Rants & Raves

Rants & Raves

Economy of Ideas: Round Two
Notwithstanding Mr. Barlow's stature and respect naturally due one of cyberspace's pioneers, let me offer up a critical review. (See "The Economy of Ideas," Wired 2.03, page 84.)

Copyright law states very clearly that an idea is protected at the point it is placed in physical form. That "physical form" can be digital expression. Barlow does not dispute that, yet he says that the mutability of electronic information somehow makes the expression different. This, of course, overlooks (or ignores) the point that fixation in electronic media is fixation for copyright purposes.... Yet Barlow says that because Net-based writing is impermanent, and because of what he considers a natural tendency of members of the Net culture to ignore others' legal rights, copyright law is outmoded, and, at the least, must change. Change, he says, or perish.

I fear, more than anything else, Barlow reminds me of William Roper, Sir Thomas More's son-in-law, who in Robert Bolt's A Man for all Seasons insists that the law of England be set aside in order to get at More's enemy, Thomas Cromwell. More, saying that it would make no difference if Cromwell were the Devil himself, asks Roper, "What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ... And when that last law was down, ... do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."

What Barlow mentions nowhere is that there is a world of well-protected, privately compiled and mass-distributed information already on the Net. I refer to the online services that have not only depended upon traditional copyright law but upon licenses to protect their material, even though widely available since 1970.

Barlow says that the same culture that led to widespread hacker penetration of copy protection schemes (and now various hacker penetrations of the Net itself) will lead to defeat for technology-based copyright protection. If this is in fact the case, however, I fear the Net will remain the domain of low-intensity information such as items in the public domain, new e- journals, and the ubiquitous e-mail for which signal-to-noise ratios are distressingly low.

So, in the end, Barlow gives us (1) a romanticized vision of information in cyberspace, (2) a prediction that chaos will reign where copyright should pertain, and (3) a conclusion that no solution exists for this state of affairs. I'm with Sir Thomas: Give me the law.

Stephen L. Haynes
Minneapolis, Minnesota

John Perry Barlow responds: The physical and virtual worlds differ fundamentally. If I felt that laws written for the physical world were likely to work well in cyberspace, I'd be right there with Sir Thomas. But wishing don't make it so.

This is not to say that I believe chaos will reign or that I would take some perverse delight in such a turn. People want order, and when it can't be imposed, it generally emerges from the collective will. I believe that a future Thomas More would say, "In the absence of laws which can be enforced, give me ethics."

It's been obvious to many people that patents and copyrights don't work real well for nonphysical things. As Barlow points out in Wired 2.03, it really only works for print/image/etc. because, for all of history, protectable content was so attached to the physical medium that most people never made the distinction.

The basic confusion of form with "content" obscures where the problem is; for centuries, paper and printed word were considered one, the laws defaulted to cover the combination, habit considers them one.

Instead of trying to preserve current turf, by dragging things back into the flawed 19th-century model which only worked by accident, it's more useful to ask: What sort of nonphysical creative thing can I produce that cannot be taken from me?

That thing is attention - I can give it to you, but you cannot take it from me. As much as you might copy my work (book, program, etc.) it is static. Paco Xander Nathan has pointed out that attention is the monetary unit in an information economy. I think it's also a key to working out systems that allow commerce in a nonphysical environment.

Information flows and self-levels just like water. Trying to stop it has obviously not worked, and copy-protection just irritates users. This is vestigial, historical emphasis on medium confused for content.

What is interesting is the transition - from no information to some information - attention. You get my attention (money frequently helps), you tell me what you want from me, I produce information to satisfy your need. Transaction complete. This isn't new - authors get commissioned to write magazine articles; musicians hired to make soundtracks, fill out bands; artists do custom murals on buildings; the list is endless. You can copy specific instances of work, but you can't reproduce their work-generation process, i.e., their creativity. And in the cases where you can come close, it's usually easier to just hire them.

Support, interaction, customization, design, fixes - this is attention. You can't copy it. "Bits" are static. I used to sell Fido/FidoNet with a tiered pricing scheme. First, free. Take it, run with it, have fun, ask no questions. Then two levels of pay-for; hobbyist and commercial. That got you a printed book with lots of details, and I'd talk to you on the phone. Finally, for reasonably serious money, I'd make you a customized version. Then you got pretty good support.

Attention is the generation of personalized information. Communication is the medium in which attention grows.

While it's possible to get around the expense of dealing with authors or their representatives or other authorities, the benefit devalues rapidly the further you get from the source.

Tom Jennings

tomj@wps.com

John Perry Barlow responds: As usual, Tom Jennings is right. And his elegant proposal that attention is a kind of medium fits succinctly with my theory that protection will move to the relationship between provider and market. This is already the case with billions of dollars worth of intellectual property sold by lawyers, architects, and other professionals to their clients. It's hardly useful for an architect to copyright her plans for your house.

Mr. Barlow, I just read and enjoyed your Wired piece and was thinking that your analysis, while IMHO it is absolutely dead on, suffers from one debilitating metaphor. Throughout your argument you objectify information while you simultaneously try to undermine that objectification. That is, you argue effectively that information is not a thing but a process/relationship/verb; however, you cast information as a thing throughout the piece.

I think the danger in how you characterize information is this: Many people are utterly convinced that information is a thing - a commodity that can be transferred - and they base their actions on this flimsy foundation. ... While you argue against the concept of information transfer, you actually argue against yourself by continually casting information as an agent, not an action. Information doesn't want to be free, informers do. The meanings are rhetorical in nature: They are negotiated, they are constantly constructed and reconstructed during the interactions among participants in the communicative acts. By saying things like "information wants to change" etc., you give agency to the code - even though your purpose is just the opposite.

Stephen Doheny-Farina

sdf@craft.camp.clarkson.edu

John Perry Barlow responds: It's a problem of my personal semantics. I call a lot of nonthingish things things, like, to use a big one, this Thing Called Love. Language, or at least English, is limited in its ability to describe the nonspecific action or state of being.

Actually, since I believe information is a life form, there are many cases where information may be seen to act upon ...uh ...things.

As yet another constipated copyright essay landed on my desk today, I wished I was back at Chez Panisse last night with your "Economy of Ideas" article and my 350 ml of wine. Copyright is essential business fodder here at Dialog (where I run the CD-ROM products), so I was a motivated reader, but I also thought I heard some nice echoes of the Tao Te Ching. I'm thinking of text that says the more laws and edicts you promulgate, the more thieves and robbers you create. Also, the scarcer and more valuable you make anything, the harder it is to keep from thieves.

Anyway, I think it is going to be very, very tough sledding to change the intellectual property paradigm. If we go to patronage, the obvious bad choices are governments or wealthy individuals. So what would practical, equitable patronage be?

Barry Richman

barry@netcom.com

John Perry Barlow responds: Mr. Richman identifies one of the key problems of the future. It was solved in the past by a sense of responsibility among art patrons. The only reason ordinary people were able to hear the recent works of Bach or behold a new Michaelangelo sculpture was that their patrons believed they were morally bound to share those miracles.

Note from the Editors: John Perry Barlow is still struggling to answer the deluge of mail he is receiving in response to "The Economy of Ideas," most of it supportive. He begs the indulgence of his correspondents and is grateful for their attention. So far, he has received more than 200 e-mail messages and letters, most of them long and thoughtful. More arrive daily. This is the most mail he has ever received as a result of a print publication of his work.

Ticket to Ride (but in a cop car?...)
It was with a great deal of interest that I read Simson L. Garfinkel's absorbing, well-researched, and ultimately scary piece on the use of the drivers' license as a tool of social control ("Nobody Fucks With the DMV," Wired 2.02, page 84).

You see, I had only a few hours earlier emerged from a harrowing stay of more than sixteen hours in a piss-soaked lock-up in Fairfax, Virginia, denied the right to bail myself out or, for ten hours, even to make a phone call to a lawyer or friend. Missed a professional conference, important meetings, and a night's sleep, too.

My crime: two parking tickets in Brookline, Massachusetts.

It's good Wired devotes such serious attention to the way computers have empowered the state to control the basic fabric of our lives. Better still would be articles on how we as citizens can reclaim the technology and use it to protect ourselves from a level of power the state never was intended to have.

Otherwise Wired would leave us with a vision of happy cybernauts spinning their own self-referential digital communities, thinking it makes them free, all the while falling further and further under the control of people and institutions who are probably relieved we are looking into a computer screen instead of at them.

Donald Frazier
Newton, Massachusetts

Clipped Behind the Iron Curtain
The widespread discussion on the Clipper Chip in both US media and relevant discussion lists is limited mostly to American people. Therefore, I wish to add my small opinion from behind the former Iron Curtain, based upon my lifetime experience of living in Poland.

For years we lived here with the overwhelming impression of being under constant surveillance by omnipotent secret services maintained by the undemocratic regime supported by Moscow. For instance, people were afraid not to take part in the sham elections. The regime was also afraid in every way of people's informal associations. Participants in unofficial gatherings were photographed and videotaped with the hope of identifying them. The telephone was always considered insecure and all international calls were assumed to be wiretapped. As the published files of East Germany's STASI showed, these fears were not groundless.

(Cyberspace) provides really a unique experience to have the freedom to send out (to the West) everything one wishes - just after the period of total censorship. Recent developments in cryptography and the work of the Cypherpunks have enabled, perhaps for the first time in mankind's history, the opportunity to create global communities that evade governments' surveillance. The governments may slow the outburst of universal privacy but will not evade it. In the Clipper's case, I agree with the conclusion of Newsweek (February 14, 1994), which suggests that Americans will use foreign-made devices, and foreigners will be reluctant to use US ones that can be wiretapped.

Doodek
via an anonymous mailer

Commercialization or Commodification?
In "Is Advertising Finally Dead?" (Wired 2.02, page 71), Michael Schrage gets very excited about the idea of advertisers using context-sensitive "viruses" lurking among the recesses of cyberspace, ready to latch onto whatever you're watching or reading to promote something.

Schrage's attempt to dismiss criticism of the idea by comparing his viruses to postal junk mail doesn't work. No one opens our personal letters, reads them, and remails them with "related product information."

One of the reasons I use and pay for access to the Internet is to go where everything hasn't been tested before a focus group. I don't mind paying for access; and remember, there's a difference between commercialization and commodification.

Bill Humphries
whump@delphi.com

Undo

• In our review of Telegeography 1993 (Wired 2.03, page 26) we left out some important bits: +1 (202) 467 0017, and 4579195@mcimail.com. Also, it is estimated that global telephone traffic in 1992 exceeded 5.5 trillion minutes.
• Sandy Sandfort reported in "Security Through Obscurity," (Wired 2.03, page 29) that Stego was shareware available from the sumex-aim archive under the info-mac/Recent directory. It has been moved to the /cmp (compression tools) folder.
• There was a small factual error in our review of Sense of Snow (Wired 2.04, page 115): Smilla's father was actually an anesthesiologist.
• Three's a charm ...on the cover of Wired 2.02, that's a Philips CD-i remote - and it's spelled with one l....
• In Wired 2.02, page 32, we inadvertently printed Kevin Sullivan's first name as "Keith."

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