A Slightly Less Wild West?

Two articles in today's New York Times got me thinking about the way that rules are slowly developing in the Wild Wild West of the Internet.

In the first, David Carr, in his "Media Equation" series, discusses "A Code of Conduct for Content Aggregators". In it, he considers the way that content moves about on the 'Net -- picked up by one reader, promoted by another, broadcast by a big aggregator, etc. In most cases, not much credit is given, and even less money.

For those not familiar with the current system -- aggregators use others' content to draw in readers (a.k.a. eyeballs!), for which they get to sell advertising, which is how the aggregation sites make money.

The most important question Carr asks is "where is the line between promoting the good work of others and simply lifting it?"

His answer: "Naughty aggregation is analogous to pornography: You know it when you see it."

Meanwhile, over in the paper's Technology section, Brian X. Chen was writing about a "Faint Line on Cloning" for creators of video games. Chen draws the distinction between "cloning" and
"taking inspiration", by quoting a co-founder of a small Dutch gaming start-up:

When another company takes inspiration from the game and they try to make a different game out of it, that’s when getting imitated turns into a compliment....Getting cloned is like getting punched in the face. It’s like a robbery.

These can be grey areas, and the lines get fuzzy.

Cloning is common in gaming, Chen writes, largely because games are hard to protect. The mechanics of the game can't be copyrighted, although they might be patentable. But that process can be both time-consuming and expensive. Some game creators are anti-patent, believing that "patent protections could stifle creativity in future games" -- although some change their minds when their games are cloned.

I've written before about the "information wants to be free" myth of the early 'Net. To be strictly fair, that's not exactly what Stewart Brand way back in 1984 -- he said, "Information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable... On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time." Guess which half of his statement went wide? And Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's reply? "Information should be free, but your time should not." (An excellent write-up of the issue from Richard Siklos at CNN/Money can be found here.)

Information, of course, doesn't care whether it's free or not. It's the cheapskates who don't want to pay, who then come up with high-falutin' explanations of why it ought to be free who think anything online should be free. But the creators of the information do care. And they're the ones who get to decide, because it's their hard work and creativity.

If I write a novel and post it online for the world to read, and tell you, "Go ahead; read it. It's free," then -- well, go ahead and take it to read. But don't assume that you can swipe it. And if I ask you to pay, well ,then it's your decision whether to purchase it or not. But it's not your right to "aggregate" it or "clone" it -- those are just better-sounding words for stealing.