I assure you doubters out there that people in the MIT Media Lab aren’t in it to download free music.
I think the point of the statement is that once information is digitized, it can be reproduced at will and go anywhere. It wants to be free, and to keep it from being free you need DRM hardware and jack booted thugs from RIAA suing grandmothers.
When I was in grad school you accumulated journals or paid many visits to the library or your advisor’s office to look things up. Now everything is on-line - if you have a license. Some journals still offer the ability to buy reprints of your paper, a leftover from the days when you would send it out. When I was in school no one did that, since it was easier to copy a journal article. I got requests for reprints all the time from Eastern Europe, where copiers weren’t allowed. Information was less free there than here - today it wants to be even more free.
Information wanting to be free doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons it shouldn’t be - just that you’re going to have to work at keeping information in chains.
Shouldn’t this make us reconsider the very idea of treating information as a good? IANAE, but as far as I know, we don’t have to invent new rules to cram things like fire protection, tax preparation, and lap dances into the mold of “goods”; we recognize that we’re paying the fireman/accountant/stripper to use their skills to do something for us, not buying a product from them.
No? It seems all right to me. People were coming up with songs and stories centuries before they were the subject of government-enforced monopolies. It might be a bad thing for the people who want to charge for access to information, but no one is entitled to make a living from a particular activity just because he wants to or because he’s done so in the past.
I would argue that information isn’t produced at all - it’s discovered.
Consider, for example, an MP3 of “Oops, I Did It Again”. This is a string of a few million bytes, and if you feed it into an MP3 player, you’ll hear the song. Even if Britney Spears had never been born, your MP3 player would still play exactly the same song when you fed those bytes into it. It’s just that you’d never think of actually feeding those particular bytes into it if she hadn’t come along to show you that they produce a catchy pop song.
That’s about what the phrase means to me: information wants to be free in the sense that water wants to flow downhill. You can temporarily keep it from happening, if you put enough energy into it, but natural forces will eventually win anyway because gravity never gets tired, goes bankrupt, or changes its mind. If your business depends on a promise from your government that they’ll make all your water flow uphill instead of downhill, you’re in for a painful lesson down the road when it turns out to be harder than they thought.
Also, I read “free” to mean liberated–distributed freely–not complimentary. Television shows, for example, are broadcast for free, but they still “want” to be shared online… which really just means the fundamental nature of information makes it impossible to stop the people who want to share them.
That’s a fairly specious distinction, isn’t it? Whether Spears {or more likely her writers} created or “discovered” it {although which Platonic realm it was lurking in before they unearthed it escapes me}, it remains that that combination of notes is a unique product of their labour and creativity. As such, they own that information, or at least the right to control its production and distribution. Copyright, in other words:
While a few altruistic programmers may be interested in the philosophical implications of making the world {or a least the internet} a better place for free, most of would like to be remunerated for our time and effort, and to retain some degree of control over our work. And, as Adam Smith pointed out, that remuneration - and by extension control - is itself sufficient impetus for making the world a better place. And Britney Spears.
The MP3 file is essentially a very long number, and as such, it exists in the same realm as all the other numbers. Recording a song is, in a way, similar to discovering a 3 million digit prime number: you brought it to the public’s attention, but that doesn’t mean it’s yours. It’s prime whether you discover it or not.
That’s not to say it’s random chance, of course. Talent, skill, and knowledge help you find what you’re looking for: the information that represents a song that sounds good to you. When you make a change to the song you’re working on, you’re discarding the old information and replacing it with a related but different piece of information, essentially navigating through the space of all possible songs. You could do the same with prime numbers, using your skill and knowledge to skip past the numbers that can’t be prime and focus on the ones that probably are… but even if you develop a revolutionary method to find huge prime numbers that no one else knows about, you still didn’t create those numbers.
Is it? Those notes played in that order would sound just as good no matter who wrote them.
Under today’s copyright laws, yes.
As a general principle–“if something is a unique product of your labor and creativity, you own it, or at least the right to control its production and distribution”–no, god no, of course not. When you get your hair cut, your new look is a unique product of your barber’s labor and creativity, isn’t it? But who would want to live in a world where your barber can dictate who you can show your hair to and under what circumstances, or prevent you from getting a similar haircut from someone else?
There are a number of things I wouldn’t mind getting paid for, but I sure don’t expect the government to step in and grant me a monopoly just so I can make money at something that wouldn’t be profitable otherwise.
Centuries ago there was a very different model for creativity. If you read biographies of artists and musicians from the early 18th century and before, they “sold” their art to rich patrons. Dante’s poems were copied, but the biography I read of him did not mention him ever getting any money for them. Composers often had court positions. Mozart was one of the first selling music for money - by Beethoven’t time it was quite common. Sterne sold Tristram Shandy, but he still tried to get noble support. Authors marketing their work is a fairly new concept.
The information or value in the song (and Richard Thompson covered it, so it can’t be that bad ) is the few sets of random bits that people are willing to pay for. I suppose you are free to write a program to generate random sequences of bits for an MP3 file - if you want to wait around for something worth listening to, be my guest. I don’t think you’d have to pay royalties!
So I agree with you, in a sense. What you are paying for is selection. That’s why self-published instant books didn’t take off. Select randomly, and you usually get junk. You’re paying for the publisher/editor filter really, not the words. I bet you can find a lifetime of reading on the web absolutely free, if you want.
If all publishers and record companies went belly up, and all content was on the web, I think we’d soon be paying to enter sites where someone we trusted selects content worth viewing.
For what it’s worth, William Tyndale translated the Bible into English and was burned at the stake, but not just for the act of translating. He was a Protestant reformer heavily influenced by Luther, and considered a heretic (even while the Church of England itself was breaking from Rome).
OK, I’ll bite. I don’t know too much about intellectual property law, but it doesn’t seem beyond the bounds of possibility that a hairdresser could trademark a particular style, in the same way that fashion houses do with dresses - although it would have to be a style quite identifiably unique to him. The problem doesn’t lie in whether he can trademark it, though, it lies in whether he can make it stick: is he going to sue everyone he sees in the street with a 'do even vaguely resembling his own? Of course not, because it’s unenforceable.
Britney Spears’ publishers, on the other hand, can enforce their copyright, because the avenues of production, reproduction and distibution are limited: there are always going to be a few bootlegs floating around Hong Kong, but no-one’s going to sell them in countries where copyright is actively enforced, and they wield a big enough legal stick these days to keep P2P underground.
The difference lies in the nature of the information being copied, and the legal punch of those who created it: the haircut may be information, but how different does it have to be from the original cut to be different information - and can the barber afford to let the courts decide the issue each time? Britney Spears’ publishers don’t have that problem: it’s - usually - clear whether a song is or isn’t theirs, they have a mass of legal precedent on their side, and the money and willpower to fight to keep copies suppressed.
It seems the phrase is used in a number of ways by different people.
A useful way of avoiding woolly thinking is to avoid language that is imprecise. Or, conversely, imprecise language is often used as a means of obscuring a speaker’s true position.
At the meta level, one can often discern a speaker’s level of honesty and underlying motives by studying the way that they deliberately use obscure or inaccurate language. By studying what they are being obscure about, and what inaccuracies they indulge in, you can infer what they do not wish you to consider or know about. Rather in the same way that a person picking their way through a minefield will tell you where the mines are by where they don’t go.
Information does not want anything. It is not sentient. In fact, the only protagonists involved with information who *want * something are the people involved. When someone says “information wants to be free” my first thought is: why do you not want to say “I want information to be free”? What is motivating you to obscure the identity of the sentient entity who actually wants?
Lots of things are public goods in the same sense as information is. I considered using the word “stuff”, but I was trying to sound a bit establishment.
That being said, there is a complication that I suppressed that you hint at. IIRC, the odd economist has declared that it’s a serious problem for neo-classical economics. It’s this: information is both a good (thing we like to consume) and a condition required for the operation of markets. But I’m not sure that’s important for this discussion. However,Voyager’s point
is closely related to this theme: how much should one search? How much information about how much to search do you need? etc.
I mentioned one source of tension before, but another - the often hidden tension between instrumental and natural rights justifications of property rights - is shown nicely by Case Sensitive
I think property rights are a good thing, but only insofar as they “make the world a better place”. Others think that something is the “product of their labour and creativity” should be theirs to do as they see fit regardless of consequence. In defining and protecting property rights, these people are going to disagree from time to time.
As for Smith, he mentions butchers and bakers, but not lawmakers or scholars. Markets are very effective in some situations, not so in others. In this case, in trying to figure out how to appropriately define and enforce property rights, we’re not trying to plan by interfering in a market, but to plan for an effective market.
Information is not just art and songs, it is also invention.
Would Edison have tested thousands of materials for lighbulb filaments if there was no way to patent it? Seriously, you spend thousands of hours and mountains of cash to perfect a lightbulb, and the rich guy down the street can buy one for $1, reverse engineer it, and build a plant twice the size of yours, because he didn’t spend all his money on research.
Indeed, people did create stories and songs in years past, but just look at amazon.com. There is an enormous quantity of literature and music being developed every single week. Probably more music in a week than all of Mozart’s contemporaries produced in a year. More books in a week than a person could read in a year.
I believe this is because a person can actually make a living creating art, instead of having it be a hobby to do after the work day is over. More quantity and more quality of art, music, literature and invention, because people can throw themselves in headfirst, without having to convince a benefactor to finance them.
I was debating whether or not to say anything in this thread until Mr2001 mentioned Edison. Edison is a perfect example for both sides of this argument. Certainly he wouldn’t have worked on his inventions without a patent, but he wouldn’t have been able to shaft Tesla either.
Thomas Edison is a great example of what is common corporate practice now. It’s the predatory behavior of patenting things to hold as “value” to increase stock value. This actually hurts innovation, though they will say that it helps it. Recently Microsoft upped it’s patents by a ridiculous margin because their accountants said that MS didn’t hold enough patents. Canon uses the fact that they are a top patent holder as evidence of their innovation. The fact of the matter is that this is a false marketing ploy. What they do is they patent technology and hold it. Its like the guy who claims he holds the patent on wireless networking. Many people patent things just so they can sue someone else who tries to develop it, even though the patent might be for the concept without the practical development fully worked out. This hurts the innovator who actually accomplished bringing it to market.
The idea of property is an illusion. We tell ourselves that we own, land, cattle, information, but the reality is that nothing can be owned outside of what we can take and hold by force. What copyright and patents are for is to give a system for justifying the use of force to accumulate power. They overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy over the poor, and enforce a classist structure that benefits the people who are writing the laws to begin with. People on down the pyramid sometimes see a benefit in supporting this system, when the benefit is not seen, what we refer to as “piracy” occurs.
The whole idea of property is predicated upon the concept of producers and free-loaders. ‘Producers’ have a long tradition of couching their self-interest in moralistic terms in an effort to coerce a certain behavior through pressure in the form of guilt, when guilt doesn’t work naked aggression is the substitute. The system that built as a way to protect producers from freeloaders has created a new breed of freeloader that is benefitted by the system. The record companies stock holders are a good example of this, they do little of the work but reap most of the profits.
So what we have now is a system that is supposed to reward one for their hardwork but it’s become a system where everyone wants their “Money to work for them”. In otherwords we have found a system that attempts to find a moral justification for greed. It’s a sense of entitlement to think that one should be compensated for the information they create as much as it is to pirate that work.
Because of this the have nots or the have lesses feel little guilt when stealing from corporations who they see as just trying to get over anyway.
The phrase comes from people WANTING information to be free, it comes from our desire to learn and our desire to teach.
I disagree. Patents, when done right, protect the little guy from the big guy. Xerox was a tiny little company before its owners bet the company on developing Xerography. If there were no patents, as soon as they had the bigger companies could have seized the market, leaving them with nothing.
I agree that the patent system is a mess today, but inherently it is a good thing.
There is also a matter of balance. One could argue that “pirating” which is unavailable to millions of poor people due to an excessive price is ethical. Pirating a movie so you can watch it at home without waiting for the DVD is not. Giving copyright protection for a reasonable amount of time is good. Giving it for three times the life of the creator is not so good. Patents and copyrights do drive innovation.
I’m sort of an anarchist by default, it’s something of a passive choice. I am incredulous about anything that people say is “good” about this system. I really could honestly care less whether or not it survives. There is something of an “uber-system” that is always there no matter what we try to make it become, a series of oligarchies where some people are in power and others are not. I rarely find protecting their innovations to be a compelling argument. I think that for every example of a good patent, I could find one of a bad patent. It’s neither here nor there, and I hold that information should be as free as possible, though having done business, I know the value of being cagey, but it’s about a power struggle, not some moralistic choice.
I have very little faith in “the system” and I don’t really care what people do with it. Not that I want to see people starve, or get raped and murdered, but to me morality is about the propagation and wellness of the species, and patents/copyrights do pretty much equal harm/good as far as I can tell.
I sit here daily and give out my intellectual property. I do art regularly, and rarely get compensated. It’s seeming like it’s very difficult for me to make money doing the things I want to do, but then again I don’t particularly need money.
We are all free to release our stuff public domain. We are not free to steal others. My wife sells articles to a lot of small papers around the country. Since she can resell an article many times, she can charge less to each paper. She can also google herself to see if a paper who did not buy her article posted it, or if someone who bought print rights only posted it without permission. Thanks to the presence of the law, offenders take it down very quickly. Your desire for anarchy is all very fine, but I wonder if you’d be willing to make up for the money writers around the country and world would lose to it?
Well you’d have to understand where I am coming from. I believe the US has been coopted by special interests, that it is nothing more than corporate feudalism. I have a government that operates private prisons that are illegal internationally. I have a country that claims to be free yet locks people up for drug offenses. I have a country that views the lives of people in other countries as less valuable than it’s own citizens. I don’t believe that a governmental collapse would be a worse system. We’d still have the same corporate masters, the only difference is that they wouldn’t have a government propping them up. There would still be private arbitration organizations, and with information technology we can see where we are spending money and where those dollars go. I’m not advocating that I wish for the government to collapse only that I have no faith in it. Thus far, I have yet to hear a truly compelling argument to the contrary, usually the argument is someone trying to push their fear on me by saying “It could be worse.”
Again as I was saying, there is no such thing as “ownership” past what you can enforce. I am free to do anything I can get away with, having a government doesn’t change that, it only changes the tactics one must use to get away with things. If I were a senator I could drive my mistress off of a bridge, if I were president I could bomb a country with impunity.
Well the thing you’re not understanding is that a different system would work very differently, the loss of money would be irrelevant as the entire power structure would have changed around. We’d still have the nature of oligarchy, but it doesn’t really matter that anyone loses money because the ripples would be more significant than a belief that one deserves revenue.
Also, I am not advocating anarchy, I am more of an anarchist by default as I said. It’s simply because I cannot trust the system. However, it’s more that I don’t even really believe there IS such a thing as a Nation State, it’s a bunch of competing mafias and special interest groups that configure the way they are going to run things, it’s very syndicalized, the only thing a collapse would do is open people’s eyes to the reality of the anarchy we already live in.
However, if it were not for the drug war, I’d probably be pleased with our government. Most people I know are far more afraid of cops than they are of the thugs on the street. I live across the street from some projects with a bad rep, I’m not afraid to walk down the street. I’ve never been assaulted by anyone I either didn’t know or wasn’t a cop.
) is the few sets of random bits that people are willing to pay for. I suppose you are free to write a program to generate random sequences of bits for an MP3 file - if you want to wait around for something worth listening to, be my guest. I don’t think you’d have to pay royalties!