I’m just going to come out and say what we all know to be true. Let’s call it the Manifest Destiny of the Internet.
The Manifest Destiny of the Internet is this: Every bit of media in existence1 will be digitized and made available to the world in a form that is instantly accessible from anywhere and free to use.2
The “pirates” will win, and win so completely that we will forget what the fuss was ever about. Grabbing media without impediment of any kind will come to seem as natural as breathing.
As Cory Doctorow likes to say, there is no future in which bits will get harder to copy. There was a brief period of time, starting with Gutenberg in the case of printed matter and Edison in the case of audio recordings, when mechanical reproduction was possible but difficult—hence, scarce and centrally controllable. That period of time is ending.
I chose the term “Manifest Destiny,” with all of its connotations both dark and bright, for a reason. The transition to this world will be ugly. It will take a long time, and won’t happen without a fight. A lot of good people will lose their livelihoods. The quality of media may suffer, at least in the short term, while new methods of quality control are worked out.
The old business models will survive for a generation on the back of consumer habit; they may survive for a generation more under the umbrella of government protection. In the end, though, as the efficiencies of the black and gray markets triumph, Big Media will run out of lobbying dollars. Intellectual property as we know it will be no more.
Massive efforts are already underway to digitize the world’s media and make it accessible online. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are working with the world’s libraries to digitize books. Virtually every audio recording ever released can be found online—a project realized without any centrally organized effort.
Many of these projects are not sanctioned by rights holders, but increasingly, copyright holders themselves are making their catalogs available, reasoning that traffic can be monetized in any number of ways—see the New York Times archive and NBC/Fox’s Hulu, for instance. Scarcities will arise in the post-copyright world, along with ways to leverage those scarcities for gain. In a world where the viewer has unlimited choice, eyeballs and attention spans will become the new commodities to be brokered.
Edit: Anthony Grafton presents a contrary view in the New Yorker.
1. I’ll limit this to media which has been published and survived long enough to be digitized.
2. Also: high-quality, searchable, and fully hypertextualized.
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1 comment:
Yes, this does seem to be the inevitable way of things. We can see it already occurring in the newsprint production companies as production tails off.
However, I don't think, as you suggest, that intellectual property will be dead. Instead, it will belong, as it always has with technical patents, to those who control access. Technical patents have been the exclusive right of those who have the training to understand and apply the information. While they are published for anyone who cares to look them up and maintain an intellectual property owner through professional courtesy and ethics only, they remain in the domain of the scientist and the engineer.
However, mass media is intrinsically developed to be accessible to anyone, and so the intellectual property will belong to the ISPs, who can allow or refuse access to the media at their desire. One good example is China's firewall for its public. Will all media be under this kind of scrutiny in the future? The possibility is certainly there if the world becomes digitized.
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