Imogen Heap the Musical Cyborg

Heap demonstrates the technology of her musical suit in the first 13 minutes and then begins her song, "Me and the Machine." Absolutely amazing.

Shapiro and Varain vs. Barlow: Economy+Information

John Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas" and Carl Shapiro and Hal Varain "The Information Economy"

Shapiro & Varian talk about information goods the way most talk about data, as a commodity to be turned into profit. Selling information in the Age of Information creates an entirely different economy, where the market price of "goods" does not depend on the production cost any longer; sellers set prices based on the value information has to its market (Shapiro & Varian 3). Their approach to information is purely business-like. Cold, and nothing like Barlow.

Barlow describes Information as a living thing, a relationship, an activity. He says on page 7, "Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods... Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk, information is still something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code. But, whether it's running at gigabits per second or words per minute, the actual decoding is a process that must be performed by and upon a mind, a process that must take place in time."

Eventually, Shapiro and Varian hit a point that agrees with Barlow – marketing one's intellectual property involves establishing authority: building a reputation to convince the market to buy one's product without knowing whether the product is good yet. Shapiro and Varian call this building brand name, and Barlow calls it point of view. Barlow, on page 10, writes "Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away... In aesthetic information, whether poetry or rock 'n' roll, people are willing to buy the new product of an artist, sight-unseen, based on their having been delivered a pleasurable experience by previous work." 

On page 8, Shapiro & Varian make a huge mistake. They argue that the Web "isn't all that impressive as an information resource. The static, publicly accessible HTML text on the Wen is roughly equivalent in size to 1.5 million books. The UC Berkeley Library has 8 million volumes, and the average quality of the Berkeley library content is much, much higher! If 10 percent of the material on the Web is 'useful,' there are about 150,000 useful book-equivalents on it, which is about the size of a Borders superstore. But the actual figure for 'useful' is probably more like 1 percent, which is 15,000 books, or half the size of an average mall bookstore."

Shapiro & Varian could not have underestimated the Web more in 1999, when their book was published. 

I have no way to confirm whether their statistics were true 14 years ago, but saying only 10% of the information on the Web is useful is an incredible oversight. They continue on page 9 to describe the usefulness of the Web's immediate access factor, but even there they lack a complete picture. 

The Web, whether a majority of its content is "useful" or not, is much more impressive than Shapiro & Varian give it credit for – even as a marketing tool, which they seem to be limited to in their focus here. The Web is not just immediate and widely accessible – it has cracked the code, broken the barriers, for information to cross time and space. Their library metaphor shows just how diminutive their take is. With information on the Web, there is no longer a need to physically go where information is to access it, and people no longer have to be on synchronized schedules to share information. 

They say the Web enhances the value of information (9), but it also enhances the scope of its audience, enabling those with an idea or product to share to reach people who they never could have in physical space or time. Shapiro & Varian seriously overlooked that characteristic of networking technology, which has made commerce explode online.

When it comes to law and technology meshing, the two sets of authors hold strongly contrasting ideals. Shapiro & Varian write, "The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in the 1890s to control monopolies. Technology has changed radically since then. As we have stressed, the underlying economic principles have not. As a new century arrives, the Sherman Act is flexible enough to prevent the heavy hand of monopoly from stifling innovation, while keeping markets competitive enough to stay the even heavier hand of government regulation intruding in our dynamic hardware and software markets" (17-18). 
Barlow writes, "Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks, like the punctuation of biological evolution grotesquely accelerated. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome" (6)

In my view, Barlow was closer to the truth here. If anything has become apparent in the struggle between technology growth and the stagnation of the law, it is the latter's inability to keep up with the former. 

Reading Notes for Barlow "The Economy of Ideas"

Barlow: "The Economy of Ideas"

"The source of this conundrum is as simple as its solution is complex. Digital technology is detaching
information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition.

Thus, the rights of invention and authorship adhered to activities in the physical world. One didn't get paid for ideas, but for the ability to deliver them into reality. For all practical purposes, the value was in the conveyance and not in the thought conveyed." (2)


"While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one.

All of the broadcast-support models are flawed. Support either by advertisers or government has almost
invariably tainted the purity of the goods delivered. Besides, direct marketing is gradually killing the
advertiser-support model anyway.

The greatest constraint on your future liberties may come not from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent." (3)

In the Age of Information, we patent and copyright IDEAS, and not their physical manifestations. "In certain areas, this leaves rights of ownership in such an ambiguous condition that property again
adheres to those who can muster the largest armies. The only difference is that this time the armies
consist of lawyers.

What was previously considered a common human resource, distributed among the minds and libraries of the world, as well as the phenomena of nature herself, is now being fenced and deeded. It is as though a new class of enterprise had arisen that claimed to own the air.

In a more perfect world, we'd be wise to declare a moratorium on litigation, legislation, and international treaties in this area until we had a clearer sense of the terms and conditions of enterprise in cyberspace. Ideally, laws ratify already developed social consensus. They are less the Social Contract itself than a series of memoranda expressing a collective intent that has emerged out of many millions of human interactions. Humans have not inhabited cyberspace long enough or in sufficient diversity to have developed a Social Contract which conforms to the strange new conditions of that world. Laws developed prior to consensus usually favor the already established few who can get them passed and not society as a whole." (5)

"Whenever there is such profound divergence between law and social practice, it is not society that adapts. Against the swift tide of custom, the software publishers' current practice of hanging a few visible scapegoats is so obviously capricious as to only further diminish respect for the law.

Law adapts by continuous increments and at a pace second only to geology. Technology advances in lunging jerks, like the punctuation of biological evolution grotesquely accelerated. Real-world conditions will continue to change at a blinding pace, and the law will lag further behind, more profoundly confused. This mismatch may prove impossible to overcome.

But something will happen. After all, people do business. When a currency becomes meaningless, business is done in barter. When societies develop outside the law, they develop their own unwritten codes, practices, and ethical systems. While technology may undo law, technology offers methods for restoring creative rights." (6)


Information is an activity. 

"Gregory Bateson, expanding on the information theory of Claude Shannon, said, "Information is a
difference which makes a difference." Thus, information only really exists in the Delta. The making of that difference is an activity within a relationship. Information is an action which occupies time rather than a state of being which occupies physical space, as is the case with hard goods.

Even when it has been encapsulated in some static form like a book or a hard disk, information is still
something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code. But, whether it's
running at gigabits per second or words per minute, the actual decoding is a process that must be
performed by and upon a mind, a process that must take place in time.

Information must move: Information that isn't moving ceases to exist as anything but potential...at least until it is allowed to move again. For this reason, the practice of information hoarding, common in bureaucracies, is an especially wrong-headed artifact of physically based value systems." (7)


Information is a life form. 
It is a life form, and humans are its host.
"Information Replicates into the Cracks of Possibility: just as the common housefly has insinuated itself into practically every ecosystem on the planet, so has the meme of "life after death" found a niche in most minds, or psycho-ecologies. "

If ideas and other interactive patterns of information are indeed life forms, they can be expected to evolve constantly into forms which will be more perfectly adapted to their surroundings. And, as we see, they are doing this all the time. But for a long time, our static media, whether carvings in stone, ink on paper, or dye on celluloid, have strongly resisted the evolutionary impulse, exalting as a consequence the author's ability to determine the finished product. But, as in an oral tradition, digitized information has no "final cut."(8)

Information is a relationship. 

"The value of what is sent depends entirely on the extent to which each individual receiver has the
receptors - shared terminology, attention, interest, language, paradigm - necessary to render what is
received meaningful.
Data may be any set of facts, useful or not, intelligible or inscrutable, germane or irrelevant... Only a human being can recognize the meaning that separates information from data." (9)

"Familiarity has more value than scarcity: Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.


Point of View and Authority Have Value: In aesthetic information, whether poetry or rock 'n' roll, people are willing to buy the new product of an artist, sight-unseen, based on their having been delivered a pleasurable experience by previous work." (10)



"...point of view is an asset which cannot be stolen or duplicated.
In the hick town I come from, they don't give you much credit for just having ideas. You are judged by
what you can make of them. As things continue to speed up, I think we see that execution is the best
protection for those designs which become physical products.

But, as we become fixated upon information commerce, many of us seem to think that originality alone is sufficient to convey value, deserving, with the right legal assurances, of a steady wage. In fact, the best way to protect intellectual property is to act on it. It's not enough to invent and patent; one has to innovate as well." (11)

"Nevertheless, most of what a middle-class American purchases has little to do with survival. We buy beauty, prestige, experience, education, and all the obscure pleasures of owning. Many of these things can not only be expressed in nonmaterial terms, they can be acquired by nonmaterial means.

It is an economy which consists almost entirely of information. This may become the dominant form of human trade, and if we persist in modeling economics on a strictly monetary basis, we may be gravely misled.

I'm not really so gloomy about our prospects as readers of this jeremiad so far might conclude. Solutions will emerge. Nature abhors a vacuum and so does commerce." (12)

Ethics used to be more important than laws -- and now we have a law for almost everything. There is no way for law to keep up with the new issues technology is presenting. "Uncodified or adaptive "law," while as "fast, loose, and out of control" as other emergent forms, is probably more likely to yield something like justice at this point.

...people seem to eventually buy the software they really use. Once a program becomes central to your work, you want the latest version of it, the best support, the actual manuals, all privileges attached to ownership. Such practical considerations will, in the absence of working law, become more and more important in getting paid for what might easily be obtained for nothing." (13)

"In any case, whether you think of yourself as a service provider or a performer, the future protection of your intellectual property will depend on your ability to control your relationship to the market - a relationship which will most likely live and grow over a period of time. The value of that relationship will reside in the quality of performance, the uniqueness of your point of view, the validity of your expertise, its relevance to your market, and, underlying everything, the ability of that market to access your creative services swiftly, conveniently, and interactively. " (14)

"Crpto-Bottling... Having come from a place where people leave their keys in their cars and don't even have keys to their houses, I remain convinced that the best obstacle to crime is a society with its ethics intact. " (15)

"If the payment process can be automated, as digital cash and signature will make possible, I believe that soft product creators will reap a much higher return from the bread they cast upon the waters of cyberspace.
Moreover, they will be spared much of the overhead presently attached to the marketing, manufacture, sales, and distribution of information products, whether those products are computer programs, books, CDs, or motion pictures. This will reduce prices and further increase the likelihood of noncompulsory payment.
But of course there is a fundamental problem with a system that requires, through technology, payment for every access to a particular expression. It defeats the original Jeffersonian purpose of seeing that ideas were available to everyone regardless of their economic station. I am not comfortable with a model that will restrict inquiry to the wealthy.

An Economy of Verbs:

• In the absence of the old containers, almost everything we think we know about intellectual property is wrong. We're going to have to unlearn it. We're going to have to look at information as though we'd never seen the stuff before.
• The protections that we will develop will rely far more on ethics and technology than on law.
• Encryption will be the technical basis for most intellectual property protection. (And should, for many reasons, be made more widely available.)
• The economy of the future will be based on relationship rather than possession. It will be continuous rather than sequential. 
• And finally, in the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns." (16)

3.19 Notes

The Memory Hole

Three videos: first, second, and third. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"

When others do a search for your online information, what do they find? What do you want them to find? What information exists about you online that you'd like to remove? What would happen, ideally, with electronic research about you?

Apropos of the movie (which, if you haven't seen it, is very very good) trailer: we can't wipe people from our memories, but what happens if we try to wipe traces of ourselves from the internet, or from Facebook? What remains? What's the shelf life of information?

We'll also look at the evolution of privacy settings on Facebook.

"We Can Remember it for you Wholesale" - book that Total Recall was based on

Facebook creeping... there is a lot of information about you that is, by default settings, accessible to the public -- not even just the Facebook community

Six Strikes Law

Is the Internet in "the cloud"? They are in physical space, and a lot of electrical production.

The only thing that can overturn the Citizens United supreme court decision is a constitutional amendment. Ohmygawd.

Homework:

Information ownership vs. information anarchy

We will meet in AML105 on Thursday.

Read John Perry Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas," keeping in mind that it's by (1) a member of the Grateful Dead and (2) a co-founder and member of the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (He didn't invent the term cyberspace -- William Gibson did -- but he was the first to apply it to what it currently describes.) 

Read, also, Shapiro and Varian, "The Information Economy," keeping in mind that Hal Varian is currently chief economist at Google.

Write a blog entry. 

If you prefer the stock option for the blog entry, compare the perspectives of Barlow with those of Shapiro and Varian. Barlow seems to be more about principles, and has economic ideologies very different from Shapiro and Varian. Shapiro and Varian say that they're about models, not trends. Note that their book, like Barlow's article, was published in the middle of the dot-com bubble that (when it burst) contributed to the recession of the early 2000s: Time Warner and AOL produced the "worst merger ever," WorldCom and Global Crossing went public and cheated on their accounting and went bankrupt, the stock market lost $5 trillion in value, and tens of thousands of people with new degrees in technology-related fields went unemployed. So: in retrospect, what do these authors get wrong, and what do they get right? Whose predictions have come more true, and who would you ideologically align yourself with? Give examples. 

Amanda Palmer, a Copyright Libertarian

Amanda (Fucking) Palmer of the Dresden Dolls used to be a street performer. She would ask passersby for money in exchange for a flower, and some intense eye contact. In her music career, she and her band have surfed many couches and taken food donations from fans in countless cities.

With all of her practice in simply asking people for things when she needed them, she decided to give her music away for free online. She encouraged downloading, but asked others to help her in a crowd-funding project. She discovered incredible results when she asked people to pay her, rather than making them pay through a record label.

Her goal was to raise $100,000.

Her fans donated $1.2 million - "The biggest crowd-funding project to date."

She testifies that her fans want to help her when she connects to them by asking. "Asking makes you vulnerable," she says.

"Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance. But the internet and the content that we're freely able to share on it – it's taking us back. It's about a few people loving you up close, and about those people being enough."

How do we make let people pay for music? 

Amanda Palmer is a copyright libertarian: advocating voluntary funding and free will.

3.7 Notes

Computer Fraud Act, 1984 (<--- bogus - made before the Internet even existed?)

Illegal to violate the terms of service of any product/service.

That means... if you have an alias on Facebook, YOU CAN GO TO JAIL for violating FB's terms of service. 

It turns 46 million Americans into Criminals

It would take 76 8-hour work days for the average person to read the Terms and Conditions they agree to in a year.

Lessig's speech on Aaron's Law

Law named in honor of Swartz

Aaron violated JSTOR's terms of use by writing a script that downloaded article after article. That was his his ACTUAL criminal activity. "He was basically going to be sent to prison for checking out too many library books. If you were to do that in a real library, you'd be kind of a dick, but you shouldn't go to prison for it," said Edwards.

Lessig is currently going after Congress for its susceptibility to ignore lobbyists b/c of corporate/$ influence. #OccupyWallStreet

History is not natural. We're not where we are because there was no other way. People make cultural, economic, legal choices.... Once you turn experiences into information, you can do all kinds of stuff.
Meaning need not reside in information; people impose meaning on information.
When people have not calibrated their expectations enough because the issue has not been around long (doctors getting sued vs. copyright infringers), the first thing they prioritize is money.

--Edwards

"Art for Copy" movie to watch
John Burger essay, "Ways of Seeing." 

Notes: "Free Culture" Ch. 12 Harms

Creativity squandered, not expressed, not distributed
"The four students who were threatened by the RIAA (Jesse Jordan of chapter 3 was just one) were threatened with a $98 billion lawsuit for building search engines that permitted songs to be copied. Yet WorldCom—which defrauded investors of $11 billion, resulting in a loss to investors in market capitalization of over $200 billion—received a fine of a mere $750 million. And under legislation being pushed in Congress right now, a doctor who negligently removes the wrong leg in an operation would be liable for no more than $250,000 in damages for pain and suffering. Can common sense recognize the absurdity in a world where the maximum fine for downloading two songs off the Internet is more than the fine for a doctor’s negligently butchering a patient?" (185).

"But fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights such as fair use is astonishingly bad—in practically every context, but especially here. It costs too much, it delivers too slowly, and what it delivers often has little connection to the justice underlying the claim. The legal system may be tolerable for the very rich. For everyone else, it is an embarrassment to a tradition that prides itself on the rule of law" (187).

"For in a world that threatens $150,000 for a single willful infringement of a copyright, and which demands tens of thousands of dollars to even defend against a copyright infringement claim, and which would never return to the wrongfully accused defendant anything of the costs she suffered to defend her right to speak—in that world, the astonishingly broad regulations that pass under the name “copyright” silence speech and creativity" (187).


Regulation simply enables the powerful industries of today to protect themselves against the competitors of tomorrow

"Everyone, of course, concedes that some regulation of markets is necessary—at a minimum, we need rules of property and contract, and courts to enforce both. Likewise, in this culture debate, everyone concedes that at least some framework of copyright is also required. But both perspectives vehemently insist that just because some regulation is good, it doesn’t follow that more regulation is better" (188).

"This is the world of the mafia—filled with “your money or your life” offers, governed in the end not by courts but by the threats that the law empowers copyright holders to exercise. It is a system that will obviously and necessarily stifle new innovation. It is hard enough to start a company. It is impossibly hard if that company is constantly threatened by litigation" (191).

"The law is a mess of uncertainty. We have no good way to know how it should apply to new technologies. Yet by reversing our tradition of judicial deference, and by embracing the astonishingly high penalties that copyright law imposes, that uncertainty now yields a reality which is far more conservative than is right.... Free market and free culture depend upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an overregulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an overregulated-regulated market." (192).

"The efficient spread of content means that content distributors have a harder time controlling the distribution of content. One obvious response to this efficiency is thus to make the Internet less efficient. If the Internet enables “piracy,” then, this response says, we should break the kneecaps of the Internet.... regulation of technical infrastructure will ... impose significant burdens and costs on the technology, but will likely be eclipsed by advances around exactly those requirements"(193).

"Copyright may be property, but like all property, it is also a form of regulation. It is a regulation that benefits some and harms others. When done right, it benefits creators and harms leeches. When done wrong, it is regulation the powerful use to defeat competitors" (194).

Better technology fosters better competition (196).

"While terrestrial radio does not have to pay our hypothetical Marilyn Monroe when it plays her hypothetical recording of “Happy Birthday” on the air,Internet radio does. Not only is the law not
neutral toward Internet radio—the law actually burdens Internet radio more than it burdens terrestrial radio... if an Internet radio station distributed adfree popular music to (on average) ten thousand listeners, twenty-four hours a day, the total artist fees that radio station would owe would be
over $1 million a year. A regular radio station broadcasting the same content would pay no equivalent fee." (197).

"And so the attorneys representing the webcasters asked the RIAA, . . . “How do you come up with a rate that’s so much higher? Why is it worth more than radio? Because here we have hundreds of thousands of webcasters who want to pay, and that should establish the market rate, and if you
set the rate so high, you’re going to drive the small webcasters out of business. . . .”
And the RIAA experts said, “Well, we don’t really model this as an industry with thousands of webcasters, we think it should be an industry with, you know, five or seven big players who can pay a high rate and it’s a stable, predictable market” (197-198).


Corrupting citizens
"According to The New York Times, 43 million Americans downloaded music in May 2002. According to the RIAA, the behavior of those 43 million Americans is a felony. We thus have a set of rules that transform 20 percent of America into criminals" (199).

"In September 2003, the RIAA sued 261 individuals—including a twelve-year-old girl living in public housing and a seventy-year-old man who had no idea what file sharing was. As these scapegoats discovered, it will always cost more to defend against these suits than it would cost to simply settle. (The twelve year old, for example, like Jesse Jordan, paid her life savings of $2,000 to settle the case.) .... And the consequence of our law as it is, is that those with the power can use the law to quash any rights they oppose"(200).

Drugs, driving regulations, taxes -- most Americans regularly break the law.

"Generations of Americans—more significantly in some parts of America than in others, but still, everywhere in America today—can’t live their lives both normally and legally, since “normally” entails a certain degree of illegality" (201).

"And I do care if the rules of law sow increasing disrespect because of the extreme of regulation they impose. Twenty million Americans have come of age since the Internet introduced this different idea of 'sharing.' We need to be able to call these twenty million Americans 'citizens,' not 'felons'" (202).