The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: The Anarchists and the Money Makers

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. (www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html)

When corporate powers realised money could be made on the Internet we saw the dot com explosion, fuelled by greed and ambition so large that it became divorced from economic reality. Now they are trying to control the infrastructure - one that they did not build, and do not understand.

The founders and developers of the Internet were not motivated by fashion and commerce. It was a social and cultural space that no one owned, and which everyone could use and develop. Corporations see it as a distribution medium for intellectual property and 'walled garden' content - which you pay for. You thus have a clash between cultural creativity - the anarchists, in the best sense of the word - and commercial interest i.e. the businessmen. The latter forget, or do not care, that they did not build the Internet. The anarchists did.

Hollywood does not understand the electronic infrastructure; what they understand is content and distribution, which is related to fashion and commerce. And yet the electronic infrastructure forms and evolves faster than business and social trend. Commercial minds do not recognise the free and open sources of the infrastructure; Hollywood wants to change your Internet-connected computer into a copyright protected outlet. But the infrastructure is unpredictable and cannot be controlled, just as you cannot control the eighteen year old code-wizard, developing formidable applications in his bedroom. Napster is a good example. The music industry fell on it with their full weight and eventually won but - and this is the critical point - the idea itself could not be controlled. Other file sharing services appeared, and people simply transferred to them. In the newspapers and on television, reports mostly told the story how Napster was challenged, regulated and eventually bought up, suggesting that the music industry triumphed. They do not mention Kazaa, Limewire or WinMX. The real news is not that Napster has lost the fight but that a) there is a clash between the industry and the anarchists and b) Napster is not crushed, but irrelevant.

The skills of the hacker (the anarchist) are at least as formidable as those of the developers slaving away in software corporations. For the hacker a server, de-activation control or firewall are an intellectual challenge. In this respect, the domain and power of a company is founded not on an impenetrable physical location - the building that admits authorised personnel only - but on intellectual skill translated into binary data. We talk about the knowledge economy, and Mr Gates himself has acknowledged that most Microsoft capital is cerebral rather than material. Computer code is one of the most refined human achievements, and its abstraction means it is no one's property and it is not inviolate. Anyone can learn about C++, PHP or HTTP. Millions of people do; some of them want to exert prohibitions and control, and others object to that and try to undermine their power. They usually succeed, because code can be de-constructed.

Kazaa - ironically - was linked to established commercial interests because installing the software involved installing spy-ware on your computer. Marketing profiles are immensely valuable; if the web browsing habits of millions of people can be monitored and compiled, you have a very interested businessman. The satisfying conclusion to this tale came from the hackers who opened up the code, deleted all the spy-ware junk, and now provide KazaaLite - the file share application, spy-ware free. Kazaa were not amused, yet it's difficult to see what they can do. They provided a file sharing service to allow millions of people to illegally obtain software, music and videos - so they cannot object to KazaaLite, either morally or legally. And even if they did, it's too late: KazaaLite is out there on the Internet, and no one can prevent that.

The Kazaa story is complex and intriguing, with the following protagonists:

1) Software companies and the entertainment industry

2) The consumer

3) File sharing technicians

4) File sharing marketers

5) Software hackers

It is difficult if not impossible to gauge this situation with an ethical template. The obvious starting point is to point out that software developers have a right to protect their intellectual property and are - in this example - the overriding moral factor together with the music and movie makers.

Not everyone agrees with this. Proprietary software is notoriously expensive and has remained so despite the fact that hardware has reduced in price dramatically. No one would deny the right of the developers to be rewarded for their work, but once it is completed the distribution costs are virtually nil - the price of a CD or an authorised download and its associated bandwidth. Marketing is probably the major expense. It is this business model, based on intellectual work and inconsequential distribution costs, that allowed Mr Gates to develop his staggering wealth. All of this may be healthy free market capitalism, or it may have elements of corporate arrogance and exploitation. It's probably a little of both.

The same applies to music production: we were initially told that the price of CD based music would reduce as production costs fell. The price of a CD did not reduce, it increased like everything else (with the exception of computer hardware). The revenue was probably used for increased marketing, so when CD production costs did drop, the revenue was being used up, feeding the growing music empire - and the Italian villa lifestyle of the corporate fat cats. And with the film industry, we could question the astronomical sums paid to movie 'stars', for doing work that does not exactly rank highly on the 'contribution to humanity' scale. They are not brain surgeons saving lives, or diplomats negotiating world peace. The entertainment industry provides for yet more Italian villas.

These are legitimate supply and demand situations - but perhaps supply-demand-exploit is a more accurate characterisation and we are right to object to it. With the software industry, the recent Microsoft court cases did exactly that: Microsoft domination is getting out of hand. Viewed in this way, the fact that digital code is so easily ripped off is perhaps a reason to rejoice rather than worry: you are no longer subject to market exploitation, and do not have to pay for someone else's Italian villas.

I once knew someone who obtained some software illegally. He had a friend who asked if he could have copies, and since he had paid a small amount of money for it (bought from software 'pirates'), he felt justified in asking for the same amount - £25 for applications that would normally cost about £1000. His friend objected, saw it in terms of a CD that would cost a few pence, and was asking not for the copies, but to borrow the CDs to copy himself. As with the Kazaa story, this scenario was complex and intriguing. If he asked for money, he was effectively becoming a software pirate himself, benefiting from stolen intellectual property. He distinguished between ownership and distribution, and did not like that idea. And yet if he did not ask for the £25, he was effectively being exploited by the other person. He'd paid £25 himself - a tiny proportion of the high street cost, but an outlay nonetheless. He realised that his friend was blissfully unaware of these complicated issues, and if he insisted on remuneration it would damage their friendship. He provided the copies at no charge.

If you analyse this micro-situation in its own terms - rather than judge it as uniformly unethical - then it presents interesting questions. The computer and the Internet have presented us with situations where there are no definitive answers, just various inter-relating viewpoints. Instead of ethical certainties, contrary and opposing positions have their own value, legitimate in their own terms.

The analogy of the cathedral and the bazaar (www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar) has become well know. The corporate model for software development is - according to Eric Raymond - like a cathedral. Open source development is like a bazaar:

No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here-rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches… out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles. The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock. As I learned my way around, I worked hard not just at individual projects, but also at trying to understand why the Linux world not only didn't fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders. By mid-1996 I thought I was beginning to understand. Chance handed me a perfect way to test my theory, in the form of an open-source project that I could consciously try to run in the bazaar style. So I did-and it was a significant success.

Raymond saw part of his task as redefining and conceptualising open source development, to give the hackers greater credibility. The non-proprietary 'bazaar' method is aligned with the origins of computer knowledge: as a scientific and research based enterprise. Scientists publish their findings to benefit human life. This is - admittedly - not as clear as it was ten or twenty years ago; genetic engineering and AIDS research, for example, have enormous commercial possibilities and are guarded and copyrighted. But these are exceptional and very recent developments. Generally speaking, scientific discovery is freely available; the contents of any library will demonstrate that.

I suggest that in some respects, the cathedral-bazaar analogy can be reversed. The bazaar is a place of commerce: chaotic, and subject to survival of the fittest laws. It is adversarial, where a retailer will define a price and you have to persuade him to reduce it. There is a conflict of interest: much like the adversarial relationship many people have with Microsoft. We need their products because they have become monstrously ubiquitous, and we complain when they do not work properly, and become ever more bloated and expensive. They are sometimes more interested in consolidating and expanding their empire, rather than the needs of the consumer.

The cathedral, by comparison, is a place of civilised and reverential conversation. It has ideals, and people generally cooperate with each other in relatively harmonious communities. The hacker derives cool intellectual pleasure from solving problems and writing robust, elegant code - sometimes just for fun. His product is available to others, and they can improve on it still further, if they wish, to everyone's mutual benefit. Fundamentally, the commerce of the bazaar has no place in this. People contribute for the joy of it; it is collective, democratic, and subject only to the ideal of greater refinement. This is how Linux has developed and now, not only is it a widely used platform, but there is also a wide range of open source applications - an office suite, for example, comparable to the Microsoft version. It proliferated, not because of standardisation reasons and a big marketing programme, but because it was a good product.

Anarchist/hackers want the Internet to govern itself, i.e. that it is subject to and developed by the imagination and ingenuity of the people who use it. Cultural life will fashion it - and possibly Nature too, if we consider the pattern-organising principles described in Emergence, by Stephen Johnson, as natural tendencies. 'Intelligence' may be a better term here, i.e. that Nature has an intelligence, and that the Internet has been evolving in a recognisably parallel form. We can interpret open source code like Linux in a similar way - it has organised itself, from the apparent chaos of many disparate people, scattered around the world.

The corporates are afraid of an infrastructure that threatens their interests, and thus want to control it. The anarchists do not want this, and point out that they do not own it. Like code (or intelligence) itself, no one can own the Internet. Physically it is located nowhere or, if you like, at countless millions of individual terminals all around the world. But that is not really what the Internet is, or it would cease to exist when the computer and modem is switched off. Like code, the Internet is an idea in which we participate; it is intellectual property owned by everyone.

Hollywood wants to change the Internet into a regulated content distribution platform, and your computer into a supply-controlled device. If they have their way, it would be like public radio: licensed, regulated and modulated. They do not understand two critical points: that the infrastructure goes under the platform, and it exists because of its ubiquity. It supports content, no one owns it, and anyone can use and develop it. It is not a commercial structure, but a reflection and manifestation of cultural life. Cultural life is not, fortunately, AOL, Disney, or Miramax movies.

The Web was conceived as a "common information space" and now it exists - and continues to grow - no one can say "hold on, I don't like this, and want to control it and make money from it". The products, I suspect, will continue to flash around the bit stream removed from any economic transaction. It is an alarming prospect for the software, music and movie corporations, and yet it does not seem to be harming their wealth.

Why is software so expensive, and why should Mr Gates be so inconceivably rich? Why is a music CD so expensive, and why should music and movie 'stars' be so adulated and rich?

Ultimately, the Internet cannot be controlled - but they are still trying to do it. It is essentially democratic, and that suits some people and not others. I understand that the price of an Italian villa has increased, because there are large numbers of very rich people trying to buy them.

It's called supply and demand.