Information doesn’t deserve to be free -Jaron Lanier

Second life artifacts of life can make you rich when you reduce talented people to working for nothing and untalented people get paid for this crude approximation of life

Perhaps it is the irony of programmers making money from “rain” in Second Life but something tells me Web 2.0 philosophy is self-serving rhetoric meant to strip wealth from one group in society and give it to another. Second Life’s virtual money can become real-life cash

The architects of Web 2.0 are computer geeks. The insistence that information – as in books, music, graphics, the things created by people – are worthless and should be free is a double standard.

The Lord of the Internet Cloud, as Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier calls them, don’t do anything for free. Thirty years ago I paid nothing for TV, $25 a month for the telephone. Now I have a cell phone at $75 a month (there are 4 in this house), $180 to Eastlink for cable, phone and internet. I pay Microsoft $165 for the operating system on each computer I own, Intel $300 for a processor inside a computer that sells for $700. Google, who pay not a cent for the information they display, made $23 billion in revenues last year and netted $6.5 billion.

And if you play by the rules and do as the Lords of the Internet say, you can sell your music on iTunes and get paid. You can write crude graphics programs for Second Life and get paid.

If you are a talented graphic artist, photographer, musician, novelist, journalist, songwriter or other person from the pre-Web 2.0 – sorry. We will take your creative effort and pay you nothing. You don’t belong to the Web 2.0 club. We don’t owe you anything because we are freeing you from the bondage of your former life. We will let you tour and get paid if you perform in front of people but only until we decide your live performance is not a scarce commodity. Then you will have to busk for change.

Amazingly, one of the big proponents of free everything is “Tech Dirt” who slavishly follow the rule that only “scarce resources” get paid. Music and movies and videos are declared plentiful therefore free. The services of the people who own Tech Dirt are declared scarce and precious therefore you must pay them if they consult with you on how to make this work.

I am amazed by the self-serving arguments. Watch the credits roll by on a decent movie. There are hundreds if not thousands of people involved in making movies. Only a few movies break even. It’s childish to close your eyes to the real costs of producing art. Personally, I don’t care if the people who make movies get rich. I like to watch movies and at $10 a ticket or $20 a DVD it’s a bargain. Or I can wait until they are on TV and think they are free because the cable bill only comes once a month.

I know the arguments. Artists are freed from the shackles of the greedy agents, managers, record labels, big corporations. That is true, Web 2.0 does free people but why does it insist creatives aren’t worth paying for?

The answer probably lies in human greed. The Lords of the Internet control Web 2.0. They make up new rules to make themselves rich.

The Web 2.0 internet could pay artists. It’s easy when everyone is consuming artistic product on the internet. Each song already has a digital code. Encode the music, the movies, the books, the stories from newspapers with the digital code and work out a format for micro-payments. If someone wants to listen the cost would be tiny. If you want to own the mp3 or movie it’s $0.99 a song or $9.99 a movie, whatever the toll is.

If someone wants to embed the code for a story, song, video or movie on a website there would be no fee. The person consuming the product would pay a micro-payment.

Don’t be shocked – nothing is free. We are paying already for the ISPs, cable companies and others who extract money as we consume artistic product. Only now the money is not going to the people who produce the product.

Advertising is not a reliable way to pay for art. The advertisers want to control content and do. Look at YouTube. They are beholden to advertisers. We could carry display advertising on NJN Network. The rules are: no discussion of sexuality, controversial politics and if anyone says the word “Fuck” the ads are yanked.

Advertising is the death of free and lively debate. We won’t carry ads under any terms of censorship so we’ll never be rich but we will be free.

The quote is from Jaron Lanier who recently published You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.” Lanier is a pioneer of the internet world and he speaks passionately about the need to re-format the current model.

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