27 March 2019

Information Wants to Be WHAT?

The EU Parliament has passed "sweeping" changes to the European copyright directive, which in turn requires individual European nations to amend their laws. Sort of. And depending on who is a "European country" in the near future. But that just leads to the critical underlying question:

If information isn't already free, who pays for it?

The universal answer is "someone else has to pay, and the actual human creators get the lowest share because distribution has a more-accepted accounting basis and therefore can claim the highest proportion of the revenue." (Which is not to say that distribution doesn't have legitimate costs of its own, like paying bookstore employees and library staff. Paying exhorbitant returns to venture-capital investors in "talent agencies" that are betraying their own clients, not so much.)

The distributors who latch on to advertising (and data-gathering) revenues like leeches don't want to pay. They hide their motives behind their plaintive cries that the internet will be harmed by having to pay for what they show in return for advertising (and data-gathering) revenues. Curiously, the nonprofit distributors out there, like those who operate university campus web portals, aren't complaining.

The transferees who make money (regardless of how) from derivative works don't want to pay. Neither do some of those who leech off the creativity of others appropriate others' works as a substantial basis of their own. (n.b. The less said about the distraction of satire, parody, and inspiration here, the better — those legitimate issues, especially the first and last one, just demonstrate that "art" and "commerce" are only barely-intersecting sets, let alone congruent.)

The transferees who make money from direct distribution (like publishers) and authorized/intended derivative works (like film studios) are complaining. A lot. Not much of that money is making its way back to the actual, human creators, though.

So, as a modest proposal — with more than a little bit of reality behind it: Every American already has the right to read almost anything in the Library of Congress's collection. One just has to show up. (It's a little bit more complex than that in these days of Mystery Security Theatre 2001, but not that much.) For free. Hell, the Library doesn't even have to pay for its acquisitions, except for the cost of shelving them!

Including the e-books. Because the Copyright Office demands deposit copies for them too.

So the Library of Congress (and, for that matter, all national libraries) should offer public access to those items, too. And pay the actual creators for that access. Because, at the bottom, that exposes the two missing words at the end of "Information Wants to Be Free": "to Me". The problem is the characterization of "information" (whether "art" or yesterday's securities pricing is immaterial) as appropriate for fees for individual access. (Ownership of a copy is a different question. Related, but different… especially once one looks into subfields in which "the original" has a greater perceived value than a copy.) Because at its core, "Information Wants to Be Free" actually means "I want the Library of Congress operating 24/7, a block from my residence, at no transactional cost to me." That costs money. But someone else should pay for it.