Some wonderful piece of lecture, right there. Wishing many read your comment and think about it.

drf’s senaste bloggpost.. S.K.Y.N.E.T

Stefan’s senaste bloggpost.. Copycut bloggarn´

The Internet has basicly done the same as the printing press did, lowered the barrier to spreading information drasticly. For about 20 years ago some really powerful people with influence thought about how to make money when the west no longer could compete with countries just starting to climb the industrial ladder. They thought about knowledge and information, but they did it with the kognitives of the industrial society. Supply and demand. Most powerful people of today still thinks in those terms. But we have allready lived in a society where information was very scarse, and thus its price very high. That was the time before the printing press, when the only things worth spread was words from the kings and the church. That was not a knowledge or information society, that was a society with a high price on information. The lowered barrier of spreding information that the printing press offered also gave birth of the scientifical method, to bublish findings and let others scrutinise it and build upon it.

Information has a value, and the value for the society grows as information gets cheaper and easier to spread. Science thrives on it, it demands it. Just think if Newtons knowledge had remained secret, i he had remained a military contractor – No, i wont tell you my secrets, but i calibrate you guns for a fee – Thats not science, that would be absurd to call sciense. If that had been the thinking of smart people those days, their secrecy would have kept science from developing at all. So, what the Internet has ment, is the same as the printing press. But unfortunately, the “power and the church” of today is reacting the same way today as it did in the times of Gutenberg.

The biggest problem is that of balance of power. Internet has put the publishing ability in the hands of everyday people, but not (yet?) the power. The power lies still among those that had it before. Today we have multinational gigants against private persons, the balance of power is as skewed it ever can be, very sick indeed. This is also the base of recent legislation, all lobbying is just as out of balance, there is no counterbalance.

Some voices advocates a drastic shortening of the copyright monopoly of publishing. Does that alter the balance of power? For old works yes. But say we decide it for 5 years, that means 5 years of people beeing hurt by gigants for every new work there is. Look at the Spectrial and think of Google and filetype:torrent or the google-cache. Imagine there was a counter power just as powerful as Google in every case, and in lobbying of politicians.. I bet Warner et al would think twise before going nuts over something they hardly even can proof beeing a loss. The problem is an infrastructure problem, not the law. Well, today there are some bits and pieces of the law that needs to be rolled back, but most of this is just a consequence of the same things beeing out of balance. When there are no incentives for anyone to assume the counter-balancing position, the infrastructure is out of balance.

I know of at least two that has thought about it in these lines, one is called Lessig and the other one i just learned about, his name is Dan Heller. Imagine some organisations just as powerful as any multinational giant, representing the little guy, and having every business incentive there is to do so, no matter on what site the little guy has published something. But also, if the little guy just share a file, then he is not infringing anything, then he is just helping the copyright holder. Possible? Yes it is. It is not that complicated either. All it needs is automatic, easy and zeero cost registration of works. Something that is very easy to do with the technology of today, registering data is what computers are really good at. How, you may ask. I was also baffled by the thought first, i did not get how 1+1 could be 2 in this case. Dan Heller explains it quite good in a blog-post. It is not easy to explain, i guess that is a psycological effect of the reality we live in today, most people do have a hard time grasping things coming from outside the Plato-cave. Dans post is quite lenghty, but he do explain it very well.

We, or the giants, do not have to be afraid of some kids using material from the net and doing all kinds of things with it, like sharing their experiments or deriative works with their friends. But most of would have something to say if a company tries to monetize it without our consent. Ordinary people communicating in private or collecting data in private should not have to fear copyright, usually they do not even care, but companies do. Markets do not grow by punishing or educating individuals about copyright, compliance is achieved-and business grows by creating convenient and automated mechanisms that make both access to and use of content easier.

Now how about those countries climbing the ladder of industry? Well, there is a solution to that and it is also conveniently the same solution as to overpopulation. It consists of a “medicine” they more than gladly will take, and especially we in sweden have taken that medicine and showed how brutaly effective it is. The medicine is called high standard of living and education. Without our immigration under the last 40 years, there would not have been many swedes around. When they quickly come up to our standard, they will also be our equals in most other aspects too, including wages, then the “problem” is gone. So help them, one way is by not locking in information and knowledge. Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for a day. Educate him how to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime.