Information Doesn't Want to Be - Cory Doctorow

Last updated Apr 3, 2024

• Author: Cory Doctorow
• Full Title: Information Doesn’t Want to Be
• Category: #books

what Charles Dickens did, a hundred and fifty years before, when copyright laws meant that his copyrights were worth nothing in the U.S.: he was widely read, but he was not making any money from it. So he took the piracy as advertising, and toured the U.S. in theaters, reading from his books. He made money, and he saw America. (Location 155)

Mammals, he said, and I paraphrase here and do not put it as well as Cory did, invest a great deal of time and energy in their young, in the pregnancy, in raising them. Dandelions just let their seeds go to the wind, and do not mourn the seeds that do not make it. Until now, creating intellectual content for payment has been a mammalian idea. Now it’s time for creators to accept that we are becoming dandelions. (Location 171)

I just stood there, literally silent, waiting for them to tip me out for the weird, loving act of randomness I was making available to humankind. (Location 205)

People actually like supporting the artists whose work they like. It makes them feel happy. You don’t have to force them. And if you force them, they don’t feel as good. (Location 212)

They’d enjoyed the content, and they wanted to feel the pleasure of firsthand, direct support for the content provider. (Location 220)

the philosophy that has kept street performance viable for hundreds of years. Not everybody passing by will play the game. But enough people will play to make free content an ongoing reality. (Location 229)

a more mutually supportive ecosystem. We don’t know exactly what it will look like or how it will function, but as long as human beings enjoy trafficking in the commerce of art and information, it is possible. (Location 235)

By putting laws into place that stop the free flow of information, sounds, and images, you mute the possibility of a real, authentic exchange. You take control out of the hands of the content creator, and out of the hands of the public, who can no longer decide whether or not they want to offer their support. (Location 239)

agony. (Location 249)

This is the lesson I learned, as a rock star and as a street performer in my wedding dress: • Keep the content authentic, • keep the exchange honest, • keep the message spreading by any means necessary, • and people will come. • Once they come, if you make it easy for them, many will pay. (Location 256)

Trying to protect a system that’s now fundamentally broken is like trying to reroute a raincloud to go and thunderstorm over a different town. You’re better off dealing with the facts, and grabbing your umbrella. Or, if you’re like many of the people I know: stripping naked and running around in the street, screaming with joy, and enjoying the downpour. (Location 277)

at the turn of the twentieth century, composers were forced to defend their own turf— they called performers pirates, and insisted that recording music was a form of theft. (Location 285)

When we’re talking about copyright, we’re fundamentally talking about four different activities: making creative works, investing in creative works, distributing and selling creative works, and enjoying creative works. (Location 309)

some of the most dedicated audiences are made of up creators themselves (which is why authors are usually photographed standing in front of a wall of other people’s books). (Location 316)

Businesspeople are prone to all sorts of madness. Succeeding in business requires that you avoid this madness. One particular strain of madness is the overwhelming, irrational concern that you might be letting someone benefit from your work for free— what an economist would call “aversion to positive externalities.” (Location 325)

wellspring (Location 344)

“Jam yesterday; jam tomorrow; no jam today.” That is, we used to have jam, before everything changed, and we’re told there will be even more jam in the future. But right now, there is no jam. (Location 345)

People working through trauma and depression have been rehabilitated by art therapists teaching them to express themselves artistically. (Location 359)

“irrational,” in that the work artists put into their craft exceeds any reasonable expectation of profit or even a break-even return. (Location 361)

Pretty much everyone who ever set out to earn a living (or part of a living) in the arts failed. (Location 379)

The single most important thing you need in order to have a career in the arts is persistence. The second most important thing you need is talent. The third most important thing is a grounding in how the the online world works. (Location 394)

if I’m wrong, I promise that I’ll be wrong in a well-informed and interesting way. (Location 413)

When the UN writes a treaty, it asks the countries of the world to sign on to it. These signatories go on to pass national laws that reflect their obligations under these treaties. (Location 438)

There is a law (the DMCA, in the U.S.) that says it’s illegal to descramble a movie without permission— and this is what makes anti-circumvention so pernicious. (Location 455)

there’s an “algorithm”— a mathematical system for scrambling the text. These algorithms are usually public and well understood, because no one is ever sure if an algorithm is secure until all her peers get a chance to look at it and check it over for flaws. (Location 469)

Because anti-circumvention rules mean that only a digital lock’s maker can authorize you to open it, on-the-fly conversions to improve compatibility often aren’t allowed. That’s how copyright ceases to protect creative works and begins to protect digital locks instead. (Location 492)

Digital locks are roach motels: copyrighted works check in, but they don’t check out. Creators and investors lose control of their business— they become commodity suppliers for a distribution channel that calls all the shots. Anti-circumvention isn’t copyright protection: it’s middleman protection. (Location 531)

As Brewster tells it, Microsoft spent years waving one hand over its head, shouting, “Look out! Pirates! Pirates!” In the other hand, it held the knife. (Location 555)

Amazon offered the labels a lateral move: give up on digital rights management (DRM) software and sell your music as “unprotected” MP3s (Location 572)

an Internet meme called “Now you’ve got two problems.” As in: “Your shower broke, and you decided to fix it yourself instead of calling a plumber. Now you’ve got two problems.” (Location 581)

books are old. Much older than copyright. Older than property. Older than markets. (Location 617)

reverence (Location 618)

Destroying a book has some of the same emotional tenor as eating a dog. (Location 619)

if publishers do succeed in convincing readers that books are just like CDs and DVDs, then the sight of a book in a shredder will have no more emotional kick than the sight of an old, scratched CD in the gutter, and publishers will lose all the social value they currently get for free. (Location 627)

“Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is cash-poor and time-rich.” (Location 636)

There was a weird Keystone Kops moment when the big studios and their technology partners tried to prevent publication of the 09 F9 key— every time they did, it made the news, and affronted Internet users republished it somewhere else. Soon, there were millions of copies of the number. (Location 663)

Job done. Ed Felten (see previous sidebar) once assembled a team of researchers that looked at the difficulty of removing the Secure Digital Music Initiative watermark— the product of the most ambitious and expensive watermarking project ever undertaken. They figured out how to do it with ease. (Location 715)

THE MAJOR STRATEGY behind both spyware and anti-copying software is called a “rootkit.” Rootkits are programs that covertly modify a computer’s operating system to blind it to certain files and processes. (Location 747)

Fundamentally, the only way to get computers to resist users’ attempts to see what’s going on inside them is to design programs with the facility to misreport their files and processes. And forcing such programs on users inevitably opens the door to spyware. (Location 772)

These computers came loaded with secret software that could operate the laptops’ cameras covertly (when the software ran, the cameras’ green activity lights stayed dark), as well as capture screengrabs and copy the files on the computers’ hard drives. (Location 777)

A RECENT TREND in the computer industry is to sell general-purpose computers as “appliances” with limited functionality. (Location 786)

Cui undertook to reverse-engineer their technology himself, and was able to quickly unravel the system. He found that HP had devoted a lot of resources to preventing the use of refilled cartridges, but almost none to other types of security. (Location 825)

Without a thorough understanding of our computers’ workings, and without independent verification of their security, it’s impossible to trust our machines. (Location 838)

In 2011, a security researcher named Trevor Eckhart discovered that some Android phones had shipped with a commercial rootkit called “Carrier IQ.” (Location 843)

When Eckhart published his findings, the carriers performed the classic deny-threaten-downplay tactics, (Location 847)

Study after study shows that overseas downloading of U.S. TV shows drops off sharply when those shows are put on the air internationally. (Location 867)

Refusing to sell their viewers the content they wanted in the format they preferred drove those viewers to piracy. • Once the audience started pirating the content they wanted, they quickly turned to pirating other content, too. • Having become aware of and proficient in the ways of downloading, the audience developed a downloading habit that outlasted the end of the blackout. (Location 891)

If you’re a publisher, label, or studio, the answer is simple: don’t let companies sell your goods with digital locks on them. (Location 899)

Tim O’Reilly is known for many things: he cowrote one of the first UNIX manuals, he popularized the term “Web 2.0.” He’s also famous for saying “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” (Location 931)

one charge is that being copied helps you make money only if you’re already famous. (Location 946)

C.K. showed that the absence of digital locks wasn’t a disincentive to pay him. By performing an act of public generosity and trust, he inspired a million bucks’ worth of reciprocal generosity and trust. (Location 979)

No one can decide whether your stuff is worth money until they see it; and • they can’t see it until they know it exists. (Location 1041)

Even famous and successful acts, who represent a major source of revenue for the labels, usually can’t renegotiate the deals they signed starting out. (Location 1057)

The reason the deal is nonnegotiable is that it is industry-wide. There are only three major record labels, and they all offer the same rotten terms to their new artists. (Location 1061)

If you sign with an indie label today, there’s every chance that you’ll be recorded, mixed, and mastered by the same engineers and producers, in the same studio, that you would have been working with if you’d gone with a major. (Location 1083)

Copyright Royalty Board (Location 1092)

musicians get nothing from U.S. radio play, and never have. Only the songwriters are entitled to a royalty. (Location 1100)

Word of mouth has always been a creator’s best friend. Recommendations from personally trusted sources were a surefire way to sell products. (Location 1124)

The Internet is practically made of word of mouth. Telecommunications has always been bigger than entertainment. (Location 1127)

Sociable conversation is the inevitable product of socializing. Sociable conversation is the way that human beings establish trusted relationships among themselves. (Location 1145)

Some artists have also turned largely obsolete formats like CDs into swag by packaging them in elaborate, beautiful enclosures. (Location 1237)

this is the era of on-demand swag. Increasingly, T-shirts and other items can be made in very small batches, even one at a time, (Location 1240)

One way to think about commissioned work is that it represents the price of adjusting your creative priorities. (Location 1249)

many free/ open-source software creators work on programs and features just because they like the idea of them. But, having made a name for themselves as expert, high-quality software developers, these people attract commercial commissions from companies that have a need for a specific feature or program. (Location 1249)

Concert promoters don’t particularly care if recorded music is paid for or copied freely, just so long as it’s popular, because the more popular an artist is, the more the concert tickets are worth. (Location 1256)

Again, the Internet acts as a force multiplier here— you can ask more people, in more places, and accept their donations in more ways. (Location 1283)

The Humble Indie Bundle is a wildly successful “pay-what-you-like” distributor of video games. (Location 1284)

PayPal, the most popular payment processor online, has a well-deserved reputation as a high-handed, obstreperous bureaucracy that arbitrarily freezes its customers’ accounts, often without recourse. (Location 1307)

Occupy Wall Street movement. (Location 1322)

If you’ve given a lot of thought to your industry, have a good feel for what’s going on, and are prepared to do a lot of work that isn’t related in any particular way to “creating”— that is instead best characterized as accounting, administration, marketing, PR, bookkeeping, and sales— then you’re less likely to fail on your own than you are to fail with an industry partner. (Location 1329)

entertainment giants are giant, slow-moving, and remorseless does not mean that they aren’t also the way to make the most money while reaching the largest audience with your work. (Location 1356)

Entering the arts because you want to get rich is like buying lottery tickets because you want to get rich. (Location 1394)

A company “externalizes” its costs by causing some other business (or the government) to pick up the tab. The classic externalized cost is pollution. (Location 1417)

A common carrier is an intermediary that “carries” everyone who can pay the price of admission, regardless of who they are, where they’re coming from, where they’re going, and why they’re out and about. In exchange, common carriers are absolved of any liability for the problems created by their carriage. (Location 1425)

The ferryman loses his common-carrier status as soon as he starts to pick and choose from among the people on their way to market. (Location 1432)

Two thousand fourteen was the year that “net neutrality” sprang into the public consciousness, and not a moment too soon. At its heart, net neutrality is the idea that ISPs should deliver the bits we ask for as quickly as they can get them. (Location 1472)

Notice and Takedown works pretty much like it sounds: if you think a file hosted on my server is infringing on your copyright, you tell me (Notice) and I have to remove it (Takedown). As long as I do so, I’m considered a common carrier— no matter what happens in the ensuing legal battle, I’m not liable for it. If (Location 1535)

anything that makes it easy to remove material from the Internet makes it easy to commit acts of petty censorship. (Location 1564)

Globally, copyright is often interwoven into trade agreements. (Location 1573)

PIPA and SOPA sparked a global storm of Internet-driven protests, and resulted in millions of calls and emails to the U.S. Congress and Senate and, ultimately, the withdrawal of the legislation. (Location 1580)

the Internet is the nervous system of the information age, and that laws that treat it without due regard are a threat to the very idea of a fair and free society. (Location 1584)

the legislative agenda for the entertainment lobby. And if you wanted to sum up that agenda in a single sentence, it would be this: More intermediary liability, with fewer checks and balances. (Location 1589)

Many companies and nonprofit organizations maintain “proxy” servers, which can be used to increase the security and robustness of one’s Internet connections. (Location 1628)

The fewer channels there are, the worse the deal for creators will be. (Location 1666)

Everything we do to increase intermediary liability decreases creators’ leverage and makes it harder for audiences to help each other find new things to love. (Location 1705)

These people have devoted their lives to fighting against special protection for digital locks. They’re fighting, too, against increased intermediary liability on the Internet. (Location 1733)

Our social intercourse is built on subtext as much as it is on text (Location 1752)

Industrial regulations should apply to industries, not individuals, families, and private groups. (Location 1786)

Heartfelt personal messages from people you love— or people you identify with— have virtues that can’t be matched by scripted banter. (Location 1887)

It’s about scale: once a company is big enough that it can boss everyone around, it does, and that bossing is only ever to the benefit of that company and its shareholders. (Location 1906)

SOPA and PIPA included provisions allowing users to unfreeze financial accounts and reinstate websites by filing legal papers with the appropriate intermediaries. (Location 1911)

And this goes double for people who don’t speak the language that the dispute-resolution system uses— dissidents in far-off lands, immigrants, and people who go cross-eyed at the sight of legalese. (Location 1918)

The UN, the EU, Finland, and many other governmental entities describe Internet access as a human right. (Location 1949)

A “free press” means more than “You are free to hand-write your message on scraps of paper and hand them to people”— it requires access to the full range of press technologies, and that includes the Internet. (Location 1961)

there are some weird edge-cases that reasonable people might disagree about (Location 1984)

Once we allow for some authority to secretly, unaccountably block information, we’d be foolish to expect anything but overbroad, abusive censorship. (Location 1996)

“not even wrong”— that is, it proceeds from factual misconceptions and then compounds them. (Location 2013)

Adding censorship to the Internet means adding surveillance to the Internet. (Location 2029)

Before the raid, Swedes were ambivalent about the site; afterward, many people decided that whatever wrong the Pirate Bay might be responsible for, it was peanuts compared to the real harms that entertainment-industry pressure had created— suborning illegal interference with the police and ordering a raid that casually destroyed the Internet presence of hundreds of local institutions. (Location 2043)

A plane is a flying Solaris minicomputer connected to a bunch of commodity SCADA controllers of the sort found everywhere from conveyor belts to nuclear power plants. (Location 2127)

security is a process, not a product (Location 2138)

As cryptographer Bruce Schneier quipped, “Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break.” (Location 2142)

real security systems are designed to be patched. (Location 2144)

But by building a facility for managing and enforcing copies into the Kindle, Amazon has created a new set of vulnerabilities to legal and technical attacks that are absolutely without precedent. (Location 2169)

Once the new operating system is installed, the 3DS restarts itself and checks to see whether the old operating system was “tampered with.” If it detects any tampering, it switches itself off and never switches on again. It is broken forever. (Location 2196)

In 2011, a branch of the German government was caught illegally sneaking a rootkit (the Staatstrojaner, or “State Trojan”) onto the PCs of people it suspected of crimes. (Location 2214)

In some countries, the NSA is actively recording every single cell-phone conversation, (Location 2227)

NIST was forced to recall one of its cryptographic standards after it became apparent that the NSA had infiltrated its process and deliberately weakened the standard (Location 2234)

When we take away the right to figure out if something bad is going on in our computers, the inevitable consequence is that bad things will happen in our computers. (Location 2256)

copying will never, ever get harder. (Location 2303)

If we’re going to regulate the Internet and the computer, let’s not treat them like glorified cable-TV delivery services. Let’s regulate them as the building blocks of the information age. (Location 2314)

The rule, established by the Copyright Act of 1790, created a short period of initial copyright, fourteen years, renewable by the author for another fourteen years. (Location 2323)

Take music sampling. Incorporating snatches of one song into another has long been an integral part of musical performance. (Location 2361)

Kmit lifted his bow from the strings, and the hall fell silent, except for the ringing phone. After a moment, Kmit began to improvise on the (over) familiar song. The performance that follows is astounding. It’s great music. It’s also perfectly legal. (Location 2366)

none of the classic hip-hop albums could have been released under present-day practices. (Location 2378)

But thanks to record-industry lobbying (sometimes abetted by musicians), the term of copyright for sound recordings in most of the world is now ninety-five years. This extension was applied retroactively, (Location 2388)

it’s transcendently hard to clear a sample unless you’re signed to one of those labels, too. (Location 2393)

Blanket licenses are how radio DJs are able to play music. (Location 2409)

the compulsory license, allows musicians to record cover versions of each other’s songs without negotiating specific permission. (Location 2410)

“illicit” download services could start to focus on delivering excellent user experiences, new artist-discovery systems, (Location 2427)

Collective licensing societies have a poor track record when it comes to fairly distributing the fees they collect. (Location 2434)

A collecting society run with the smarts of Google and the transparency of GNU/ Linux has the potential to see to it that payments are fairly dispersed. (Location 2440)

a blanket-license scheme is possible. It’s been done. A lot. It works. (Location 2448)

Better music services will bring in more listeners and more license fees, and pay more artists and more investors. (Location 2457)

Dandelions produce two thousand seeds every spring, and when a good, stiff breeze comes around, those seeds are blown into the air, going every which way. (Location 2471)

when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright has to change, too. (Location 2486)

What technology does, mostly, is open doors for new artists who had been shut out of the old system— which sometimes means closing doors for the artists who had thrived. (Location 2524)

The Internet and the PC have created entirely new media. (Location 2535)

The printing press made it possible for many more people to read and interpret scripture; it also sped up the fragmentation of the Church, (Location 2539)

The Reformation ushered in an era of freedom of thought and conscience, and, what’s more, it enmeshed religion more thoroughly in the lives of congregants. (Location 2547)

“If we can’t control these things, we’ll have to invent some new ways of making money, and make less from the old ways.” (Location 2572)

A good copyright system is one that enables the largest diversity of creators making the largest diversity of works to please the largest diversity of audiences. (Location 2579)

It’s fine for copyright to try to secure some income for the tiny percentage of creators who’ll earn a living from their work. But while it’s at it, it shouldn’t get in the way of all the people who are making art because they want to express themselves. (Location 2581)

Edison tightly controlled how many movies could be made each year, and what subjects these movies could address. (Location 2587)

the entertainment industries keep saying that their demands are the existential minimum. (Location 2598)

Anti-copying efforts are breeding the digital equivalents of antibiotic-resistant bacteria— turning relatively benign, business-friendly technologies into systems that are designed to be as hard as possible to cooperate with. (Location 2618)

content-blocking and surveillance are the province of book burners and censors, not creators and publishers. (Location 2620)

Only the trivial is subject to extrapolation. (Location 2632)

working efficiently in groups is the oldest dream our species has. (Location 2635)

Anything that minimizes the drag on our collective efforts is to be celebrated. (Location 2656)

when you’re in the business of solving problems for a living, your job becomes making sure that the problems never go away, or you’ll be out of business. (Location 2659)

A refusal to engage with (or protect) technology doesn’t mean that the bad guys won’t get it— just that the good guys will end up unarmed in the fights that are to come. (Location 2681)

this Internet thing is bigger than the arts, bigger than the entertainment business— it’s the nervous system of the twenty-first century, and, depending on how we use it, it can set us free, or it can enslave us. (Location 2708)