Digital thoughts

So, the copyright craze has reached new levels of absurdity. It's clear to me that it won't stop until we make it stop. The question is, how? I see two possible ways:

1. Get people to pressure and/or boycot the big media. Surprisingly enough, this occasionally works in the real world (see the recent Spore DRM case), but to expect a full-blown revolution here would be childish.
2. Get people to put their own intellectual creations under open licenses.

Now, not only is (2) more realistic, but many people already do it. The effect is two-pronged: it raises awareness about "alternative" licensing (which is closer to becoming the mainstream, but I digress), and floods the market with open content and software. Just look at the Creative Commons Metrics page, or better yet, watch Flickr's Creative Commons. Not to be let down, Sourceforge hosts millions of software projects, although many are inactive (Freshmeat's 45000+ projects figure seems much more realistic).

All of this, of course, raises a question, and believe me, I hear it way too often: how do all these people earn a living? I can only say this: the same way as Redhat, Sun, Mozilla Corporation, Baen Books, Nine Inch Nails, Linus Torvalds... I could go on and on and on, but it doesn't matter. The real question isn't "how" but "why". Why does it work for them? And the answer to that is surprisingly simple. In the words of my favorite author:

(...) in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented -- your personal capital with your friends and neighbors -- you more accurately gauged your success.

And if you still don't see why that's important, look around as the world's economy comes crashing down: how much is your actual money worth? Wouldn't you rather have friends with resources to spare?

And now we get back to the issue of copyright. Unlike, say, food and lodging, which are limited by their nature (at least until the Singularity comes, but I digress... again), information actually multiplies when shared. Try it yourself; you have nothing to lose and many friends to gain. And soon information will be more valuable than anything else, if it isn't already. Except for friends, of course.

How to End the Copyright Craze by Felix Pleşoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Edit: One day later, I find Lawrence Lessig attacking the same problem from a different angle.