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Thursday, July 31 2008: Information Wants To Be Free

Category: General

Posted by: beowulf

I've always taken the aphorism to mean two things. First, it is a dictum or moral statement that I should be free to use information (including data, source code, and digital content) and modify or adapt it to my use after I have procured it (free as in speech, not beer). Second, it is a statement of fact that because of the evolution in digital technology it is becoming increasingly cheaper and easier to distribute information, therefore, even premium content will eventually get redistributed in a free format (the RIAA's continued inability to quash file-sharing backs me up on this one).

What follows is an excerpt from Vin Crosbie's article Information Wants to Be Free (or Does It?) where he takes a look at the quip with an eye toward economics.

"The Real Problem

Progress of new information technologies (such as the Internet) has dropped the true price of information online into an abyss, one today's transactional infrastructures can't yet handle. The gravity of that situation has temporarily pulled the price down to zero. Sound straight out of an economics textbook? Here are two real life examples.

Time magazine can charge $3.95 per print copy, but it won't find users willing to pay that much per month for access to its Web edition. Time's online users might be quite willing to pay $0.25 per month. Likewise, users of The End of Free -- the incongruously free content Web log about the end of free content online -- might not be willing to pay $5 per month for access, but they may be willing to pay $0.10. The problem for Time and The End of Free are the service fees that MasterCard, Visa, American Express, and even PayPal charge to process $0.25 or $0.10 transactions. The fees are larger than the transactions themselves. As current infrastructures can't process the prices online users might be willing to pay, the sites can't charge anything at all. They're free access.

The price of online information hasn't actually hit zero, but it has fallen to a level where it can't be easily transacted. Hey, who said the path of technological progress is always smooth?

If you're a content provider or publisher stymied by the inability to sell at new, lower prices users are willing to pay for information, what do you do?

You withdraw from online or find ways to make your content intrinsically more valuable (more about the latter in my next column).

If Brand's Dictum is a bitter pill for publishers and content providers to swallow, they can take comfort that they aren't in the computer chip business. A transistor costs one millionth of what it once did. If Brand's Dictum were as severe as Moore's Law, today's edition of The New York Times would contain 100 million pages and cost a quarter-millionth of a penny (assuming its publisher didn't long ago go bankrupt)."

Comments

Steve wrote:

How do you square the principle of free-use-of-information with your expectation of getting paid to produce, at day's end, information? If you don't get your hands dirty at work, your output can probably all be saved on a hard drive.

Is a software company wrong to expect to be paid for their product?

Thursday, July 31 2008 16:00:07

beowulf wrote:

>How do you square the principle of
>free-use-of-information with your
>expectation of getting paid to produce,
>at day's end, information?

I may be blind to it, but I don't see any contradiction between my take on free information and my profession. As far as I can tell, Initech is paying me for my expertise (such as it is) at producing desired results - not for the information I author. In fact, I've probably only had 2 people ask to review my source code in the 11 years I've worked there and they weren't managers but fellow drones.

I also make a concerted effort to make my source code free both within the company (though due to the feudal, segmented structure of the company hardly anyone is interested in using someone else's code) and sometimes on the flog (sanitized to remove company specific elements). Maybe I missed your point, but I don't see a conflict.

>Is a software company wrong to expect
>to be paid for their product?
Not at all. But I do think they are foolish if they don't formulate a business model that can exist in a world of $50 DVD burners, freeware CD rippers, and affordable internet access with 3Mb or better upload speeds because piracy is a fact. Content that is walled up behind a fee for access this week will be free to download on a filesharing site next week, if enough people want it.

Thursday, July 31 2008 22:12:29

Steve wrote:

If the only consumer of your work is your employer, then you have the luxury of controlling the transaction.

At a software company, I get paid with money charged to customers. If the company had no right to protect its product, it's hard to see how the business could operate. Piracy is a fact, and the ugly necessity of a successful business model is code obfuscation and robust license checking.

The pharmaceutical companies are in the same boat. The result of vast R&D expenses is a pill that can be decoded into pure, easily copied information with a mass spectrometer. Unable to obfuscate molecules, they rely on messy patent law.

>I should be free to use information...
>and modify or adapt it to my use
>after I have procured it...
What if the vendor of the information you want doesn't want to give you unlimited rights? They might not mind if you modify it, but they'll balk if the only way to do that is to hand over the keys to the kingdom.

In an business like music it's impossible to deliver the product without letting the cat out of the bag. Then the best option is to find a place to collect a toll and ignore the petty thieves.

Friday, August 01 2008 11:02:15

beowulf wrote:

>>I should be free to use information...
>>and modify or adapt it to my use
>>after I have procured it...
>What if the vendor of the information
>you want doesn't want to give you
>unlimited rights? They might not mind
>if you modify it, but they'll balk if
>the only way to do that is to hand
>over the keys to the kingdom.

I guess what it boils down to is that I think trying to make money off of information is a "bad idea"and that companies should be service oriented - selling their expertise at generating, manipulating, or organizing information.
I find that statement to be less than satisfying, however. I'll need to mull it over and get back to you.

>In an business like music it's
>impossible to deliver the product
>without letting the cat out of the bag.

Well, there is evidence out there to suggest that music piracy isn't hurting RIAA profits at all. Putting that aside, however, the record companies' run at being able to make money by selling information was due largely to the economic barriers to average citizens producing or reproducing that information on their own. Prior to the 1930s musicians made money by performing their music in venues, not by recording it once in a studio and then re-selling that one performance millions of times. The music industry needs to get over itself and realize they aren't the only ones that can produce 1s and 0s that encode music anymore, and musicians need to realize that they will need to perform to be paid.

Friday, August 01 2008 12:02:41

beowulf wrote:

I had time to think this over and you raise a good point. If some company wants to sell their information with conditions attached (obfuscated, DRMed, licensed for a short term, etc.) and I want the information badly enough to agree to their conditions, then that is the company's prerogative. I prefer free information, but I don't think it is necessarily immoral for company's to try to sell locked down information.

Tuesday, August 05 2008 22:42:06

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Thursday, July 31 2008: Information Wants To Be Free

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