Dead Head
Back when I was a
journalist--before I became a provider of digital content--I thought life would
always be simple: I would write articles, and people would pay to read them.
But then I heard about the impending death of intellectual property, a scenario
painted by cyberfuturists John Perry Barlow and Esther Dyson. As all media move
online, they say, content will be so freely available that getting paid to
produce it will be hard, if not impossible. At first, I dismissed this as
garden-variety, breathless overextrapolation from digerati social theorists.
But even as I scoffed, the Barlow-Dyson scenario climbed steadily toward the
rank of conventional wisdom.
Barlow and Dyson do have a
solution. In the future people like me, having cultivated a following by
providing free content on the Web, will charge our devotees for services that
are hard to replicate en masse. We will answer individual questions online,
say, or go around giving speeches, or spew out insights at private seminars, or
(this one is actually my idea) have sex with young readers. The key, writes
Barlow, will be not content but "performance." Barlow, a former lyricist for
the Grateful Dead, offers this analogy: The Dead let people tape concerts, and
the tapes then led more people to pay for the concerts.
The
seminal version of the Barlow-Dyson thesis is Barlow's 10,000-word 1994 essay
in Wired . It is with some trepidation that I challenge the logic of this
argument. Barlow is a noted visionary, and he is famously derisive of people
less insightful than himself (a group which, in his opinion, includes roughly
everyone). He says, for example, that the ability of courts to deal correctly
with cyberissues depends on the "depth of the presiding judge's
clue-impairment." Well, at the risk of joining Barlow's long roster of the
clue-impaired, here goes.
Barlow's argument begins with a cosmic premise: "Digital
technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law
of all sorts has always found definition." This is wrong on two counts. First,
all information does take physical form. Whether digital or analog, whether in
ink or sound waves or synaptic firings or electrons, information always resides
in patterns of matter or energy (which, as Einstein noted, are interchangeable
manifestations of the physical world).
To be
sure, the significance of information is independent of its particular
physical incarnation. So is its value. You download this article from Slate's
servers and copy it onto your own hard disk, and it's still worth--well,
nothing, but that's a . Suppose it were a Madonna video: You'd get just as much
enjoyment out of it regardless of which particular bunch of electrons embodied
it.
B >ut this independence of meaning and value from physical incarnation
is nothing new. It is as old as Sumerian tablets, to say nothing of the
Gutenberg press. Indeed, the whole reason intellectual-property law exists is
that people can acquire your information without acquiring the particular
physical version of it that you created. Thus Barlow's belief that "property
law of all sorts" has always "found definition" on the "physical plane" signals
a distressing confusion on his part. The one sense in which it's true that
information is "detached" from the "physical plane"--the fact that
information's value transcends its physical incarnation--not only fails to
qualify as an original insight, and not only fails to make
intellectual-property rights obsolete; it's the very insight that led to
intellectual-property rights in the first place! Barlow announces from the
mountaintop: "It's fairly paradigm warping to look at information through fresh
eyes--to see how very little it is like pig iron or pork bellies." Maybe so,
but it's hard to say for sure, since the people who really did take that fresh
look have been dead for centuries.
If you somehow forced Barlow
to articulate his thesis without the wacky metaphysics, he'd probably say
something like this: The cost of copying and distributing information is
plummeting--for many purposes, even approaching zero. Millions of people can
now do it right at their desks. So in principle, content can multiply like
fruit flies. Why should anyone buy an article when a copy can be had for
nothing?
Answer: Because it can't.
The total cost of acquiring a "free" copy includes more than just the
copying-and-transmitting costs. There's 1) the cost--in time and/or money--of
finding someone who already has a copy, and will give it to you for free or for
cheap; 2) the risk of getting caught stealing intellectual property; 3) any
premiums you pay to others for incurring such risks (as when you get copies
from bootleggers); and 4) informal punishments such as being labeled a cheat or
a cheapskate. The size of this last cost will depend on how norms in this area
evolve.
Even in
the distant future, the total cost of cheating on the system, thus figured,
will almost never be zero. Yes, it will be way, way closer to zero than it used
to be. But the Barlow-Dyson scenario still is wrong. Why? Because whether
people cheat doesn't depend on the absolute cost of cheating. It depends on the
cost of cheating compared with the cost of not cheating. And the cost of
getting data legally will plummet roughly as fast as the cost of getting it
illegally--maybe faster.
In their writings, Barlow and Dyson make clear they're
aware of this fact. But they seems unaware of its fatal impact on their larger
thesis. How could cybersages have such a blind spot? One theory: Because
they're cyber sages. You have to be a career paleohack like me, getting
paid for putting ink on paper, to appreciate how much of the cost of legally
acquiring bits of information goes into the ink and paper and allied
anachronisms, like shipping, warehousing, and displaying the inky paper. I
wrote a book that costs $14 in paperback. For each copy sold, I get $1. The day
may well come, as Barlow and Dyson seem to believe, when book publishers as we
know them will disappear. People will download books from Web sites and either
print them out on new, cool printers or read them on superlight wireless
computers. But if so, it will then cost you only $1--oh hell, make it $1.25--to
get a copy of my book legally from my Web site.
Now
imagine being at my Web site, reading my promotional materials, and deciding
you'd like to read the book. (Thank you.) A single keystroke will give you the
book, drain your bank account of five shiny quarters, and leave you feeling
like an honest, upstanding citizen. Do you think you'll choose, instead, to
call a few friends in hopes of scoring an illegal copy? And don't imagine that
you can just traipse on over to the "black-market book store" section of the
Web and find a hot copy of my book. As in the regular world, the easier it is
for Joe Consumer to track down an illegal distributor, the easier it is for
cops to do the same. Black marketeers will have to charge enough to make up for
this risk, making it hard to undersell my $1.25 by much. And there are , too,
why the cost of cheating will be nontrivial.
M >eanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, there's another reason
for the cost of legal copies to drop. Many journalists will reach a much larger
audience on the Web than they do now. The "magazine" model of bringing
information to the attention of readers is stunningly inefficient. I hope it's
not egotistical of me to think that when I write an article for, say, the
New
Republic , I am not reaching nearly everyone who might have an
interest in it. Granted, the Web is not yet a picture of efficiency itself.
Search engines, for example, are in the reptilian phase of their evolution. But
most observers--certainly the Barlows of the world--expect radical improvement.
(I'm not saying all journalists will see their audiences grow. The likely
trend, when you , will be for many obscure and semiobscure journalists to see
their audiences grow, while the few rich and famous journalists will see their
audiences shrink. Cool.)
One
much-discussed cybertrend is especially relevant here: the scenario in which
various data brokers offer a "Daily Me," a batch of articles tailored to your
tastes, cheaply gleaned from all over the Web. When this happens, guys like me
will be living the life of Riley. We will wake up at noon, stumble over to the
keyboard in our pajamas, hammer out 1,000 words, and then--without talking to a
single bothersome editor--make our work available to all data brokers. Likely
fans of my article will be shown, say, the first couple of paragraphs. If they
want to read more, they deposit a quarter. Will you try to steal a copy
instead? Do you steal Tootsie pops at checkout counters? The broker and the
electronic cash service will pocket a dime of that. I take my 15 cents and head
for the liquor store.
Of course, this "disaggregation of content" may be ruinous
for magazines like Slate. But consider the upside. Not only will the efficiency
of the system permit rock-bottom pricing that discourages cheating, but the
fluidity of content will disrupt channels of potential cheating. If you
subscribe to a regular, old-fashioned online magazine, it's easy to split the
cost of a subscription with a few friends and furtively make copies. (You
wretched scum.) But if you subscribe to the "Daily Me," this arrangement makes
no sense, because every Me is different. Sure, you may e-mail a friend the
occasional article from your "Me." (You wretched scum.) And, in general, this
sort of "leakage" will be higher than in pre-Web days. But it would have to
reach massive proportions to negate the overall gains in efficiency that will
keep people like me in business.
This argument, like all
arguments about the future, is speculative. It may even be wrong. But it is
consistent with the history of the world. The last half-millennium has seen 1)
data getting cheaper and easier to copy; and 2) data-creation occupying a
larger and larger fraction of all economic activity. Thus far, in other words,
as the realm of information has gotten more lubricated, it has become
easier , not harder, to make a living by generating information.
Cyberspace is essentially a quantum leap in lubrication.
Barlow's insistence that
intellectual property will soon be worthless is especially puzzling since he is
one of the biggest troubadours of the Third Wave information economy. Sometimes
he seem to think it's possible for a sector of a market economy to get bigger
and bigger even while the connection between work and reward in that sector
breaks down. He writes: "Humanity now seems bent on creating a world economy
primarily based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be
eliminating any predictable connection between creators and a fair reward for
the utility or pleasure others may find in their works." Far out, man.
