From: avatar (avatar@renegadeclothing.com.au)
Date: Tue Jan 14 2003 - 19:31:36 MST
A great email. I can only add the impact of eink.com and the xerox digital
paper/ink project will be factored in. Freebooks will exist in a webpage to
digital paper download environment as a subculture. Full notions of freeware
await self-reproducing assemblers. As an aside, this ties in with notions of
limits to scientific knowledge for physics substructure/cosmology vs.
relatively unlimited social/cultural engines. It also ties in with the
notion that "base units of immortal living" for relatively "normal,
traditional human-style" living can be provided for free, i.e. your generic
3-d car template, toaster template, blah blah. There may be several hundred
of such "units" of practical existence, with several dozen being of survival
level.
Towards Ascension
Avatar Polymorph
34 After Armstrong
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@aeiveos.com>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 11:54 AM
Subject: Re: free information
>
> 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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