TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction by John Perry Barlow
2 Microsoft Research DRM talk
3 The DRM Sausage Factory
4 Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and
Wal-Mart, and why it’s doomed us, and how we might survive anyway
5 Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars?
6 You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen
7 How Do You Protect Artists?
8 It’s the Information Economy, Stupid
9 Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever
10 What’s the Most Important Right Creators Have?
11 Giving it Away
12 Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on
the Internet
13 How Copyright Broke
14 In Praise of Fanfic
15 Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-Men of the Meta-Utopia
16 Amish for QWERTY
17 Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
18 Free(konomic) E-books
19 The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights
20 When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with
Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil
21 Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy — minus the editors
22 Warhol is Turning in His Grave
23 The Future of Ignoring Things
24 Facebook’s Faceplant
25 The Future of Internet Immune Systems
26 All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites
27 READ CAREFULLY
28 World of Democracycraft
29 Snitchtown
Introduction by John Perry Barlow
San Francisco - Seattle - Vancouver - San Francisco
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
“Content,” huh? Ha! Where’s the container?
Perhaps these words appear to you on the pages of a book, a physical object that might be said to have “contained” the thoughts of my friend and co-conspirator Cory Doctorow as they were transported in boxes and trucks all the way from his marvelous mind into yours. If that is so, I will concede that you might be encountering “content”. (Actually, if that’s the case, I’m delighted on Cory’s behalf, since that means that you have also paid him for these thoughts. We still know how to pay creators directly for the works they embed in stuff.)
But the chances are excellent that you’re reading these liquid words as bit-states of light on a computer screen, having taken advantage of his willingness to let you have them in that form for free. In such an instance, what “contains” them?
Your hard disk? His? The Internet and all the servers and routers in whose caches the ghosts of their passage might still remain? Your mind? Cory’s?
To me, it doesn’t matter. Even if you’re reading this from a book, I’m still not
convinced that what you have in your hands is its container, or that, even if we agreed on that point, that a little ink in the shape of, say, the visual pattern you’re trained to interpret as meaning “a little ink” in whatever font the publisher chooses, is not, as Magritte would remind us, the same thing as a little ink, even though it is.
Meaning is the issue. If you couldn’t read English, this whole book would obviously contain nothing as far as you were concerned. Given that Cory is really cool and interesting, you might be motivated to learn English so that you could read this book, but even then it wouldn’t be a container so much as a conduit.
The real “container” would be process of thought that began when I compressed
my notion of what is meant by the word “ink” - which, when it comes to the
substances that can be used to make marks on paper, is rather more variable than you might think - and would kind of end when you decompressed it in your own mind as whatever you think it is.
I know this is getting a bit discursive, but I do have a point. Let me just make it so we can move on.
I believe, as I’ve stated before, that information is simultaneously a relationship, an action, and an area of shared mind. What it isn’t is a noun.
Information is not a thing. It isn’t an object. It isn’t something that, when you
sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your possession. It doesn’t have a
market value that can be objectively determined. It is not, for example, much like a 2004 Ducati ST4S motorcycle, for which I’m presently in the market, and which seems - despite variabilities based on, I must admit, informationally- based conditions like mileage and whether it’s been dropped - to have a value that is pretty consistent among the specimens I can find for a sale on the Web.
Such economic clarity could not be established for anything “in” this book,
which you either obtained for free or for whatever price the publisher eventually puts on it. If it’s a book you’re reading from, then presumably Cory will get paid some percentage of whatever you, or the person who gave it to you, paid for it.
But I won’t. I’m not getting paid to write this forward, neither in royalties nor
upfront. I am, however, getting some intangible value, as one generally does
whenever he does a favor for a friend. For me, the value being retrieved from
going to the trouble of writing these words is not so different from the value you retrieve from reading them. We are both mining a deeply intangible “good,”
which lies in interacting with The Mind of Cory Doctorow. I mention this because it demonstrates the immeasurable role of relationship as the driving force in an information economy.
But neither am I creating content at the moment nor are you “consuming” it
(since, unlike a hamburger, these words will remain after you’re done with them, and, also unlike a hamburger you won’t subsequently, wellΕ never mind.) Unlike real content, like the stuff in a shipping container, these words have neither grams nor liters by which one might measure their value. Unlike gasoline, ten bucks worth of this stuff will get some people a lot further than others, depending on their interest and my eloquence, neither of which can be quantified.........
ACCESS THE COMPLETE EBOOK, RIGHT AWAY
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