The Land of Free

Looking forward to reading Free, the long awaited book by WIRED main man and digital prophet Chris Anderson, author of the book with the already institutionalized title ‘The Long Tail’. In The Long Tail Anderson argued that the Internet will offer a new future (and bright business opportunities) for all those precious backlist titles and other long lost ephemera, now again findable and traceable thanks to the ultimate search powers of the world wide web. This theory, set out first in an article with the same title, has recently been criticized, but still gives a nice insider view on what the net is really all about: seek and thou shalt find.

Anderson’s new book Free: the future of a radical price, to be released July 7, is also based on an article released previously on/in WIRED. In this article, and more elaborately in the book I presume, Anderson discusses the omnipresence of free on the Internet, giving rise to what many believe is an inherent law of the web: everything online will eventually be free (in Anderson’s words: ‘It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned’).

But how to make money with free? How to create incentives for people to produce content if everything online is free? How can we build an economy around freemium?

Two nice reviews in the Guardian (here and here) look at the book from different perspectives. The first one is mostly interested in the potential of the web for free business models, as an extension of the public domain. The last on the other hand criticizes Anderson’s lack of attention for what this trend will eventually lead to and this might perhaps have to do with the problem of incentives for creating content when everything is free. But as Anderson shows, free does not mean money can not be made in another way (for instance through advertisements, cross-subsidizing, premium services, offering experiences, online vs. offline models etc.). Next to that the principle of the gift economy also plays a large role online. As Anderson states, money is not the only motivator to produce, and our economies are increasingly based on values like respect and time (reputation economy and attention economy). Still, on a very basic, practical level, something does sting here, foremost a lack of certainty that the free will actually make revenue in another way (granted in the old model sales are not certain either). So, I am looking forward to see how Anderson tackles this problem at a less theoretical level. A first preview part of the book has been published on/in WIRED here. Also via WIRED video, you can find a video of Anderson talking about Free underneath. And for the rest the wait is until July 7^th.

On a side note: the book has been accused of plagiarism, taking uncredited source material from amongst others Wikipedia. Well, that only shows free has limits. Even free sharing of information still means we need to refer to our sources. Seems to me one of the basics of the reputation economy and this little stunt is definitely harming Anderson’s.

RiP, Maecenas and Event

Brett Gaylor, the director of the Open Source documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, is experimenting with the ‘Maecenas model’ (by others dubbed the ‘pay–as-you-like’ or Radiohead/NIN model) while launching his documentary online as a free download. I have written about RiP before here and since then the (CC licensed) feature length film has only gained more popularity and media attention.

WIRED dedicated a whole article, consisting of an interview with Gaylor, on the movie and discusses its business model, the release and popularity of the movie and the ‘copyfight movement’ Gaylor is involved in.

 Why would Gaylor choose the Maecenas model? When we consider other possible free online content (or Open Access) business models, the Maecenas model does seem to be a more logical model than the model I wrote about yesterday which Bloomsbury Academic is applying to Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix. For in this model there is a clear cut end product, a printed book that can be bought to cover the costs for the production and the free online dissemination of the product. In the case of RiP, this seems a less logical path to follow: the whole idea behind this documentary movie is of course that there is no end product: in the process of continually remixing, reediting and mashing-up the material RiP consists of, the documentary could better be seen as a (continuous) project than a product. As WIRED states: ‘in the realities of remix culture, where there is no such thing as a final cut’. This of course does not mean that certain ‘snapshots’ of the documentary can not be ’materialized’ and sold as products to cover for the costs. And Gaylor does this too, releasing DVD versions of the movie and showing his documentary in a theatrical run at movie theaters and festivals. So in a way, he is betting on two horses. However, Gaylor’s alternative choice for the Maecenas model seems very interesting for the current project. In this specific case it seems like a very good idea to apply this community based model, where RiP collected quite a large network of remix collaborators and enthusiasts around its project core and attracted lot of similar minded folks interested in the goals and values Gaylor tries to spread and promote with his movie, who might definitely be interested in promoting this project further.

However, one of the additional problems of financing and even possibly profiting from such an inherent collaborative and community based project is how to divide the costs and the benefits? As Gaylor states in the WIRED interview:

 “But since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be rewarded, that we wouldn’t undercut their efforts to promote and recoup on the film by giving it away.”

 This of course also refers to the problem of attribution in such an ‘authorless documentary’ or collaborative approach: who will get the money? Will it go to Gaylor, (who of course in this case is still very much the master mind and creative brain behind the project) will it go to the foundation Open Source Cinema, which Gaylor has founded?

For Gaylor this does not seem to be the biggest problem however. His goal is to make the documentary as largely available as possible, arguing that that should be what copyright should be about in the first place. Gaylor in WIRED:

 “We’ve gone to really great lengths to make this film as accessible as possible,” […]“It’s already on the Pirate Bay, and that’s great — it’s another delivery format. We didn’t put it there ourselves, though; we didn’t need to. Had we gone that route, it’s fairly likely, given the realities of the film-distribution universe, that we wouldn’t have these other opportunities to get the film to people who still watch TV, rent DVDs or go to movies, which is, in fact, most people. We wanted those people to watch this movie.”

 

When asked about his views on copyright he favors a balance between creating an incentive for producers and at the same time creating as wide accessibility to the consumer population as possible:

 “The classic copyright ones: Providing an incentive, while at the same time ensuring the public’s access to the work. Ultimately, that’s what I, and most people in this movement, are pushing for — a balance. So the film release was a lot more “free as in speech” than it was “free as in beer,” because it was important for me that average folks could see the film on TV or in theaters. And eventually, after a limited term (measured in months!), the film will fall into the public/pirate domain and be copied freely.”

 Gaylor also has some interesting thoughts about the future of remix culture and business models concerning movie distribution in such a context. He talks about going to the cinema as maybe becoming a (money making) experience event on the same scale as going to a concert. This could then serve as a way to cover for the costs that will be lost when the content will be available as a free download or as a pirated version:

 “We’ll see how I feel about that in a year. The remixing is just starting to take off, and I envision a time when these sorts of interactions will create an environment where a theatrical screening is to filmmakers what live performances are to musicians. The ability to create something unique for a particular screening or event allows you to offer an added value to that audience member, as well as have something unique that’s different from what you can get on a DVD or online.”

 And this is interesting indeed, while things might be increasingly online for free the logical option seems to be to charge for events that are unique and cannot be recreated in a ‘reproductive’ manner in an online environment. And this means that, paradoxically enough (or is it even that paradoxical?), Event becomes a capitalist commodity, whereas that what can be reproduced and spread easily online will more and more become available for free. Talk about turning around your business model.

In praise of Eleutheria

‘Beauty is pregnant with potentiality’ – Bracha Ettinger

 

Again, delving deeper into the rabbit hole, let’s try to entangle the concepts in the web of free knowledge definitions.

In the previous post we mainly discussed the difference between free information and free knowledge. But we were not quite finished. We were still basically stuck when we hit the Cyberpunk definition which gave information an inherent entelechy towards freedom, making it in a way into an active agent.

 

But maybe we shouldn’t interpret the cyberpunk aphorism of ‘information wants to be free’ in such a way. For as we established before, information in itself is not active. Information needs an agent. If we again look closer at the DIKW definition, we find that knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, it is thus deterministic. Information has (or can have) use and meaning, but only becomes knowledge when it is ‘made active’, when it is put to use, involving an action/actor. Again, in other words to make it clearer: information without action might have meaning and may be useful, only when it is put to use can it become knowledge. As the definition says: the intent of knowledge is to be useful, information does not have this intent, it only has the potential.

Information needs an action/actor to combine information into knowledge: to give it meaning in context.

 

Now as we look at it in this way, the cyberpunk definition of information should be free or wants to be free, can be interpreted as in order to be able to become knowledge. And this is the possibility the web offers increasingly.

 

Now this potentiality of information entails two things:

 

-         -     It entails an actor, who acts upon the information, collecting and combining it in such a manner and applying it to the appropriate context so that it can become knowledge. Since it is the actor (or actors in this respect, for of course in many occasions it is groups of people working together turning information into knowledge) who is responsible for the creation of this knowledge, it is in a way his or her interpretation, combination and contextualization of the information. This explains why people have moral rights or even claim copyright or intellectual ownership over their active creation of knowledge out of information (if they publish it that is, there is no such thing as copyright on thoughts, unfortunately one thinks sometimes…).

 

-         It also entails a movement, a dynamic, as already expressed in the Cyberpunk definition. Not a dynamic inherent in information however, but a dynamic from information towards knowledge (a force in between information and knowledge in a way). It is the potentiality itself that creates the dynamic, the need towards. As the Cyberpunk movement argues, the digital age and the coming of the Internet, which has freed information from its mostly physical and print based constraints, has enlarged this potentiality of information enormously, making the dynamic or movement seem in a way more urgent, or more logical. In this way one can say that it is the digital age that makes information want to be free.

 

As a final remark, what is interesting in even more recent developments is that the actor can now also be a computer: with the rise of the semantic web the computer can turn/turns information into knowledge or at least into networked information, conceptualizing and contextualizing it and thus combining it in a useful manner. Maybe this means information and communication technologies as well as social media are adding a new layer to the DIKW hierarchy: Connectionism, or connected, interlinked information. As Kevin Kelly says when speaking about social media: ‘we are connecting everything to everything’, and: ‘when connected into a swarm, small thoughts become smart.’

Bits of Freedom

As promised before, I would like to dig a little deeper into the meaning and complexities of the concept of free information, referring to the well known aphorism ‘information wants to be free’. No better way to start than by throwing in some good old definitions we can all find scattered on the web.

So stay tuned (or run away screaming) for Everything you always wanted to know about….free information, free knowledge, open knowledge, gratis knowledge, open science, open access, open content, copyright, copyleft and Creative Commons and most importantly, what the difference is between the lot of them.

 

First of all we need to establish the difference between information and knowledge. Often a distinction is made between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. Together they form the knowledge hierarchy. One can find a lot of sources for the origin of this model, but it seems the original distinction was born in poetry. As T.S. Eliot wrote in 1934 in the opening stanza of the choruses from his play “The Rock“:

 

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

            Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

            Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

 

Milan Zeleny (who quotes Albert Einstein on his website with ‘information is not knowledge’, although I can find no source for this quote online nor can others) and Russell Ackoff are both said to have expanded the DIKW definition. The difference between the concepts comes down to something like this:

 

Data… data is raw. It simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence (in and of itself). It can exist in any form, usable or not. It does not have meaning of itself. In computer parlance, a spreadsheet generally starts out by holding data.

Information… information is data that has been given meaning by way of relational connection. This “meaning” can be useful, but does not have to be. In computer parlance, a relational database makes information from the data stored within it.

Knowledge… knowledge is the appropriate collection of information, such that it’s intent is to be useful. Knowledge is a deterministic process. When someone “memorizes” information (as less-aspiring test-bound students often do), then they have amassed knowledge. This knowledge has useful meaning to them, but it does not provide for, in and of itself, an integration such as would infer further knowledge. For example, elementary school children memorize, or amass knowledge of, the “times table”. They can tell you that “2 x 2 = 4″ because they have amassed that knowledge (it being included in the times table). But when asked what is “1267 x 300″, they can not respond correctly because that entry is not in their times table. To correctly answer such a question requires a true cognitive and analytical ability that is only encompassed in the next level… understanding. In computer parlance, most of the applications we use (modeling, simulation, etc.) exercise some type of stored knowledge.” (source: http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm)

Important in this respect is that both information and knowledge are in this definition already seen as processed data. However, knowledge has an utilitarian streak to it, for, as the above definition says, its intend is to be useful. Information does not have this intent. It is just there, you can do with it what you want, make it knowledgeable in a fashion you see fit. Information already has meaning conveyed in it but lacks in a way direction, it needs an actor. The most important aspect to remember in this respect is that knowledge is information that has been put to use, adding another layer of value to the raw data (they also speak of the DIKW pyramid). This is an important difference which we will come back to later.

Now that we have established the difference between knowledge and information, let’s go back to the free-bit. What is the difference between free information and free knowledge?

When one googles free information, Wikipedia brings up ‘information wants to be free’, the slogan first coined by Stewart Brand. It has been, as Wikipedia says, given a normative spin by hacker Richard Stallman:

“I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses… When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.”

Interestingly enough, Stallman here combines usefulness with information, into useful information. Is he talking about knowledge here? Not necessarily, information can be useful of course (as also mentioned in the definition above), only when it is put to use (again by an actor, requiring an action) does it become knowledge or knowledgeable. Information always also is potential knowledge and this is also what makes it potentially valuable (in the right hands). The Cyberpunk movement goes even further according to Wikipedia, arguing that information ánd knowledge should be free since ‘its internal force or entelechy makes it essentially incompatible with proprietary notions. Information is dynamic, ever-growing and evolving and cannot be contained within (any) ideological structure.’

I like the way Wikipedia says that with these notions ‘desire’ is put into information, it is brought to life in a way, craving freedom, needing to be liberated. But if one makes information come to life in this fashion (giving it an internal drive), doesn’t one also create a sort of living Frankenstein, putting agency in a lifeless abstract and in itself (though not potentially) useless concept? Doesn’t the Cyberpunk movement in this way destroy the distinction between information and knowledge? Or do they simply not approve of the above definition? Or do cyberpunks see themselves as the agency ‘liberating’ information, in the form of the so-called hacker?

And now what is exactly the difference with free knowledge?

I will get back to that later.