Staticfree Blog

In my continuing email discussion with Neil Gaiman concerning the above collection, I put together what turned into a rather long delude of my beliefs when it comes to information and intellectual property. I'm still thinking a bunch of it over, so this is just my opinions at present (isn't that always the case?).

Anyhow on to the rant:

Well, although my implementation seems a bit misguided, the idea is this: information wants to be free. Not necessarily free as in no money, but free as in accessible. This is the nature of information on computers today: if possible, the information will move towards being unrestrained, unencrypted, and often duplicated. You see this all over: if there's a copy protection scheme that can be bypassed, someone will try and bypass it. This happened with DVDs, adobe's e-book format -- once it's been bypassed, there's no putting it back.

Now, books intrinsically prevent this type of behavior. Not that it's impossible, but it's (usually) impractical. Their physical nature prevents it.

Now the key here is why information wants to be free. It's not that people are out to steal intellectual property when "liberating" information, it's that the benefits of having information that is free are amazing. Blind people can have books read to them without having to hire someone to read for them. Someone could copy a book to a PDA and read the book wherever they are. People can play DVDs on computers that don't run commercial operating systems. People can listen to music in ways they never could before.

These are just a few examples that have been used in a great deal of arguments concerning intellectual property rights, and more specifically the (evil) DMCA. Personally, I think that the DMCA, SSSCA, and other such legislation is misguided (and horribly designed/implemented). This legislation and potential legislation assumes that people want information to be free so they can steal it. Most often, this is not the case.

Personally, I wanted the books I put up to be free (note again: free unbound-free, not beer-free) just for reasons I cited. I have had my computer read excerpts from books to me when I got tired of reading my screen, I have copies of books that I own in print on my PDA so that I can read them wherever I am. This is why I have them. I had them online so that others could do the same or use them in other such ways. Now, the problem here is: certainly not everyone who would download them from my site has paid the royalties to the authors that they deserve. And as you've noted, I do not have the legal right to do such.

Why do I want information to be free? Well for one, I run a free operating system, with free software and software I've written or enhanced. The only way to prevent information from wanting to be free on a computer is to lock it up, from screen to keyboard. The entire computer has to have information "security" built into it to in order to entirely prevent the information from being free (think of it as a ship that will sink if it gets a single hole in it). This is not the kind of computer I want to use. I hope that it is not the kind of computer anyone else wants to use, but apparently there are politicians and their corporate supporters that would love to see it common place.

Intermediately, if you cannot lock up the entire computer, you have to lock up a piece of software that the information can live in securely. Again, this is not something you'd ever see an open source advocate considering a viable option for a commonly-deployed system. Locked software means true security or security through obscurity (ala DVD). Sadly, the latter is easier and is the way that most "copy protection" ends up getting done. This means that corporations have the legal right to protect you from "abusing" the intellectual property you have purchased right to. (as trying to circumvent "security" is a violation of the DMCA).