Let me begin with a picture of Kenneth Himma, Ph.D, J.D., and philosophy professor at Seattle Pacific University.
Alright, all kidding aside, this is actually actor Kevin Bacon in the 1978 film Animal House. And, if you are familiar with the scene being depicted, I should note that I am not asserting that Himma is a flustered ROTC student trying in vain to maintain order during a riot on the city streets after a fraternity prank causes mass chaos, uselessly shouting to the crowd “All is well!”. No, instead I should explain that this image is something that came to my mind when I realized that arguments Himma puts forth in a 2005 accepted and forthcoming APA Newsletters on Philosophy and Computers essay against the popular notion “information should be free” (ISBF) are likely to forever fall on deaf ears.
Now, I’m not necessarily claiming that Himma is standing in the middle of the chaos and proclaiming that “information should not be free”! In fact, Himma points out that he’s merely deconstructing the ISBF idea from the standpoint of mainstream moral views, maintaining that arguments in defense of ISBF are ungrounded and that legitimate intellectual property (IP) rights should be protected – that if IP law is illegitimate it’s not because of ISBF, but it would rather have to be because of something else. Well, that’s all well and good, but, like Bacon in the middle of the chaos, Himma is wasting his efforts.
I agree with Himma that there is no negative right to information, nor that the populace has a morally protected claim to any “true propositional content”, as Himma labels it. I agree that IP and IP holders deserve protection to the fullest extent of the law. I even agree that information should not be free solely based upon its nature, the marginal costs of its reproduction, or even general human interest in it. Truly, Himma is altogether accurate in his arguments. However, what Himma fails to adequately address is that the ISBF concept is only perfunctorily used as psychological rationale by some who wish to share information within the commons. In other words, I think some people in the ISBF crowd are only trying to defend what has become an unstoppable force within the networked information sphere, a “fact-of-life” that is pointless to defend: popular practices are inevitably making information BECOME free! Right or wrong, the crowd WANTS information to be free, and it’s going to get it.
Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks (2006) does not need to defend the reasons why information should, or “wants”, to be free. Its pages detail at length the many political, societal, cultural, and personal benefits to the ‘information commons’ ideal, and more importantly, that it actually exists and precisely how it functions to such ends. It’s a beast of a thing. And, if the losers are the institutions and persons who produce IP, their losses seem inconsequential to the beast. Even if it’s in the interest of fairness to compensate those who generate IP, once it reaches the commons, compensation becomes irrelevant because information just becomes free. Infringement happens – deal with it. Besides, laws are generally useless if they cannot be effectively enforced. Now, let me spell out that I’m not advocating that any laws be broken. Rather, I’m following in the footsteps of the Chris Andersons, Clay Shirkys, and Lawrence Lessigs of the world, all of whom have echoed or touched upon similar observations in their own work.
What this is really about is fear – fears that old economic models are dead, that fair practices will be eschewed, that voices will be lost, and that money will not be made. I guess that’s just too bad. Cut to Benkler:
…an ordered system of intake, filtering, and synthesis … has been shown to have emerged on the Web. It does not depend on single points of control. It avoids the generation of a din through which no voice can be heard, as the fears of fragmentation predicted. And, while money may be useful in achieving visibility, the structure of the Web means that money is neither necessary nor sufficient to grab attention – because the networked information economy, unlike its industrial predecessor, does not offer simple points of dissemination and control… (Benkler, 2005, p. 254)
In a space where money isn’t necessary to reach an audience and where money cannot buy control, it’s no wonder money isn’t coming back to those who rightfully (or not) deserve it. Arguments like Himma’s, no matter how semantically or philosophically grounded they may be, are wasted on a crowd addicted to the information commons and which does not care to be told they’re doing anything wrong. Like I said, infringement happens – deal with it, because the crowd wants information to be free.
References
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Himma, K. (2005). Information and intellectual property protection: Evaluating the claim that information should be free. American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers, Forthcoming. Retrieved 2 November 2009, from http://ssrn.com/abstract=727446.
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Tags: Benkler, copyright, Himma, information commons, infringement, intellectual property, IP, Wealth of Networks