessarily established that information ought to be "protected", if by "protected" you mean that a person should be able to control how others use the information in their lives. I don't see how society benefits any longer from thie kind of protection.
Imagine, if you will, that information isn't protected. Would our way of life change for the worse? I honestly don't think it would. Programmers would still have plenty of work. Musicians would still create music as they always have and make their money the way they always have - live shows (only the rare musician makes significant income from royalties). Competition among producers will become healthier and consumers will reap the rewards. Instead of somebody sitting on their monopoloy power that a patent provides, they will have to get off their ass and keep up with the competitors who are working on superior and cheaper implementations.
I need someone to try to give me a good solid argument that the abstraction we call "intellectual property" that so severely limits our freedoms ought to be allowed to continue as law.
This is my mail to Nicholas Petreley.
/ 000904oppetreley.xml
h noon.html,
a cknet.html).
In response to http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/09/04
"Information does not want to be free -
people want it to be"
In your article you describe a "Napster system for software"
called "Crookster" and basically deny that peer-to-peer
networking does not have a free speech dimension.
Unfortunately, it has, and a very fundamental one. For
background reading, I recommend starting at
http://semlab2.sbs.sunysb.edu/Users/pludlow/hig
specifically 3.8 "Blacknet"
(http://semlab2.sbs.sunysb.edu/Users/pludlow/bl
Basically, what we are experiencing now is the beginning
of mediator free communication first time in history of
mankind. If you look at the history of communication, in
the past it usually involved a number of people helping
the sender and the recipient to talk to each other and
exchange information as well as value. Think for example
publishing a book or a record. In the past you needed
the author, the editor, the lectorate, the printer,
a number of people to ship the work, a number of people
to sell it and make individual contracts manually, a
number of people to shuffle the money and prepare the
bills, and, if the recipient could not read, someone
reading it to him or her.
Each improvement in technology has not only put a number
of people out of work, the scribes at the monasteries busily
copying books being only the first. It has also shortened
the length of the pipeline between the sender and the
recipient and it has lowered the transaction cost of
communication.
With the internet this cost is near zero for a single individual
communication, and the length of the pipeline is at two
(sender and receiver) and it is still shrinking. The number
of people working in the communication industries is
increasing, but these people are no longer involved in
YOUR communication, publishing YOUR work, but they are busy
maintaining a communication network open for ANY communication,
and your specific communication is only a few packets in that
sea of information. This is a shift from personal craftsmanship
to industrial infrastructure maintenance: People produce
goods or services no longer for a specific individual or
individual project, but the are maintaining a general
infrastructure used by more or less anonymous clients. You
do not know the names of the people who fabricated your car,
or your hot dog, and you do not know the names of the people
working together in order to have this email reach your desk.
There is no longer an editor and a publisher to thank in the
foreword.
This leads to a number of paradigm shifts in communication,
because a lot of concepts like protection of minors, copyright,
taxes and others depended on the presence of mediators involved
in any communication. For example, when you enter a video rental
in germany, there is a section that is blocked for minors, and
protection of minors relies on the shop owner to act as a mediator
and block access to certain stuff. For example, when you try to
import certain prohibited Nazi propaganda into Germany, customs
as a mediator will take care of that and conficate the stuff at
the border.
With the advent of the Internet, there is no longer any mediator
between the sender and the recipient AND the Internet provides
the technology to make sure of that. Cryptographically hard
technology, that is.
For example, using the SSL protocol, sender and receiver can
establish an encrypted communication channel between each other,
which cannot be intercepted. There is no way for any outside
party to tell what S and R are talking about and what kind of
information they exchange. SSL is designed to make this impossible.
Protection of minors currently relies on being able to tell what
is going on between S and R, though. Filters are listening in,
and change communication if they deem it unsuitable for R. This is
called a man-in-the-middle attack, and SSL certificates are specifically
designed to protect against these. You do not want an attacker to
listen in into your ecommerce transactions and change the account
number and amount in a banking transaction - SSL protects you. You
do want your filter to listen in into your childs communication
and change the content of the pages you think it should not see.
SSL protects against that, too. The MPAA and the RIAA want filters
to listen in into your communication and change the content of the
MP3s you did not buy. SSL protects against that, too.
Cryptographically enhanced communication protocols do even more,
though, and this is what Blacknet is really about. Using MIX technlogy
as applied to the remailer network or as discussed in Onion routing,
a cloud of encrypted communication is created in a peer to peer network.
Nodes inject encrypted packets of a standardized size into the network
and packets bounce through arbitrary number of random nodes, with
each node decrypting the packet and revealing an enclosed encrypted
packet with the next hop destination in it. This creates a cloud
of untraceable, anonymous communication, so that an outside watcher
cannot even identify (S, R) pairs. You could not even tell who
talked to who in such a network.
Such networks already exist in research implementations, and some
companies such as Zer0 Knowledge in Canada are testing commercial
variants of it. The net result is total privacy in communication:
Outside watchers cannot tell who talked to whom, and they cannot
tell what is being talked about. Note that this does not apply
to S and R: Inside their eastablished anonymous communication
channel they may or may not exchange certificates and thus can
establish a cryptographically hard and undenyable, hard to fake
proof of identity.
Both of this is already built, and available on a large scale (SSL)
or will be available on a large scale (ZKS Freenet).
For complete mediator free communication there is only one piece
missing in the puzzle, and that is anonymous cash payment, digital
coins. David Chaum invented that technology in the seventies, and
tried to market his product under the name Digicash. I don't know
about the current status of it, but I know what will happen once
this becomes available on a large scale, too:
People can search and find each other anonymously, thorugh services
just like Napster. In Napster I am not really interested into your
identity, I just want some goods. I can then establish a MIXed anyonymous
connection to you and exchange some files and a bit of digital cash.
From the outside, no party will be able to even observe that such
an exchange has taken place, or that you and I even know each other.
Nonetheless, in the end I will have one more file on my disk, and
you will have a bit more money in the wallet.
That is the concept of Blacknet.
It challenges fundamentally the rules our society is build upon, down
the the financing of our states. The crux with Blacknet ist: To protect
against blacknet, you must abandon the concept of mediator free
communication. To each and all communication there always must be
a big brother listening in and decide whether this is lawful and
licensed exchange of IP and money, deduce the tax from the money,
and grant permission to communicate. No more free and secret sped.
This too is no longer the world we are currently living in.
So one way or the other, Blacknet will destroy or society.
And that is the free speech dimension of things like Napster.
Kristian
Permission granted to do with the mail as you see fit.
Kristian
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
"Nicholas Petreley expresses his opinion about how "Information Doesn't Want To Be Free--People Want It To Be". " Pretty provocative piece - although his reasoning is sound."
I think we can come to this conclusion ourself, if need be, thanks.
Petrely writes:
"The fact is our current system entitles us to some free information, and it requires us to purchase or license other information. You may not like the fact that some information must be licensed, but that's how it is. Those who want information to be free as a matter of principle should create some information and make it free. But what they shouldn't do is license or buy existing information that is not free and then cut it loose without permission. That's just plain wrong,..."
There are two types of objects - tangible and intangible. Tangible objects (food, your car, a minidisc player) can only have one owner at any given moment. Intangible objects (music, inventions, words) can have any number of owners. Physical objects have a single owner out of nessesity - it cannot exist in two places at the same time. But what about an idea? Clearly I can make a copy of your poem without depriving you of that poem.
So what is the point of giving exclusive ownership of an idea when it can be shared by all without depriving the creator of that idea? It is power, clearly enough. I have, you don't, let's negotiate. It is easy to use Napster as a sort of strawman to attack, but it's another issue entirely when you look at intellectual property in the light of the AIDS epedemic where millions have died and continue to die because pharmecuticals own the right to the knowledge. "Give us a half billion for the rights to create our vaccine. OH, you don't have that kind of cash? Oh, your entire country's GDP isn't even half that? Sorry." How about irrigation technologies? I could go on but I think my point is made.
I'll grant that there needs to be an impetus for the company to create the vaccine in the first place, but once it's created that knowledge should be in the public domain.
"...and it demonstrates that what they are interested in is not free speech at all but getting stuff without paying for it."
This is akin to saying electronic hobbyists are only interested in descrambling their cable feed. Can it be a side result? Yes. Is it the point? No.
Are you not aware of what a 21st century, western idea ownership of knowledge is? Is it beyond your ability to comprehend - not even nessesarily to understand but to just acknowledge - that ownship of an idea is repugnent, almost humorous?
As an aside, I enjoy the fact that I can get a song and erase it if I don't like it. No blood no foul. I appreciate the fact that I haven't heard a single radio ad in 2 years. I can't name a single radio station and I live in metro Boston. I haven't seen a single TV ad that I haven't gone out of my way to see.
Free speech, Nick, isn't only about the right to speak myself but the right of others to speak so I might hear them. You've got this idea that free speech means "me me me" but what it really does (and should) stand for is "them them them". And what does a company that control information fear more than anything? Loss of market share, loss of mindshare, loss of control.
And what is intellectual property about if not control?
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
At least, that's the way I understand him.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
What you are neglecting here is that you have a right to your body and everything you can protect. If you need to make a deal with the people -- that you'll eventually make your content available for free in return for them not copying your content -- then you have to live up to your end. Tell me, please, what copyrights have expired in the last fifty years?
Copyright's dead, but not because of anything we did.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
If you are offering the music for free download, then why do you need to offer file sharing? All the music is available directly from the source so there is no need to let users upload files. If you are going to maintain quality control and free yourself from any legal hassles then you need to just supply the music that you know is legal and that you know has been encoded cleanly and so forth. The target then is to make it so that you have a wide enough range of music that you hold the attention of the public. How much music do you download a week? From a quick scan, they appear to have CDs from around over 70 labels with around 4 or 5 hundred artists. With this amount of music available (and it appears to be growing all the time), the sharing argument is relatively irrelevant.
The only Good System is a Sound System
Dark Side of the Moon? In MP3 format? URL??
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
If you're in Stalinist Russia, and you don't like bread lines, you should boycott bread and starve to death -- that'd show them. Yea, right.
There is no remote connection between doing what is necessary to prevent one's own starvation and worshipping at the altar of consumer culture. As far as I know, no one has ever died from lack of television.
In other words, while your anarchist sentiment might be sincere, your analogy sucked.
I hate corporations. I hate them because they constantly steal from me, lie to me, buy politicians that are supposed to represent me, buy laws that line their pockets and punish me, and just all around make the world a shittier place to live.
They steal from you? Give me a dozen examples. It should be simple for you to do, as corporations are "constantly" stealing from you. They lie to you? Bullshit. Corporations exist to make money. That is the truth, and all of the advertising jingles are just tools to help them achieve that end. If you don't like their products, or are repulsed by their advertisements, HURT them. Stop buying their products, and they will become the company that you want them to be, because that is the only way for them to continue making money. And, again, as the adjective "constantly" applies to all of the other accusations in your diatribe, providing a few dozen examples of each offense ought to be easy.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
The problem here is that copyrights are NOT property. Property as defined in the traditional capitalist economic theory is forever
Wrong. All forms of capitalist theory except the most simplictic and caricatured have accepted the concept of property rights for limited times in numerous forms.
And it exists for one reason...It exists because one object cannot be owned by two persons at the same time. They cannot use it both.
Wrong. Labor creates property in the theories of Locke, Smith, and the Chicago and Austrian schools. It exists because you have a right to the products of your labor.
Please learn capitalist theory before you lecture about it.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Yours is the most well reasoned post I've seen on this issue in a long time. I'm quite impressed.
I use Napster, and here's how I rationalize it...
I've been made to feel like a criminal every time I walk into a CD store, even though before Napster, I hadn't done any of the things the people who make me feel that way considered wrong. My technological choices (no audio DAT players, why?) have been artificiaclly restricted. The people who's work I appreciate have been stomped on and badly treated. The people who want me to pay are busily trying to take away even more of my technological choices, and ever restricting whole classes of technology from ever being researched. Stupid media that I don't want are shoved down my throat with all the art of a vetrinarian trying to make a horse swallow a pill.
Needless to say, I'm pretty angry. Perhaps that's a bit of an understatement. Anything I can do to poke these people in the eye, and remove them from my life, I'll do.
If the artists had PayPal accounts that were completely ungarnished by the music _industry_, I would gladly send some money their way.
If I'm stomping on some current artists rights, tough patooties. They chose to align themselves with a band of thugs in the hopes of financial reward. Let them suffer. When they break ranks with them, I'll be happy to help.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I've got a ten year bond in my account. It's my property. After ten years, it doesn't exist anymore. Case closed.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Please learn what you're talking about yourself before you patronise others.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
The central problem here, which this article makes perfectly clear, is that someone who owns and creates something has every right to sell it under any terms they want. If those terms suck, no one will buy it.
Exactly. They will download it on MP3.
Just because people want something does not mean they deserve to have it- especially not on terms THEY choose.
Paying money doesn't mean I "deserve" to hear a song. I am entitled to use my ears whether the record execs want me to or not. If someone is playing a CD on their speakers and I walk by, I suppose you could say I don't "deserve" to be able to hear it, but it seems rather silly. Similarly, if I download a song and play it on my computer, you could say I don't "deserve" to be able to hear it. But it misses the point, really.
The point is that artists and record companies need to be reimbursed or else they won't be able to continue producing music. We shouldn't reimburse them simply because to do otherwise would be "wrong." We should reimburse them because we appreciate their efforts, we enjoy their songs, and we want them to produce more. If we do not enjoy the songs, if we wish they'd stop putting out such crap, then to reimburse them would be counter-productive. (Some might even say harmful.)
But you don't have the right to change the terms of their sale just because you don't like it, or because you think they're behind the times.
The way you're wording this is a bit odd. I suppose you could think of MP3 trading as "changing the terms of sale" but it only serves to obscure the issue. You could say "it is illegal to distribute copies of their copyrighted work" and I would say, "you know your Title XVII." When you say "you don't have the right" do you mean that we don't have the legal right, moral right, or what? Your own personal idea of what "rights" we have?
Speaking for myself, I believe we have the right (and sometimes obligation) to reimburse those who provide a valuable commodity, such as music or software; and we have the right to withhold reimbursement from those we choose. You may have your own idea, and the law certainly provides a different viewpoint.
This is not a moral view; what you want has no moral relevance when we're talking about someone else's rights.
rather than on the basis of bland, vulgar, corporate propaganda.
Oh fuck off. There is no huge corporate conspiracy to keep whatever shit home-town folk band you like off the airwaves. The reason that the music you like is not popular is that it is shit. The record companies have no secret mind control formula which is not accessible to anyone else; what they do have is a skill in producing a product (the "marketing" is part of the product; people like to have "stars" rather than bearded recorder playing granolas). Your music is shit. Deal with it.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I beg you please, do not ever go into a courtroom under this dangerous delusion. A court will not try to read your mind, fail and then shrug its shoulders and say "well, we can't prove intent". The standard of proof is "reasonable doubt", and there is no reasonable doubt that someone posting copyrighted music on the Web intends to aid and abet copyright violation. A reasonable person would not carry out the action unless they had this intent, and you are assumed to be reasonable unless there is powerful reason to suppose you are not.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
The author suggests that the Napster case is not about free speech, but rather "free stuff." Perhaps for many users of Napster -- the ones taking proprietary content without consent -- this may be the case, but that is not the point of the Napster lawsuit.
Napster is about two things -- whether or not a person may enter into the business of providing a communication and file-sharing forum without undertaking a duty to enforce the universe of third-party proprietary rights. This question was settled decades ago in the Sony Betamax case, but the IP world (ironically including Sony) now wants a second bite at the apple. Napster distributes software that is Napster's own intellectual property, and does not itself distribute any third-party content. How far are we to permit the reach of Copyright to impinge upon non-infringers? How is any sensible person ever going to get into the information distribution business should the Napster ruling stand?
The question is not whether underlying use of Napster by particular persons is unlawful, it is about whether underlying use by particular persons makes Napster itself unlawful. Be careful, with that we make hall monitors -- and with that private free speech censors -- out of every Internet ISP -- which is why the ISP's have filed an amicus brief on behalf of Napster.
Anything good in pop-culture exists because it was created by talented people -- talented people that get ripped off by those same corporations. And I know I'm not alon.
So the scriptwriter for The Matrix didn't get a cent for his contribution? I bet Matt Groening is close to flat broke, too. And all those bands with million selling CDs, they shouldn't quit their day jobs.
I hate to get nitpicky here, but the statement I made, "No other property can be given away without loss by the owner," refers only to other (non-information) property. I did not explicitly say that information could always be given away without any cost to the owner. Rather, I said that if you give away information, you always still have it, which is a different thing. You're reading something in to my argument that I didn't actually say or intend to say.
That being said, it's worth clarifying the difference between information that is valuable only for reselling to others (i.e., music, movies, art, etc.), and information which has intrinsic value to the creator (i.e. credit card numbers, bomb-building secrets, business plans, etc.) The former is generally protected by IP laws, while the latter is usually just kept really, really secret. I was talking about the former type of information. I should have clarified that in my argument.
Unfortunately you are totally wrong.
To have some fun, I am quoting Schneir, Applied Cryptography, Second edition, p. 157.
"One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information. To record a single bit by changing the state of a system requires an amount of energy no less that kT, where T is the absolute temperature of the system and k is the boltzman constant"
Can't beat money as a motivation, mate...
What about sex? Many people gladly trade money for sex =^). Or a threat to your health / life? That's probably a superior motivation.
Money is not the supreme motivator. A cow orker of mine just gave up a much higher paying job so he could have more time with his daughter. I would do the same for my son. Unfortunately there are too many people who live for money and that's just sad, not an argument for draconian laws.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
>The Africans are free to develop their own chemical compounds, and to do with them as they please.
and if they dont want to pay, or cant pay it is their choice, they have themselves chosen to die. Because our revenue-stream is more important than human lives.
yup.. makes perfect sense...
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Interesting choice of words... I'm assuming then, that we could take the argument one logical step further and say that since you yourself are essentially a pattern of DNA and moluecular mass you would have no problem with stepping into a machine and allowing someone to make a copy of you. How does that fit with your morality?
--
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
You claim, in your September 4 Infoworld column, that Napster is all
about greed. The jury is still out on that. And it will stay out
until you can go buy the MP3 for an artist you hear on the radio, or
even an artist you heard when you were a teen (e.g. 10CC, or Seals and
Crofts, or Styx). Whenever you interfere with a market -- whenever
you tell people that they can't buy something -- you get a black
market.
Napster functions exactly like a black market, except that the price
is solely your time spent finding a good copy of what you want. Black
markets aren't about greed -- they're about buying what you want to
buy, not necessarily what's for sale. The RIAA wants to sell music
one way, and consumers want to buy it another way. They happen to be
paying a low price to get it that way, but there's no reason that has
to last.
If the RIAA *really* wants to find out if Napster is about greed or a
new business model, it'll go into competition with Napster. Surely
the RIAA knows how to set up a web server big enough to sell the same
content available via Napster. And they have very little to lose by
doing so, since most people are aware of the existance of Napster, and
frankly, Napster works, at least if you want a popular piece of music.
Only then will we be able to say whether Napster is about stealing or
sharing. One thing this economist can tell you for certain: the RIAA
will be as successful at suppressing music file copying as the US
government has been at suppressing some drugs. And the US government
has been throwing many people in jail for decades -- something the
RIAA has only fantasized about doing.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
This isn't about artist's rights anymore. This is a war the music industry started against its consumers long ago. The chickens have come home to roost. When the industry is utterly razed to the ground, we can start thinking about what to do instead to ensure artists rights.
I think that copyright is largely dead and gone. It can't be enforced without imposing a police state. The media industries have abused its protections so badly that nobody takes it seriously anymore. They are the ones who broke the social contract first.
Copyright and patent law are not about any 'natural' right. They're about trying to make sure tht people who create things can continue to spend time doing it. That's all they're for. Not some silly notion that something that can be given away without costing the giver anything has any intrinsic value.
Stop trying to keep a stupid and pathetically inadequate system alive, and think of something better. Your insistence on keeping something that no longer works around smacks of dogma, not reason.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
You don't need to but you are assuming the web is the best possible method for distributing files. While it is good for many things I do not think it is a very reliable source for distributing binaries. A file-sharing approach allows you to mirror on a scale impossible to acheive with the web. The trick is to make digitally signed music that can be verified by the end-user as the original before downloading the music. Also I'm a geek and therefore it is in my nature to explore new possibilities. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
No other property can be given away without loss by the owner.
/very/ beneficial for the owner, both in terms of monetary value and in terms of control. At the same time, giving away information can be /very/ detrimental to the owner.
As well reasoned as your post is, this one sentence completely destroys your argument.
Information is the most powerful piece of property someone can own, share, give away, sell, or keep a hold of. Entire courses in human history were charted by men and women maintaining a grasp on information (Manhattan Project comes to mind). Furthermore, entire other courses were charted by the dissemination of information (the Bible comes to mind). The point is, information being held on to can be
People talk about how the next war will be the Information War. Media groups, from Slashdot to NBC base their entire livelihoods on information gathering and choice dissemination. Whether information gets given out or protected is the most crucial decision anyone can make.
And if you need an example that may hit closer to home, how come you haven't given me your credit card information? We get up in arms because people are giving away our information, and little do they realize that they already gave it away, much to their harm.
Do not underestimate how much of an effect giving away information can have. Not all information is harmless.
As recounted in this website, the phrase "information wants to be free" has a little-known counterpart: "information wants to be expensive." It was first uttered back in 1984 (now there's an ironic year for information wanting to be free!) by Stewart Brand:
(emphases mine)So, people, next time you use the phrase, please take a moment to reflect on what it really means?
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
That was always my favorite analogy. Both freeing information and rotting meat are events that are easy to instigate, hard to prevent, and harder to undo. But just because something seems like a "force of nature" in this fashion doesn't make it a good thing.
The right to "property" and the right to "life" have to be enforced to mean anything. You seem to imply that the former is more important than the latter. Billions of people on this planet might probably want to differ.
Yes, I am sure that some people would pay for their MP3s if they could. No doubt you are among this group. However, that still doesn't make it ethical to use Napster to copy this music illegally. The RIAA has the right to package and sell it's intellectual property any way that it sees fit. You can't go into KMart, break out a package of Wrigley's spearmint and then try to pay for just one piece. KMart isn't interested in selling you just one piece. The RIAA, likewise, isn't interested in selling you just one song (yet).
Like I said, if you really want to screw the RIAA the best thing to do is search through the piles of freely redistributable music and find some that you like. There are lots of bands that are offering exactly what you purport to want (the sale of singles at a decent price), they simply haven't signed contracts with the RIAA.
I think we have again a case of the "beer vs speech" ambiguity with the word "free". Petreley apparently interprets the phrase with the "beer" sense of the word.
But I have never thought that "Information wants to be free" says anything about price. I think that the meaning is that since one can duplicate and distribute information utterly effortlessly nowadays, it only takes a single small leak for a piece of information to spread all over the world, if there is interest in it.
Of course, since this makes information common, it consequently often makes it pretty cheap. But that is just a side effect.
Information doesn't want to be costless, information wants to be unrestrained.
--
Because the producer did produce it once, and they need to be compensated. Put it this way -- if you don't pay for it, who will ? Ultimately, someone has to fork out to get the software written, and the current licensing model is a reasonably fair distributed payment system. if a specific item required nothing to create, isn't its inherent value zero?
A program takes quite a lot of effort to create. Therefore it's inherent value is most certainly a lot greater than zero, which explains why the market is prepared to send their checks to the software companies for making their software available.
Nick Petreley really hit the nail on the head here. PEOPLE want information to be free, and seem to have a tremendous lack of respect (or perhaps just a tremendous amount of ignorance) about our current economic system, so they just go about circumventing it without allowing the market to operate. The market *needs* at least a minimal notion of intellectual property in order to function.
Very often I see a lot of arguments that "information has no scarcity", and I reel back in horror at that inaccuracy. Raw, unfiltered data has no scarcity. It's just bits. Information, however, is a specific configuration of bits that adds value. The fact that there is a lack of "valuable information" (i.e. good music, good software, good books) implies that there is a form of scarcity involved -- a scarcity of skill and talent to create valuable information.
Information creation is a scarce service.
So this implies that we probably should have mechanisms to require payment for information if the market finds it valuable. What's at question is whether we should have to pay for it as a product, like we currently do, which is clearly inefficient from an economic perspective as it leads to excessive profits, or in english, "rich rock star" syndrome.
So the question really shouldn't be about how to destroy intellectual property. It should be about how to come up with new business models that are much more efficient than the "shrink wrap" business model... and this actually seems to be what the industry is doing. Subscription-based software, ASP's, etc. are all signs of the times.
-Stu
Just another trick to generate ad revenue. It also badly (possibly willfully) misconceived the meaning of "information wants to be free". Obviously it attributes intentionality to something that doesn't have it, but so do well accepted aphorisms about "water seeking its own level", etc. These are statements about phenomena that say how they behave. Its certainly not a moral statement. Although, for one reason or another, many people also believe it to be a good thing, the statement itself is not "information should be free", or "I want information to be free", but "information behaves as if it were free".
It wasn't originally a statement about *price*, but one about *control*. As making copies of information and transmitting it (which are the same thing, in the final analysis) becomes easier and quicker, it becomes harder and harder to control access to information. This was initially thought to be a good thing because it could be used to circumvent *censorship*, not copyright.
Of course, the reasons for loss of control are economic: the cost of copying has fallen to almost zero, and thus the primary barrier which copyright holders and publishers used to control copying is fast disappearing.
And, of course, since censorship and copyright are both about controlling information, an increase in its "leakiness" will undermine both. This whole area is interesting and deserved a much better article than this weak troll full of stupid ranting about things being "just the way it is".
Is Open Source for the masses? You might say yes, but then I might say no. We both have our reasons for supporting either cause. Just because something isn't physically tangible doesn't mean that I can't say it's mine. And if I say it's mine, then I should be able to choose who I let play with it.
If I make a painting or a sculpture, I might let my friends look at it, but maybe not my younger cousin with the greesy fingers. I may not also want a person who I might believe will steal it and call it their own -- or worse yet, copy it and call it mine (it will never look the same).
Value judgements on what's right and what's wrong are best left for the masses to deside, we were given the ability to choose since we came upon this earth.
Just my few cents...or maybe more.
~KONala >^..^
i assert that the licensing model is NOT appropriate, i suppose i should have been more clear on that in my original post. it makes no sense in general that if something, say an album that takes a few days for a recording group to create (and really, they can bust em out that fast), has work put into it one time, it seems logical that the producers/artists should receive appropriate payment one time.
That's bogus because it is hardly ever that someone knows an "appropriate payment" at the moment the work is created. Britney Spears albums make millions of bucks when really the "appropriate payment" for these crimes against art would be a horsewhipping, whereas the author of Moby Dick doesn't get diddly because he's dead by the time anyone noticed his work is worth anything.
I suppose you could have some sort of Communist model of intellectual property where a group of apparatchiks decide what is important art and what is an appropriate payment, but the current system, as stupid as it is, is probably preferable to that.
If you really like one songs, buy it as a single. But just because you don't want the whole CD doesn't make it right for you to steal even part of it.
Oh, of course, let me see... Now... where IS that purple haze single... Hrmmm. That's right, there isn't one! Well... I'll just buy the original album that had it on CD, what? No cd for that album! All they have is Band of Gypsies and Greatest Hits?! But all I want is Purple Haze.... Well, I guess since they aren't selling Purple Haze they can't possibly lose money if I download it. So there.
Not all songs are offered as singles, and not all albums are available in CD format, or even Tape format. What if I want music that the RIAA has decided there is no market for and so stopped selling? What am I supposed to do if there is no way for me to BUY the music I want? Buying it at a used CD shop or used Record shop doesn't give the RIAA a dime... So why should they care if I download it instead? If you aren't selling a product anymore, and someone can get that product for free without taking it away from you then no one is stealing from you.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Ironicly I actually made more money when I was in highschool than I do now since at that point I could get away with charging $50/hr to work on computers. Add that I have a lot more bills now and I would be lucky to be anywhere close to what I made then. I buy more CD's because MP3's restored my interest in music which had been burnt out by years of radio and MTV that didn't serve my tastes in music. I also buy more books and movies now largely due to my growing interest in media.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Before you impugn the critical thinking skills of others, you might want to break out a logic textbook and look up the term "begging the question". In this case your thesis is that ideas are property per se, and therefore using those ideas without their owners' permission is theft. You then go on to prove your thesis by assuming as a premise that ideas are property per se, and therefore using those ideas without their owners' permission is theft. That is not logic in any meaningful sense. No progress is possible in this debate until people recognize that the real question is not, "Is it ok to steal?" but rather "Does it make sense to classify something that can be endlessly replicated without cost as `property'?"
The argument in favor of intellectual property is that creators need incentive to create. I'm not entirely sure I believe that, but it is certainly true that creative people need to pay their rent and grocery bills the same as everyone else. The arguments against intellectual property are, first, that people are naturally creative, and they create more efficiently when they are free to build on previous work, and, second, that intellectual property laws can be used to stifle freedom.
The latter point is most troubling to me. As our economy evolves, we expect information products to become every bit as much necessities of life as food and shelter; in fact, in many cases we expect information products to displace physical goods as necessities of life. With physical goods the economy has always worked on the principle that once you buy it it's yours, and the seller has no further say in what you do with it. Not so, intellectual property. Intellectual property is governed by a license which binds you to an ongoing commitment to the seller. Vendors of intellectual property would have us believe that the terms of these license could be literally anything: a continuing financial commitment, refraining from using competing products, and disclosing sensitive personal information are all terms that have appeared in intellectual property licenses, and we can only expect the license terms to grow bolder.
To me, finding a balance for intellectual property law is the single most important challenge facing our civilization today. What good are the guarantees of liberty we have worked so hard to build (literally centuries of human endeavor) if we and our posterity are going to have to license ourselves into bondage just to participate in the digital economy? A fair and equitable balance must be found. I don't pretend that that balance will be found in "information wants to be free", but there's a lot less danger in that than in the "mine, all mine" espoused by the intellectual property industries and their apologists.
-rpl
I guess, but I don't think it's any more inflamatorry than saying that people want to maximize their own advantage. That's not news - most economic models (but interestingly enough, very few compsci models) assume that user-agents are "greedy maximizers" out for their own gain. The trick to creating a market is to set up a system in which everyone wins without having to change this property. Whenever you see a black market (like Napster, as another user already pointed out), you're witnessing a problem with the market structure. Greedy maximizers (IMHO) will be willing to sacrifice their time and energy to get a poor copy of a pop song rather than spend $20 for a high-quality copy. However, I also believe that these same people would gladly pay for a nice, clean, high-quality copy of that same song for a reasonable price. I bet they'd even be willing to pay microcharges on a per-listen basis.
Anyway, you should go look up the old MP3.com editorial "Drug Dealers Don't Sell Aspirin" for a good summation.
Can your IM do this?
that's why I hotwired it and drove it off the lot one night, honest your honor, it's not my fault!
.50 cent platter, why is this so expensive? It's so easy and natural, the limitation is a purely artifical human contrived scheme to limit supply and keep demand and prices up. I always have to giggle when I order a copy of MSft OFFICE and am told they are out of stock, har har. I just put 'em on backorder and install from another disk, at least a license is on the way. But Msft is going to turn real fascist and enforce electronic registration so we can't even do that as a way to get around their user inconvience problem.
One car dealer has this slogan: "I'd give them away but my wife won't let me"
I tell potential employers, "I'm not a free man, I'm expensive"
I think what ppl are getting at with the "wants to be free" slogan (and who could be against freedom??) is the low cost of copying, compared with purchasing an official license - something that costs $499 only takes a few minutes and a
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Oh fuck off. There is no huge corporate conspiracy to keep whatever shit home-town folk band you like off the airwaves. The reason that the music you like is not popular is that it is shit. The record companies have no secret mind control formula which is not accessible to anyone else; what they do have is a skill in producing a product (the "marketing" is part of the product; people like to have "stars" rather than bearded recorder playing granolas). Your music is shit. Deal with it.
So, by this rationale, the only good music is the music that sells the most? Ergo, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and N'Sync are the best music of the 90s?
What I'd like to see is sales figures for albums that ignores all sales in the first 5 or 10 years or so since the album was released. I.e. how well does the album sell once the marketing hype wears off, and how well does it last? Just for the sake of example, Michael Jackson's _Thriller_ may have outsold Dark Side of the Moon, but I'll bet DSotM outsells Thriller at least 5 to 1 nowadays.
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At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
By the way, for all y'all who you don't like the RIAA, don't listen to their member companies' music -- no problem. After all, there's plenty of other music out there from promising local bands, who could probably use your support. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I find it comical that people take up the cause of vigilante justice against the oppressed musician proletariat by downloading as much major-label music as strikes their fancy.
Come on people, you know you want it. Don't be coy. Tell major record labels that you're going to fill multiple hard drives with the music they sell, not because it's anything personal, but because you can. That's what you really want to say, isn't it?
These recording moguls have already admitted and settled out of court for hundreds of millions they bilked the American consumer out of with illegal price-fixing schemes. If IP laws (which are nearly fictional in their moral authority) are to be obeyed then so are trade laws. Of course if you can afford enough lawyers you can afford to ignore the law and just cough up a nice hefty bribe to buy a few senators and change the laws.
This lawsuit is not about criminality, but about who gets a nicer slice of the swag. Eventually like mp3.com the RIAA will force Napster into a settlement, because they're the older and more well-established pack of thieves.
As for RIAA, fuck them. These bastards have pushed for decades to create new copyright legislation that extends copyrights nearly indefinitely, which amounts to wholesale theft from the public domain. Essentially, if they get their way, there WILL be no public domain. I consider it total war and basically anything goes. Hell with them.
They'd gladly wipe out freedom of speech or any chance of privacy in order to achieve their goals which they cloak in the flowery rhetoric of "responsibility" and "property" but which really means total control, forever, of everything "intellectual."
If given the choice between one word of free speech and all the intellectual property in the world, my choice is burn it all, fuck it, we don't need it.
The first time I read Stallman's manifesto, the first thing that popped into my mind was, "Information wants to be free?" Now, FSF advocates under close scrutiny will admit that this only works as a figurative statement, but the fact of the matter is that Stallman uses it as base for his ethics of intellectual property.
What people need to realize is that information is such (vis-a-vis white noise) because someone put effort into creating it; to say that information has some intrinsic quality, or worse desire, to be free is ascribe behavior that is downright anthropomorphic to well-defined, abstract concept. That it is infinitely duplicable does not mean that there is not compensation due; a person is providing you a service, and you should reimburse that person for his time and effort. I like the author's charge: If you don't like the pay music, create and distribute free music.
To this end, I like Stephen King's revenue model: Honesty. He writes "Don't steal from the blind newsboy;" he has successfully gambled that people will pay the small one time fee to experience his work, not just out of grace ("patronage"), but due to a sense of ethics ("captialism").
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring epicurean ***
The property interest a tenant has comes from a contract, hence "contractual". Contractual interests are sometimes property interests, but neither are property. Note that some contracts allow the contract itself to be property...
: a quality or trait belonging and especially peculiar to an individual or thing b : an effect that an object has on another object or on the senses c : VIRTUE 3 d : an attribute common to all members of a class : something owned or possessed; specifically : a piece of real estate b : the exclusive right to possess, enjoy, and dispose of a thing : OWNERSHIP c : something to which a person or business has a legal title d : one (as a performer) under contract whose work is especially valuable : an article or object used in a play or motion picture except painted scenery and costumes /-l&s/ adjective /-n&s/ noun
From www.m-w.com:
Main Entry: property
Pronunciation: 'prä-p&r-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Etymology: Middle English proprete, from Middle French propreté, from Latin proprietat-, proprietas, from proprius own
Date: 14th century
1 a
2 a
3
synonym see QUALITY
- propertyless
- propertylessness
See that "Preview" button?
So what you are trying to say is that there is no way to buy Purple Haze? It's not on any CD available anywhere? That's funny, I just did a search on Amazon and came up with 87 CDs with the song Purple Haze on it. Even assume only 25% are correct and not duplicates, that's 21 CDs with the song. Seems like someone sure is selling it.
As for used CDs, you have every right to go and buy a used CD. The RIAA doesn't make any money off that sale, because they already made their money of the original sale. Unlike downloading it from the web, the money has already been made, and the person loses the ablility to use the CD once he sells it. Now, compare that to NApster, where one person buys a CD and a million people download it. Kinda different, huh?
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Nick is a Linux advocate. If the Open Source is not Linux, or installed on Linux, he wants nothing to do with them.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
So what you are trying to say is that there is no way to buy Purple Haze? It's not on any CD available anywhere? That's funny, I just did a search on Amazon and came up with 87 CDs with the song Purple Haze on it. Even assume only 25% are correct and not duplicates, that's 21 CDs with the song. Seems like someone sure is selling it.
Yeah, it's on the Greatest Hits CD. I just picked it as a random example of a relatively hard to find song that everyone has heard of. It's on 2 other CDs as well, one of which is no longer produced or sold, and one of which is sold someplaces but very hard to find. The fact is that SOMEONE somewhere bought the CD. And if that CD is no longer for sale, and the song on it is not available to be purchased through an RIAA approved distribution method then they CAN NOT lose money from me downloading it. You CAN NOT lose money if someone copies something you are not selling.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
- Even with Microsoft monopoly, the software industry is full of opportunity. Anyone can learn how to code, and find a way to make money out of it. The music industry is not that simple.
- Music is entertainment. For some idealistic minds, entertainment is not business. We all now thats its wrong - entertainment is BIG business anywhere in the world.
- Maybe it's easier for college kids to see themselves making money out of code than making money out of music. So in a sense they are trying to protect their own future. To be a great musician is hard, and to be a top band is a distant dream.
- Maybe file size matters. Some years ago, trading software was hot in BBSs. Most commercial software could be found for free in Warez BBSs all around. Many of them were large downloads at that time. Some could even fill an 1.2 Mb 5"1/4 floppy disk
:-) It was not viable to download music, for technical reasons. PCs were not powerful enough for MP3 and similar codecs. Now if people try to copy Win2000 over the Internet... not even DSL is close to allow this to be done in the next few years.
Anyway thats my personal opinion... lets see what the guys outside here think...The central problem here, which this article makes perfectly clear, is that someone who owns and creates something has every right to sell it under any terms they want.
I know we're really talking about music here, but this point takes the argument onto a broader level. Bear with me here.
As I see it, "owning" something is not a god given right. It's more an agreement that we use to share out the finite resources of the planet. (limited land, fossil fuel etc.) But because those resources are finite, their use ultimately affects everyone else (eg. pollution, deforestation etc.) So being the "owner" also carries a responsability to make good use of that resource (its criminal to pour beer down the sink). Ie. other people do have a say, even though it's "yours".
Now lets look at a strictly IP example. Certain US drug companies hold patents on AIDS related medications. South Africa wants to provide these drugs to the huge numbers of people with AIDS. The drug companies want a lot of money. South Africa can...
You think that bussiness model sucks? Fine- drive them out of bussiness with your own
... by manufacturing the drug by themselves, locally in South Africa. But the US is threatening sanctions if they do -- the point of IP is that no-one else can provide their own competing product.
Anyway, this example is some way from music, but it's worth bearing in mind that some of these arguments "if you don't like it, don't buy it" don't scale too well.
The problem is that nobody gets it.
The statement "information wants to be free" is a true one. However, thanks to the rather poor word choice concerning the last word in the statement, it seems nobody really understands it.
Napster users don't get it. They somehow get this idea that "free" means "zero-cost," and while that may be true in the dictionary it isn't true in the context of this statement.
The author of this article, though, is guilty of precisely the same thing. He isn't stealing music, but he still doesn't get the idea that the "free" in "information wants to be free" has precisely nothing whatsoever to do with cost.
And worse off, almost none of the Slashdotters are getting it either; every post I've seen in favor of this article is still making that exact same error. I suppose it's somewhat understandable; all Open-Source software, at least as we know it today, has been zero-cost. However, that doesn't mean it has to be. We've had software that was "speech and beer" and software that's "beer but not speech." Why could there not be software that was "speech but not beer"?
I think it's possible. No one seems to have tried it yet, but I don't think it's an impossible task. Cross-model software isn't entirely new; look at Id, which tends to release its software under a combined shareware/commercial model (get the demo for free, get the rest of the game -noting that the engine itself is absolutely identical- upon registration). If this can be done with "beer but not speech" as one of the models, it would seem sensible that "speech but not beer" might also be possible. Id hasn't tried that yet, but I don't see them as being entirely averse to trying it a few years down the road.
It's certainly a possibility. The question is, who will be the first to try? Do we really want it to be, say, perhaps Microsoft, who could take the idea, run with it, and then try to claim credit as the real "innovators" of the Open-Source movement as the people who made it profitable (untrue, of course, but they could say it and people would believe them)? I don't think so.
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As a human being with a soul your biggest tool in fighting a soul-less, imortal, and amoral being is to join together with other beings with souls. In the end you will win because soul-less beings are ugly when exposed to the glare of public scrutiny. All soul-less beings want to keep a low profile remember that.
Here is a though for you. If you are a liberal person why would you shop at wal-mart and help support republicans? Why would you watch fox tv and help Murdock give even more money to politicians you hate? Same goes in reverse if you are conservative why would you give Ted turner money by watching CNN?
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
Lemme see. Four years ago, the copyright on _Huckleberry Finn_ expired, Russ. The copyright on _Alice in Wonderland_ expired about a decade ago. Sometime recently, _The Strand's_ copyright on _A Study in Scarlet_ expired.
Yes, the current state of copyright law is abusive. Yes, the terms accorded to items of value are ridiculous. Fine -- you want my help (or even my money) fixing that? You got 'em. But the only way to provide any return on investment on a commodity with zero marginal cost is to grant a monopoly on that commodity. For literary and creative works, whose content is independent of the form of their presentation, that means something not unlike copyright.
If information wants to be free, and people need to eat, then if you want people to produce information, then you need to prop up the cost of the information they produce. You can do it through government subsidy or you can provide it by monopoly, or you can use a hybrid, such as we use now. The hybrid -- a small number of people get government subsidies to do basic work, and everybody else gets a monopoly on their content -- seems to work. The other two extremes don't.
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If someone creates content (i.e. music), they have the right to put whatever restrictions they like, through the use of copyright and license agreements.
No it doesn't.
Excessive or illegal restrictions on the licensing of intellectual property can and has been construed as "copyright misuse" and has caused the IP owner to lose copyright infringement actions.
See this article for information on the Lasercomb case and others in which this has occurred. Specifically, licensing agreements forbidding reverse engineering are covered by this.
This is why the Microsoft EULA says this:
Limitations on Reverse Engineering, Decompilation, and Disassembly. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.
Bolds mine. It wouldn't have that added disclaimer if it would be illegal for them to forbid it outright, since they'd love to do that.
I for one would be interested in helping fund (with my cd buying money) a label that plays a part similar to that of the Free Software Foundation. Such a label would require the artists signed to them to release their music under an open-content license. In exchange the label would provide the normal features such as production, distribution, publicity, etc and only take their royalty from those sales up to the point where they've made back their costs. This would allow artists to keep a lot more of their own money and still provide the community with free music. Since free music drives sales (I for one bought far more CD's since MP3's) their should still be a lot of money to be made. A lot of new artists would also be interested as they'd have a lot more options with our FreeMusic Label.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Why should something have to be paid for multiple times when it was only produced once? Because it allows the costs to be shared among the people who are interested in it. That's why lots of people can see a movie for under 10 bucks instead of having to individually pay the millions of dollars that it cost to create it. Which specific items are you referring to when you say that they cost nothing to create? Time is money, after all.
Congrats to Petreley for his article, btw, it's probably the best article he's ever written and is what a lot of us have been saying for a long time: While there are a handful of principled people defending the likes of Napster, it's mostly people just wanting free stuff.
And nope, that's not my quote in the subject, I saw some other Slashdot poster using it for his sig. I'd credit him for it if I could, but I don't know who it was (whoops, IP violation? ;-) ), but wanted to throw it out there because it's a great line.
Cheers,
The thing with MP3's is that for 2 songs off of an album that they play on the radio, there are another 8 that they will never play on the radio and will never be heard Unless you either borrow or buy the album.. That's not freedom.
That's when you realise you've made a big mistake and should have just bought the single because the rest of the album sucks... That's where the free part comes in, As in free previews of the rest of the CD that no one will play on the radio, and sometimes for good reason...
I would love to do as the author stated, and create some free music.. Problem is, It would HAVE to be free, because No-One ine their right mind would pay for it.
I can see a day when there will be Time Limited MP3's where you have a day or so to "Preview" before the file will self destruct in 10...9...8 ETC....But like everything else It Will Be Hacked...
Spaz
Stupid can opener! You killed my father and now you've come back for me!
i meant what i said. Content, by virtue of being something that a Creator creates, is the property of the Creator. Perhaps I should have said "inherently" instead of intrinsically, I did write the post in 5 minutes while procrastinating. sorry to have offended you, my pedantic friend.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
no, thats not what i am saying. I'm saying that it is currently legal to download, and play, MP3s from Napster, because the AHRA does not specifically make any distinction between you copying your friend's music and downloading music from millions of people on the web. It's still fair use. Go ahead and use Napster, and be comforted that you are doing it legally (unless the law changes). DONT say its legal because "information wants to be free". Music is not information. Music is content, and the rules for distribution of this specific content currently say that copying is fair use. Keep in mind that laws may change and if they do, then Music may no longer be protected the way it currently is. For example, Music may become as controlled as software. In which case we lose our legal umbrella. Chanting "Information wants to be free" is irrelevant and misses the point.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
The remarks in the preceding appear to be trolling, but taking them on their face:
(1) Napster has NOTHING, really, to do with the conduct of its users. They are not parties to the suit. There is NO allegation in the complaint of direct infringement -- the sole Count (apart from an irrelevant state claim) is for contribution. The question is not whether two people using Napster to trade another's IP without fair use or consent is infringing -- on this point I agree with the troll. The relevant legal questions in this case (rather than the troll's straw man) are: (1) whether space-shifting is noninfringing conduct; and (2) whether Napster is, in fact, capable of substantial non-infringing use.
(2) At least one three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit has its doubts. The injunction was stayed in an order, finding substantial flaws, both in the form and the merits of the District Court opinion.
(3) The Supreme Court, whom I reasonably rely upon for constitutional advice when conflicting with the unsupported statements of a troll, knew full well the constitutional status of the Patent and Copyright Acts when it wrote the Sony opinion. Moreover, they recently held that the Amendments (including the First, Fifth and Eleventh) trump the Patent and Copyright Clause in the Florida College Prepaid and Seminole Tribe cases.
In short, I agree that Copyrights and Patents have special, indeed, constitutional status from Article I, Section 8. But so does every law passed under the Commerce clause! No provision of Article I creates a power in the Congress to block free speech. Period.
(3) You could easily count the aggregate number of people who have been jailed for copyright infringement on a hand or two. Thus, either there aren't that many "theives" [sic], or the troll is wrong.
How about; YOUR ARGUMENT IS SHIT?
grow up, will you?
^popular ^= shit.
Or do you think that the Ford Escort was the best car of all time?
Or do you think that Miller Lite is the best beer in the world?
How about the dominant computer operating system in the world? Is Windows 95 REALLY better than Linux?
Do you honestly believe that Brittney Spears, #1 selling artist, is a better musician, produces better music than say, Robert Fripp? Sure, she produces a better "product", by the scale that products are measured on, which is sales, but by no means is it better music.
There is no huge corporate conspiracy, true, but record companies DO tend to favor promoting performers that are young, sexy, well packaged, and not necessarily artists. You see, people with real talent can walk across the street to the next record company, people with talent are often intelligent to demand better contracts, people with talent often espouse viewpoints in their art that are not, shall we say, appropriate for mass consumption? In short, they're harder to deal-with, on a business level, and harder to sell to the masses. (I'm talking about real iconoclasm here, not teenage rebellion crap) Why sell products that are hard to sell? Brittney Spears is easy to sell to millions of spoiled American teenage brats with mommy and daddy's credit card. Robert Frip only sells to a few wierdos with eclectic tastes, who may not have enough money to blow on a new CD every week.
The reason that the music I like is not popular, is because it is not a convenient product to sell, therefore the companies do not market it as enthusiastically, and not as many people are exposed to it.
Of course, as a consumer of music, I have to think about my priorities about what I consider "good" music, and "bad" music. Among those criteria are NOT how good looking the performer is, or how many CD's they sold last year, or how many weeks their single stayed at #1.
True, people LIKE to have "stars", because they've been force-fed the romance of this "star" phenomenon since Elvis. The record industry created this environment, and this market, but we don't all have to be mindless little sheep for them.
Therefore, my musical tastes run incompatible with the business model of the music industry. Therefore, I require a promotional and distributional model that exists OUTSIDE of the mainstream music industry.
Unfortunately, Napster suffers from the same pop-culture overflow that hit radio does, because Napster doesn't have a lot of good music. Mostly pop crap. Oh well, there's still the few underground record stores left out there.
On the Skywalker Ranch where the Storm Trooper Posse says:
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
A war the music industry started years ago? I don't remember any declaration of war. Look, if you don't like the terms that the Cd is sold under DON'T BUY IT. If you don't like the little legal disclaimer that says that your purchase price does NOT cover the right of making copies for distribution, then DON'T BUY IT. If the record companies really are doing something wrong, then why don't you form a company and show them how it's really done? Fact is: record companies COULD sell their Cds with the price of the right to copy and distribute the data included. But I'd bet they charge lots more for it than a regular Cd, because that's a very valuable right. That they don't choose to do this is their choice. Either buy it or reject it, but don't try to tell me that you're striking some moral blow against evil execs by stealing it. I don't know what the heck your holy "war" is all about, but I suspect it DOES just all boil down to: you're just as greedy as the record execs.
As for used CDs, you have every right to go and buy a used CD. The RIAA doesn't make any money off that sale, because they already made their money of the original sale. Unlike downloading it from the web, the money has already been made, and the person loses the ablility to use the CD once he sells it.
By your argument I actually create value every time I download a song that's on a used CD that's for sale. The artist, the studio and the RIAA lose nothing (because they would have gained nothing from the sale), the used CD store loses nothing because he still has the CD, I have what I want at less than I might otherwise have paid, and the person who uploaded the song in the first place still has the CD, which he may or may not have bought from a used CD store.
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E_NOSIG
You can't make people money by watching their TV channel... unless maybe you've got one of those Nielsen devices on your TV. The advertisers pay them in hopes of getting a return. There's no way to calculably measure how many people are influenced by a particular commercial.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
It doesn't matter whether or not the RIAA is bad--and I'll be right there with you saying that they are. The problem is that whether you like it or not, the music shared on Napster is someone else's property. And taking that property makes you a thief.
If I write a piece of software that I want to sell commercially, I don't want the l33t skr1pt k1dd33z spreading it all over the net. I want my money's worth. Sound greedy, immoral, and ineffective? Think of it another way.
If I write a piece of software that I want to distribute under the GPL, I don't want Microsoft to take, modify, and resell it as proprietary software. I want the users to get their freedom.
If you're going to argue against rights to control your own media, then you're going to have to get rid of the good as well as the bad. You can't have it any other way.
Visit the
I think Nick's missed the real meaning of the (over-used) phrase.
"...wants to be free" doesn't mean that everyone has a right to copy any information. We still, now, mostly respect the idea of old-school copyrights with all their in-built fair-use provisions.
What it means is that it's very difficult to stop people copying information. To do it would require not only complicated and annoying copy-protection and licensing schemes that kill the traditional copyright-based rights we have, but also an insanely harsh set of laws against circumventing them. To effectively stop copying, you have to build what is more or less a fascist state. Most people consider this sort of effort to counter information being free far too much hard work, if not simply unnatural.
Of course this is exactly the action the MPAA, RIAA, and other DMCA proponents are working on right now. They'd happily screw up the world to protect their right to make a buck from someone else's work. Because the world owes them a living, you see.
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I never said anyone should be compelled to release any information. You fail to see the distinction between compelling someone to release their secrets and allowing freedom of thought using information once it has reached your senses.
OK, so musicians who love their art will be compelled to produce as little as possible? Only the people creating art whose primary reason is money will lose their motivation. And good riddance to industrialized art. People selling material products will always be able to make money since people will always want to consume them. Demand isn't going to go away. So the supply will be there. And you're confused again if you think I'm talking about communism. I'm all in favor of paying someone good money to provide a good or service that I have neither the time or ability to create for myself. And I think those who offer the best implementations of a good or service for the best price should be rewarded with more business. This only stimulates higher productivity. Patents diminsh productivity because they create monopoloy power and allow a producer to be lazy since nobody can compete with them fairly. I'm arguing for capitalism pure and simple. Except IP shouldn't be capital because IP isn't necessary and it negatively impacts our individual quality of life and takes away our natural rights.
About the money. Sure money can be printed by the Federal Reserve, but it is still not a good analogue of information in my mind. It is not a pattern or idea that dwells in the mind. It is legal tender. Those who wish to keep information in captivity may wish to give information certain legal properties that resemble money, but I don't believe that's what information is about. At a fundamental level, money is a purely social-legal construct whereas information is not. Information is fundamentally just a pattern that can be represented by any number of schemes.
Your right, paying money doesn't mean you "deserve" to hear a song. It means you have the right to have a copy of the song. If you hear someone else's copy, or here it on the radio or whatever, that's fine. But that doesn't give you the right to "own" a copy of the song. Paying money gives you that right. If you download a copy of the song, you now "own" a copy of it, which means you should pay for that privilege (because it certainly isn't a right).
The point is that artists and record companies need to be reimbursed or else they won't be able to continue producing music. We shouldn't reimburse them simply because to do otherwise would be "wrong." We should reimburse them because we appreciate their efforts, we enjoy their songs, and we want them to produce more. If we do not enjoy the songs, if we wish they'd stop putting out such crap, then to reimburse them would be counter-productive. (Some might even say harmful.)
If you don't like what someone is doing, you shouldn't be purchasing their product, or using it. If you think it is worth taking the time to download, play, and take up your HS space, then obviously you enjoy it. There are many ways to sample songs before you buy them which have been around for quite a while, you should be using these to find out what you want to spend your money on. If you don't want to buy an album, you have no right to "own" a copy of the songs on that album (that's right, not even that one you really like). If you really like one songs, buy it as a single. But just because you don't want the whole CD doesn't make it right for you to steal even part of it. If I only want to plumber to come to my house and unscrew the cap to I can get into the pipes in my house, but he wants to charge me for the whole thing anyway, can I have him come over and unscrew the pipes and then kick him out whitout paying? Why should I pay for the whole thing when I only wanted part of it?
Speaking for myself, I believe we have the right (and sometimes obligation) to reimburse those who provide a valuable commodity, such as music or software; and we have the right to withhold reimbursement from those we choose.
So what your saying is that no one has a right to charge for what they do/make? Or more specifically, they have the right to charge for it, but you have the right to use their service/goods and not pay that charge (thus negating the purpose of charging in the first place). Do you have the right to charge your employer for your time (ie get paid)? Does your employer have the right to withhold paying you? What if they think you didn't work as hard as you should have this month, can they not pay you? What if they think you're charging too much for your time, can they just not pay you? If you use a good/service, you agree to pay for it. Not doing so is stealing (yes, I understand if it's a service nothing is lost, etc etc etc, it's all semantics).
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
And yes, you are right, we don't live in Utopia. We have and will continue to further strip people of their rights. Given the opportunity to seize power like this, it is the natural thing for corporations to do! I don't blame them. However, we don't have to give corporations and business entities everything they want! If nobody objects, we will just keep losing more and more rights ad infinitum until we, and every scrap of our cultures, are property of some corporation!
Now, if you try to lie about the origin of the money in your hand - that is, if you try to convince me that it came from the Federal Reserve - or if you try to tell me that you wrote the novel (plagiarism) - then that's immoral.
And DNA is in no way guarded. The natural mechanisms that are associated with DNA have evolve to promote as wide of a dissemination of genes as possible. This is precisely why DNA containing organisms are so widespread, and why they all share a great deal of common code. Viruses copy and spread genes among prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Plasmids are exchanged among bacteria. Under certain conditions, the DNA can simply go naked and spread from one organism to another. You could say it "wants" to be free, if you don't mind the anthropomorphism. If you object to that phrase, you would have to at least agree that DNA tends copy and spread among organisms through a variety of mechanisms. This is one reason why the genetically engineered crops are so frought with potential problems for both the manufacturers and the public at large.
And you've got it backwards with music too. Do you think that the mass produced music out there these days - Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, etc. is quality music written by artists who are passionate about their art? Or do you think it is "engineered" by the labels to meet certain specs that they know will lead to sales. Most of the crap on the airwaves these days is devoid of artistic merit, IMHO. Of course art is subjective, so I can't back that up. I believe that if money were removed from the music, we would lose all the crappy corporate music and would be left only with music made by true artists who are making music for the right reasons. And they will still be compensated well with live shows as it has always been. If you would like some links to some fine quality music created for free let me know and I'll post some links.
Napster *was* designed with the *supposed* purpose of allowing small artists to get their music out to the world. However, the boys at Napster were taking into account that mp3s were bigger than Elvis, the Easter Bunny, and even Santa Claus. By only allowing the sharing of the mp3 format, they basically stuck themselves into the niche of pirates. I would be willing to bet that 95% (if not more) of the mp3s files in existence are illegal copies of songs from major copyrighted artists. The idea behind mp3 compression is great. It is the real world usage that has made it the shady activity it is today. If I take albums that *I* own on CD (or tape or vinyl for that matter) and convert them to mp3s only for my own enjoyment, then I am still within the legal right. If I give them to my friend, then it is illegal. The concept of a peer-to-peer mp3 sharing system is pretty shady IMHO. It pretty much guarantees abuse and illicit activity.
On to the warez scene... Warez traders and mp3 traders generally have the same argument. If company X didn't charge so damn much for it, I would be able to buy a copy. I call you on this one. Bull-poop. If they charged only a dollar for Adobe Photoshop 5.5, you *still* would rip it and distribute it illegally. The kick is not getting something for free... It is getting something for free that *you aren't supposed to*. Otherwise, every little warez kiddie and mp3 freak would be jumping on the linux bandwagon wholeheartedly.
I totally agree with the idea of freeing information, but information is *not* products. Yes, give out all the information you can on MS APIs and system calls. That still doesn't make Windows a free product. You are paying for a completed work. You are paying for the thousands of man-hours of development. There are free alternatives within the law. I run linux, not because it is free. I run linux because I like it. I own a copy of Windows. It came with my PC. I paid my Microsoft tax. A completed product is where companies (including record labels and software companies) make their money. Who are we hurting but ourselves when we pirate software or music?
Unfortunately, there is a thrill in being outside the law. I don't agree with Napster. I don't agree with warez. These things aren't going to go away just because I do no like them. There are too many people who get their kicks from doing illegal activities online to ever have these things completely go away. So they close down napster... How many replacements do you think we'll see?
To anyone I may have offended, tough. Grow up. Breaking the law is still breaking the law, no matter how you try to justify it.
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
If people care so little about Brittany that they won't pay to support her, well, I guess that means she won't be able to pay her bills. I believe that's called capitalism. Whether or not they get to listen to her music is incidental to the matter. If the only way you can get people to pay you is to hold a figurative gun to their head, what a sad state of affairs it is for you.
Try that the next time the plumber comes to your house. You don't care about him, so after he gets done fixing whatever, tell him to leave and that your not going to pay him. You won't pay to support him, because you don't care enough about him. For some reason I don't think that that will fly. If you use someone's service or goods (and yes, listening to music can be considered using a service or good, it is the artist's "product" you are using) you have to pay for it. There is no clause about "If you don't feel like paying for it, or think it's too expensive (even though you agreed to the price up front) then you don't have to pay". Can your employer keep you working there and just not pay you because they don't care enough to pay to support you? No, they have to pay you for all the time you worked there.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
You are quite right. Boycotting the RIAA is like boycotting Microsoft. It doesn't change a darn thing because there are millions of other people that don't care that the RIAA is evil. Since there is very little that I or the RIAA can do to keep you from trading MP3s I can see why it is that you feel that trading MP3s is "the best that you can do" to strike back.
However, there is a better way. While boycotting Microsoft has very little effect, the Free software community has proven that supporting Linux (as competition to Windows) has a huge effect. At first it may seem silly and pointless, but if you spent some of your time sifting through the vast troves of legal MP3s for new bands that are truly good you can do the same thing to the RIAA that Linux is doing to Microsoft.
The RIAA isn't going to change their tune until they have some competition, and that competition is going to come from the Indie bands spreading their music not through RIAA channels but over the Internet. So find some good (legal) music and share it with your friends. You undoubtedly have some people that you trade music with on a regular basis. They will trust your judgement, and will be interested in the "new" bands you discover. Use the Internet for what it's worth.
Eventually these types of grass roots efforts will force the RIAA into selling music the way you want them to, and life will be good.
Or you can just steal MP3s, I suppose :).
That is accurate.
I never said there was a problem with hoarding your information or trying to keep personal secrets. What I said was that you are not justified in making money on the basis of preventing other people from acting on information, which is what IP currently allows.
But lies are information, and it is clear that you do see limits on what sort of information may be propagated, and how they may be propogated.
Of course you should have recourse in the event of slander or character assasination. And of course it is unwise to shout fire in a theatre. And if your wife asks you if that dress makes her look fat, it is wise not to say something that sounds equivocal. Basic social etiquette. But these things have no bearing on the issue of whether ideas and patterns can be owned and whether the current IP laws really benefit "we the people".
That's because as an information producer, if I am unable to control in any way when (not "if") information I produce will be shared, then I am unable to control any sort of income which may be generated by controlling how that information gets spread.
This is not inconsistent at all. If I have access to the information and can act on it intellegently to solve my problem, then I don't need to pay you to help me - I am self sufficient. You propose that I stunt my self determination and self sufficiency by trying to tell me what I can and cannot do with information. What you fail to realize is that information alone is rarely enough anyway - your services will still be in demand, not for some information that escaped your control in the past, but for your problem solving skills. You will get paid to generate new specific information tailored to somebody's specific problem. Of course, once you solved their problem you no longer have control over that particular information, but you will be needed again when another problem crops up that requires analytical skills. It's a bit naive to think you should just stop by your client's place and drop off some generic information and be done!
Besides, why should attempting to make some money off the art you produce be a bad thing, or even degrade the quality of the art produced?
Michelangelo was a skilled artist for reasons that have nothing to do with money. Of course he should be paid to paint the Sistene Chapel - a task that the custodians were neither able nor willing to do for themselves through any other means at their disposal. Popular music is now an sophisticated industry. Music is produced and promoted with the primary goal of selling CD's, not producing great art. Of course there are exceptions, and you may not believe this at all. I personally would not miss any of the crappy music that would disappear if the labels all went out of business.
On the other hand, it's pretty clear that this notion of "high fidelity" meme sharing, while in and of itself not inherently bad, does not justify posting Metallica songs on Napster. That's because you're not sharing your experiences that you may had when listening to Metallica (be it revulsion or just annoyance)--you're just publishing Metallica songs without authorization.
Well, I've never published anything on Napster, and I don't care for Metallica, but I still don't agree with your assertion. You are sharing your experience. Do you not show pictures or slides of your skiing trip to share the experience. Videotapes of your wedding that your sick mother missed? Recordings of sounds you hear are no different. They are clearly a way to share an experience. That is self evident.
These (and other) apriori assumptions are the garbage in--it appears you do not prove these assertions, only make them.
What you apparently fail to understand is that you cannot prove any statements you or anyone else makes about your natural rights. I happen to believe that the notion of IP is garbage. Please prove to me that you have a natural right to own patterns or ideas. You say you can't? Well I guess everything you've said is just GIGO then!
My beliefs are more accurately stated:
Now of course I cannot prove these assumptions. They are simply part of my moral belief that people should be controlled and restricted as little as possible. You can't just call them unproven garbage when your moral beliefs have no more proof than mine.
I have never been convinced that it makes sense to give away this right. I do not believe that good music, art, software, food, other luxeries of life, or the ability to make a living depend on curbing that right. You apparently believe that they do.
What I said was that you are not justified in making money on the basis of preventing other people from acting on information, which is what IP currently allows.
On this I disagree (obviously), as I believe that to some extent I should be able to control the information I produce. More below.
You propose that I stunt my self determination and self sufficiency by trying to tell me what I can and cannot do with information.
Because it stunts my self-determination and self-sufficiency by preventing me from making an earning as an information provider.
It is a fundamental paradox of philosophy that "freedom" sometimes requires restriction in order to truely be free. For example, if you wish to be thin, you cannot eat everything in site. If you wish to be an accomplish pianist, you must devote yourself to the piano which means giving up other freedoms you may have otherwise enjoyed.
This extends to relationships and interactions as well: if you are dating one person, that person may require you to not date another or else the first will leave you. And if you wish to learn something from me, I may require you to compensate me so that I may be free to continue to teach, rather than have to give up teaching in order to put food on my table.
Actually, I do not propose to stunt your self-determination and self-evolution. I do propose that I may wish to stunt these things if (a) your self-determination and self-evolution requires something from me, and (b) my giving these things without compensation will stunt my self-determination and self-evolution. That a situation may arise that my self-evolution and self-determination as an information provider may be stunted is part of this philosophical paradox: I need to eat, I need to put food on the table, and the time it takes for me to produce information is time that I (in your world) cannot use to put food on my table.
What you fail to realize is that information alone is rarely enough anyway - your services will still be in demand, not for some information that escaped your control in the past, but for your problem solving skills.
Oh, I realize this well enough--as a freelance software developer, I get paid to produce information (in the form of custom software) on demand. And I do produce free software--open source modules which I give away because I like working on those modules.
Yet--to specify that any program I sell in the future I cannot necessarly control the sale of that software, or guarentee income from that sale--that takes away one of my rights as an information producer. To me, if we should take away that right, and to what degree we should take away that right: that's the debate. I have no problems with giving up some of my rights as an information producer. But your solution seems to me to be too draconian.
Music is produced and promoted with the primary goal of selling CD's, not producing great art. Of course there are exceptions, and you may not believe this at all. I personally would not miss any of the crappy music that would disappear if the labels all went out of business.
I wouldn't miss the crappy music either, but taking away the artists rights to make money off their own music doesn't strike me as a good way to have great music. Part of the reason why we have crappy music is because the RIAA strips artists of their rights for promises of large payouts which never happen--and only the intelligent who figure out ways to cut corners in the production process survive. It's too draconian to assume that these artists will be better off if we do an "RIAA" on them and take away their right to sell their own music.
Well, I've never published anything on Napster, and I don't care for Metallica, but I still don't agree with your assertion. You are sharing your experience. Do you not show pictures or slides of your skiing trip to share the experience. Videotapes of your wedding that your sick mother missed? Recordings of sounds you hear are no different. They are clearly a way to share an experience. That is self evident.
Yeah, but there is a far cry from having a bunch of friends over and sharing an evening with them while I show slides or play music, and uploading those pictures or that music to Gnuster or Napster.
There is no experience sharing because the publishing process is anonymous. There is no commentary. There is no face-to-face enjoyment of the process, or the periodic stopping of the music to bring a couple more beers. Instead, your pictures or the music you uploaded to napster just shows up as another item in a long list of "hits" on a search engine, or appears as a sliding bar showing the number of bytes downloaded.
This isn't sharing an experience by any stretch of the imagination.
What you apparently fail to understand is that you cannot prove any statements you or anyone else makes about your natural rights.
I personally believe there are no "natural rights"--only those rights we as a civilized society create for ourselves to govern our own behavior.
But "natural rights?" Nature won't sentence me to serve time in jail if I steal your car or murder your dog or spray paint graffiti on your house. Nature doesn't give a damn if I take a large hacksaw to your head and cut your brains out. Only you, and the people around you, care. And I fully expect if I were to attempt to do these things I would be stopped (and rightfully so) by the people around you--not by a passing grizzly bear or a couple of Canadian ducks that happen to observe my crimes.
Because the only rights we have are the rights we grant each other, the only rights which are "inalienable" are those rights we believe God has granted us.
By the way, this is what our founding fathers believed when they created the United States on the "social compact" form of goverment. The "rights" we enjoy are actually restrictions on our freedoms which we implicitly agree to in order to enjoy the fruits of a civilized society. And most of these restrictions are simple, logical, and "obviously necessary"--such as restrictions on my ability to steal material posessions that you may own, or restrictions on my ability to cause you harm which prevent you from going about your life.
Other restrictions, on the other hand, are more balancing acts: our founding fathers believed in a limited from of Intellectual Property as was necessary only to provide information produces an opportunity to be reasonably compensated for their time and effort, yet provide for that same information to fall within the public domain after a reasonable period of time. That's because our founding fathers believed (as I do) that information producers should be able to benefit from their work--yet not at the cost of preventing others from building off their work, or learning what they can from that work.
Please prove to me that you have a natural right to own patterns or ideas. You say you can't?
Oh, but I can--at least to within a definition of "rights" which stem from a common agreement between individuals to act in a civilized manner. Of course, as there are no "natural rights" beyond what human beings agree to, I assume apriori that people who agree to a social compact wish to behave in a "reasonable" manner--which is not a given. (For example, slavery is not reasonable, but built into our constitution.)
The proof goes something like this:
1) It takes time and effort to produce information.
2) That time and effort, for really good information, is sufficient to prevent an information producer from engaging in other activities which would put food on his/her table.
3) In order to assure that information producers produce information, it is reasonable that they be compensated. Of course this assumes we wish information producers to produce information--and so this suggests we need to "value" that information in such a way as to provide incentives (or not) on information which we as a society may deem as valuable (or not).
That is, I assume we want the information. And I assume we want the information enough to be willing as individuals in a society to pay for that information.
4) In order to be compensated, an information provider needs to be able to control the spread of that information in a "reasonable manner" so that when information goes out, payment comes back.
In this case, "ownership" is not (nor has it ever been) ownership of an "idea" in the traditional sense that I can own a shoe or a baseball. In this case, "ownership" is an abstraction whose sole purpose is to provide a way for information producers to be compensated for their time, expense, and efforts in producing that information, in direct proportion to the value we as a society may place on that information.
I have never been convinced that it makes sense to give away this right. I do not believe that good music, art, software, food, other luxeries of life, or the ability to make a living depend on curbing that right. You apparently believe that they do.
But here's the thing. No-one will ever stop you (at least now, dunno in the future--but if they do, I'll fight it as hard as I can) from inviting a bunch of people over and performing a Metallica CD for them while commenting on how lousy a musician Lars is.
You are not prevented from telling stories, sharing your experiences, showing slide shows, playing music, or otherwise interacting with other people on a one-on-one basis. This is the core of "high fidelity" meme sharing, anyways--personal, one-on-one interaction, or interaction with a small group.
But there is a far cry between this and publishing. Once you start publishing, the question arises: are you publishing your own contributions? Or are you repackaging someone else's stuff? The current law permits you to publish a review, and even exerpt portions of that work for the purposes of review--that is, for the purposes of sharing your experiences with regards to that work to another.
What I am suggesting is that simply taking someone else's work and repackaging it is not sharing an experience with "high fidelity." It's not sharing an experience at all. And as such, software like Napster doesn't even come within a country mile of this "high fidelity experience sharing" which you describe.
You can't just call them unproven garbage when your moral beliefs have no more proof than mine.
My "moral" evidence (which I will gladly omit the term "moral" as irrelevant in the future) relies on one simple and unquestionable fact:
It takes time and effort to produce information.
So the question is, should we expect information producers to produce their information for free, so that you may be free to republish their hard work without compensating them, in the name of "high fidelity experience sharing?"
I think it's wrong to take food off someone's table if (a) they worked hard on something that (b) has value to society to a degree that members of that society would pay for that work if they had to. And don't even talk to me about voluntary payments--only the most naive fool would believe that a system of voluntary payments would ever work to the same degree if only because most proposed systems of voluntary payments have no regulatory checks to assure that payments are made. (And when we have to provide regulatory checks to assure that a "voluntary" payment is made, it's no longer voluntary, anyways.)
So if society values it enough to send a check if they have to, and if it takes time and effort to produce information, it strikes me as wrong to prevent an information produce from being compensated. Period.
That's an interesting question. I would have no problem with that as long as I'm in control of my personal body. If I'm forced into the machine against my will, then it's immoral. If an existing copy of myself is copied with the machine then I could care less.
The 9th Circuit took the same view in Sony, adopting a "primary purpose" test. The Supes shot that down, and stated that to be free from liability for contribution, all that is necessary is that the process merely be capable of substantial noninfringing use. If Napster can be used lawfully, then unlawful use of Napster by others is irrelevant to NAPSTER's liability.
Clearly, Napster can be used lawfully. I can sell Shelly a pen, hoping and wishing and advising Shelly to go ahead an infringe your book, and still not be liable for infringement. Your remedy is against Shelly, if she does, and not me.
That's just the way it is. Sue Shelly and leave the pen manufacturers out of it.
Another stimulating thought. But I don't think that the conclusion logically follows from the fact that information can be traded for money or food. If the cost of information drops to neglible levels, people will still trade things for other things. Goods & services for goods and services. And they will still sell information in the form of expertise.
There will always be payment waiting for the person who can take the freely available information and apply it intelligently to the solution of somebody's specific problem. Look at the ars digita company set up by Phil Greenspun. They give away their code, yet they are rolling in dough because they have the brains to solve specific problems. So Phil and friends are having no problems paying their gas or grocery bills.
You asked about musicians. The vast majority of career musicians make all (or nearly all) their money from live performances. This has not changed since the times when it wasn't even possible to record and distribute music. Significant royalities are rarely seem by the musician who doesn't break platinum, and even then they are often not seen. So there will be little, if any, negative impact on the musician's bottom line. And I believe that the upside for musicians is significantly greater than any downside.
Sure they can- you're missing the entire point with music.
I wasn't talking about music. My post was a response to this statement,
The central problem here, which this article makes perfectly clear, is that someone who owns and creates something has every right to sell it under any terms they want.
which is very broad statement, ie. it doens't seem to be just about music, and being broad, I gave the South Africa/AIDS example --- not because the RSA/AIDS case was the same as music -- it plainly isn't, and I said so,
Anyway, this example is some way from music
but because I wanted to reply to that general statement about the rights of the owner. I wanted to say that the attitude of just "looking after" the owner,
don't scale too well.
to bigger situations, like RSA/AIDS. So I agree with you about not comparing it to music. I'm not. It seems fair to me that the artist have means by which he/she is rewarded. But I disagree with you on,
South Africa is welcome to develop their own AIDS drugs without violating patent laws in the least.
I mostly disagree, because it's a limited viewpoint. Because a higher and more all-inclusive viewpoint says that when humanity has the means, it should use the means to improve/save the lives of millions. The money/investment viewpoint is by no means without merit. It has value, and much material progress has been made with that view. But the "One World" viewpoint is simply a higher and more integral viewpoint.
The nazis loved their fatherland, and said to hell with everyone else who is outside the borders of the fatherland-race. They loved and protected their own race only. It is plainly a higher viewpoint that says we should love and protect all races. Yes, the mega-corp should care and protect itself, making sure it survives and prospers. But at some point the higher view tries to integrate this with the survival and health of everybody. At the moment people are saying, "yes, on the planet we have the technology that can help, but South Africa will just have to wait until it can develop its own tech, however long that takes..."
ie.South Africa is welcome to develop their own AIDS drugs without violating patent laws in the least.
And as long as people come from this limited view point, no political system is ever going to solve these problems. It was Einstein who said something about people suffering from an "optical delusion of consciousness" that limits us to caring for only those few closest to us, and that our task should be to "widen our circle of compassion".
Your, and a lot of others argument, and the argument of the writer of the original article, is based on the asumption that intelectual property exists, and is the same as property. If you accept that, you are clearly right.
The problem is: Do we define information as a property, and do we define the right to control the information you have created,once it has left your head, as a basic human right? The problem is not easy: The UN human rights list does not include any such right, neither does the US constitution, as far as I know...
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This message was created while listening to totally RIAA-free music distributed by its author in mp3-format.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
But you do have some interesting thoughts.
Do you agree or disagree with the notion that people should also be free to interact with others as they so choose?...etc..nondisclosure contracts...etc...
If A and B wish to keep a mutual secret then that is fine with me. I never said people should be compelled to tell me everything they know. But if information enters my mind in the absence of my explicit acceptance of a contract, then I am not bound.
I'm glad you put in the phrase "to me, at least", as it is not self-evident to me that all information must be shared without restriction.
Again you are confusing "must be shared" with "can be shared". Different things entirely.
Otherwise, I may just post that video of you, naked, humping a mule with a naked midget girl on it's back to your church group. Nevermind the fact it's a fake.
And again, the fact that lies are immoral has no bearing on this topic. Whether or not IP is allowed to exist, lies will still be immoral.
if you take away my right to make money on that information, then I may not be as motivated to produce that information.
And again, you're assuming that you have a right to make money on that information. Sorry, but in my book you don't have a right to make money by hoarding information. You have a right to make money by providing a good or service that I cannot or do not have time to provide for myself. If you aren't motivated to provide a good or service that is in demand, then you lose. Somebody else will provide it and get the $$$. And if you are producing art, then I don't want to see your benjamin-motivated art anyway. I want to see art created by people doing it because they are compelled to by something in their soul.
There is a big difference between saying to a friend "wow, I really heard this really kick ass song from Metallica--you've really got to get their latest CD!" and posting a Metallica song on Napster.
The difference is in the degree of fidelity. I could hum the tune. Or I could play and sing it with my guitar. Or I could record a rendition of it. Or, if my friend reads minds, I could replay it with high fidelity in my mind. Or in the year 2030, we'll just hook up our brains with our USB 16.0 ports and share. Or I could play a tape I made off the radio. Or an mp3 from napster. Or a tape I made at a concert. All are just different ways of representing the information with varying degrees of fidelity. They are all just ways of sharing an experience.
I'm sorry for you if you've bought into the corporate notion that sharing experiences in high fidelity is immoral.
It's certainly an interesting analogy comparing the distribution of software and music. The only problem here is that the author has completely neglected a key step that allowed something like a Linux to grow: a distribution channel. Could Linux have become the force that it is in the computer world without being able to bypass the old world retailers only interested in stocking Microsoft and Apple?
If the RIAA has power, it's not due to their legal staff. It's due to their ability to control all the distribution, and even advertising channels to the public. What the hell good is free music if it has no means of being heard due to a 50 year lock on all channels of distribution? To move further along the author's analogy, what the hell good is a free operating system if it's nearly impossible to get?
Not to leave out Napster in my rant here. Ever try going and hunting down some of Napster's featured new artists? What a freaking joke! I tried going through their so-so web site, found a couple of groups that sounded interesting based on their description, then as I'm sure you've already guessed I came up empty. The free music that Napster is supposed to eventually channel for just didn't exist. So much for this being the distribution model that can work around the locks of the RIAA.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Napster could also be a venue for distributing indie music, and it is in fact being used that way. This fact ought to shield the company from any liability by the time this case works itself out, since Napster (the company) doesn't host any of the music itself, RIAA-owned or not. Napster is really no more threatening than gopher.
And the brethren went away edified.
Petreley has a decent point in this article. Now before I get moderated to -18 for lack of dogmatism, hear me out:
Petreley's stance on the "open" craze that's so stylish right now is much the same as mine - he thinks people are confusing beer with speech (tho I don't think Petreley uses that overworked metaphor) to detrimental effect. The folks who are taking advantage of Napster as a source of free-as-in-beer music but hide behind free-as-in-speech ideals are destroying the credibility of the rest of us.
Understand that I myself have used before to download music (that I previously owned on CD, of course... *wink*), but I don't view my renegade downloading as part of a noble movement - instead I see it as a transgression against society on about the same level as jaywalking - nobody is going to catch me, and no one is hurt enough to prevent me from doing it.
That doesn't mean that no one is hurt at all, and it doesn't mean that a society of jaywalkers is a healthy society - it just reflects the fact that people will break laws if they feel like they can get away with it and the consequences aren't particulary dire.
The subtler point that Petreley misses is that not all "illegal" actions with regard to freedom of information are unethical. I might not believe that it's ok to duplicate Win2000 CDs (or even desirable, for that matter), but you can bet that I wear my DeCSS t-shirt (thank you copyleft) with pride.
What Petreley doesn't get is that there is a totally valid civil disobedience aspect of the freedom movement, and I wish I could have seen him acknowledge that in his column. I wear my DeCSS shirt not because I think source code is free speech (though it probably is), but because I don't believe a corporation should be able to dictate how I view the publications that I have purchased. The civil disobedience aspect of the information freedom movement, and the efforts of the EFF, are as important to the future of open and free (as in speech) information as the development of Linux and other quality open software.
Moral: Stop whining and evaluate your position legally and ethically before reciting geek dogma. Save the lawsuits for stuff that actually matters.
-ubermuffin
If I were asked to answer the following question: WHAT IS SLAVERY? and I should answer in one word, IT IS MURDER, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: WHAT IS PROPERTY! may I not likewise answer, IT IS ROBBERY, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?
- Pierre Joseph Proudon, "What Is Property?"
Thus, the anarchists proclaim, "Property is theft," because the ownership of property by institutions (corporations, non-profits, governments, etc) deprives humanity of utilizing that property to their best ability.
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net
The fact is our current system entitles us to some free information, and it requires us to purchase or license other information.
Why? Why should that be? Why is that morally right? There have been lots of systems, and they have had lots of different rules. Some have been better then others. I don't accept what The System entitles me to. If you have a problem, go cry to you're precious system, see what they do to me
But what they shouldn't do is license or buy existing information that is not free and then cut it loose without permission. That's just plain wrong
I'm sorry, but because The System believes something doesn't mean its true, and if you take that statement as fundamentally true, then you should seriously reconsider you're criteria for fundamental truth. WHY Is it 'just plain wrong'? Why should ideas be controlled? Saying simply that huge corporations loose money if it isn't observed is certainly not going to convince me.
This paper is seriously lacking in foundation, if this paper had been turned into my freshman English class at ISU, it would have been returned with a big fat F. I've heard this idea repeated with an almost religious air. And while there maybe economic reasons for this, I really don't get the moral ones. I'm not a religious man, and pirating is a lot more fun then not pirating.
And as far as his incendiary 'crookster' challenge, its 'gnutella' and win2k isn't exactly hard to find out there.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The fact that the music industry is despicable does not justify the theft of their intellectual material. Besides, your act of civil disobedience (stealing songs via Napster) is certainly not helping the artist. At least the record company is giving the artist something, you aren't giving the artist anything but a sharp stick in the eye.
Don't give me any crap about destroying the RIAA, Napster is all about theft.
If you want to screw the content-hoarders the ethical way to do so is to create content and give it away. And if you can't do that, then spend some time sorting through the gigabytes of existing freely redistributable music and make a list of the songs that don't suck (and then share that with everyone you know).
Content is not content. There's a world of difference between buying a professionally encoded MP3 and downloading a file somebody encoded using God knows what software, or pasted together from usenet files, or truncated, or named according to some standard they made up on the spot.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Honestly, stealing IP is not a good thing to do, and the mantra "Information wants to be free" is not a justifiable excuse. IMO, this is not the real reason that people are currently ripping off massive amounts of IP without any remorse.
Most people are not naturally lacking in integrity as to go around stealing other peoples things. The exception to this is when people feel ripped off. Ripping people off is legal and will certianly stay legal, but it does invoke dislike and the feeling that retribution is needed. This is generally considered low class or bad business practice.
I think the reason digital piracy exists is because people do feel very ripped off, especially when it comes to music and software. Music is controlled by 6 (is it 5 now?) mega corporations which admittedly fix prices at an arbitrary high level, and manipulate congress to pass laws removing fair use from the consumer (DCMA), as well as disservicing 95% of their artists. When someone buys a $18 cd and does not like most of the songs on it, after hearing the 2 good songs on the radio, after being told that CD prices would have dropped to tape levels by now, and after the megas disallowed stores to advertise sales, this customer feels cheated. The customer will then feel no remorse for uploading the entire CD to a p2p service and downloading some better music in exchange. Perhaps if CD prices had lowered to a reasonable level ($7-9), and sales down to $4 had been advertised, and the artists made more than $0.52 per CD, people would feel bad about stealing IP. One might feel inclined to purchase the CD out of guilt.
I believe one of the reasons that the corporate IP environment has become so bad is the destruction of the capitalist system by laws passed purely for the protection of profits of select industry groups (5-10 companies). In a fair capitalist system, the government lays down a system of laws ensuring basic civility. This creates an even playing field for consumers, producers, and vendors where darwinian selection determines who will profit. However, when laws such as the DCMA or UTICA are passed for the protection of a handful of companies, the level playing field is corrupted, and specific parties are given a legal advantage by the government.
This creates contempt from upstarts and others who stand to loose due to new legal restrictions. As the government continues to support large corps through new laws, the natural selection dissaates, and the merging of corporations creates a system of quasi-monopolies, which makes consumption in america feel a bit more like a communist system, only with an uneven distribution of wealth.
The bottom line is consumers lost fair use rights, and don't believe congress cares. So they have decided not to follow the laws anymore. Many feel that if information can not be handled in a fair manner, they will just pass it around for free. It may not be right, but people tend to respond negatively after getting ripped off.
Dude, you're so missing the point. The issue is not about the musicians and the labels. If the musicians want to make more money they need to either work out better deals or find alternative ways to monatize their works. Yes, the labels are very greedy, but the artists will continue to work with them until they find alternative ways to make money. The issue is that people are getting copyrighted works without the author or the label's permission. People need to understand this point. Money is part of this, but in some cases it is more about controlling the destiny of one's own work. For example, everyone hates Metallica over the Napster incident, but it is unfounded. What Metallica is saying is that they don't want others deciding the fate of their commercial recordings. A little known and often overlooked fact though is that Metallica ENCOURAGES bootlegging of their live shows. They ENCOURAGE people to share and distribute that work. They have given PERMISSION to this. Obviously it isn't over money because they have no monetary gain from the distribution of these recordings of their live shows. They did NOT give permission for the distribution of their studio work though, and this is their main issue. Maybe one day people will learn to respect each others property...
--Jon
This is exactly what's happening right now. Slashdot readers fear that in five years this will be a reality. It will be - get used to the idea. As you say, they shoehorn the new ideas into the old economy. These new-fangled computer things are very good at enforcing security policies such as these. Linux users are proud of how secure their systems are. PGP users are proud of how secure their emails are. All this technology can be used to enforce copyright. And as Slashdot readers know, if technology can be used to do something, it will be.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
The way I understand it is that information has the universal quality that it is so difficult to keep wrapped up. The point is that, for one reason or another, people make that information free and that it is impossible to keep it bound and not free. I believe that is the purpose of the phrase.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
property => value
But it does not logically follow that
value => property
In the world of logic, A=>B does not mean that B=>A.
I do not believe that something must become the property of someone simply because it has value. The moon is scarce and has a lot of value to me because it makes me happy and provides nice lighting for romantic interludes. By your reasoning, its scarcity and subjective value make it property. I can think of other examples that show the flaw in this reasoning, but that shouldn't be necessary. The fact that information can be valued does not mean it is property.
I think it is much more logical that you need at least both scarcity and value to have property, and these should be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for property (as I still don't believe the moon is property). What do you think?
My point is that people want to buy what they want to buy. You might want to sell only what you want to sell. But what if consumers don't want to buy that? It seems patently absurd to me for the RIAA to be complaining about people stealing something that isn't for sale: compressed music files. Can I go into a store and buy an ISO9660 CDROM with professionally encoded MP3's on it? No. So how can you say that I'm stealing something?
If the RIAA wants to complain about theft, let them sell what they claim people are stealing.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
No it isn't and no it doesn't. It's someone's intellectual property, which is very different from physical property. For one thing, you can't strictly speaking "take" it -- you suddenly have more than one instance, with no effect on the original. This may constitute "license violation", but it's NOT theft under US law -- or morally.
It may still be wrong in some cases (as it may be in some of your software examples). But using improper terminology clouds the real issues.
--
"Information wants to be free" really should be "Informations can be free." No other property can be given away without loss by the owner. You give away a physical thing, you don't have it any more. You give away information, you've still got it.
What Napster has done is encourage others to break the law. Is the law just? Depends on whether it's right to create artificial scarcity of information (i.e., copyright). How do we determine what's right? Look at the consequences of making it legal versus making it illegal.
Case 1 (copyright): Copyright exists so that information can be shoehorned into traditional economic systems that are based upon scarcity, supply and demand, etc. If copyright is enforced, it's business as usual. If it's poorly enforced, you get the chaos that's happening now in society (a Bad Thing, since it discourages content creation and encourages the lawyers). How to enforce copyright in the *gag* "information age" is the big problem.
Case 2 (no copyright): Without copyright, traditional economic systems fail, and information creators are not rewarded. Thus, production of information decreases. This is a Bad Thing. The only solution is to find an alternate economic system. Just as a quick reminder, communism doesn't work, and all those other cool-sounding systems (street performers' protocol, etc.) haven't been tested in a large-scale economy. There's nothing that's known to work.
In other words, behind door A, we have chaos and uncertainty, and behind door B we have uncertainty and chaos.
I personally would like to see a system where all artists get accounts on PayPal or something like that, and we can just donate whatever we feel like for each MP3 we download (preferably off of the artist's high-speed, high-quality site). Of course, people will rationalize their way into not paying: "they're already rich", "musicians get all the chicks", "they suck too much to deserve to get paid for this MP3 that I'm keeping"... Nobody really knows if enough people will pay to make it worth while for artists. And before you start yelling about indie bands giving away their work, remember that a lot of them are doing that to build a fan base so they can start charging for it.
Finally, remember that what's right and wrong (and legal) is decided, to some extent, by society. Copyright is currently part of our social contract. For it to be right to ignore copyright would require a fundamental shift in the public viewpoint. This shift seems to have already begun, but it hasn't happened yet.
Do we have to abide by copyright until such a shift happens, or are we morally justified in ignoring copyright since we are leading the charge into this new economics of information? That's the real question.
There is an huge difference between sharing software and downloading copies of music that you have already paid for.
A good example of this is when CDs first came out many of the Dire Straits albums went back into the top 40 album chart as many people bought another copy on a different medium.
I do not agree with the Microsoft business model but at least they give you a 50% discount if you have already bought their software and want to upgrade.
If the music industry want to be honest about it why don't they just give you a licence for a year; after all that is how long music cassettes last before drop-out becomes intolerable.
I have used Napster to obtain copies of albums that I have purchased time and again. The law allows fair use in copying. I am allowed to copy my CDs to tape for my personal use etc. etc. I see no difference in obtaining that copy from a third party when the cassette or CD put out is of inferior quality.
Yes I do see the CD and DVD as an inferior product they are overly fragile and having been around for in excess of fifteen years I would expect these issues to have been addressed already.
Long before Napster was available I had all my music stored to hard drive to try to preserve it for the future. Hard drive space is now included when I budget for CD purchases. Napster is addressing problems with the digital medium's transience that the media companies did not deal with as it would reduce the profits from repeated purchases.
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
He missed the point of the saying.
What "information wants to be free" was *originally* talking about was not the desire of individuals for information to be free; it was the economic reality that information, unlike land and most other forms of property, is not easily excludable.
It's easy to build a fence around land and not let people into it; that's in general not true of information. Worse yet, while only one person can possess a given physical good at a particular time, the same isn't true of information --- and your possession of fact [x] doesn't reduce the value of fact [x] *to me*. Also, transmission costs are low and getting lower.
It is thus *economically impossible* to prevent the free transfer of most forms of information, just as it's more or less economically impossible to prevent the sale of drugs --- you can outlaw it, but all you'll do is drive it underground and throw lots of people in jail.
(This is of course, a gross overgeneralization: it is possible in certain limited circumstances to devise mechanisms for exclusive information use, and what many of the current legal battles are really about is determining in which circumstances it is appropriate to do that. But *as a general rule*, information is not excludable, and "wants to be free").
The RIAA sued over MP3.com distributing RIAA members music (right ot wrong, not relevent here).
Notice that all the other online music labels have not been sued for being such. (For example Vorbisonic, which even uses a free [speech and beer] music format).
MP3.com is still distributing music, and selling CD's. Nothing stopping it.
That's the way the world started out, and as we see with the open source movement, that's where the world is headed again. It's death to the big info monopolies and mafias, and good riddance.
Information does want to be free, because once you learn something you can't make yourself unlearn it... why feel guilty about it?
Maybe it isn't fair to pin this on most open source advocates, but there are certainly interesting dichotomies in what Slashdot considers "news for nerds." On the one hand, any license that isn't strictly free is shouted down. Borland C++ is branded as free-as-in-beer and therefore unacceptable. Any story that mentions freedom of speech gets hairtrigger responses. Stories about The Man (i.e. Microsoft) are snickered about in a frenzy of populist hooplah.
At the same time, there's a worship of corporately created pop culture: The Simpsons, X-Files, Hollywood movies, big budget anime, The Cartoon Network. Now wait, this isn't corporate-fed culture, it's special stuff created only for geeks in the know, right? Not like other crap, like Friends. That's for the masses.
I think quite a few people would like these to collide, so everything they are interested in can be free of charge. But they are two completely different things, the second of which is created by a system that arguably would not exist if free everything was the order of the day. If you're really anti-corporate, then you should stop watching TV, stop buying CDs from major labels, and stop watching anything but indie films. That's much better than whining about how corporations should spend millions of dollars entertaining you for free.
If I choose to put my complete CD collection on the web, is it my fault that other people play the CDs. If I choose to publicise their location is that a crime?
That kinda logic is not going to get you very far in life...
How about I set up a stand in front of my house with a pile of drugs.. and put up a big sign... free drugs here.. is that legal too ??
Also, some information *does* want to be freely available like the whois database, or the song lyrics servers, and these are freely contributed, and unlawfully (in my opinion) restrained.
Run little ones and zeros! Run and frolic in the wild!
If I might steal a line from a movie to explain this... "It doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it just runs programs."
Unless the whois database and the lyric servers have gained sentience (in which case please let us know) then they can't want anything. They do simply what they are programmed to do and nothing else. They are not self aware and therefore can not have wants, needs, or emotions.
Funny how someone can point at napster and its users and say greed - but not the record labels. Man thats odd - isin't it? I'm wondering what Steven King is thinking about all this (after his own first attempt at net sales (literally)). Hmm, wasn't that last ruling with mp3.com giving the record labels 130 some-odd million, but they aint givin any musicians dick - right? greed - hmmm. And all this aside - arent record/cd sales up?
Perhaps because eMusic does not sell the music I want to buy?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
A longer version of this essay can be found at http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2000-09/lw -09-penguin_1.html.
I prefer anarchy, but only under a strong & wise anarch
I'd rather be strapped to a chair "Clockwork Orange" style while Jon Katz read every single one of his articles to me than make my way through a piece by Petreley.
The man is an ass and it's not suprising that he doesn't care for freedom of information since his essays are always free of any factual information.
He's a throwback to the days when the Linux community was hard up for advocates and he should be discarded now that his usefulness has passed.
--Shoeboy
Anyway, I argued in another part of the thread that time and effort spent do not logically imply property. Time and effort are spent raising a child, yet when he is released into the world as an adult he is not your property. Some things shouldn't be owned. And ideas and patterns are something that shouldn't be owned.
Nobody forces a person to spend time and effort in an activity that they don't want to do or offers no reasonable chance of compensation. So, in a world without IP, people will just have to change their expectations of what kind of work will produce monetary rewards. General purpose software is not likely to be an area that produces monetary rewards - it will come from labors of love. People will not be able to expect a legally imposed artificial scarcity of information as a basis for their product's value. But that doesn't mean the end of the intellectual worker. Nobody says thinking isn't work. And nobody says thinking can't be compensated under certain conditions. The ability to own ideas and patterns is not a precondition to making money through thinking. But business models may change in some cases.
There will always be payment waiting for people who can do intellectual work to solve someone else's specific problems (engineering, movie soundtrack, customization of software, etc). I don't see intellectual workers making less money in a world without IP. The easy problems that will be solved by eliminating IP and sharing already existing ideas and technology freely without liscences will always be replaced by problems at the next step. In every industry or company, there is always a next step that will require problems solvers who sell their talents to the highest bidder.
Umm, maybe I'm a bit slow, but why would someone interested only in "getting stuff without paying for it" go out and "buy existing information that is not free"?!? It seems that would be more of a selfless act, like providing food to the homeless, who are hungry, and can't afford to buy it themselves. (I realize this isn't a perfect analogy)
"this isn't a perfect analogy." DUH!
What would be a perfect analogy and a truely selfless act is if you were to buy licenses for everyone you gave the information to for free. For example, if I were to post a Metallica song from a single on the net, but for everyone who downloaded the song, I were to buy the single on CD and send the CD to them for free. That's selfless.
Buying one disk and sharing it with my friends is not selfless. Why? Because in exchange perhaps my friends will go out and buy one disk and share it with me--and if I have 20 friends, my music budget has dropped to 1/20th of what it would have been otherwise.
It seems obvious that this article was written purely to incite a riot, and as such, it was well done.
If "incite a riot", you mean "I strongly disagree with the points raised," perhaps you're right. If you mean "the points raised are totally off-base, and are only ment to piss people off", bullshit--not only is information free, but it's expensive as well. Or do you think it costs nothing for Metallica (our favorite whip-it boys) to produce a record album?
Have you noticed that few, if any, Napster advocates are arguing that it should be legal to purchase a copy of Windows 2000 and share it with a community of Windows fans on the Internet via a peer-to-peer networking system? Why not? Is it because there are no fans or potential fnas of Windows 2000?
This is an apples and oranges argument. "Why not?" Because if you are already an owner of Windows 2000, then you already have a copy in data format. When I download an MP3 from Napster, it's because I don't want to take the time to rip and encode the tracks of my CDs--I have them in audio format, but not data format. Napster saves me the time. That's why, Mr. Petreley.
Not everyone who downloads music from Napster owns the CD. Frankly, it takes less time for me to rip a CD than it does to find it on Napster--and unless you are really good at Napster and have a really crappy computer, it should take less time for you to rip a CD as well. The software to rip a CD and turn it into an MP3 is out there, and many good versions of ripper software can be had for free. Try poking around www.mp3.com.
Or are you being dishonest here? Hmmmmm????
his analogy is flawed - music is not software - purely for legal reasons. And Napster is NOT illegal whereas his "Crookster" would be.
Note that illegality is irrelevant to morality.
some definitions:
Information: ideas, concepts (ex. democracy, peer-reviewed scientific research, education)
Content: an expression of human creativity and effort. May be functional, artistic, or both.
While Information can and should be free, content is intrinsically the property of the creator.
So when we use Napster to download music, you CANNOT use the argument "it's ok cause music is information and information wants to be free". Music is not information, it is content.
But Napster, unlike "Crookster" is LEGAL because copying recordings is legal under FAIR USE. The inly differrence between Napster and copying your friend's tape (legal!) is the scae. Since the Audio Home Recording Act does not mention scale, we are not in violation. If the AHRA were to be amended to specify that millions of recordings en masse is bad, then we would then be illegally using Napster.
Software has no AHRA equivalent and therefore software remains illegal to reproduce no matter the distribution channel.
So use Napster legally but don't be a hypocrite. And Information SHOULD be free, but don't ingeniously label everything "Information" just to get a free ride. USE Napster because it is legal to do so and we can send a message to the RIAA. But don't confuse information with content.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Although I lost my warez connections around the same time I was old enough to get a driver's license, I imagine it's pretty easy to get Windows 2000 for free on the net. And no MS lawyers on your back! This point he makes doesn't really make any sense. People buy Windows 2000, either by itself or as part of a machine, because of the support (either documentation or pre-installation) that is provided with it. If it's a college hacker, it's likely he got his copy for free, because he's poor. If it's an older hacker, he may have bought his copy simply for the convenience of not sucking up to 14 year olds on IRC. Does anyone see the RIAA backing down? This comparison just doesn't make any sense.
Information wants to be convenient. For many people, it's more convenient to get music from Napster and listen to it on their computer. If the RIAA offered a reasonably priced, legal, Napster-like online service that didn't have Napster's inconsistencies, I think it would do incredible business. www.emusic.com is trying this out (a subscription service with unlimited downloads for $9.99 to $19.99 a month), however it has a limited number of artists (some of them are quite excellent, though, They Might Be Giants, Elvis Costello, Frank Black, along with hundreds of bands you've never heard of). Hopefully this model will be successful and become more mainstream.
Information doesn't WANT to be free, and it doesn't simply 'become' free either. We've always had to go to great lengths to come upon ANY information. Saying information wants to be free is like saying a rock wants to think; it won't happen without intervention.
That's the beauty of the GPL and BSD licences - they help release information to humanity, rather than allowing it to hide in obscurity, or to be patented, copyrighted, and succinctly forgotten.
If information would simply release itself, we would have no need for the GPL or similar licences. We would have no need for multi-million dollar research projects. We wouldn't need to send robotic probes into space to discover more information. We wouldn't need to go to school to learn. We wouldn't need to spend hours researching algorithms to make more optimized code.
No, information doesn't want to be free. One of humanity's greatest pursuits has been to acquire it, and to create it. And there's nothing any idealist can say or do to change that simple fact. We spend our lives searching for information. And information will never just 'come' to us as if it 'wants to be free.'
Life isn't that easy.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
ok, so that's the way its been for years. guess what- current tech. basically antiquated the status quo. either fight it (they are) or deal with it (doesn't seem likely..sigh). but the smart move is to realize that its a new ballgame and maybe there's still a way to come out of this new era alive.
You may not like the fact that some information must be licensed, but that's how it is.
again, that's how it was. times have changed quite a bit since the current music-on-a-disc-for-money system came about.
today, its easy and common to move large amounts of data around on public data connections. audio is just another form of 'large data'. if the Net remains functional, audio will flow. sorry, dude; that's life. adapt to it.
Those who want information to be free as a matter of principle should create some information and make it free.
many are. I would bet that more than half the linux apps that exist are opensource; and were done with the full intention of releasing source. can't get more 'free' than that. music [mere entertainment] can't compare to someone releasing working sourcecode.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It would be nice if this were all done on an honor system (like shareware). I want to be honest. I'll pay for what I use - I don't want to pay for songs I find that I hate, and I don't like paying too much. Of course, if the recording companies really did this, they'd probably want to encrypt everything and put security on it (it's all about control, right?). I can't blame them, given all the money to be made and all the piracy that exists. Too bad there aren't more honest and fair people out there (artists, fans, recording companies alike).
Think about it. It will have to be like this in the not-to-distant future. When everyone has high bandwidth connections, who's going to go to the store and buy a CD when they could download it instantly to their stereo? I say we stop buying CDs right now (and DVDs in the near future) and tell the RIAA and MPAA we'll only buy their goods via a download (maybe uncompressed for purists who hate MP3 compression...).
There. That was a nice little ramble.