To: James Moody 
cc: "Eric K. Meyer" , online-newspapers@marketplace.com,
        online-news@marketplace.com
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Per James Moody:

> So, we come full circle, sort of, to the question of just who, after all,  
> owns the information.  I don't anthropomorphize information and make 
> statements such as "information wants to be free", with my apologies to 
> Mr Barlow.  I think information sometimes "just happens" to a person who 
> needs it, but more often it is created by someone who sets out 
> specifically to do just that. How does that person, in the Net 
> environment, gain his/her just rewards for the effort? How does an 
> author and/or publisher profit ... (Eeeewwwww, there's that word 
> again) from the investment they have made in time/money/expertise etc to 
> distill the mountains of data "out there" into a digestible amount of 
> information. And more specifically, how do they "profit" in the absence 
> of any ability to manage the dissemination of their product?
> 
> I think that applying expertise and experience to the evaluation of data 
> defiinitely adds value and needs some form of compensation in order to 
> encourage "publishers", whether they are million subscriber magazines or 
> individual small publishers to invest the time in this enterprise, 
> otherwise we'll all end up drowning in a sea of undigested "facts".


It appears to me that the seeds for some real shock may appear over the 
next two years on this topic.

On the one hand you have the large community of people and companies who 
prosper by offering computerized access to, indexing of, and viewing of 
massive amounts of information through the Net. This includes the BBS 
operators, the Netcom's, the InfoSeek corporations, the many web page 
offerings which incorporate "stuff from elsewhere." This community 
thrives on the notion of informaton as free, somewhat unaccountable, that 
copyright is an impossible and unnatural impediment to modern information 
public policy interests.

On the other hand you have Microsoft and many other entities creating the 
infrastructure hyped as able to turn every person with a personal 
computer and a phone line into a publisher of their own personal 
databases, specialized professional knowledge bases, articles, etc.

This latter group, which should probably approach tens of millions of 
people over the next five years, will have bought into the idea that they 
can now publish stuff of proprietary nature which can be protected by 
copyright... either because they bought into the hype of publishing for 
profit, or because they believe in their right to limit distribution of 
what they say to their chosen forum and site.

The former group is moving hastily to have the legal situation modified 
to clarify that no Internet Service Providers (what ever that many come 
to mean when everyone has that ability via their own lines and faster 
personal computers), on the theory the deserve "common carrier" type 
exemption like the phone company. They are also suggesting that the law 
place most of the legal weight on "posters" of information.

Well, this raises the "empty chair" problem for those holding copyrights, 
especially the zillion small publishers. If only a poster is liable, what 
happens when exitence of anonymous remailing tools spreads, including 
into the data haven countries which aren't cooperative with many Western 
countries? How do you obtain evidence internationally with which to prove 
a case when that costs tens of thousands of dollars, if it could be done 
at all. What happens when you can't prove, or cannot afford to prove, the 
complicated questions of who was operating what computer at the time THAT 
computer "seems" to have been the source?

Law in the books is useless if implementaton of it is impracticable, 
affordable only to 5% of publishers. It's impossible if the "poster" is 
merely an empty chair in which no real person proven to have "posted" the 
offending material.

It seems to me that the millions of "little people," average citizens 
buying Net publishing software and stuff at their local places for a few 
hundred dollars, are going to have some bad feelings toward their plight 
as little publishers in a world where the law has exempted the big 
distributors of information and left only empty chair to sue... at tens 
of thousands of dollars per case. Todays fast legislative changes to 
protect one sector, may be the object of some considerable surprise and 
resentment a few years from now when everyone's "creative product" is 
being lifted and spread 'round the world at will ... without limit.

James Cook

From owner-online-news@marketplace.com Sat Jun  3 22:30:49 1995
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