CLASH OF TIGHT 'UNS

Dick Pountain/20 August 2002/13:38/Idealog 97

Of all the buzz phrases that our industry has spewed up, perhaps the most irksome of all is 'The Information Society'. The meaning it hints at is that 'information' has become the most valuable substance in our world, more valuable even than money, gold or whatever. This irritates me as an admirer of Claude Shannon's Information Theory, because I see information as being both ubiquitous and valueless. Information is just the number of bits required to distinguish between two messages, in which case the messages 'Buy Enron!' and 'Sell Enron' both contain precisely the same amount of information. You can't eat information nor does it keep out the cold or the rain off your head. Information might tell you where to find food, or how to build a roof, but someone still has to fetch it or build it, and you also need to verify the information by reference to the real world.

As is always the case, this buzz phrase does however conceal a little truth, but that truth is actually called Intellectual Property rather than Information. Intellectual Propery or IP is information that has been appropriated, made into property, so that it can be bought and sold. An in-depth report on Enron's finances would be IP, and owning it could reveal a big difference between the values of those two messages...

IP has indeed become one of the most valuable substances in our world, and that's because the term covers the copyright on books and films, the patents on inventions and drugs, and the code for computer software. IP exists not in the artefacts themselves (bundles of paper or bottles of pills) but in the legal permission and detailed instructions for making or copying them - and that's the crux of the matter, because IP only has value within framework of law, and enforceable law at that. I might one day decide that my name is my property, and that I want to charge people 10p every time that they utter it, but since this is not enforceable it's a pretty poor scheme for getting rich. In fact I do make most of my living from selling intellectual property, namely books and articles like this one, and the enforceability of that is somewhat better, but only just.

The real problem is that a huge crisis is looming in the world of IP, all thanks to the Internet. We've been living with this crisis, and vaguely aware of it, for a decade or more, but only now are its true proportions becoming apparent. What we are faced with now are the two proverbial irresistible forces going head-to-head with one another: the tendency of the Internet to make all intellectual property available for free, against the desire of the owners of most of the world's IP to monopolize it and extract the maximum profit from it.

The first force arises from the very nature of the Internet, which was designed for free distribution of information and so lacks any plausible, effective and convenient infrastructure for charging for content. This fact has become enshrined as an ideology of 'free information', espoused by a large number of net users, from the sincere and serious advocates of Open Source software, through political libertarians, to the crackers who live to defeat all kinds of copy protection technology.

These are pitted against the second force, the huge media, record and software corporations who have been hoovering up all the IP they can for years (backlogs of Hollywood film studios, record label back catalogues, smaller software companies). Once they own it all, they need to extract as much profit as they can from it. When in the 1960s I bought my copy of, say, 'Blues and Roots' by Charlie Mingus, I thereby donated a few shillings in profit to Atlantic Records. That was merely a one-off payment, which is no longer good enough. To create the sort of revenue streams modern bean-counters insist on, they need to sell it to me over and over again. Even the invention of the CD only made me buy it one more time (while adding value in terms of fidelity, durability and convenience). What they really need is to make me pay every time I listen to 'Blues and Roots' (or watch 'Point Blank', or run Microsoft Windows). And we are, just now, arriving at the technology that will make this possible.    

PC Pro has covered some aspects of this coming struggle - for example Jon Honeyball wrote recently about Palladium, a future version of Windows that interacts with encryption hardware built into the PC motherboard to provide complete control over who runs what software, where and when. Microsoft's latest licensing policies and the XP Activation scheme all point in this direction too. In the music and film worlds too, hardware-assisted copyright control systems like CPRM will come to hard disk, SD card and DVD player alike. And of course the crackers, who have at least as much expertise as their foes, are just drooling to have a crack at them all.

This titanic struggle squeezes out any middle ground (it's hard to find a place for your deck-chair between two equally massive icebergs). People like me, or say ordinary musicians, who just want to get paid a living wage for our modest efforts will be the losers. What we actually need is a secure and convenient way to collect micropayments for Web access, but neither of the clashing titans is interested in anything so modest or sensible.