6.805/STS085: The Future of Content

The expectations of the future of digitized intellectual property are causing writers around the world to lose their hair. Fretting about the future lack of value in their own work, they write worried articles about where this new economy might take us. Some of these articles seem quite accurate, like Esther Dyson's "Intellectual Value,"[1] but others take the threats too far, such as John Perry Barlow in "The Economy of Ideas."[2] This new wave of information is not so much a radical departure from the way things were heading, as Barlow suggests, but the next step in the trajectory of technology. In this new world, Dyson's concepts of paying for the "support, aggregation, filtering" of content, and not the content itself, is only partly correct. The filtering of content will become ever more important, as the barriers to publishing come down and more content is available, but the content itself -- often forgotten -- is still what people will pay to obtain. Firms selling content on the Internet are doing more than just filtering, though. The way the Internet changes things, and the way firms will be successful, is by adding interactivity to a previously static medium of print .

In this paper, I will first critique the ideas of Barlow and Dyson, through a discussion of the concepts presented in their papers. Next, I will consider go2net, Inc., as an example of a firm providing content over the Internet, to see how the two writers' ideas hold up in a real example occurring since they were written. Drawing from the ideas of Thomas Kuhn, I will subsequently check to see if Barlow and Dyson's visions of this drastic change in digital intellectual property fit into the traditional model of a scientific revolution. I will then conclude with a summary of these points and a look into the future.

Barlow's article takes the stand that the new breed of digital information requires a completely new framework in which to regard it. He describes information as three main concepts: an activity, a life form, and a relationship. And while I agree with most of his conclusions about how intellectual property must change in the light of cyberspace, I doubt the wisdom of his extreme position in calling information totally different from what we have seen before. I also disagree with many of the statements Barlow made in the first part of his article, laying the groundwork for the rest of his piece. First, he sees information, now digitized, as something completely new, whereas I believe digitization is just the next step after the printing press, radio, television, and other communication technologies, and thus the ideas concerning its value can be looked at in light of how the older technologies changed the value of information. His understanding of economics also seems shaky in light of its importance for his article. Plus, his thought that information is a life form is a poor analogy, and his concept of information's value is unclear with respect to time and scarcity versus familiarity. However, he does make several good points, including those on how the software industry functions.

Barlow states that "Digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition."[3] He goes on to describe how both patents and copyrights protect the expression of an idea, and not the idea itself. Barlow seems to think ideas, too, should be protected, but I disagree; only the expression deserves protection. The purpose of those two legal methods are not to protect ideas, since those who set them up realized that protecting an idea was too difficult and probably not wise. Ideas should be spread; implementations of ideas should be sold -- and protected for a time, to encourage inventors to invent and propel the economy.

Barlow does not make a distinction, though, between what information in cyberspace is an idea, and what is expression. If I write a book, and publish it on the Internet, then am I publishing ideas or expression, and how do I want to protect it? If, for instance, someone quotes me, then I want credit, but that is protected by copyright. If someone uses my idea, then that is much harder to prove than a direct quote, and while general literary customs require the person to reference me, I cannot count on legal protection. However, in the literary world, anyone who is found stealing another's ideas without reference is discredited; the writer must consider his reputation. This point actually agrees with Barlow's later point that ethics will play a stronger role in the new intellectual property framework, but my reasoning is different. True, copyright, technology and ethics will help authors protect themselves and gain value from their work, but ideas can never be protected on a legal level.

Barlow also makes the argument that "unbounded intellectual property is very different from physical property."[4] I think this point is misleading; while it is true that physical resources do gain in value from scarcity, I think the better analogy would be made with an inventor who wants to get his patented product onto the market. This inventor wants to sell as many of his product as possible, in order to get the largest economic gain, assuming he does profit more, the more he sells. That concept is much like intellectual property, only the payment systems are different. The author of an idea gains prestige each time his idea is propelled, and can gain economic value from his prestige later on.

His title, "The Economy of Ideas," suggests that he might take into consideration economic principles, but the one statement he makes blurs much of what one would learn in an introductory microeconomics course. He envisions a world in which "our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost. [italics mine]."[5] But what he must mean, and I believe is an important economical point, is that this distribution requires no marginal cost, that is the cost to produce one more copy of the information after the last one. And that point, for the most part, is true; the cost of time of transmission and toll on the wires sending it is minimal enough to be considered free. However, there is a definite initial cost to this transmission; someone had to pay to set up the server, to lay the wires around the world, to create the information, and these costs are not insignificant. Economic theory deems marginal cost the more important cost, in terms of profit, but economic reality has shown that startup or initial costs do play a significant role. For example, most newspapers are cheap but not free, although the marginal cost of producing one more copy after making ten thousand is minimal. Therefore I do not see intellectual property, even in digital form, not requiring some kind of payment at some point in the consumption process.

A second economical point, which both authors mostly glossed over, is that supply and demand will insist that authors will be paid for their work, so authors really need not fear too much for their profession. Should all authors give up writing because they were not being paid, a system would be set up so as to pay authors so that they would reenter the market to sell their works. The method of payment may not be the traditional book setup but more like that of the magazine. Instead of writing a book and selling it to a publisher, and then getting a slice of the profit from each book sold, a writer may sell his writing to an online magazine that will distribute his work as part of a larger magazine. People will pay for the compilation because they are looking for the type of content that they expect this magazine to deliver. Content is king; there is too much out there, and people want to find ways to get to the good content easily that is why filtering and editorial services are so important. But they would be nothing without the content that they provide. You do not buy the Wall Street Journal only because you know it has articles on business; you buy it because you want to read those articles without sifting through a lot of other unwanted material.

Barlow brings up another interesting economical view when he muses on the possibilities of an information-based exchange rather than a monetary one. He envisions an economy "which consists almost entirely of information."[6] However, I do not see this drastic economical change happening any time soon. Money is convenient as a means of exchanging goods and services, including information. While I can see the concept that bartering information could have a strong role in the future economy, and, perhaps, already does in examples like magazines trading subscription lists, people like having a common basis with which they can compare the worth of their food versus their ideas. Information does not offer such an easy, intuitive basis of exchange.

As one of his main ideas, Barlow declares, "Information is a Life Form."[7] I protest this statement. While the points that information wants to be free, wants to replicate into the cracks of possibility, and wants to change are all true, I think the better sum of these points is that information is a virus, a beneficial type of virus perhaps, but not a life form. As in biology, where viruses have a status not quite that of true cellular organisms, in the realm of ideas, information is not a true life form either. I make this point because I think it is important that people realize that information is nothing without people to transmit it, process it, and change it, just as viruses cannot survive without real organisms as hosts. I believe Barlow gets into philosophical trouble when he sees information as independent of the process that creates and propels it; people are that process, and people will continue to share information and at the same time find ways to survive by selling the fruits of their labor. Information alone is not going to go out and propel itself without some person behind it – at least not until artificial intelligence systems become much more sophisticated. Also, Barlow's reasons for why information is perishable also seem suspect. Yesterday's stock prices have little value to the broker, but a lot of value to the analyst who uses past prices to predict future ones. There are too many examples in which information has value for long periods of time, especially in analysis, to call it perishable as a life form is perishable. In this case information also acts like a virus; only when there is no new host to infect does the virus finally die. Only when there is no more use for the information does it finally peter out and disappear. Like a virus in a cell, information can lie dormant in books or now digital stores, and it can lie dormant for a long time before someone finds a use for it again and brings it back to life.

In his subsection, "Information Is A Relationship," Barlow tries to argue both sides of the coin. First, he says familiarity has more value than scarcity; next, he argues exclusivity has value. I agree with these statements from the examples that he gave, but Barlow fails, in my view, to properly draw conclusions from these seemingly conflicting arguments. He tries to correlate both these ideas to time, that whoever can act on the information first profits, and then everyone else gains value as more people own it. But I find this unconvincing; I think Barlow missed what the several underlying components to value are; he only described their results. To have a lot of value, an object or piece of information must be highly desirable. The economics come into play when, on top of being desirable, it is scarce. Obviously a lot of people would like to know stock prices are going up, but if only one person has access to that information, then it is valuable due to its limitations. But there are also profits of scale: a product is valuable when it can be sold to a large group of people. So Barlow, by trying to say that information is valuable if it is either scare or ubiquitous, only serves to confuse the reader and leave him with little meaning at all. A more layered explanation, perhaps like mine above, serves better to convey the ideas.

I think an interesting and accurate analysis that Barlow makes is that of the new software industry trend "among small, fast moving enterprises who protect their ideas by getting into the marketplace quicker than their larger competitors who based their protection on fear and litigation."[8] After doing research on RSA Data Securities, now owned by Security Dynamics, I have found that they fit the mold of the larger company well. They have consistently used litigation or threats of litigation in the past few years against PGP, Cylink, Public Key Partners and others infringing on their patents in order to protect their market share. However, as their patents are due to expire soon, they must find other ways to compete, and perhaps their lessened legal bill will free up some resources for creating better products. But I envision the smaller companies in the cryptography market taking a bigger share as time goes on as they are more limber and used to fighting on purely a product and marketing basis, not on litigation. It will be interesting to see if RSA is able to hold up in the changing market over the next few years.

Esther Dyson, editor of the newsletter Release 1.0 and technology industry savant, claims in her article, "Intellectual Value," that content will be less important in the new digital world of the Internet than the services that support it. Content will be distributed free, she writes, and providers will make money filtering it, assembling it, and integrating various content modules. This statement seems correct, but Dyson’s article fails to make distinctions between various qualities of content. She divides content by topic, but an important sales point for content is the quality of the information sold. Surely, as a newsletter writer who is able to sell her ideas partly because of the name that she has already made for herself in the industry, she must know that not all newsletters are born equal. And this point is crucial because people will pay for content that they think is good, whether that is because it is entertaining, or intellectually stimulating, or necessary for their business function. All the filtering services in the world would be useless if the content they ultimately provide is not any good.

Dyson also tries, like Barlow, to define intellectual property and value and faces the same exclusivity/familiarity valuation problems. Luckily for her, she does not try to pigeonhole information into defined categories as strongly as Barlow, and thus she does not make his mistakes in trying to say more than can really be said about such a variable thing as information. Her point that the information that will be most valuable will be tied to a real-time person in some respect is very true. When all static information is available, any time, what is not there, what is not always there, a specific person, is more valuable.

Dyson also made a few other comments in her article that I disagreed with. One, revealing her lack of experience actually doing any programming, despite being an information technology expert, is that she says it "is easy to program software to solve problems but hard to define those problems and questions precisely."[9] An economics major from Harvard,[10] Dyson clearly does not value the difficulty in doing the performing programming of software (does she think software projects are always behind schedule because the programmers are too busy playing Myst?). I agree that defining the problems that a piece of code needs to solve is often very difficult, but, as a biased computer science major, I believe that programming the software can often present technical problems that rival the business ones. Just because the programming efforts can be black-boxed away by the business people does not mean they are insignificant.

I also dispute her statement that the Internet "dramatically changes the economics of content."[11] While the Internet takes replication and distribution of content to a new level, it is not entirely different from the magazine or newspaper economics in place today. In a typical newspaper, which sells for very little on a daily basis, there is a huge amount of content, and there is also a fair amount of advertising. Considering the ubiquity of some newspapers, like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, they are almost like Internet distribution in that you can find them anywhere and the purchase price is cheap. What you pay for when you buy this newspaper, much like what Dyson describes in what people will pay for on the Internet, is the organization, filtering, type of content, and delivery that the newspaper provides. Considering you have not read it until after you have received it, you are not directly paying for the content, but instead the assumption of what the content holds. Were the newspaper to start providing different or poor content, you would probably be less likely to buy it, at least not for the same reasons that you purchased it previously. The point of this is that we do not have to completely rethink things; however, it gives writers like Dyson, whom people look to for advice in technology matters, something to write about if she claims there will be a drastic change in the way information is processed. The true change, though, will probably be more gradual and less jarring.

Back on the topic of the value of content, Dyson compares the situation to real estate today. "Land ownership matters," she writes, "but it's not the most interesting factor in real estate today."[12] Huh? The other factors she mentions as more interesting, location, zoning rights, and obligations, are important, but I feel Dyson is missing the point about real estate, just as she did about content. Nothing matters in real estate if you do not own the land, just as nothing matters about how good your filtering scheme is if the content is poor. The auxiliary processes are surely important, but let us not lose sight of the fundamental value of any of these systems. The root value is in the content or land that supports them.

A recent press release described their goal to in "utilizing innovative technologies to deliver its content and to enhance the attractiveness and utility of its product offerings."[15] Because this mission sounds very much like the content company of the future that Barlow and Dyson describe, I have chosen it as an example for this paper.

Currently, go2net offers three different main sites. The first, Metacrawler, is a search engine that searches all the top engines on the Internet simultaneously and compiles the results. The second, PlaySite, a company they bought in July of 1997 from Internet Games Corporation, strives to offer the best Java gaming opportunities on the Web. The thirds, StockSite, offers financial data for companies listed on exchanges. They also are use the "personal window" approach with go2vision, which provides stock quotes, sport scores, and headlines in a small window using push technology as part of a Netcaster channel.

However, these were not the featured sites that go2net started with, and the demise of their original plan serves to highlight some of Dyson's and Barlow's points. Originally, go2net had three areas of their sites: go2sports, go2business, and go2internet. (Metacrawler also existed on the side.) Each of the three areas offered articles and commentary, and tried to make use of JavaScript and Java by integrating the technologies on the sites. The real draw to the sites, though, was the quality of the authors, not the technical gizmos they included on the site.

This draw was apparently not enough, however; thus they eventually dropped or revamped each of these sites. They increased the visibility of Metacrawler, so that instead of a link from the side of their homepage, it is now one of the three major features. They dropped go2internet; despite the excellent writing (although I may be biased since my brother was the primary author), there was probably too much competition for just content on Internet or sports or business trends. go2sports also disappeared; entertainment returned with PlaySite, the interactive games site. StockSite replaced go2business; StockSite still provides the articles and commentary that go2business did, but it also offers more in the way of stock quotes and easily accessible company information, from stock charts to press releases, with a generous use of Java applets. These new sites have also learned to tone down the use of unnecessary technical gizmos that detracted more than added from the focus of the site. They focused the technology where it was more useful, such as in dynamically creating stock price graphs, instead of random links they used to use to show off the browser's frame features.

The trend in these changes is clear: the movement from static delivery of articles, which one could almost as easily get from a magazine or newspaper, to interactive features that really offered a new service. Metacrawler offers the filtering system that Dyson says will be the service of the future; I have found its use to be much more satisfying than the traditional search engines because it hits all of them with a single query. PlaySite strives to be the ultimate interactive site in game playing. It reflects Barlow's concept of the value of direct interactivity. Unfortunately, it has been plagued with technical problems, although they seem to be improving. StockSite offers Dyson's "aggregation, filtering, assembly and integration"[16] of financial content.

The next question, of course, is whether this company is making any money. It is not making much, at least not yet; their most current numbers show that for the nine months ending June 1997, net losses were $1.2 million on revenue of $150,000. After an initial IPO at $8 a share, their stock is now hovering around $7.[17] They cannot charge for their content to earn revenue; Dyson and Barlow are right, that content has to be free or very few will bother paying for it. Thus they try to sell advertising contracts, as Dyson envisions, sales of which have been picking up, but clearly have not put them in the black. Perhaps this part of Dyson's vision has not yet caught up to the delivery of content; if so, the immediate economic future of the company does not look too bright. Hopefully for them, the advertising model will pick up quickly and they will become profitable soon.

So does this company fulfill the predictions of Dyson and Barlow? In many respects, go2net is heading in that direction; they have moved away from traditional content and are focusing on delivering services that provide not static content but interactivity (PlaySite) and compilation of data (StockSite and Metacrawler). Dyson's advertising model, in which ads are tailored to the individual, is not yet here; they can focus their ads to the types of users for each site, but the individual user data is not used in selecting which ad will be shown. Perhaps that will be the next step -- and the profit-making step? -- in this company's future.

Dyson and Barlow each speak about the new directions in intellectual property as if it were a dramatic change, a revolution of sorts. To see if these changes do actually fit the traditional definition of a technological revolution, I shall examine it against Thomas Kuhn's theory, which is outlined in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.[18] Kuhn's theory states that a given scientific field will originally have several competing theories, or paradigms, but will eventually settle into one. That paradigm will dictate the science that the current scientists practice, called normal science, by defining the problems that they will try to solve. However, in this practice of normal science, anomalies will pop up and be stored away, facts and findings that do not fit with the current paradigm. If enough of these anomalies build up, then a crisis will occur: competing paradigms which better fit these anomalies will sprout, and scientists will begin asking questions about the very basis of their field. This change is known as the revolution. Eventually, a new paradigm will be chosen, and normal science, under the new paradigm, will resume. Typical examples of scientific revolutions include the change from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy or the movement to Einstein's relativity from Newtonian physics. [19]

There are several complications in trying to describe digitized intellectual property in this model. First, one must separate the medium from the content. The Internet, or more specifically, the World Wide Web, has, in a sense, been a revolution in technology. It offers, or promises to offer, some combination of older media, like newspapers, magazines, radio and television, as well as interactive media like multi-player electronic game systems or telephones. The former group offered little in the way of interactivity, but did provide a fair amount of content, generally filtered by channel or type of magazine or newspaper. The latter offered more interactivity, but generally at the expense of content. Phones are greatly interactive, but there is little new material involved in a content sense; games offer some of each. The Internet could be considered a revolution because it combines both.

The way to fit this new version of intellectual property into Kuhn's model is not to think so much about the medium, but the possibilities it produces in the way of intellectual property and how we think about it. We should consider the old paradigm the world of "old" laws and customs of copyright and patents and quoting rules. Because then the change in thinking that produced such articles as Barlow's and Dyson's is the evidence of a crisis in Kuhn's model; people are critiquing the roots of what was previously considered a set group of rules regarding intellectual property. The Internet proved to be an anomaly in the intellectual property world, and subsequently the crisis is happening. The next step is to figure out what the new paradigm will be.

I believe this new paradigm will take form much as Barlow and Dyson predict, but that their views will be found to be somewhat dramatic in retrospect -- especially Barlow's. Although their thoughts in intellectual property and providing content show that changes are taking place, and even perhaps a revolution in Kuhn's sense, the new model will only provide consumers of content with more and better and better-fitted choices of material. Swamped with information, we will, as Dyson suggests, pay for the service of having only the content we want delivered to our electronic doorstep. At root, though, that is not so different from getting your choice newspapers delivered; it is only much, much better because it is tailored to you. That is where information technologies will take us: ultimate customization content, for which intellectual property will be protected, not by law, but by technical and ethical means.

1. Esther Dyson, "Intellectual Value," (Wired, Issue 3.07, July 1995).

2. John Perry Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas," (Wired, Issue 2.03, March 1994).

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Esther Dyson, "Intellectual Value," (Wired, Issue 3.07, July 1995).

10. Esther Dyson Biography; see http://www.edventure.com/bios/esther.html

11. Esther Dyson, "Intellectual Value," (Wired, Issue 3.07, July 1995).

12. Ibid.

13. See http://www.100hot.com

14. About go2net, Inc. See http://www.go2net.com/help/about.html

15. See http://www.go2net.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId=CngQjubWbu0zusdaWmW&FQ=c%25GNET%20or%20%22go2net%20Inc.%22&Title=Headlines%20for%3A%20GNET%0A

16. Esther Dyson, "Intellectual Value," (Wired, Issue 3.07, July 1995).

17. See http://www.stocksite.com/research/snapshot/SNAP/A13CF-CS.html

18. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn, University of Chicago Press, 1962.

19. Ibid.