"Information wants to be free"

[Tim May]

At 11:29 AM -0800 2/27/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Tim May wrote:
>
>>At 2:57 PM -0800 2/26/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>>>
>>>If they can fix micropayments so that I can authorize my web
>>>agent to spend up to $5 a month and not pester me about it,
>>>they might have something I'd use.
>>
>>Most people will skip any sites that cost money...unless, maybe, it's
>>a porn site that they specifically want.
>>
>>There are very, very few pay sites which are surviving, let alone thriving.
>
>Right.  All the "content-for-pay" artists now have to compete
>against all the unpaid amateurs who are webpublishing because
>webpublishing is easy and nearly free.

Or because "information wants to be free" (*) and _someone_ will make 
the songs or images or whatever available for absolutely nothing. 
Good examples of this are Napster, of course, and the 
alt.binaries.erotica.* Usenet newsgroups.

(* I never particularly liked the "information wants to be free" 
slogan, for various reasons. See the archives for discussions.)

>
>Unless they can provide content that is absolutely above and
>beyond what the amateurs can do technologically and artistically,
>they are going to discover that there is no paying market for
>their stuff.

Probably not even then. Unless the Net is heavily censored and 
encryption is banned, there are just too many "degrees of freedom" 
for the above-mentioned "information wants to be free" point to be 
invalidated. The cases of Mojo, Gnutella, Freenet, and free versions 
of Napster make this point.

(Though the automated thievery, er, "sharing," of Napster made it 
trivial to install for even 6th graders, and thus led to the tens of 
millions of users, it is likely that future systems will still be 
used by many even if not so easy to "click and steal.")

--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns