From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 17:54:57 MST
On Tue, 14 Jan 2003, Nathanael Allison wrote:
> I know this idea is going to be attacked since many of the people on this
> list are authors. I'm not purposefully trying to make enemies. I know it
> seems that way.
Not really Nathanael -- even if ones perspective potentially harms some
subset of list members, one would hope that we could try to debate it
in an open and constructive fashion.
> Why aren't these books available on programs like napster. There are a ton
> af them, kazaa, imesh, bearshare ect.... I'm searched and found nothing. We
> could make all the books under a special search like "extrotrans3456".
As to the "why", that is fairly easy to answer. Most content producers
(those who have electronic copies of the media) don't run around publishing
their materials in open forums because this amounts to (in the current
environment) shooting oneself in the foot. This is what generated the
big blowup about Elcom/Sklyarov cracking the Adobe eBook format.
There appears to be a catalog of registered copyrights:
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/
For those entities which are out of copyright, there is
Project Gutenburg: http://www.gutenberg.net/
See also: http://www.gutenberg.net/history.html
> I mean i haven't bought a CD in like 5 years. Why shouldn't we be able to
> download books as well. I know it's illegal, but no one is doing anything
> about the free music.
If you think this is true, you haven't been reading Slashdot and other
sources re: the various efforts regarding the RIAA and enforcement of the
DMCA or some of the laws being floated before congress at this time. It
isn't for lack of *trying* to solve the problem. It is because
to really solve it one has to trump both (a) encryption technology
and (b) distributed computing. It doesn't seem likely that (a)
will happen without "quantum computing" or that (b) will happen without
some really strong revocation of the concept of "privacy rights".
Your ability to enjoy novel (new) music would disappear overnight
if all artists producing such content simply refused to release it
in a form that could be copied or redistributed. (One could imagine
an "active" music player that simply refused to "play" a song unless
it could connect to a secure server and verify one owned a license
to listen to said song. I.e. you have to provide a real-time thumb
print at human body temperatures matched with a voice print and
retina scan in order to enable the playing of specific songs for the next
24 hours.)
> Really though shouldn't these books be available to anyone for free.
> For transhumanistic ideas to gain a greater base shouldn't it be free like
> the bible.
This depends on the author. For example, I make many of the papers
I've written over the last decade available for free to anyone with
so much excess time on their hands that they will bother to read them.
Many other academic types do the same (though they usually go through
some "producers" to do so). There is obviously quite a dichotomy
between Nature charging one $15.00 to receive a copy of a paper,
that I as an author could XoX and send to you for probably less
than $1.00. Obviously the dichotomy gets much larger when one
considers that one can pay $15.00 for a 6-8 page paper from Nature
or $15.95 for "The Spike" (384 pages) from Amazon [even more
discounted if you get "The Spike" and "The Age of Spiritual Machines"
for $21.64]. Is the information content of these books really
so low that academic papers can justify charging ~45x the amount
per page?
The problem is this -- until one has really robust nanotech -- so
personal survival is not an issue (i.e. you can live off the "fruit
of the land" for free), then one *has* to pay the scientists, reporters,
authors, playrights, musicians, actors, etc. if one expects content
to be produced. It seems likely that that will flip once one has
robust nanotech -- i.e. the producers will have to pay the consumers
to consume their product because there will be a shift in the relative
quantity of producers/consumers. But for now producer # is << consumer #
so the consumers should be paying in one way or another (taxes to direct
payments) for the content they find useful.
> What it comes down to is where is the money going that is generated by these
> books. If most of it is just going into someone's pocket tham I'm sorry that
> seems very unextropian to me. I know people have to make a living but beyond
> that there main concern should be to make as big an impact as they can.
One has to keep in mind distribution numbers. If a technical book,
e.g. Nanosystems or Nanomedicine, sells more than 10,000 copies it is
viewed as a blockbuster. One has to contrast this with Michael Chrichton
novel or a Tom Hanks movie where one is dealing with quantities of millions.
I think there may be a bias within the production industry as to how
one goes about creating a Michael or a Tom (so one can get the economies
of scale bumped by 2-3 orders of magnitude). Whether that is generally
good or bad I don't know. It raises some paradoxical questions as to
how one can have a "big impact" if one doesn't have a "name" and how
one can have a "name" if someone hasn't invested in creating that and
how one can "invest in creating a name" if one doesn't skim funds from
what one knows are really unprofitable ventures in order to invest those
funds into "name creation".
Food for thought.
Robert
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