I was looking for an RSS feed from a photography site, to use as screensaver images automatically in xscreensaver. I just wanted some low-res stuff, nothing fancy - preview-quality images would've been great! Unfortunately, I did not readily find an RSS link, but I found some Q&A pages under their support. One question was from a photographer that was upset about finding her images on other websites, due to people who had subscribed to her RSS feed from the parent site. She was also upset that the subscribed users had no profiles, names, or other information (for what purposes I know not, since I have not yet delved into their membership policies or community expectations). The support reply basically said that the RSS feed was doing what it was supposed to do, and that it was not possible to "block" someone from using an RSS feed.
Now, to me this underscores a basic disconnect that pervades several facets of the internet-connected world. A most notable facet is DRM-laden media from content producers. Another is authored, copyrighted works published as e-books. Ostensibly, the argument goes like this:
"I perform my trade to make money. If people access my works for free, I don't make money. Therefore, I must prohibit people from accessing my works for free, or else there is no longer an incentive for me to produce new works."
Herein lies the rub: published works, cut records, stomped CDs, printed photographs and assembled pieces of furniture were all relatively "difficult" to reproduce before the advent of modern technology. Unless you went to some serious trouble or had some serious equipment, you could not easily copy, say, a nice picture of a lake and have it look anything like the original. The quality would be shot, the color gone. These days a good photocopier does most of the work and the result comes out rather good. Go all-digital, and there is zero quality loss.
Bring in modern computer technology, and interconnect it to a massive, standardized backbone (i.e. the Internet), and now we have a new reproduction and delivery mechanism for products. Better yet, the cost of reproducing electronic goods is practically zero. Just make another copy - the operating system does all the work, and with the right tech it happens in a heartbeat. Put out a link and millions of people can download it - all for a minuscule fraction of the cost of what a photo or musical work would have cost to manually reproduce.
We could argue here that property is property, and people have a right to make money on however many duplicates of their works they choose to make. But let's step back a moment and consider another example. It takes a great deal of effort, experience, materials and tooling to produce a set of fine kitchen cabinets. You don't just grab a handsaw and start hacking at plywood. There is, of course, the wood, and the fasteners, the jigs, the saws, blades, planers, router/shaper bits, glues, clamps, work space, sandpapers, paints and finishes, just to name maybe 20% of everything you need for the cabinet production. The cost of the materials, plus the cost of the labor (which equates to experience, knowledge and skill) to turn those materials into the finished goods, plus around 10% profit, is all factored into the basis of cabinet prices for a generic cabinet shop. Case and point: there is a substantial investment to produce, and therefore a substantial fee for the product.
Let's now suppose that you could produce a cabinet electronically. That really doesn't make sense, but to just explore the issue, let's suppose it could happen. After you go through the trouble to do the design work, you get everything ready and then push a button. Into a machine goes wood chips, glue, and paint. Whir whir whir, and out pops a perfectly finished cabinet! This is our advanced cabinet shop.
What is that electronically-manufactured cabinet worth? Is it worth more, less, or the same as the one painstakingly made by the generic cabinet shop above?
The corollary is to all the things we can download from the Internet. Our servers, operating systems, content management systems all serve the purpose of reproducing data over and over again to countless consumers. The difference is that most of those consumers aren't paying for most of that content. Most of the content isn't something we'd charge for anyway. If they do pay for it, they are not willing to pay the cost of what they could buy a physical version for - to them, the value isn't there. Even if it costs fractions of a penny to stamp out music CDs, what does it cost to provide that CD's worth of data for download? The fact is, a stamped CD must be manufactured, quality-checked, packaged, labeled, wrapped, boxed, and shipped to a "brick-and-mortar" or online store for sale and distribution. Therein lies the cost of a $15 CD. Why pay $15 - or even $10 - for the content when you cut out the last seven or eight steps of the process?
The same applies to movies, books, and just about everything that is now electronically produced. I'm not saying it's right or wrong to charge whatever is charged for goods available online. I'm saying that in this new economic playground, there are very different rules at hand. I do not agree with people who publish content in so grossly a public place as on the Internet, and then complain about that content appearing in a dozen unauthorized locations. It would be no different than printing a thousand low-quality copies of a picture and dropping them out of a tall building window. A thousand people grabbing those photos later, do you have any right to complain about "unauthorized" reproductions or the "unauthorized" display of the work you scattered to the four winds?
There are those who would look at all of this and think: "Look at all that money we're losing! We need to capture all of that! Everything costs something, right?" Well, could you sell the air we breathe? Is the air in my home better than the air in yours, and could I bottle it and sell it to you? Would you buy it? There are limits to what is salable and what is not. Forcing the creation of an economy where none exists leads inexorably to destruction.
So, the issue here shouldn't be about property rights on the Internet, but rather: how do people make money with the Internet as their distribution system? Forget property rights, and assume they don't exist on the Internet. Really, I think they never did, and despite the best efforts of governments around the world, property on the internet will never work the way it works in the real, physical, hard-to-duplicate world. We have to rethink the economics of Internet-based production/consumption. The hard part is lining this up with aspects of the world that do not translate easily to the Internet, such as the production, delivery, and purchase of food-stuffs (my "People Need To Eat" axiom).
Conversely, a product that fetches $1 on the internet but is downloaded one million times certainly earns as much as a product costing $50 and purchased from a store 20,000 times. Perhaps we humans are just not ready for an Internet-based economy.
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