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Thanks for that Mr Snake. Sorry for my misunderstanding.
On free information, I was doing some reading on another topic and found an article by Richard T. Kaser, the Executive Director of the "National Federation of Abstracting & Information Services". In that article - "If Information Wants to Be Free . . . Then Who's Going to Pay for It?" - he says:
[T]here's one expression floating around the Internet that seems to have come into popular usage quite fast, and it is increasingly being cited as if it were not only intuitively obvious (and therefore true), but a divine revelation (and therefore True, with a capital T).
The expression, of course is, "Information wants to be free." But what, exactly, does that mean? I've detected at least three meanings:
- 1. Speaking at a recent meeting in Washington, D.C., CNRI's Robert Kahn observed, "One view is information should be free of standard organization," i.e., it should be free from conventional structure.
- 2. In a recent statement to the U.S. Copyright Office, U.S. citizen B. Ball said, "I resent any abridging of my rights to do what I please with any multimedia or electronic content I have purchased." Therefore, another view is information wants to be free of unnecessary controls.
- 3. People are always saying to me things like, "Well, do you think anyone should actually own the human genome?" Or, "Should foreign governments not share their climate data with us?" Or, "Should people have to pay to read the results of research funded by the U.S. Government?" In other words, what people are always saying to me is, "Don't you think information ought to be free of charge?"
His 'five assertions' later in the are also relevant. Among other ideas,he believes free information is an illusion built by culture, and also suggests that absolutely free information could be the siren that leads us to our death.
He goes on to support the point made by some that the medium is the thing:
...the notion that information ought to be free is ingrained in our culture. I would even go so far as to say that you as individuals also believe this. And I'm going to prove it to you.
When you go to the library, you expect to check out a book for free. When you turn on your radio, you expect to listen to music for free. When you turn on your TV you expect to watch network programming for free. You, like everyone else, have come to believe that information is free.
Still, there's a double standard. If you want to personally own a copy of that book you checked out of the library, you are willing to pay for a copy. If you want to personally own a copy of that song you heard on the radio, you are willing to pay for the CD. If you want to personally own a copy of the movie you just watched, you are willing to buy the video.
I conclude from this that, as a society, we pay for the medium and not the message. As a society we perceive that the value resides in the copy, not in the content . . . which is free . . . free to use again and again and again, free to reuse (say, if we want to quote something or lift a fact) . . . and free to give away to a friend or resell once you are done with it. All of this is ingrained in our thinking. It's not new.
...although he suggests this is not fact, but a useful fiction we have all willingly participated in.
On free information, or free-looking information, he says Either the user pays directly or the producer finds some other way to finance the operation, and I think we agree on that. I see models that give away free stuff in order to direct traffic towards some not-so-free stuff as a plausible future.
If information wants to be free, then everybody pays.
That seems the point, rather. We already do pay for free-looking-information to look free, as Kaser points out. Taxes paying for libraries(or in the UK, of course, the license fee paying for programming) are one example of something we are already doing, and could well do more of.
In the TED talk I linked to before, Blackmore talks about the emergence of a new replicator, the teme, a sort of techno-meme. She suggests there is this third replicator, very much like a meme, the difference being that it has escaped our heads and replicates electronically.
I'd recommend reading the article by Kaser, and I'd recommend watching the TED talk by Blackmore. Together they've inspired me to think about this a little differently.
I think there's a drive towards information replicating over and over and more and more easily, and what Blackmore suggests seems to explain that some.
If there is an evolutionary drive towards absolutely free information, could that be, as Kaser suggests, the end for us? Have the parasitic memes given birth to an even less anthropocentric parasite? Could we affect it's growth if it has?
Chief among the memes supporting the temes is the idea that you need to leave a record to have mattered; your books, your albums, your paintings; your place in history. It's a potent replicator for obvious reasons. It's driven people to write things down and record things, eclipsing oral traditions with higher fidelity and as a result, higher fecundity. An oral meme can 'go off', being forgotten if not replicated soon enough. Whole languages die that way, let alone stories. A textual meme, however, can be found again years later. The dead sea scrolls, for example.
If temes continue to run amok(and I don't really see how we have all that much choice) one benefit will be gaining backups of cultural product. Where things used to be lost(a small press of an album, a short lived magazine, etc) now they are almost all backed up on several computers around the world. Comic book scanners have been talking about this for a while. One big team of uploaders refer to their work as Digital Comics Preservation, aware that paper is easily destroyed and that digital can be copied over and over again.
It might be hard to get a copy of an old action comics issue, but you'll be able to read V for Vendetta forever.
(I read an article on this topic recently, but unfortunately I can't find it. Basically it said 'allow copies, last forever, don't allow copies, risk being lost forever'. I'm sure there is some nuance missing in my summary, but that was the gist)
Once again I am not able to give the thread my undivided attention, so please do point out if I am making no sense with this patchwork posting. |
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