Why I give it away.
Saturday September 1, 2001
You can read the long (if incoherent) form, if you like, but you could also read someone else’s fable which helps explain where we’re headed, if things go on the way they have been.
And yes, it’s a fable, and yes, it seems extreme—until you read this.
We’re already there. We’re already at a place where companies can fuck up your life in the name of protecting their intellectual property. Academic research is stifled and whistle blowers are arrested and perfectly natural human reactions to art and ideas, facilitated and made visible by the internet, are turned into criminal acts.
Ideas cannot be commodified. If they are, they become something that can be bought and sold and taken away.
And copyright commodifies ideas.
Alternatives? Why, there are dozens. The Street Performer Protocol, for instance, and the copyleft crowd. Micropayments and honor systems. One merely has to look to the ingenuity of cam girls to see what is possible with a little imagination, gumption, and brass.
But no one will get rich with those, I hear you cry.
Take a look around you. Who’s getting rich here and now, huh?
(What’s that? Sex? Oh, fine. Here.)