E-books and e-publishing - Samuel Vaknin (best historical fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗
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the US Patent Office in granting his company the patent. In an
open letter to Amazon’s customers, he called for a rethinking
of the whole system of protection of intellectual property in
the Internet age.
In a recently published discourse of innovation and property
rights, titled “The Free-Market Innovation Machine”, William
Baumol of Princeton University claims that only capitalism
guarantees growth through a steady flow of innovation.
According to popular lore, capitalism makes sure that
innovators are rewarded for their time and skills since
property rights are enshrined in enforceable contracts.
Reality is different, as Baumol himself notes. Innovators tend
to maximize their returns by sharing their technology and
licensing it to more efficient and profitable manufacturers.
This rational division of labor is hampered by the
increasingly more stringent and expansive intellectual
property laws that afflict many rich countries nowadays. These
statutes tend to protect the interests of middlemen -
manufacturers, distributors, marketers - rather than the
claims of inventors and innovators.
Moreover, the very nature of “intellectual property” is in
flux. Business processes and methods, plants, genetic
material, strains of animals, minor changes to existing
technologies - are all patentable. Trademarks and copyright
now cover contents, brand names, and modes of expression and
presentation. Nothing is safe from these encroaching juridical
initiatives. Intellectual property rights have been
transformed into a myriad pernicious monopolies which threaten
to stifle innovation and competition.
Intellectual property - patents, content libraries,
copyrighted material, trademarks, rights of all kinds - are
sometimes the sole assets - and the only hope for survival -
of cash-strapped and otherwise dysfunctional or bankrupt
firms. Both managers and court-appointed receivers strive to
monetize these properties and patent-portfolios by either
selling them or enforcing the rights against infringing third
parties.
Fighting a patent battle in court is prohibitively expensive
and the outcome uncertain. Potential defendants succumb to
extortionate demands rather than endure the Kafkaesque
process. The costs are passed on to the consumer. Sony, for
instance already paid Forgent an undisclosed amount in May.
According to Forgent’s 10-Q form, filed on June 17, 2002, yet
another, unidentified “prestigious international” company,
parted with $15 million in April.
In commentaries written in 1999-2000 by Harvard law professor,
Lawrence Lessig, for “The Industry Standard”, he observed:
“There is growing skepticism among academics about whether
such state-imposed monopolies help a rapidly evolving market
such as the Internet. What is “novel,” “nonobvious” or
“useful” is hard enough to know in a relatively stable field.
In a transforming market, it’s nearly impossible…”
The very concept of intellectual property is being radically
transformed by the onslaught of new technologies.
The myth of intellectual property postulates that
entrepreneurs assume the risks associated with publishing
books, recording records, and inventing only because - and
where - the rights to intellectual property are well defined
and enforced. In the absence of such rights, creative people
are unlikely to make their works accessible to the public.
Ultimately, it is the public which pays the price of piracy
and other violations of intellectual property rights, goes the
refrain.
This is untrue. In the USA only few authors actually live by
their pen. Even fewer musicians, not to mention actors, eke
out subsistence level income from their craft. Those who do
can no longer be considered merely creative people. Madonna,
Michael Jackson, Schwarzenegger and Grisham are businessmen at
least as much as they are artists.
Intellectual property is a relatively new notion. In the near
past, no one considered knowledge or the fruits of creativity
(artwork, designs) as ‘patentable’, or as someone’s
‘property’. The artist was but a mere channel through which
divine grace flowed. Texts, discoveries, inventions, works of
art and music, designs - all belonged to the community and
could be replicated freely. True, the chosen ones, the
conduits, were revered. But they were rarely financially
rewarded.
Well into the 19th century, artists and innovators were
commissioned - and salaried - to produce their works of art
and contrivances. The advent of the Industrial Revolution -
and the imagery of the romantic lone inventor toiling on his
brainchild in a basement or, later, a garage - gave rise to
the patent. The more massive the markets became, the more
sophisticated the sales and marketing techniques, the bigger
the financial stakes - the larger loomed the issue of
intellectual property.
Intellectual property rights are less about the intellect and
more about property. In every single year of the last decade,
the global turnover in intellectual property has outweighed
the total industrial production of the world. These markets
being global, the monopolists of intellectual products fight
unfair competition globally. A pirate in Skopje is in direct
rivalry with Bill Gates, depriving Microsoft of present and
future revenue, challenging its monopolistic status as well as
jeopardizing its competition-deterring image.
The Open Source Movement weakens the classic model of property
rights by presenting an alternative, viable, vibrant, model
which does not involve over-pricing and anticompetitive
predatory practices. The current model of property rights
encourages monopolistic behavior, non-collaborative,
exclusionary innovation (as opposed, for instance, to Linux),
and litigiousness. The Open Source movement exposes the myths
underlying current property rights philosophy and is thus
subversive.
But the inane expansion of intellectual property rights may
merely be a final spasm, threatened by the ubiquity of the
Internet as they are. Free scholarly online publications
nibble at the heels of their pricey and anticompetitive
offline counterparts. Electronic publishing poses a threat -
however distant - to print publishing. Napster-like peer to
peer networks undermine the foundations of the music and film
industries. Open source software is encroaching on the turf of
proprietary applications. It is very easy and cheap to publish
and distribute content on the Internet, the barriers to entry
are virtually nil.
As processors grow speedier, storage larger, applications
multi-featured, broadband access all-pervasive, and the
Internet goes wireless - individuals are increasingly able to
emulate much larger scale organizations successfully. A single
person, working from home, with less than $2000 worth of
equipment - can publish a Webzine, author software, write
music, shoot digital films, design products, or communicate
with millions and his work will be indistinguishable from the
offerings of the most endowed corporations and institutions.
Obviously, no individual can yet match the capital assets, the
marketing clout, the market positioning, the global branding,
the sales organization, and the distribution network of the
likes of Sony, or Microsoft. In an age of information glut, it
is still the marketing, the media campaign, the distribution,
and the sales that determine the economic outcome.
This advantage, however, is also being eroded, albeit
glacially.
The Internet is essentially a free marketing and - in the case
of digital goods - distribution channel. It directly reaches
200 million people all over the world. Even with a minimum
investment, the likelihood of being seen by surprisingly large
numbers of consumers is high. Various business models are
emerging or reasserting themselves - from ad sponsored content
to packaged open source software.
Many creative people - artists, authors, innovators - are
repelled by the commercialization of their intellect and muse.
They seek - and find - alternatives to the behemoths of
manufacturing, marketing and distribution that today control
the bulk of intellectual property. Many of them go freelance.
Indie music labels, independent cinema, print on demand
publishing - are omens of things to come.
This inexorably leads to disintermediation - the removal of
middlemen between producer or creator and consumer. The
Internet enables niche marketing and restores the balance
between the creative genius and the commercial exploiters of
his product. This is a return to pre-industrial times when
artisans ruled the economic scene.
Work mobility increases in this landscape of shifting
allegiances, head hunting, remote collaboration, contract and
agency work, and similar labour market trends. Intellectual
property is likely to become as atomized as labor and to
revert to its true owners - the inspired folks. They, in turn,
will negotiate licensing deals directly with their end users
and customers.
Capital, design, engineering, and labor intensive goods -
computer chips, cruise missiles, and passenger cars - will
still necessitate the coordination of a massive workforce in
multiple locations. But even here, in the old industrial
landscape, the intellectual contribution to the collective
effort will likely be outsourced to roving freelancers who
will maintain an ownership stake in their designs or
inventions.
This intimate relationship between creative person and
consumer is the way it has always been. We may yet look back
on the 20th century and note with amazement the transient and
aberrant phase of intermediation - the Sony’s, Microsoft’s,
and Forgent’s of this world.
THE INTERNET AND THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
The Internet - A Medium or a Message?
By: Sam Vaknin
The State of the Net
An Interim Report about the Future of the Internet
Who are the participants who constitute the Internet?
* Users - connected to the net and interacting with it
* The communications lines and the communications equipment
* The intermediaries (e.g. the suppliers of on-line
information or access providers).
* Hardware manufacturers
* Software authors and manufacturers (browsers, site
development tools, specific applications, smart agents,
search engines and others).
* The “Hitchhikers” (search engines, smart agents,
Artificial Intelligence - AI - tools and more)
* Content producers and providers
* Suppliers of financial wherewithal (currently - corporate
and institutional cash gradually being replaced by
advertising money)
The fate of each of these components - separately and in
solidarity - will determine the fate of the Internet.
The first phase of the Internet’s history was dominated by
computer wizards. Thus, any attempt at predicting its future
dealt mainly with its hardware and software components.
Media experts, sociologists, psychologists, advertising and
marketing executives were left out of the collective effort to
determine the future face of the Internet.
As far as content is concerned, the Internet cannot be
currently defined as a medium. It does not function as one -
rather it is a very disordered library, mostly incorporating
the writings of non-distinguished megalomaniacs. It is the
ultimate Narcissistic experience. The forceful entry of
publishing houses and content aggregators is changing this
dismal landscape, though.
Ever since the invention of television there hasn’t been
anything as begging to become a medium as the Internet.
Three analogies spring to mind when contemplating the Internet
in its current state:
* A chaotic library
* A neural network or the latter day equivalent of previous
networks (telegraph, telephony, railways)
* A new continent
These metaphors prove to be very useful (even business-wise).
They permit us to define the commercial opportunities embedded
in the Internet.
Yet, they fail to assist us in predicting its future in its
transformation into a medium.
How does an invention become a medium? What happens to it when
it does become one? What is the thin line separating the
initial functioning of the invention from its transformation
into a new medium? In other words: when can we tell that some
technological advance gave birth to a new medium?
This work also deals with the image of the Internet once
transformed into a medium.
The Internet has the most unusual attributes in the history of
media.
It has no central structure or organization. It is hardware
and software independent. It (almost) cannot be subjected to
legislation or to regulation. Consider the example of
downloading music from the internet - is it tantamount to an
act of recording music (a violation of copyright laws)? This
has been the crux of the legal battle between Diamond
Multimedia (the manufacturers of the Rio MP3 device), MP3.com
and Napster and the recording industry in America.
The Internet’s data transfer channels are not linear - they
are random. Most of its “broadcast” cannot be “received” at
all. It allows for the narrowest of narrowcasting through the
use of e-mail mailing lists, discussion groups, message
boards, private radio stations, and chats. And this is but a
small portion of an impressive list of oddities. These
idiosyncrasies will also shape the nature of the Internet as a
medium. Growing out
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