Cory Doctorow: Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free

http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/09/worse-than-nothing/

by calvin_c • 12 years ago

141 51 12 years ago

mc32• 12 years ago

Often forgotten, or ignored, the whole quote, part of it often used to express a desire for freedom to access information, from a consumer's point of view "...information wants to be free" is:

"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"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

These two contentious forces need to find an equilibrium so that as consumers we get quality information.

sliverstorm2• 12 years ago

Right up there in the annals of misquotes with:

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Often mangled to something like:

Those that would give up freedom deserve neither freedom nor safety

Often used in response to people who are willing to give up the freedom to own heavy military ordinance, and the like.

http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/07/what-ben-franklin-really-...

the_ancient3• 12 years ago

WTF does gun control have to do with this topic?

XorNot2• 12 years ago

Also that he uses the term 'essential' there. I'll bet he wasn't thinking its essential people be allowed to yell fire in a crowded theater.

bo1024• 12 years ago

Interesting article, but hard to tell where it was going.

Turned out to be about how DRM is a bad idea. I'm not sure what the title has to do with the article though....

IvyMike• 12 years ago

This is an excerpt from his new book; the article headline is the book's title. I agree this is not a good title for this excerpt.

Later his argument goes "Information doesn't want to be free--people do" and this story is just one bit of supporting evidence.

Zenst• 12 years ago

Is he not going on about data and not information, given data is not interpreted and information in interpreted data into meaningfulness. Hence DRM data bits are data and not until the DRM is removed do they become information.

fifthesteight• 12 years ago

Mr. Doctorow is why I stopped reading BoingBoing. If you are familiar with his work this is not a-typical.

jordanpg• 12 years ago

No great fan of DRM myself, but I don't think the economic case is very strong here.

If strong DRM so obviously reduces sales, then are the publishers just ignorant of that? Of course not. It's because DRM is mostly about legal licensing and legal hardware standards, as discussed exhaustively in the OP here [1] and comments.

In my most cynical hours, I imagine that behind closed doors, the publishers are looking for ways to encourage piracy because of the boosts to overall enthusiasm that results (ie. free advertising), which is documented in the article.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7751110

wpietri8• 12 years ago

are the publishers just ignorant of that?

My hypothesis: DRM is like magnetic healing bracelets. Do they work? No. Do people buy them? Yes. Are the purchasers just ignorant? No, not exactly. Ignorance isn't the problem, because telling them the facts doesn't change behavior.

People who buy magnetic healing bracelets want particular feelings more than they want to know the truth. So they buy the thing that gives them the feelings they want.

I suspect DRM is similar. Major media company executives like feeling in control. They don't like people "stealing" their content or doing "the wrong thing" with it. DRM gives them feelings of control, letting them turn the positive-sum game of entertainment back into a zero-sum dominance game.

Ridiculous, but that's what happens when your raw building material is primates, and then you give all the power to the ones best at climbing the primate dominance hierarchy.

Steko• 12 years ago

Magnetic healing bracelets aren't a very good analogy. Digital locks actually do stop some people from copying. Does it stop informed/skilled people? No, neither do real locks but we keep putting them on houses and cars for good reason. Digital locks provide a non-zero level of actual security and a signal that the issuer intends to protect the content from unauthorized distribution.

If I leave my belongings out in the street tonight, I can imagine anything of nominal value will be gone by morning. I think more people would enjoy having my electronics than the latest Corey Doctorow novel. This isn't because the electronics industry hasn't made TV's and electronics available to the people in my community. It's because people prefer free to paying if all things are equal.

Instead I continue to keep my belongings in my house, with my doors generally closed and locked while I am out. When I am missing something, it's generally because I have misplaced it. Some people who do this do still get robbed but to say locks and doors and walls don't work is a bit silly.

drivingmenuts• 12 years ago

Publishers haven't come to terms with electronic distribution because they can't conceive of a world where the Publishers aren't needed for everything related to books.

Are we better off with/without Publishers? It depends. Certainly, there is some value in having a publisher - editing, guaranteed distribution, payment, etc. - all the things that would be time-consuming and take away from the writer's first love, writing. Along with that, there are annoyances as well - dodgy DRM, outdated ideas about format, etc.

It was easy when books were physical - a book was a solitary unit not easily shared.

Now, not so much. An eBook can be easily shared - in theory, without DRM, the author would make the $7.99 cover price once, the book would hit P-bay and that would be it.

To say that the problem is with people who don't value the author's work is an oversimplification, as well. Many people might value a work highly, but the electronic edition is easier or cheaper to get thru illicit means.

There are those who say that sharing is not theft - true, to an extent. It's not so much stealing as it is just shitting on the work that an author has done.

Which isn't to say that all authors are worth your time, either. Everyone has an opinion about what's good writing and what's not. Personally, I dig Terry Pratchett, but there are some who don't like his work. So to them, he's not worth the effort and expense of paying for to purchase a book.

Now, you might ask yourself: self, why would you buy a book you don't like? In my case, I want reading material and there's not much way of knowing if the book is any good before I buy it (space military novels). I've gotten halfway thru a book and realized: I blew $2.99 on complete shite and that sucks. It's only halfway thru the book that I realized that the work of the author hold no value for me (and maybe a bit of negative value).

However, the publisher is the one who got me - they set the price, they wrote the summary, they even sourced an attractive piece of art to cover the book. Ostensibly, they even edited it (though that's often rather spotty with self-published authors). So, a publisher still has some value to bring to even a crappy author.

It's a complex problem and one not likely to be solved because no one really likes to think about how they can make their own job redundant, at least not without getting a reward for it.

For publishers, it's a losing game.

pdkl95• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, belief systems that rely on the Just Worth Hypothesis[1] is are very common. Once consequence of this is the very common belief that if a change is made to the legal definition of what is "good/moral" vs "evil/immoral", then <i>reality will conform</i> or otherwise adjust itself such to maintain some sort of "balance".

You see this at the core of many political and arguments: baning abortions "obvious" stops people from having sex, restricting drugs "obviously" causes people to stop using them, so banning copying and restricting the legal (meaning "moral") methods of use to a DRM scheme "obviously" prevents people from viewing that data for free.

Unfortunately, this suggests that it will be very difficult to convince anybody to reverse these beliefs, because it would require them to accept that some particular type of justice is not an inherent property of nature.

TL;DR - It is way too common for people to believe that because [they think] reality ought[2] to work in a particular way, they end up blind to what reality actually is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

lordbusiness• 12 years ago

There is a strong belief in what is considered "right"; despite evidence to the contrary, "the system" is still very much in favour of enforcing an unenforcible law.

In other words, it is demonstrably true that some would pay for Downton Abbey Season 5 if it were available for them to do so in their country, but it's not, so they torrent it to keep up with their friends in other countries. By the time it comes out where they live, they won't need to pay for it anymore.

A significant amount of TV and movie piracy would be eradicated if media conglomerates and film studios realized they had a global audience, and released content globally as opposed to clinging on to some now artificial segmented distribution model.

In the past, a movie studio only made a given number of reels, so movies had to release piecemeal; likewise it took time for the cargo ship to move the physical books to various places around the world, in our digital connected age these things are no longer true, but the foundation of media distribution models remain the same.

justcommenting• 12 years ago

Doctorow echoes, more clearly and vividly than most, Sid Meier's succinct formulation: "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

Because that's what this is ultimately about: whether we want our children to be digital sharecroppers or citizens whose right to read is respected and who can be positively enabled to stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to access to knowledge.

chasing• 12 years ago

There's a difference between information and media. While Doctorow uses the term "information," he's really talking about professionally produced media. And mostly entertainment media, at that (NBC shows, his kid's book, etc.).

That stuff just doesn't get produced if there's not some way of generating income from it. And that requires some kind of barrier to distribution. Although the nature of that barrier -- technical, social, legal, whatever -- is very much up for debate.

wpietri8• 12 years ago

Does that require some barrier? I don't think that's at all obvious.

Previous models for funding content are built around natural distribution barriers. E.g., it was hard making and getting books to people, so you used the distribution channel as the revenue channel. So I think most of our experience is like that.

But we now live in an age where distribution is effectively free. I just bought a book (yay, Ancillary Sword is out!). I paid for most of the distribution (I bought the tablet and pay for an Internet connection); the publisher, distributor, and retail channel together have a marginal cost measured in fractions of a cent. That changes things.

I think our closest historical example is broadcast radio and TV, which has never had a barrier to distribution. One way to fund that is ads, but there are others. For example, US public radio and the BBC produce a lot of high-quality, professionally-produced media and have for decades. Or we could look at newspaper serials, the format that gave us The Three Musketeers: newspapers print so many copies that sharing is easy; people paid because it was cheap and convenient.

But the interesting stuff is just getting started. Plenty of professional writers give a lot of stuff away for free on the web. I've helped fund a few different Kickstarter films, and would have been perfectly happy to throw in more if they had wanted to make the films available freely. Micropatronage is just getting going.

eropple• 12 years ago

Nit: that almost certainly wasn't something Meier wrote. It was either Brian Reynolds or somebody on the writing staff (likely Michael Ely, who wrote a lot of the fluff). Meier's involvement with Civ and Civ-alikes steadily decreased after Civ I.

christianbryant• 12 years ago

And then, there is also Jaron Lanier: http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3899518/information-wants-...

time_is_scary• 12 years ago

here is an MP3 link of a talk he gave that summarizes the thesis of this book pretty nicely (26 minutes): http://dconstruct.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/podcast/dconstruct20...

harry8• 12 years ago

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/10/adobe-spyware-reveals-...

Don't miss what gets tagged along on drm. Key quote:

"Adobe claims that these reports are not quite accurate. According to Adobe, the software only collects information about the book you are currently reading, not your entire library. It also collects information about where you are reading that book, how long you've been reading it, and how much you've read. "

Oh and the released that so it sent the information totally unencrypted even if you are completely batshit insane enough to "trust" a company that will be a completely different collection of people in 10 years time with different policies, different corporate ethics etc etc.

What you're reading. How long you've been reading it, where you are when you are reading it, what you are up to, which parts you read more than once. Don't miss this part of the DRM debate because any for DRM and against that really needs to be yelling it really, really, really loudly right now or it will be assumed this is what DRM is for.

spacefight• 12 years ago

The more I read about always-on devices such as some DRM-infested e-readers, smart tvs, the more ideas for privacy focused startups. Tons of them...

gpvos• 12 years ago

As Larry Wall said way back in 1997: "I do not fundamentally believe that information wants to be free. Rather, I believe that information wants to be valuable."

Cory Doctorow: Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free

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