SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #69 New Moon of August 29, 2000 Contents copyright 2000 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* Since the court fight over Napster has been in the news lately, I've been thinking about related issues. So much of this issue is going to lean toward that topic. First (as I've mentioned before) is the matter of scarcity vs plenty. In short, I feel that we may be on the verge of a future where pretty much all goods, not just recorded music and computer software, will be essentially free for the taking. This won't happen overnight, and probably not even in the next decade or two, but if technology keeps advancing it should happen sooner or later. Someone on the email group objected to this with a statement to the effect of "If I don't get paid for the programs I write, I don't eat." But that misses the point. In a true economy of plenty it wouldn't matter whether or not you got paid for writing programs, because you wouldn't be paying for your food. I'm not positive there would even be such a thing as "money". Another objection is that without people being forced to "work for a living" nothing would get done, or that even if little things still got done, no big projects would get done. But would that really be the case? I can think of at least two large and complex volunteer projects that have gotten done, and done at least reasonably well: Linux and the World Science Fiction Convention. There are probably others. Education might be a problem: If there's no such thing as "working for a living" and no such thing as money, a college degree will have no monetary value. We'll need to give people other reasons to get an education. If education fails, there'll be no one qualified to do the large complex projects of the future, even if people are willing to work for love rather than money. The other problem is that some resources, such as real estate, will continue to be scarce. If too many people want to live in Neighborhood X you can't magically make more living space the way you can magically make more copies of a movie. I don't know the solution to this one. Of course we already have a mixture of scarcity and plenty. Air, for example, is not metered. Breathe all you want. In some areas pollution is showing us that air is not unlimited, and this has led to some regulation of its use, but in general it's treated as being free for the taking. So we may end up with a mixed economy, with some things being scarce goods like real estate while others are plentiful like air. It's just that the lists of items in the "Scarce" and "Plentiful" categories may change. ********************* I recall seeing a quote from one financially well-to-do person who said that when she looked at the pictures on her walls she got satisfaction from the fact that others wanted them and couldn't have them. I suspect she would not be happy in an economy of plenty, since there would be far fewer things that other people couldn't have. Life would be a lot less zero-sum than it is now. In effect, there would be more situations where you would be able to win without anybody else having to lose. I personally feel that in general, a situation where everybody wins is ethically preferable to one in which someone loses. So for me that's another reason to work toward an eventual economy of plenty. ********************* While I am in favor of creators of intellectual property getting paid (as long as we're in an economy where "getting paid" has meaning), I'm against material becoming unavailable once it's out there, and I'm against the inconvenience of having to go to "official" sources for my copy of a song or a movie or something similar. In other words, I feel information (other than private personal information and other secrets) should be free in the sense of being unfettered even if it's not free in the monetary sense. And I think there's an eventual technological solution on the horizon, just a few more doublings of compute power away. Suppose that fifty years ago I'd taken a copy of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas", played it into a disk cutter to make a new master, and sold copies with some bogus title and my name on the label instead of Bing Crosby's. I would probably have gotten caught, even though there was no such thing as "digital watermarking" or "copy protection". Why? Because people would have recognized Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" when they heard it, regardless of how it was labeled. Likewise with music now, or maybe a few years from now. I suspect we're within a few compute-power doublings of being able to do pattern recognition on tunes and speech recognition on lyrics and voiceprint recognition on the vocalist. Then we can check recordings against the copyright database and route royalty payments accordingly, regardless of what name is or is not on the label. Under this system, if you were to make your own recording of somebody else's song, or sing your own words to somebody else's tune, or do variations on somebody else's theme, royalties would get split according to some equitable formula. You'd get paid for your part of the work, while those you've based it on would get paid for their part. No copy protection, no watermarking, no "secure" formats, and (hopefully) no lawsuits. Just some sort of "Nielson ratings" mechanism plus a fund that everybody somehow pays into and from which royalties get distributed to those who've earned them. This would also mean an end to the frustration of something you want being out of print. Find it anywhere, copy it, and the owner gets fair payment without the hassles of maintaining a catalog, printing and mailing out copies, and so on. I do see privacy concerns. For example, if you're listening to lots of gay anarchist Pagan stuff you may not want your conservative Christian co-workers to know. But that's an engineering problem. I think it can be worked out, even if I don't know how. ********************* More thoughts on intellectual property, assuming an economy of scarcity for at least the time being: Someone, I think a well-known musician, has been quoted as saying that making an illicit copy of music via the Internet was the same as shoplifting a CD. But to me that clearly isn't the case. For one thing, the impact on the distribution chain is quite different. If I shoplift a CD, the retailer (and only that one retailer, not others that I didn't shoplift it from) takes the loss. As far as I know the wholesaler doesn't give rebates for theft, so other people up the chain, such as the pressing plant and delivery truck drivers and the like, all get paid. And as far as I know the artist gets paid. In contrast, if I make a pirate copy, nobody in the chain gets paid. For the retailer the lost sale is less of a loss than the theft would have been, but for everybody else, including the artist, it's lost profits that they would have made has I stolen a physical unit from the retailer. Thus it would seem to follow that as far as the artist is concerned, copying is worse than shoplifting. The (possibly absurd) conclusion is that if you're concerned for the welfare of the artist, truck drivers, the pressing plant, etc., you should ask Napster users "Why aren't you out stealing from brick-and-mortar stores?" Some use the theft rhetoric because of the emotional impact of the word. But if you think about it, what's actually stolen is a sort of abstract probability of a future purchase. That's why I prefer to think of it as "unfair competition". When you think of a music recording having competition, you probably think first of other recordings by other artists. That is one source of competition. But it doesn't stop there. That recording is competing against all the other options the potential consumer might have: Other recordings, movies, TV, putting the money in the bank and feeling good about saving it instead of spending it on fripperies, reading a book, going hiking, making up your own song and singing it yourself, and so on. Most of those are considered fair competition. What is unfair about pirate copies is that you've sort of forced the creators of the recording to in effect work against themselves. No matter how good your work is, if somebody else has what amounts to a slave clone of you that will do the same work for free, you're not going to be able to compete. And that's not fair. ********************* Speaking of piracy and of shooting oneself in the foot, Microsoft has a Web page where people can report pirating of Microsoft software. Parts of it are broken when accessed via Netscape. To me that says "Please report software piracy here, but only if you're using our Internet Explorer." Seems to me that that's one place where function should have priority over showmanship. ********************* I'm also wondering about Linux and "secure" software. The established music industry (as well as the DVD industry) is trying to develop software that puts limits on the copying of files and playing of content. But if the underlying operating system is "open source", can't that always be subverted? Make the software think it's just playing the song for a listener (perhaps even by paying for that one play), while in reality an unprotected copy is being made. I suspect the only way the music industry can really copy-protect its product is to use dedicated hardware or allow the software to be run only on operating systems whose source is kept from the public. In other words, they'd need a software patent with a clause in the license to the effect of "It's OK to port this to Microsoft Windows or to the Mac, but thou shalt not port it to Linux." But I suspect any restriction of this sort would get various anti-trust lawyers Very Interested. ********************* In other news, someone was complaining about the Silicon Valley housing situation. They're moving up from Southern California, and are having trouble finding a place to rent, even for considerably more money than they'd been accustomed to paying at the old place. That led me to wonder if the phenomenon might be self-limiting. Silicon Valley is creating the technology to make it feasible for many whose jobs are more intellectual than physical to work at home or at some other arbitrary off-site location. At the same time the Silicon Valley housing situation and other quality-of-life issues such as traffic are giving people an incentive to use that technology. There are also forces (mainly a labor shortage so employers have to keep their workers happy in order to keep them at all) giving employers reason to allow workers to work remotely. Sooner or later some critical combination of technology and incentive will be reached. So what will happen when people can work "in" Silicon Valley while living wherever they darn well please? Will things come to some equilibrium level of crowding? Or will there be a sudden high-tech Diaspora leading to a collapse of the Silicon Valley real estate market? Either way, I think we are living in Interesting Times. ********************* In one WELL conference people are discussing the "X Men" movie, which I saw a couple of weeks ago. This got me to thinking. I mentioned that in our world most mutations are useless or even harmful. You practically never see anything approaching super-powers. Somebody replied that in the world of the X-Men, some ancient beings supposedly modified humanity so as to produce more useful mutations. But if that's the case, why haven't superhuman mutants been known all through history? We do have the Salem witch hunts, and legends of fairies and such, and various religious miracles, but if mutants were as common as they seemed to be in the movie then we should have had a lot more. So why were there so few mutants through the ages if they're showing up in great numbers now? Pollution? Radioactivity? Electromagnetic fields? Other? And I'm wondering how they would be viewed in the Bible Belt. Would mutations be seen as a gift from God or as a tool of Satan? Probably some of each, since I think that would be a matter on which reasonable Christians could disagree. You might see a particular congregation deciding to take a unified stand one way or the other, but I don't think all churches would make the same decision. So every denomination would have pro-mutant and anti-mutant factions. That in itself might make a good story. Some congregation has mutants show up in its midst, and while some denounce mutants in general others note that these particular ones aren't using their powers for evil. Maybe they come to a decision (probably in favor of the mutants, since diversity is In nowadays), or maybe the congregation splits over the issue. Either way it could be quite dramatic. ********************* I've long noticed that when a lower-case command in a case-sensitive computer operating system (like Unix) is the first word of a sentence I'm writing I feel like there's a sort of no-win situation. It's not right to leave it lower-case because the first word of a sentence is "always" capitalized, but it's not right to capitalize it either because if you typed it with the initial capital it wouldn't work. I've usually solved the problem by rewording the sentence so the item in question is not the first word. But now comes relief. A few weeks ago a newspaper columnist mentioned that someone had proposed a new category of "Irregular Proper Nouns" for names that shouldn't be capitalized in the conventional way (e.e. cummings, eBay, and the like). If you extended this a little it would also apply to things like Unix commands. Somehow, giving the phenomenon a name makes it seem less wrong. ********************* You may be familiar with those chip implants they put in dogs and cats that read back an ID number when scanned. Two columnists in the Merc (and possibly other papers as well) recently did opposing pieces on the merits of putting them in humans. One dwelt on how helpful it could be in the case of lost or abducted children. The other saw it as a threat to freedom, another tool of Big Brother. That reminded me of something I originally came up with in the context of gun control, but which also applies here: They say the Tree of Liberty is watered with the blood of tyrants, but that's not its only food. Now and then it randomly demands innocent blood as well. Deny it that blood and it will wither. ********************* The weather around the Bay Area has been a little odd lately, not like normal for August and September. That reminds me of this: Everybody Talks About It But ... Tuesday before last they were predicting a Thursday-- My club meeting night. But when I awoke in the morning It was dull, gray, depressing, dreary, Blue Monday. I was almost mad enough to complain But normally wouldn't bother, Except I needed something to write about And I knew somebody who worked there So I went. The forecaster tried to explain it with a map: "We were expecting this area of Wednesday/Thursday here To stabilize and spread But a long lazy Sunday afternoon That had been quietly hanging there for three days Finally broke up and flowed west So we got Monday." I asked if it was true the days used to be more settled. They say that years ago they went Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Regular as clockwork. You could almost set your watch by 'em. He'd heard that too, But that was before they kept records So he really didn't know. I told him my father's story About how when he was little They once had a month straight Of Monday. He'd heard of that: "It was really bad-- A month of Monday morning blahs And a water shortage from all that Monday washday laundry And with no Fridays, nobody was getting their paychecks. They finally had to declare an emergency and martial law and everything And when the churches tried to organize prayers for relief-- No Sundays. Churches like having lots of Sundays." Interesting conversation, But finally time to go. "Any Thursdays coming up? That's my club meeting And we haven't had one for quite a while." "Sorry, but no. No Thursdays in sight." But sure enough, You guessed it. For the next three days, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. Thomas G. Digby written 0035 hr 2/26/77 entered 0005 hr 2/09/92 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU If you're getting it via email and the headers show the originating site as "lists.best.com" you're getting the list version, and anything you send to DigbyZine@lists.best.com will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, dying down to almost nothing in between. But any post can spark a new flurry. If there's no mention of "lists.best.com" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The content is the same for both. To get on or off the conversation-list version send email to DigbyZine-request@lists.best.com with the word "subscribe" (to get on the list) or "unsubscribe" (to get off) in the body, but nothing else (except maybe your signature if that's automatic). 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