Repeatedly commentators write that information wants to be free in the Internet Age. In my own contrarian way, I’ve concluded that information doesn’t want to be free; rather, it wants to be universally accessible.
Okay, I know this isn’t the popular perspective but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, information doesn’t have its own life. Someone created that informational bit that you seek — it wasn’t just there waiting to be grabbed.
A story is information. The information is contained in words. I’ll grant that the words may be just there for the grabbing — but not in the sequence of the story. You can grab “car,” “she,” “thus,” “red,” “motor,” “bought,” “the” – all the individual words, perhaps for free — but what you can’t grab is the construction that takes those words and puts them in the sequence “Thus she bought the red motor car.” The words themselves, absent their sequencing, are meaningless information; it is the sequencing of words that provides meaning, which is the information we seek.
Someone needs to take those words and sequence them. If the person who does it is a writer and the sequence is part of their Great American Novel, they may well want to be paid for their effort. The words are indifferent to whether they are free or costly; the writer/sequencer of the words is not indifferent.
The consumer, given the choice between paying $10 or $0 for the sequenced words will generally choose $0. That’s the way of life. Given the choice to pay $10 or not have access to the sequenced information, the consumer will balance the value of the sequenced information to him or her against the price. The closer the two are to being in equilibrium, the more likely the information will be paid for; the more in disequilibrium, the less likely the information will be bought or the lower price that the information seeker is willing to pay. But nowhere in this formulation is the sequence screaming “set me free!”
The original statement that information wants to be free is attributed to Stewart Brand, at a 1984 hacker’s conference, where he said:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
When read in complete context, the free was referring to the ability to adapt and use the information, not the price of the information or whether or not it should be paid for.
What happened is that a pithy slogan was created by taking words out of context. The slogan became a rallying cry with consequences that were unintended by the originator of the idea. The information wants to be free rally took on its own force through repetition without any consideration of what the underlying concept really was (reminds me of the more recent political slogans Death Tax and Death Panels — two misleading slogans that rally people to oppose a cause while preventing discussion of the important underlying issues).
Some ebookers have adopted information wants to be free as their slogan, with the meaning that ebooks should be very-low-cost (to no cost) and DRM-free. But it ignores the value of sequencing and the right of the sequencer to be paid for his or her work and protected from theft of his or her efforts. In this regard, sequencer includes both the author and the publisher, not just the author. It might be better to say information wants to be available — today and tomorrow, which would better reflect what the vast majority of ebookers really want.
Most ebookers I communicate with are uninterested in the problems of DRM except as it may limit their future ability to read an ebook on the device of their choosing. Their primary concerns are price and availability, and it is not until the discussion turns to the idea of future reading devices that DRM joins the discussion. These ebookers do not think information wants to be free, they think it wants to be available.
Rather than sloganeering that information wants to be free, ebooker efforts might be better spent in rallying support for a universal DRM scheme similar to DVDs. A universal DRM would reduce DRM costs and would ensure that purchases were device agnostic. It is certainly a more winnable cause than that of setting information free.
We know that the publishing industry is a little slow in focusing on the real problems of ebooks and ebookers, but this is one lesson that the panjandrums of publishing can readily learn simply by looking in their own living rooms. How happy would the CEO of any publisher be if he or she had to own and have connected 5 different DVD players in order to play movies they purchased or rented because each movie studio used its own DRM scheme? How happy would they be if they upgraded their DVD player next year only to discover that the 200 DVDs they currently own all had to be replaced because the new players couldn’t play them?
If movie studios can recognize that a single, universal DRM scheme is necessary, and if publishers can look in their own living rooms to see the value of a single video DRM scheme, how big a leap is it to conclude that ebooks, too, would benefit greatly from a single, universal DRM scheme? Seems to me that it’s really a baby step, not a giant leap — what we used to call a no-brainer – but with current publishing industry thinking patterns, a mountain is being made out of a molehill as an excuse not to act in both the publishers’ and the consumers’ best interest.
Rallying around a universal DRM scheme that lets us buy ebooks and transparently use ebooks today and tomorrow strikes me as the single most beneficial thing ebookers can do to enhance the their ebook reading experience.
Editor’s Note: Rich Adin is an editor and owner of Freelance Editorial Services, a provider of editorial and production services to publishers and authors. This is reprinted, with permission, from his An American Editor blog. PB
With respect to the author, information does in fact ultimately want to be free… or more importantly, it needs to be free. Prior to several hundred years ago, the concept of owning the content did not really exist. Many notable authors (including one William Shakespeare) freely borrowed from the works of others. At least in the United States, the purpose of copyright (and patent law) is to provide an incentive to creators to both create and to publish their works. However, it needs to be remembered that their rights are for an inherently limited term. Unfortunately in recent years the concept that the term is limited has been forgotten by many in the publishing and entertainment industry.
Also lets consider for the moment, that term right being applied to copyright is something of a misnomer. One never has the right to constrain the actions of others, yet that is what copyright gives the author, the ability to constrain how others use the author’s work. Copyright is in fact a limitation on the free action (i.e. to exercise their rights) of others.
Society should be willing to tolerate this constraint for some reasonable period but I think the increasing prevalence of piracy has shown that we may well have passed that reasonable period.
Whats worse, we pay a cost by locking information down too tightly. Existing content has often served as the seed for the creation of new content. Without that ability to re-use, to extend, to mix up existing works our society would be much poorer. As it is now, many creative works need to be vetted by lawyers, rights obtained for the sampling of work, etc.
Ultimately, information wants to be free, because we want to be free. We want to be free to retell great stories when we hear them. We want to be free to use good ideas when we see them. We may tolerate some restriction, but lets not confuse toleration with embracing the restriction.
One final note… the publishing industry is too obsessed with DRM. It doesn’t work, and likely will never work. DRM in fact doesn’t work on DVD’s (Its easily broken), and it won’t work on ebooks. The one advantage DVDs have over ebooks… they are media and relatively cheap compared to the other legal alternative (seeing the movie in the theater).
What “information wants to be free” means is that information is becoming considerably easier to copy and transmit. The marginal cost of making copies is approaching zero. That’s all.
Really, if Brand had known what a monster he was creating, he could have phrased it a little better. Using “wants” really muddles the clarity. “Has a tendency to become” might work better.
Personally, I think information wants to be anthropomorphized.
That has one of the worst pseudo-political memes of the computer age (I believe it predates the internet), only slightly better than “Free, as in beer”.
Information doesn’t want or need anything. It’s an inanimate thing, the root of ideas. It isn’t alive and never will be.
The ability to consciously use information is what sets humans apart from other living creatures like dolphins or daisies.
I was always taught that rights entail obligations. This seems to have been overlooked in the current legal situation with regard to copyright. Let people profit from their work by all means, provided they are prepared to make it available to those who want to see it: but burying old books away because the authors are hostile, indifferent or ‘unfindable’ — or worse, from fear of competition with new ones — should be seen as morally unacceptable, just as burning books is. A universal paid copyright registry is the simple and obvious solution.