The Information Chase

Banksy Leake Street London, The_Magician, 2008

The Leaning Tower of Pisa. An object which would long ago have toppled to the ground, if it were not for all those counterbalanced lead weights and years of continual stabilisation work. When the Italian government requested help in saving the structure, it was seen to be more important to preserve the tilt for tourism than make it a naturally stable building as it was intended and like any other. The earth shifting beneath it put it on the cusp of collapse centuries ago. The tower is as much a symbol of man defying physics as it can be a metaphor for the copyright industries.

A decade ago Napster came to the fore and blew apart the existing convention of paying for music. Home taping had been around for twenty years at that point and photocopying even longer, but analogue copying incurs data degradation and media costs. In the digital world of the internet, all the information we can capture around us (from natural sound to music to speech, images moving and still, words and the ideas they convey) can all be encoded digitally and hence all be reproduced digitally. Nothing disappears, it is all stored perfectly - so long as the conditions that allow civilisation to get to this point are maintained. Digitising all our data doesn't mean that all our eggs are in one basket, any more than all humanity's ideas are in the one basket of people's minds - after all, people are mortal but there are enough people to outlive the common disasters. To lose everything, there would not only have to be a fire in the library, but a fire everywhere. Distributing data across the internet as a mass-backup has proven to be robust, as seen with the shutdowns of various torrent sites. When data is copied like this, the planet effectively becomes the library - whose destruction requires a long enough time scale. So here we are in a world already heading toward post-scarcity with, undoubtedly, more data than can be viewed in any current lifetime.

The record and film industries took long enough to recognise the web could be used to sell music and movies. They perhaps also suspect they will be made obsolete. But what they cannot recognise is that even the idea will become obsolete. These industries are simply the first to fall before a genuine paradigm shift. An upheaval in technology and in culture. When disasters are not directly ending civilisations, it is economic and social upheaval that do so. The archaeological artefacts of the past survived such events, but the archaeologist of the future may find a gap in history at the early digital age. This gap will not be the result of upheaval, but of attempts to prevent that shift: paywalls, digital rights management (DRM), and planned obsolescence. Content producers/distributors have (finally) embraced the net because they know distribution costs of non-physical media is minimal. However, all the actions they take to enforce scarcity are a subversion of that very same network that is widening their profit margins. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalises any attempt to circumvent DRM, but in actuality DRM circumvents the nature of the internet - portability and reproductability. After all, the net emerged from a network designed to operate during and survive nuclear war.

"Information wants to be free" as the adage goes, but also free as in beer. Money must change hands which is why methods to supress the nature of the web exist - if not, the monetary value of a digital product would collapse in reflection of its true cost. In a free market cost is tied to supply. Infinite supply, therefore, equals infinite price drops. Any product that costs nothing should rightly be sold for nothing, if a true null-cost product were to come about. In the case of music, if you except the cost of paying someone to sing, someone to play the instruments, and someone to record and master the sound production; the actual costs beyond are zero. The above are one time expenditures, whereas the cost of digitising and reproducing the resulting file till the end of the universe is virtually nil. The only reason artists get paid beyond their direct work is because record labels were drawing endless profits from radio play and record sales leading the artists to campaign for and win a proportion of the profits. This is also true for actors and other professionals in the film industry vis-a-vis the home video market. And this is why in-the-air products still cost physical money - no business, by definition, is going to become profitable by charging nothing. They have various expenditures to cover before even making a profit - staff, electricity, servers, to name a few. Until the existing economic structure collapses, no one will be the first to embrace post-scarcity. Until someone accepts post-scarcity, the existing economic order will not collapse. Who will be the first to give it all away for nothing?

The [world wide] web was free, a gift to the world from Tim Berners-Lee. His Hypertext Transfer Protocol runs on top of the global network called the internet, delivering all the websites you visit. He has never asked for payment, and he doesn't send out legal letters demanding payment. Perhaps then it is rather, Who will be the first to take it all for nothing? When a single individual can commit 'piracy' on a (historically) industrial scale with nothing more than a home PC, what is wrong: piracy or the law? Undeniably, the ball is rolling and it was set in motion by those with nothing to lose. It is being opposed by those with everything to lose, as always. The industry bodies and lobbyists are fighting to win this battle, in the same way that someone can expect to prevent daybreak through sheer force of will. They huff and they puff to protect their lifetime copyrights. Copyrights that last a lifetime are not limited. Only to immortal corporations are they limited in time, and that will never be enough. The whole point of copyright was to help people make a living, not help corporations make a killing. It was a temporary monopoly on reproduction designed to ensure the author of a product could live off their art. It is not supposed to be the gift that keeps on giving. Or is that taking?

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