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Wired 8.10
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not
an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
The Next Economy Of Ideas
Will copyright survive the Napster bomb? Nope, but creativity
will.
By John Perry Barlow
The great cultural war has broken out at last.
Long awaited by some and a nasty surprise to others, the
conflict between the industrial age and the virtual age is now
being fought in earnest, thanks to that modestly conceived but
paradigm-shattering thing called Napster.
What's happening with global, peer-to-peer networking is not
altogether different from what happened when the American
colonists realized they were poorly served by the British Crown:
The colonists were obliged to cast off that power and develop an
economy better suited to their new environment. For settlers of
cyberspace, the fuse was lit last July, when Judge Marilyn Hall
Patel tried to shut down Napster and silence the cacophonous
free market of expression, which was already teeming with more
than 20 million directly wired music lovers.
Despite an appeals-court stay immediately granted the
Napsterians, her decree transformed an evolving economy into a
cause, and turned millions of politically apathetic youngsters
into electronic Hezbollah. Neither the best efforts of Judge
Patel - nor those of the Porsche-driving executives of the
Recording Industry Association of America, nor the sleek legal
defenders of existing copyright law - will alter this simple
fact: No law can be successfully imposed on a huge population
that does not morally support it and possesses easy means for
its invisible evasion.
To put it mildly, the geriatrics of the entertainment industry
didn't see this coming. They figured the Internet was about as
much of a threat to their infotainment empire as ham radio was
to NBC. Even after that assumption was creamed, they remained as
serene as sunning crocodiles. After all, they still "owned" all
that stuff they call "content." That it might soon become
possible for anyone with a PC to effortlessly reproduce their
"property" and distribute it to all of humanity didn't trouble
them at all.
But then along came Napster. Or, more to the point, along came
the real Internet, an instantaneous network that endows any
acne-faced kid with a distributive power equal to Time Warner's.
Moreover, these were kids who don't give a flying byte about the
existing legal battlements, and a lot of them possess decryption
skills sufficient to easily crack whatever lame code the
entertainment industry might wrap around "its" goods.
Practically every traditional pundit who's commented on the
Napster case has, at some point, furrowed a telegenic brow and
asked, "Is the genie out of the bottle?" A better question would
be, "Is there a bottle?" No, there isn't.
Which is not to say the industry won't keep trying to create
one. In addition to ludicrously misguided (and probably
unconstitutional) edicts like the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, entertainment execs are placing great faith in new
cryptographic solutions. But before they waste a lot of time on
their latest algorithmic vessels, they might consider the ones
they've designed so far. These include such systems as the pay-
per-view videodisc format Divx, the Secure Digital Music
Initiative, and CSS - the DVD encryption system, which has
sparked its own legal hostilities on the Eastern front, starting
with the New York courtroom of Judge Lewis Kaplan.
Here's the present score: Divx was stillborn. SDMI will probably
never be born owing to the wrangling of its corporate parents.
And DeCSS (the DVD decryptor) is off and running, even though
the Motion Picture Association of America has prevailed in its
lawsuit aimed at stopping Web sites from posting - or even
linking to - the disc-cracking code. While that decision is
appealed, DeCSS will keep spreading: As the Electronic Frontier
Foundation was defending three e-distributors inside Kaplan's
court last summer, nose-ringed kids outside were selling T-
shirts with the program silk-screened on the back.
The last time technical copy protection was widely attempted -
remember when most software was copy-protected? - it failed in
the marketplace, and failed miserably. Earlier attempts to ban
media-reproduction technologies have also failed. Even though
entertainment execs are exceptionally slow learners, they will
eventually realize what they should have understood long ago:
The free proliferation of expression does not decrease its
commercial value. Free access increases it, and should be
encouraged rather than stymied.
The war is on, all right, but to my mind it's over. The future
will win; there will be no property in cyberspace. Behold
DotCommunism. (And dig it, ye talented, since it will enrich
you.) It's a pity that entertainment moguls are too wedged in to
the past to recognize this, because now they are requiring us to
fight a war anyway. So we'll fatten lawyers with a fortune that
could be spent fostering and distributing creativity. And we may
be forced to watch a few pointless public executions - Shawn
Fanning's cross awaits - when we could be employing such
condemned genius in the service of a greater good.
Of course, it's one thing to win a revolution, and quite another
to govern its consequences. How, in the absence of laws that
turn thoughts into things, will we be assured payment for the
work we do with our minds? Must the creatively talented start
looking for day jobs?
Nope. Most white-collar jobs already consist of mind work. The
vast majority of us live by our wits now, producing "verbs" -
that is, ideas - rather than "nouns" like automobiles or
toasters. Doctors, architects, executives, consultants,
receptionists, televangelists, and lawyers all manage to survive
economically without "owning" their cognition.
I take further comfort in the fact that the human species
managed to produce pretty decent creative work during the 5,000
years that preceded 1710, when the Statute of Anne, the world's
first modern copyright law, passed the British parliament.
Sophocles, Dante, da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo,
Shakespeare, Newton, Cervantes, Bach - all found reasons to get
out of bed in the morning without expecting to own the works
they created.
Even during the heyday of copyright, we got some pretty useful
stuff out of Benoit Mandelbrot, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc
Andreessen, and Linus Torvalds, none of whom did their world-
morphing work with royalties in mind. And then there are all
those great musicians of the last 50 years who went on making
music even after they discovered that the record companies got
to keep all the money.
Nor can I resist trotting out, one last time, the horse I rode
back in 1994, when I explored these issues in a Wired essay
called "The Economy of Ideas." (See Wired 2.03, page 84.) The
Grateful Dead, for whom I once wrote songs, learned by accident
that if we let fans tape concerts and freely reproduce those
tapes - "stealing" our intellectual "property" just like those
heinous Napsterians - the tapes would become a marketing virus
that would spawn enough Deadheads to fill any stadium in
America. Even though Deadheads had free recordings that often
were more entertaining than the band's commercial albums, fans
still went out and bought records in such quantity that most of
them went platinum.
My opponents always dismiss this example as a special case. But
it's not. Here are a couple of others closer to Hollywood. Jack
Valenti, head of the MPAA and leader of the fight against DeCSS,
fought to keep VCRs out of America for half a dozen years,
convinced they would kill the film industry. Eventually that
wall came down. What followed reversed his expectations (not
that he seems to have learned from the experience). Despite the
ubiquity of VCRs, more people go to the movies than ever, and
videocassette rentals and sales account for more than half of
Hollywood's revenues.
The RIAA is unalterably convinced that the easy availability of
freely downloadable commercial songs will bring on the
apocalypse, and yet, during the two years since MP3 music began
flooding the Net, CD sales have risen by 20 percent.
Finally, after giving up on copy protection, the software
industry expected that widespread piracy would surely occur. And
it did. Even so, the software industry is booming. Why? Because
the more a program is pirated, the more likely it is to become a
standard.
All these examples point to the same conclusion: Noncommercial
distribution of information increases the sale of commercial
information. Abundance breeds abundance.
This is precisely contrary to what happens in a physical
economy. When you're selling nouns, there is an undeniable
relationship between scarcity and value. But in an economy of
verbs, the inverse applies. There is a relationship between
familiarity and value. For ideas, fame is fortune. And nothing
makes you famous faster than an audience willing to distribute
your work for free.
All the same, there remains a general and passionate belief
that, in the absence of copyright law, artists and other
creative people will no longer be compensated. I'm forever
accused of being an antimaterialistic hippie who thinks we
should all create for the Greater Good of Mankind and lead lives
of ascetic service. If only I were so noble. While I do believe
that most genuine artists are motivated primarily by the joys of
creation, I also believe we will be more productive if we don't
have to work a second job to support our art habit. Think of how
many more poems Wallace Stevens could have written if he hadn't
been obliged to run an insurance company to support his "hobby."
Following the death of copyright, I believe our interests will
be assured by the following practical values: relationship,
convenience, interactivity, service, and ethics.
Before I explain further, let me state a creed: Art is a
service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a
relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to
"content" is like praying in swear words. End of sermon. Back to
business.
The economic model that supported most of the ancient masters
was patronage, whether endowed by a wealthy individual, a
religious institution, a university, a corporation, or - through
the instrument of governmental support - by society as a whole.
Patronage is both a relationship and a service. It is a
relationship that supported genius during the Renaissance and
supports it today. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli all
shared the support of both the Medicis and, through Pope Leo X,
the Catholic church. Bach had a series of patrons, most notably
the Duke of Weimar. I could go on, but I can already hear you
saying, "Surely this fool doesn't expect the return of
patronage."
In fact, patronage never went away. It just changed its
appearance. Marc Andreessen was a beneficiary of the "patronage"
of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications when he
created Mosaic; CERN was a patron to Tim Berners-Lee when he
created the World Wide Web. Darpa was Vint Cerf's benefactor;
IBM was Benoit Mandelbrot's.
"Aha!" you say, "but IBM is a corporation. It profited from the
intellectual property Mandelbrot created." Maybe, but so did the
rest of us. While IBM would patent air and water if it could, I
don't believe it ever attempted to patent fractal geometry.
Relationship, along with service, is at the heart of what
supports all sorts of other modern, though more anonymous,
"knowledge workers." Doctors are economically protected by a
relationship with their patients, architects with their clients,
executives with their stockholders. In general, if you
substitute "relationship" for "property," you begin to
understand why a digitized information economy can work fine in
the absence of enforceable property law. Cyberspace is unreal
estate. Relationships are its geology.
Convenience is another important factor in the future
compensation of creation. The reason video didn't kill the movie
star is that it's simply more convenient to rent a video than to
copy one. Software is easy to copy, of course, but software
piracy hasn't impoverished Bill Gates. Why? Because in the long
run it's more convenient to enter into a relationship with
Microsoft if you hope to use its products in an ongoing way.
It's certainly easier to get technical support if you have a
real serial number when you call. And that serial number is not
a thing. It's a contract. It is the symbol of a relationship.
Think of how the emerging digital conveniences will empower
musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and writers when you can
click on an icon, upload a cyber-dime into their accounts, and
download their latest songs, images, films, or chapters - all
without the barbaric inconvenience currently imposed by the
entertainment industry.
Interactivity is also central to the future of creation.
Performance is a form of interaction. The reason Deadheads went
to concerts instead of just listening to free tapes was that
they wanted to interact with the band in meatspace. The more
people knew what the concerts sounded like, the more they wanted
to be there.
I enjoy a similar benefit in my current incarnation. I'm paid
reasonably well to write, despite the fact that I put most of my
work on the Net before it can be published. But I'm paid a lot
more to speak, and still more to consult, since my real value
lies in something that can't be stolen from me - my point of
view. A unique and passionate viewpoint is more valuable in a
conversation than the one-way broadcast of words. And the more
my words self-replicate on the Net, the more I can charge for
symmetrical interaction.
Finally, there is the role of ethics. (I can hear you snickering
already.) But hey, people actually do feel inclined to reward
creative value if it's not too inconvenient to do so. As
Courtney Love said recently, in a brilliant blast at the music
industry: "I'm a waiter. I live on tips." She's right. People
want to pay her because they like her work. Indeed, actual
waitpeople get by even though the people they serve are under no
legal obligation to tip them. Customers tip because it's the
right thing to do.
I believe that, in the practical absence of law, ethics are
going to make a major comeback on the Net. In an environment of
dense connection, where much of what we do and say is recorded,
preserved, and easily discovered, ethical behavior becomes less
a matter of self-imposed virtue and more a matter of horizontal
social pressure.
Besides, the more connected we become, the more obvious it is
that we're all in this together. If I don't pay for the light of
your creation, it goes out and the place gets dimmer. If no one
pays, we're all in the dark. On the Net, what goes around comes
around. What has been an ideal becomes a sensible business
practice.
Think of the Net as an ecosystem. It is a great rain forest of
life-forms called ideas, which, like organisms - those patterns
of self-reproducing, evolving, adaptive information that express
themselves in skeins of carbon - require other organisms to
exist. Imagine the challenge of trying to write a song if you'd
never heard one.
As in biology, what has lived before becomes the compost for
what will live next. Moreover, when you buy - or, for that
matter, "steal" - an idea that first took form in my head, it
remains where it grew and you in no way lessen its value by
sharing it. On the contrary, my idea becomes more valuable,
since in the informational space between your interpretation of
it and mine, new species can grow. The more such spaces exist,
the more fertile is the larger ecology of mind.
I can also imagine the great electronic nervous system producing
entirely new models of creative worth where value resides not in
the artifact, which is static and dead, but in the real art -
the living process that brought it to life. I would have given a
lot to be present as, say, the Beatles grew their songs. I'd
have given even more to have participated. Part of the reason
Deadheads were so obsessed with live concerts was that they did
participate in some weird, mysterious way. They were allowed the
intimacy of seeing the larval beginnings of a song flop out
onstage, wet and ugly, and they could help nurture its growth.
In the future, instead of bottles of dead "content," I imagine
electronically defined venues, where minds residing in bodies
scattered all over the planet are admitted, either by
subscription or a ticket at a time, into the real-time presence
of the creative act.
I imagine actual storytelling making a comeback. Storytelling,
unlike the one-way, asymmetrical thing that goes by that name in
Hollywood, is highly participatory. Instead of "the viewer"
sitting there, mouth slack with one hand on a Bud while the TV
blows poisonous electronics at him, I imagine people actually
engaged in the process, and quite willing to pay for it.
This doesn't require much imagination, since it's what a good
public speaker encourages now. The best of them don't talk at
the audience, but with them, creating a sanctuary of permission
where something is actually happening. Right now this has to
happen in meatspace, but the immense popularity of chat rooms
among the young natives of cyberspace presages richer electronic
zones where all the senses are engaged. People will pay to be in
those places - and people who are good at making them exciting
will be paid a lot for their conversational skills.
I imagine new forms of cinema growing in these places, where
people throw new stuff into the video stew. The ones who are
good enough will be paid by the rest of us to shoot, produce,
organize, and edit.
People will also pay to get a first crack at the fresh stuff, as
Stephen King is proving by serializing novels on the Web.
Charles Dickens proved the same thing long ago with his economic
harnessing of serialization. Though Dickens was irritated that
the Americans ignored his British copyright, he adapted and
devised a way to get paid anyway, by doing public readings of
his works in the US. The artists and writers of the future will
adapt to practical possibility. Many have already done so. They
are, after all, creative people.
It's captivating to think about how much more freedom there will
be for the truly creative when the truly cynical have been dealt
out of the game. Once we have all given up regarding our ideas
as a form of property, the entertainment industry will no longer
have anything to steal from us. Meet the new boss: no boss.
We can enter into a convenient and interactive relationship with
audiences, who, being human, will be far more ethically inclined
to pay us than the moguls ever were. What could be a stronger
incentive to create than that?
We've won the revolution. It's all over but the litigation.
While that drags on, it's time to start building the new
economic models that will replace what came before. We don't
know exactly what they'll look like, but we do know that we have
a profound responsibility to be better ancestors: What we do now
will likely determine the productivity and freedom of 20
generations of artists yet unborn. So it's time to stop
speculating about when the new economy of ideas will arrive.
It's here. Now comes the hard part, which also happens to be the
fun part: making it work.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.10/download.html
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