[Infowarrior] - Free data sharing is here to stay

[Richard Forno]

Free data sharing is here to stay

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/18/informationeconomy

The information economy is here - but governments and business are still
obsessed with 'protecting' information, rather than making it more
productive

    * Cory Doctorow
    * Guardian Unlimited
    * Tuesday September 18 2007

Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an "information
economy". The vision of an economy based on information seized the
imaginations of the world's governments. For decades now, they have been
creating policies to "protect" information ‹ stronger copyright laws,
international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to protect
anti-copying technology.

The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying and
selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder to get
access to information unless you've paid for it.

That means that we have to make it harder for you to share information, even
after you've paid for it. Without the ability to fence off your information
property, you can't have an information market to fuel the information
economy.

But this is a tragic case of misunderstanding a metaphor. Just as the
industrial economy wasn't based on making it harder to get access to
machines, the information economy won't be based on making it harder to get
access to information. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true: the more IT we
have, the easier it is to access any given piece of information ‹ for better
or for worse.

It used to be that copy-prevention companies' strategies went like this:

"We'll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an
unauthorised copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the
cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy."

But every time a PC is connected to the internet and its owner is taught to
use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option appears:
you can just download a copy from the internet. Every techno-literate
participant in the information economy can choose to access any data,
without having to break the anti-copying technology, just by searching for
the cracked copy on the public internet. If there's one thing we can be sure
of, it's that an information economy will increase the technological
literacy of its participants.

As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room in Shanghai, behind the
Great Firewall of China. Theoretically, I can't access blogging services
that carry negative accounts of Beijing's doings, like Wordpress, Blogspot
and Livejournal, nor the image-sharing site Flickr, nor Wikipedia. The
(theoretically) omnipotent bureaucrats of the local Minitrue have deployed
their finest engineering talent to stop me.

Well, these cats may be able to order political prisoners executed and their
organs harvested for Party members, but they've totally failed to keep
Chinese people (and big-nose tourists like me) off the world's internet.

The WTO is rattling its sabers at China today, demanding that they
figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at Bruce Willis
movies without permission ‹ but the Chinese government can't even figure out
how to stop Chinese people from looking at seditious revolutionary tracts
online.

And, of course, as Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology and the King of
Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of information off the internet is
like getting food colouring out of a swimming pool.

Good luck with that.

To see the evidence of the real information economy, look to all the
economic activity that the internet enables ‹ not the stuff that it
impedes. Look to all the commerce conducted by salarymen who can book their
own flights with Expedia instead of playing blind man's bluff with a travel
agent ("Got any flights after 4PM to Frankfurt?"). Look to all the garage
crafters selling their goods on Etsy.com; the publishers selling obscure
books through Amazon that no physical bookstore was willing to carry.

Look to all the salwar kameez tailors in India selling bespoke clothes to
westerners via eBay, without intervention by a series of skimming
intermediaries. Look to the internet-era musicians who use the net to pack
venues all over the world by giving away their recordings on social services
like MySpace.

Hell, look at my last barber, in Los Angeles: the man doesn't use a PC, but
I found him by googling for "barbers" with my postcode. The information
economy is driving his cost of customer acquisition to zero, and he doesn't
even have to actively participate in it.

Better access to more information is the hallmark of the information
economy. The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our
networks get and the better our search tools get, the more economic activity
the information economy generates.

Many of us sell information in the information economy ‹ I sell my printed
books by giving away electronic books, lawyers and architects and
consultants are in the information business and they drum up trade with
Google ads, and Google is nothing but an info-broker ‹ but none of us rely
on curtailing access to information.

Like a bottled water company, we compete with free by supplying a superior
service, not by eliminating the competition.

The world's governments might have bought into the old myth of the
information economy, but not so much that they're willing to ban the PC and
the internet.

· Cory Doctorow is an activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the
blog Boing Boing.