You Want Information To Be Free
Copyright (c) 2000 Wade Walker
You, sir, are a fucking thief. OK, maybe you’re not a fucking thief. Spending as much time as you do hunched over pirate MP3 sites and CD-ROM burners doesn’t exactly maximize the chances of you blowing the third nostril anywhere but onto your monitor. But you’re still a thief, baby. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming some kind of moral superiority. I’m a thief too. I possess and use illegally copied intellectual property, which amounts to stealing from the people who created it. If I had to run naked down a gauntlet of all the people I’ve robbed, I wouldn’t be dead when I came out the far side, but I’d probably take a few hard shots to the kiwis from the employees of a certain large software company in Redmond. The advantage of my viewpoint is that since I admit I’m doing something wrong, I try to minimize it. I don’t like to think of myself as morally deficient, so periodically I go out and buy the things I’ve stolen. Even so, I’ve still robbed the owners of the interest they would have gained on that money during the time I was using it illegally. But at least this lessens the total dollar value of my perfidy, and makes it easier for me to look down my nose at the guys with the two six-foot-tall bookshelves full of burned warez and porn CDs, whose arms are wasted away to flesh-covered twigs from years of doing nothing but putting blank CDs in the burner with one hand, and jerking off to a pirated MPEG of the Pamela Anderson Lee video with the other. Which brings us to Napster and its ilk. It doesn’t bother me so much that the program exists, because before Napster, people were trading illegal files over pirate FTP sites, and after Napster, they’ll be doing it some other way, like passing them encrypted over the IR ports of their Palm VIIs at Anime Club meetings. When it comes to piracy, necessity is the mother of circumvention. The thing that bothers me isn’t the widespread theft, it’s the fact that the thieves have declared their acts to be legal and moral, as some sort of perverse way to rationalize their acts. I hear this argument the most: "All Napster did was let the genie out of the bottle. And once you let it out, you can’t put it back in. It’s a brave new world, baby, one where all the talented but unknown garage bands self-publish on the Internet for the sheer joy of doing so, without having to kowtow to the suits in the music biz, one where the soulless clones who make bland corporate rock are stripped of their ill-gotten lucre and consigned to obscurity where they belong. It’s inevitable, so the music companies and artists had better get used to it." Back in the day, when my ancestors were using this same argument to fuck over the indigenous peoples of the New World, they called it "manifest destiny", and it’s just as wrong now as it was back then. Sure, they’re putting a different spin on it now—notice the not-so-subtle appeal to anti-capitalist snobbery there, the implication that successful bands are only making money because the unwashed masses don’t know any better, the suggestion that the really talented groups can’t get record deals because the man is keeping them down or because the tastes of the hoi polloi aren’t refined enough—but it’s still wrong. Another common argument is: "Information wants to be free. The very fact that it’s so difficult to contain this sort of file exchange is just a reflection of this fundamental principle. The only way to solve the problem is to make all information freely available to everyone. If people find value in it, they’ll voluntarily give back to the creators, enabling us all to live together in harmony." First of all, information doesn’t fucking want to be free. You want information to be free, because, as I mentioned before, you’re a fucking thief. The problem is, it’s not free, and just wanting it that way won’t make it so. But as long as stealing it is relatively easy and you’re not likely to get caught, it’s as good as free to a lot of people. This works right up to the point where they figure out what’s going to happen to their own property under such a system; then suddenly, magically, their own case becomes an exception. Second, this is the standard argument behind a rich tradition of moronic ideas I thought had long since been discredited, like socialism. Sure, maybe in some commie utopia where everyone brims over with love for their fellow man the artists who make music will do it just so they can see the fucking joy light up the snot-streaked pink faces of the little fucking children of the world. But here in the real world, there’s got to be that promised land of tag-team mother-daughter groupie blowjobs under the stage during concert intermissions to get artists to put forth that 110% effort that it takes to make great music. And that shit’s not going to happen if they’re no-money-having losers because no one pays them for their CDs. The annoying thing is, it’s easy to see how this genie can be put back in the bottle, it’s just that tech types are apparently afraid to say it for fear of being branded as ass-kissers to big business. As the makers of online computer games have known for a long time, it’s pretty much impossible to keep people from cheating if games and characters get saved locally on the player’s machine. No matter how encrypted your data files or how obfuscated your code, if it’s on their machine, some enterprising h4x0r will figure out a way to crack it so he can go be a big man with the ladies on Everquest with his 50th level woodland elf ranger. You know, because it’s the wood elves getting all that mad virtual pussy. So you take it off the player’s machine. When we buy a work of intellectual property, what we’re really buying is the right to use it, watch it, or listen to it, not to own a piece of plastic with a spotty aluminum disk in the middle. So in this age of third generation cell phones and cable modems, let the artist keep his data—whenever you want to use it, it just gets streamed from his publisher’s server to your wireless MP3 player. Another year or so and this’ll be dead easy. The artist gets his money, you get to listen to music, everyone’s fucking ecstatic. You can still hack this setup, of course. But with some cooperation from the hardware and software makers, you could make it really difficult—imaging building the decryption into the microprocessor, chipset, and OS, say, so there’s never a clear data stream where the user can get at it from software. But the point isn’t to make it totally unhackable, because that’s impossible. There’s always going to be some fuck-the-man teen hacker in Finland who’s gonna twist out cuz he’s got the skillz. The point is to make it just hard enough so it’s not worth the effort for the majority of the simps out there. Besides, Napster’s not even making any fucking money, and they’ve got no sane plan for ever making any. So what the hell are they doing it for? The hackers working there probably just want to flip the digitus impudicus to the corporate establishment. The suits are probably doing it because they can get shitloads of investment and publicity from idiots who don’t realize they’re getting into a doomed business. They should both fuck off and let the artists make their blowjob money.
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