SCN: Intellectual property

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

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Another oldie that's still pretty relevant...

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John Perry Barlow says intellectual property will soon be worthless. 
His own already comes close.

(Robert Wright, Slate 9/96)---Back when I was a journalist - before I 
became a provider of digital content - I thought life would always be 
simple: I would write articles, and people would pay to read them. 

But then I heard about the impending death of intellectual property, a 
scenario painted by cyberfuturists John Perry Barlow and Esther 
Dyson. As all media move online, they say, content will be so freely 
available that getting paid to produce it will be hard, if not 
impossible. 

At first, I dismissed this as garden-variety, breathless 
overextrapolation from digerati social theorists. But even as I 
scoffed, the Barlow-Dyson scenario climbed steadily toward the rank 
of conventional wisdom. 

Barlow and Dyson do have a solution. In the future people like me, 
having cultivated a following by providing free content on the Web, 
will charge our devotees for services that are hard to replicate en 
masse. We will answer individual questions online, say, or go 
around giving speeches, or spew out insights at private seminars, 
or (this one is actually my idea) have sex with young readers. 

The key, writes Barlow, will be not content but "performance." 
Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, offers this analogy: 
The Dead let people tape concerts, and the tapes then led more 
people to pay for the concerts. The seminal version of the Barlow-
Dyson thesis is Barlow's 10,000-word 1994 essay in Wired. 

It is with some trepidation that I challenge the logic of this argument. 
Barlow is a noted visionary, and he is famously derisive of people 
less insightful than himself (a group which, in his opinion, includes 
roughly everyone). He says, for example, that the ability of courts to 
deal correctly with cyberissues depends on the "depth of the 
presiding judge's clue-impairment." Well, at the risk of joining 
Barlow's long roster of the clue-impaired, here goes. 

Barlow's argument begins with a cosmic premise: "Digital 
technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where 
property law of all sorts has always found definition." This is wrong 
on two counts. 

First, all information does take physical form. Whether digital or 
analog, whether in ink or sound waves or synaptic firings or 
electrons, information always resides in patterns of matter or energy 
(which, as Einstein noted, are interchangeable manifestations of the 
physical world). 

To be sure, the significance of information is independent of its 
particular physical incarnation. So is its value. You download this 
article from Slate's servers and copy it onto your own hard disk, and 
it's still worth - well, nothing, but that's a bad example. Suppose it 
were a Madonna video: You'd get just as much enjoyment out of it 
regardless of which particular bunch of electrons embodied it. 

But this independence of meaning and value from physical 
incarnation is nothing new. It is as old as Sumerian tablets, to say 
nothing of the Gutenberg press. Indeed, the whole reason 
intellectual-property law exists is that people can acquire your 
information without acquiring the particular physical version of it that 
you created. 

Thus, Barlow's belief that "property law of all sorts" has always 
"found definition" on the "physical plane" signals a distressing 
confusion on his part. The one sense in which it's true that 
information is "detached" from the "physical plane" - the fact that 
information's value transcends its physical incarnation - not only 
fails to qualify as an original insight, and not only fails to make 
intellectual-property rights obsolete; it's the very insight that led to 
intellectual-property rights in the first place. 

Barlow announces from the mountaintop: "It's fairly paradigm 
warping to look at information through fresh eyes - to see how very 
little it is like pig iron or pork bellies." Maybe so, but it's hard to say 
for sure, since the people who really did take that fresh look have 
been dead for centuries. 

If you somehow forced Barlow to articulate his thesis without the 
wacky metaphysics, he'd probably say something like this: The cost 
of copying and distributing information is plummeting - for many 
purposes, even approaching zero. Millions of people can now do it 
right at their desks. So in principle, content can multiply like fruit 
flies. 

Why should anyone buy an article when a copy can be had for 
nothing? Answer: Because it can't. The total cost of acquiring a 
"free" copy includes more than just the copying-and-transmitting 
costs. There's 1) the cost--in time and/or money--of finding someone 
who already has a copy, and will give it to you for free or for cheap; 
2) the risk of getting caught stealing intellectual property; 3) any 
premiums you pay to others for incurring such risks (as when you 
get copies from bootleggers); and 4) informal punishments such as 
being labeled a cheat or a cheapskate. The size of this last cost will 
depend on how norms in this area evolve. 

Even in the distant future, the total cost of cheating on the system, 
thus figured, will almost never be zero. Yes, it will be way, way 
closer to zero than it used to be. But the Barlow-Dyson scenario still 
is wrong. Why? Because whether people cheat doesn't depend on 
the absolute cost of cheating. It depends on the cost of cheating 
compared with the cost of not cheating. And the cost of getting data 
legally will plummet roughly as fast as the cost of getting it illegally--
maybe faster. 

In their writings, Barlow and Dyson make clear they're aware of this 
fact. But they seem unaware of its fatal impact on their larger thesis. 
How could cybersages have such a blind spot? One theory: 
Because they're cybersages. You have to be a career paleohack 
like me, getting paid for putting ink on paper, to appreciate how 
much of the cost of legally acquiring bits of information goes into the 
ink and paper and allied anachronisms, like shipping, warehousing, 
and displaying the inky paper. 

I wrote a book that costs $14 in paperback. For each copy sold, I get 
$1. The day may well come, as Barlow and Dyson seem to believe, 
when book publishers as we know them will disappear. People will 
download books from Web sites and either print them out on new, 
cool printers or read them on superlight wireless computers. But if 
so, it will then cost you only $1--oh hell, make it $1.25--to get a copy 
of my book legally from my Web site. 

Now imagine being at my Web site, reading my promotional 
materials, and deciding you'd like to read the book. A single 
keystroke will give you the book, drain your bank account of five 
shiny quarters, and leave you feeling like an honest, upstanding 
citizen. Do you think you'll choose, instead, to call a few friends in 
hopes of scoring an illegal copy? 

And don't imagine that you can just traipse on over to the "black-
market book store" section of the Web and find a hot copy of my 
book. As in the regular world, the easier it is for Joe Consumer to 
track down an illegal distributor, the easier it is for cops to do the 
same. Black marketeers will have to charge enough to make up for 
this risk, making it hard to undersell my $1.25 by much. And there 
are other reasons, too, why the cost of cheating will be nontrivial. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, there's another reason 
for the cost of legal copies to drop. Many journalists will reach a 
much larger audience on the Web than they do now. 

The "magazine" model of bringing information to the attention of 
readers is stunningly inefficient. I hope it's not egotistical of me to 
think that when I write an article for, say, the New Republic, I am not 
reaching nearly everyone who might have an interest in it. 

Granted, the Web is not yet a picture of efficiency itself. Search 
engines, for example, are in the reptilian phase of their evolution. 
But most observers--certainly the Barlows of the world--expect 
radical improvement. (I'm not saying all journalists will see their 
audiences grow. The likely trend, when you think about it, will be for 
many obscure and semiobscure journalists to see their audiences 
grow, while the few rich and famous journalists will see their 
audiences shrink. Cool.) 

One much-discussed cybertrend is especially relevant here: the 
scenario in which various data brokers offer a "Daily Me," a batch of 
articles tailored to your tastes, cheaply gleaned from all over the 
Web. When this happens, guys like me will be living the life of 
Riley. We will wake up at noon, stumble over to the keyboard in our 
pajamas, hammer out 1,000 words, and then--without talking to a 
single bothersome editor--make our work available to all data 
brokers. 

Likely fans of my article will be shown, say, the first couple of 
paragraphs. If they want to read more, they deposit a quarter. Will 
you try to steal a copy instead? Do you steal Tootsie pops at 
checkout counters? The broker and the electronic cash service will 
pocket a dime of that. I take my 15 cents and head for the liquor 
store. 
 
Of course, this "disaggregation of content" may be ruinous for 
magazines like Slate. But consider the upside. Not only will the 
efficiency of the system permit rock-bottom pricing that discourages 
cheating, but the fluidity of content will disrupt channels of potential 
cheating. 

If you subscribe to a regular, old-fashioned online magazine, it's 
easy to split the cost of a subscription with a few friends and 
furtively make copies. (You wretched scum.) But if you subscribe to 
the "Daily Me," this arrangement makes no sense, because every 
Me is different. Sure, you may e-mail a friend the occasional article 
from your "Me." (You wretched scum.) And, in general, this sort of 
"leakage" will be higher than in pre-Web days. But it would have to 
reach massive proportions to negate the overall gains in efficiency 
that will keep people like me in business. 

This argument, like all arguments about the future, is speculative. It 
may even be wrong. But it is consistent with the history of the world. 
The last half-millennium has seen 1) data getting cheaper and 
easier to copy; and 2) data-creation occupying a larger and larger 
fraction of all economic activity. 

Thus far, in other words, as the realm of information has gotten more 
lubricated, it has become easier, not harder, to make a living by 
generating information. Cyberspace is essentially a quantum leap in 
lubrication. 

Barlow's insistence that intellectual property will soon be worthless 
is especially puzzling since he is one of the biggest troubadours of 
the Third Wave information economy. Sometimes he seems to think 
it's possible for a sector of a market economy to get bigger and 
bigger even while the connection between work and reward in that 
sector breaks down. He writes: "Humanity now seems bent on 
creating a world economy primarily based on goods that take no 
material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable 
connection between creators and a fair reward for the utility or 
pleasure others may find in their works." Far out, man. 

Copyright 1996 Slate.com





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