Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!compass!worley From: worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) Newsgroups: comp.archives.admin Subject: History repeats itself Message-ID: Date: 21 Jun 91 14:27:06 GMT Sender: root@compass.com Distribution: world Organization: Compass, Inc., Wakefield, MA, U.S.A. Lines: 44 It's strange. I'm getting just old enough to see history repeating itself. There is a faction of people on The Net who loathe any sort of intellectual property. They think all of the information out there should be usable by anybody, free of charge. Witness the FSF/LPF crowd, and also the vituperation that Ed Vielmetti has suffered now that he doesn't want to do all the comp.archives work for free anymore. All of this reminds me of the Hippie Movement and New Left of the late 1960's. Their watchword was "Property is a crime!" And their arguments were exactly the same: If we all stopped worrying about who owned what and just did the productive things were doing *anyway*, everybody would have more with less work. Which was quite true. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way in practice. The Hippie Movement was financed by remittances from the hippies' parents, and the world's only experiment in industrial socialism ("the Soviet bloc") has just collapsed in poverty and despair. People don't work unless there is something that they get out of it. Yes, you can get volunteer effort (the FSF is a sterling example), but there is a limit. Gnu Emacs was written by one person, but it's a "small" program as programs go. The only ways to deliver incentives are via a marketplace or via government grant. (You can imagine what the result of leaving it up to the government would be like!) Up until now, The Net has been like the Hippie Movement. We get a great playground, while businesses and the government pay for it. The trouble is that The Net is not just a plaything anymore. If we want to have it become an "information infrastructure" for the country, it's got to grow much, much larger than it is now, and it won't be able to live as a parasite. It's got to go commercial, and that means that people are going to have to pay for their usage. So let's update our prejudices, stop screaming that intellectual property is a crime, and start building The Net of the future, where people will provide the really useful services that can't now be done because they're too difficult to do with volunteer labor. Dale Worley Compass, Inc. worley@compass.com -- Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war? -- williamt@athena.Eng.Sun.COM