Last Friday, a bumptious ignoramus hit me with a corollary to the old “Information just wants to be free” mantra, and I’ve been on a slow boil ever since.
“Information just wants to be free” has been the call to arms for every digital anarchist in the last three decades, and it is used as the justification for everything from hacker attacks to electronic piracy.
The corollary, with which I was hit on Friday, came in the form of a troll-post berating an artist who (gasp!) was charging a fee for her creative services. The outraged boob publicly shamed this artist, telling her that her “gifts should be given for free,” not hawked on the streetcorner.
In other words: Talent just wants to be free, too.
The idiocy of both of these rallying cries is blatant, and I’m bloody sick of it.
“Information” doesn’t want anything. Information is an abstract; it has no desires, and stating that it does is how these folks avoid responsibility for their own philosophy. Information doesn’t want to be free; the people who say it does are the ones who want it to be free. Why? Because they simply don’t want to pay for it. Oh, sure, these bing-bongs will tell you that “free” means unfettered, unchained, but that’s just a smokescreen. What they really mean is “without cost.”
Information doesn’t just appear on the sidewalk. It has to be gleaned, gathered, distilled, analyzed, stored, prepared, and made accessible. The people who want it to be “free” simply do not want to pay for those aspects. They just see the end result and want it, free-of-charge. Ironically, the people who bang this drum keep their own identities (i.e., their personal information) hidden by aliases and firewalls. I wonder if their mobile phone and social security numbers want to be free, too?
As for talent wanting to be free, it’s the same story: Digital dilettantes simply do not want to pay for artistic product. “Your talents are a gift,” they say, and “It’s shameful to charge money for them. You should share them for free.”
According to these chipmunks, every artist, writer, singer, dancer, and musician should be out there working just for the love of their art. Of course, many of them do, because they do love their art, and it does bring its own joy, but any artist who performs gratis isn’t counting on their art to put food on the table.
But by logical extension, everyone who has any specific gift or talent should work for free. Not only would every actor act for free, but so would every CPA with a gift for math, every firefighter who’s strong and fearless, every wedding planner who has a talent for organization, every chef, every teacher, every soldier–in short, anyone who has applied any aptitude to any occupation–every one of them would be working for free.
It’s ludicrous. It’s naive. It’s completely and utterly wrong.
However, that’s not what pissed me off. No. What seriously chapped my agates is that this plod-minded dingleberry only applied it to things of an artistic or creative nature. In this squirrel-head’s opinion, it is only art that is not worth paying for. Oh, he wanted to benefit from our art; he just doesn’t want to pay for it.
It is hard enough to create art in this world where surviving as an artist almost always means going hungry, living meanly, and in many ways doing without. When you pile on this addle-pated attitude–this idea that it’s shameful to make any money as a creative artist–and then combine it with the “screw you” attitude of the “Information wants to be free” crowd, what you end up with is pirated movies, illegally copied books, stolen artwork, and the broad-based devaluation of art.
If you like it, if you think it’s pretty, if it moves you, if it in any way touches your emotions or makes you think, then pay for it.
Art has value. Art has worth.
Art deserves respect.
k
Yes. I was once one of those believers in “Information should be free” at the beginning of the public internet before the web took hold in the 90s. But the issue really wasn’t not paying people for their efforts, their art, their genius. It was about what can be free, being free. Information, should be free. Information that IS free, should be free. Old information therefore, basically. Public information and so on.
The current spate of dilettantes crying for “free information for all” have diluted the original meaning of the phrase.
If information is made freely available to the general public, it will enhance the human experience overall. So Public Domain works should be freely disseminated to the public, world wide.
But then we get into the same issues we see in services. Why is a mixed drink more at a bar than at home? You’re paying for the venue, the mixologist’s skills and knowledge, the server serving you so you don’t have to serve yourself, the others of the public in the venue, perhaps music that is supplied, and so on.
So it is with supplying information to the public. Someone needs to package and store and supply it. The infrastructure leading to accessing that information needs to be monitored and maintenanced. Which is why I think the internet is no different than our roads and bridges and should be available to all to utilize. If the government needs to pay (through us) to have information freely available online then so be it.
But that is not to say new information that has a cost especially for individuals, musicians, and artists who deserve to eat and live a good life that is valued at the quality of their time and works.
So the issue isn’t so much that the dilettante is wrong, but misguided and a cheap bastard too perhaps.
YES, information should be free and freely available to all.
IF it’s free to begin with. Then at some point down the long road of time it should become free as in the public domain.
A concept I think we should retain after the death of the artist and perhaps their immediate family. As for the succeeding members of their family retaining rights there are currently in place laws about that and their ability to retain rights and so on.
We do need to push information out to all humans everywhere who want it and it does therefore need to be free. But we also have other considerations as your have so kindly and eloquently (as always) pointed out. People need information to live and eat and survive. Artists and content producers also need to live and eat and survive. So we need to consider the context and not just gloss over the issue like ignorant and greedy fools.
LikeLike
Even back then, though, the “information should be free” mantra ignored the costs of gathering, storing, and presenting information. And in my experience, back in the ’80s, people WERE using it as a way of complaining about the cost of information. Admittedly, there were some idealists in that time who merely wanted unfettered access to public information, but — at least in my experience — they were a minority far outnumbered by folks who put all their favorite books through an OCR scanner and uploaded the resulting (horribly mangled) text to the UseNet.
As for public domain works, they ARE being disseminated by institutions such as the Gutenberg Press, the British Museum, and others. We also have Wikis popping up everywhere, for free. But that’s not enough for these clot-brained whingers, as we still see works under copyright pirated with impunity.
I also challenge the idea that any information is free to begin with. SOMEone had to study, analyze, and report that information. Just because that person’s work is in the public domain, it doesn’t eliminate that original cost; it just means we don’t have to pay royalties for it. Even so, SOMEone has to digitize that old book, that old Victrola recording, that old recipe, that old newspaper. And then someone has to store it and make a website so you can get to it and run the servers to give it to you. It is not without cost, not even now. We do have libraries, supported by tax dollars, that do a lot of this, but libraries around the country are closing because no one wants to pay taxes for them. More and more, the only groups doing this work (like Gutenberg Press) are funded by donations, but SOMEONE IS STILL PAYING FOR IT.
Public domain means royalty-free, not free of cost. And all the copyright laws in the world–built up to protect writers/creators and their heirs–have done nothing to address the pirating of work that has gone on since the internet was born (and before).
Now, I will agree to the concept that publicly held information — works in the public domain, results of government activity, studies paid for by tax dollars — should be available to the public free of charge. Not free of cost, but free of charge. Costs should be covered by the public; it’s our information, so we should pay to make it available. But when we talk of privately held information, whether it be a sports geek’s whiz-bang analysis of BoSox box scores or the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica or Beyonce’s latest single, we (the public) have should have no expectation of free access.
For my money, I believe a person can be both misguided _and_ wrong. Misguided is just a type of being wrong, or perhaps an explanation for why you’re wrong. For the most part, though, I don’t believe these dilettantes are misguided. I think they’re just rebellious, anti-social, and selfish. They see a cage and want to rattle it. They see a shitpile and want to kick it. They want what they want, they want it now, and they strike out against the thing that keeps them from getting it. They’re not idealists. They don’t stop with public domain or government information. They’re pirates, stealing indiscriminately from individuals and corporations alike, depending on who has the thing they want. They’re just cheap, narcissistic bingleheads who have cobbled together an accretion of philosophical potpourri as an excuse for not paying for their copy of Game of Thrones and Grand Theft Auto V.
–k
LikeLike
Thanks for your comments Kurt. Oh, wait, this is Your blog… 🙂
I’m blogging this on Monday and pointing back to this blog for people to read and as well your comments here to my comments.
LikeLike
Hehe. For more ammunition, check out the article in the Guardian on how much money US authors make (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/15/income-for-us-authors-falls-below-federal-poverty-line-survey). THIS is who these folks are stealing from.
LikeLike
Oooooooh, a rant!!! Love the plod-minded dingleberry. But you might want to check on some Shakespearean insults, there are some funny ones! Enough to get you out of a bad mood, ha ha!!! Oh, by the way, I didn’t pay anything to access this site. snicker. http://playingwithplays.com/shakespeare-insult-generator/
LikeLiked by 1 person
It must be written on my forehead. I’ve been gifted with a book of Bill’s insults, and a T-shirt listing them , too!
LikeLike
Due to you, dear dewberry.
LikeLiked by 1 person