This truth is often hidden by some given abstraction.
(file, save, download, streaming, etc.)
Businesses have been built on such abstractions. Success stories.
On the flipside, existing businesses that were built before the internet who do not know the truth have been fed these abstractions. These businesses may stand nothing to gain from participating in the copy machine. Whomever is feeding these businesses with abstractions that hide the truth are not helping these businesses. They are helping themselves and watching these businesses being destroyed by a copy machine.
A nice essay generalizing about what people might be willing to pay for, in a world where the marginal cost of production of products that people used to pay for has dropped to zero.
One category that he missed is embedding digitized products like software into dedicated hardware. It's a form of DRM that is harder to crack (I think).
Here's some examples from the audio world, that are variations of this idea.
The main audio software platforms, known as Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) have all evolved to a point where they have to support open plugin formats. Plugins are implementations of digital signal processing software, that are used in combination within the DAW to produce the end result, which is a complete, finished sound file,
Because audio production and engineering is hard (basically, things tend to not sound good) there is constant development, and fierce competition, in this niche market.
Various forms of DRM, or licensing systems, are almost universally used. This provides enough friction, meaning you can get cracked versions of most plugins, but it comes at a cost of inconvenience, malware, or compromised stability, that a modest number of small companies have built business in the market.
But the competition is fierce, and the trend in license prices has been steadily down. The cracks do hurt the sales.
One company that has thrived in this market is Universal Audio. They put heavy development into making premium, we'll respected plugins, but they only run on their proprietary DSP systems. For a while, this could be seen as a genuine advantage, as users commonly ran up against the limitations of their CPUs.
This is no longer the case, but the company has steadfastly stuck to their proprietary system. One technique they used was to embed their DSP in dedicated sound interfaces.
The sound interface market is also hotly contested, and companies are constantly fighting against commoditization. So they developed high quality sound interfaces, which is something all audio producers have to have, and use their catalog of exclusive software plugins as a "value added differentiator."
CEDAR is the pre-eminent developer of specialized software dedicated to challenging issues of noise reduction. For a long time, they limited the use of their algorithms to their own DSP hardware. If you wanted these industry best algorithms, you had to buy their, relatively, expensive systems. While they now do offer some of their software as plugins, they continue to use dedicated hardware as part of their product strategy.
One interesting possibility is the embedding of otherwise unremarkable software into dedicated hardware, because of the user interface advantages. By giving the user access to physical controls, that do nothing but mimic their virtual cousins, the goal would be to dramatically increase the usability of the software. There has been some movement in this direction, which is actually a kind of throwback to how the first generations of audio DSP devices, back when dedicated hardware was the only way to implement such processing.
You can see this tension around user interface play out in the realm of audio mixers for life performance. They use dedicated interfaces to run the real time DSP, but combine various virtualization strategies. Some of the biggest audio plugin companies, like Waves, have released versions of their popular software plugins to run on some of the modern live mixing hardware systems, thereby generating new revenue streams from existing products.
At this point, while it is entirely possible to run an entire mix of a live show on a PC with a mouse and keyboard, it is such a sub-optimal user experience, that I have never witnessed anyone do this. (Though I'm sure some foolish, Braveheart do, and budget challenged audio engineers have done it!)
"Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave."
Not really true at all. So many times I've found a dead link, archive.org doesn't have a copy, it's gone. Entire domains loaded with content have disappeared. In general, people don't copy and save other people's material, except temporarily for viewing.
Unexpectedly, we have managed to squash the initial carefree copying of the internet with just a few ridiculous court cases. Even the pirate bay founders are starting to feel tired of maintaining it.
You know as soon as something becomes a society tool, the fun is over. Internet was cute when it was a curiosity. Now that we rely on it, security, profits .. you get it.
We should have two layers. Seriousnet and Freenternet.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but to layman's cryptoanalyst like me, TPB and torrents in general seem like the easiest things to move entirely into blockchain-like network. Just embed it into torrent clients, done, right? Torrents are far more real, stable and necessary than some ethereal entities.
Btw, afaik, entire tpb/kat archive is around few gigabytes.
I'm not a blockchain expert, but I don't think it would help in this case. Blockchains are for creating a valid, secure public ledger of transactions. I don't think you want to keep an accurate public log of everything you torrent ;)
You probably want something more like Tor. However Tor's design makes it no good for large transactions thanks to all the obfuscating hops.
There's always a price to pay when attempting to secure something... the trick is making design decisions such that the price is negligible. (Think HTTPS)
I think what he's more talking about is something more akin to a distributed search system than a blockchain - you could make the magnet links last forever in a blockchain, but that doesn't really make sense if no one holds the files anymore you're just keeping useless links around and storing them on every single node for no reason.
A search DHT makes much more sense, look up keywords based on hash. Think the Kademlia network from the ED2K days. Maybe I'm being too academic by even suggesting a DHT be used, you could do it in simpler ways like flood search in the style of Gnutella - any distributed search means would work really.
I believe there are a few attempts at this in the bittorrent world, like Tribler, which is probably the most practical implementation to date, there's a few others too, none of which look particularly mature yet:
The problem with distributed search is that perfecting it is hard - bittorrent has won out because websites could be used to prevent spamming of malware, track reputation and discussion of torrents and individuals, etc. Tribler has some proposed alternatives here and I seem to remember Kad having done a decent job preventing this from becoming a significant problem, but it never had the popularity.
If someone manages to knock out all the big torrent and usenet indexes overnight, these systems will become a lot more necessary and probably get a lot more popular.
Your crypto tools are as strong as the legal freedom to use them. The time is not that far when cryptography tools were considered like military ammunition and required licenses to export and handle.
Even as legal as they are today, crypto tools are really not widespread. Release the Tobacco & Firearms (and their respective equivalent in different countries) and their userbase will shrink into oblivion.
Ultimately we have to live somewhere in the physical world, and facing large fines or imprisonment is unattractive. The real surprise to me is that hard-line intellectual property protection has remained the political status-quo throughout the world. You'd think there'd be at least one or two countries willing to try alternatives, and give sites like Pirate Bay a place to operate in peace.
Edit: Legalize Marijuana, vote the likes of Trump into power, leave the EU, threaten to nuke the US, fine, but some things, like intellectual property, are sacred.
One reason is that journalists influence public opinion and thus their opinion carries weight with the average politician. Journalists often pretty strongly support copyright because they need it in order to earn a salary.
Legalizing Marijuana is more important than copyright? I disagree. Copyright is about how we handle our cultural heritage and how we compensate those who produce those artifacts. To me that is a way more important topic than the war on drugs.
Journalists and newspapers as we know them today are deathly afraid of becoming obsolete, which they in many ways already are. What they're doing now with ads and paywalls is just delaying their extinction for a bit. I doubt you will find many journalists in favor of copyright law vitiation. Or writers in general, musicians, etc.
Thank you so much for posting this! I saw this when it was originally posted back in 2008 and think of it often but could never craft the google-fu needed to unearth it again!
Thus whoever can seize control of things that can be copied and stop the copying can sell them at any price as long as people need it...an internet monopoly.
This guy gets it. This is one of the reasons that the best way to sell product online is to create a cheap front-end product that delivers insane amounts of value to the Customer and then make profits with the back-end sales over and over, i.e. Repeat customers (because now you have their trust and good will).
I agree with Kelly that the Internet is the modern outgrowth of the publishing and media industry, though I find his focus and conclusions beyond that point lacking.
For starters, the Internet itself is far more about distribution than duplicating. It's effect is to achieve distribution of information. Computers alone are sufficient to achieve copying, but it was the distribution component which computers alone, or even low-speed or fixed-location Internet failed to achieve. And though the Internet's distribution involves copying of bits, that's not the critical function.
Information theory itself concerns the origination, distribution, receipt, comprehension (or decoding), and possibly redistribution of messages. Those are instantiated through such systems as webservers (or application engines), the Internet, protocols, and ultimately some human or nonhuman interpretation engine.
Kelly is also correct in that the Internet removes costs and frictions. Or alternatively, it shifts the cost points of media, and generally reduces the costs of originating and duplicating information, without increasing individual capacity to comprehend or filter it. This gets to the core of what's been called the attention economy, forseen in the 1970s and earlier by Herbert Simon and Alvin Toffler.
I've been looking at quantifications of information absorption capacity of people and suspect that that's generally quite low -- a few tens, possibly hundreds, of messages per day, but not much above that. The consequence of filter overload is a real problem. And the attention we can give any one message is directly inversely proportional to the number of messages received, divided by our time to dedicate to such messages.
Reducing costs gives rise to the Jevons paradox: It's not that the high-barrier-to-entry messages of the high-cost era suddenly become more available, but that a new flood of low-barrier, low-value (or negative-value) messages appear. Spam. Viruses. Junk mail. Phone solicitations. Web advertising. Clickbait.
There's also Woozle's Law of Epistemic Systems: as the audience using any given communications medium increases in number (and especially: in significance), the value of manipulating that audience will increase.
In market economics, low marginal costs become a problem as marginal cost is the mechanism by which markets set prices. For goods with high fixed and low marginal costs, market prices are simply insufficient to reward producers (or creators). This is the subject of recent books by Paul Mason (Postcapitalism) and Jeremy Rifkin (The Zero Marginal Cost Society).
Gresham's Law is another challenge, multiple ways. The popular form is "Bad X drives out good", though the general mechanism is more nuanced: Greshams mechanisms are complexity constraints applied where a "better" (more complex) good is valued identically to a "worse" one, for whatever reasons, within a given domain. The general result is that the worse goods predominate. The capacity to distinguish better from worse itself affects this, which is why a larger market tends to incentivise worse goods. And, if there is an alternative market in which the better goods are more highly rewarded, you'll see a flight of those goods to those markets. This is often exhibited as brain-drain: flight from low-paid professions such as teaching, government work, politics, or academia, to business, trades, or finance, for example.
It can also be exhibited as international flows of capital, coin, or talent.
And this plays out in information markets, where the lack of sufficient reward will see authors and creators either depart for realms in which they are appropriately rewarded, or to other fields. Political and ethnic persecution can have similar effects -- the flight of European Jews to the US in the 1930s and 1940s, or the flight of American blacks to Europe from the 1930s through the 1970s and even beyond, as examples.
Sorting out the implications of changing relative costs and rewards is key, and that's what Kelly, and a great many others, fail to do.
tl;dr: Reasons why people will still pay for digital content even though it can be reproduced at no cost: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability. Advertising is notably absent from the list. Quoting:
> Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution, almost the ONLY solution, to the paradox of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I’ve seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising. I think ads are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long-run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free. But that’s another story.
Since this is (2008), does anyone know if that blog covered that "other story" at some point? I'm currently digging through a Google search for
I am a bit confused by the website (blog?), as the sidebar links to unrelated strange stuff (graphic novel, pictures of asia). But the site should make sense as a two letter .org url is quite prestigious.
That may be true, but the further the reference gets from the original context, the more likely it becomes an appeal to authority that ends up misleading people instead of enlightening them.
Here are some important examples of quite powerful entities that do not accept the logic that you can't erase something once it's flowed on the internet: the RIAA, MPAA, DEA, various (most?) middle eastern countries, Great Britain (through the influence of the GCHQ), Mastodon servers located in Germany (see their ToS regarding holocaust denial), whitehouse.gov and various other sites that erase public statements after their criticism goes viral, various entities trying to shut down sci-hub (who will probably eventually succeed), and Barbara Streisand.
Taken together, these entities can make it practically impossible for non-technical people to access data that has a $0 marginal cost. So it's misleading to flippantly refer to the New Yorker cartoon's implication of general equalizing power of the internet as part of a fundamental critique of business models built around publishing data that has $0 marginal cost.
In that context, the comment by m-j-fox-- while maybe low effort-- serves an important function of undercutting the low effort premise upon which the article under discussion depends. Thus I give this higher effort defense of said comment.
>I mean, for a movie, just wait a few months and you can download it.
You must be new to earth.
>If you don't want to wait, you still have to wait for the next movie to come out, so it makes no difference really.
No, it really does make a difference. Waiting for something that isn't yet available is acceptable (and in any case, inevitable). Waiting for something that it's out already is not acceptable to most people.
The whole entertainment industry can go away over the next month, it wouldn't matter much. But most would prefer it didn't. There's also more than enough movies/tv shows/sports recordings/music etc for anyone's lifetime, but most would prefer to see newer ones. Enough people can afford their preference to have new ones produced every day.
The Roman policy of "bread and circus" helped prevent rioting in the streets. I would much rather our resources go to entertainment than to more police and prisons.
So, I am happy to put entertainment in the category of need.
You seem to have gotten the lesson of bread and circuses backwards. It's not meant to be understood as a good thing.
It was meant maintain a docile public that's easily manipulated, taken advantage of and ordered around, as long as it was given enough food to eat and BS arena shows to distract it.
Rioting against scum like Nero (and modern equivalents) would have been the good and democratic option.
IIRC, Nero's own guard took his sorry ass out and replaced him with Claudius, the only remaining male relative (or something like that) of Nero because he drooled on himself and appeared to be completely incompetent. He promptly stopped drooling on himself and turned out to be a fine leader.
Your view seems to be pretty shallow on why Nero was alive for so long while being a monster. One doesn't simply kill Nero and continue to rule TRE. Easy manipulation of "docile" public is an inseparable part of democracy, actually. Most people have little to no political education, not to mention the understanding of methods and processes. Most of us simply believe, because politics is boring, bread and circuses is fun. And today almost everyone can get fun without going into boring details.
>Your view seems to be pretty shallow on why Nero was alive for so long while being a monster. One doesn't simply kill Nero and continue to rule TRE.
It wasn't about "one simply killing Nero", it was about the people revolting and restoring the republic, which Rome once was.
>Easy manipulation of "docile" public is an inseparable part of democracy, actually. Most people have little to no political education, not to mention the understanding of methods and processes.
They don't need to. Democracy, as defined by the ancient Athenians, is not about "political education" or understanding of fancy "methods and processes".
It's also not about what's "best" (always defined by some narrow "experts" or partial interests). It's about representing the will and interests of the majority, good or bad.
Distracting the people with with "pan and circuses" is not part of the democracy (and of course at this point Rome wasn't a democracy, not even a republic).
>Easy manipulation of "docile" public is an inseparable part of democracy, actually. Most people have little to no political education, not to mention the understanding of methods and processes.
But surely this is not a universal truth and can changed with time and effort?
Nobody needs a movie. In most of the cases nobody really needs anything that they can wait for (except organ donors, etc.). It's just that whether people prefer to pay for certain pleasures or not. And getting to see a movie I want to see home before theatrical releases are done and finished is sth. I can pay (not all movies I want to see play in my city). People pay hundreds of dollars for things not even made yet on Kickstarter and the like, just to be early adopters.
This truth is often hidden by some given abstraction.
(file, save, download, streaming, etc.)
Businesses have been built on such abstractions. Success stories.
On the flipside, existing businesses that were built before the internet who do not know the truth have been fed these abstractions. These businesses may stand nothing to gain from participating in the copy machine. Whomever is feeding these businesses with abstractions that hide the truth are not helping these businesses. They are helping themselves and watching these businesses being destroyed by a copy machine.