
Better than Free (2008) - _pius
http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/
======
01572
"The internet is a copy machine."

This truth is often hidden by some given abstraction.

(file, save, download, streaming, etc.)

Businesses have been built on such abstractions. Success stories.

On the flipside, existing businesses that were built _before the internet_ who
do not know the truth have been fed these abstractions. These businesses may
stand nothing to gain from participating in the copy machine. Whomever is
feeding these businesses with abstractions that hide the truth are not helping
these businesses. They are helping themselves and watching these businesses
being destroyed by a copy machine.

------
b1daly
A nice essay generalizing about what people might be willing to pay for, in a
world where the marginal cost of production of products that people used to
pay for has dropped to zero.

One category that he missed is embedding digitized products like software into
dedicated hardware. It's a form of DRM that is harder to crack (I think).

Here's some examples from the audio world, that are variations of this idea.

The main audio software platforms, known as Digital Audio Workstations (DAW)
have all evolved to a point where they have to support open plugin formats.
Plugins are implementations of digital signal processing software, that are
used in combination within the DAW to produce the end result, which is a
complete, finished sound file,

Because audio production and engineering is hard (basically, things tend to
not sound good) there is constant development, and fierce competition, in this
niche market.

Various forms of DRM, or licensing systems, are almost universally used. This
provides enough friction, meaning you can get cracked versions of most
plugins, but it comes at a cost of inconvenience, malware, or compromised
stability, that a modest number of small companies have built business in the
market.

But the competition is fierce, and the trend in license prices has been
steadily down. The cracks do hurt the sales.

One company that has thrived in this market is Universal Audio. They put heavy
development into making premium, we'll respected plugins, but they only run on
their proprietary DSP systems. For a while, this could be seen as a genuine
advantage, as users commonly ran up against the limitations of their CPUs.

This is no longer the case, but the company has steadfastly stuck to their
proprietary system. One technique they used was to embed their DSP in
dedicated sound interfaces.

The sound interface market is also hotly contested, and companies are
constantly fighting against commoditization. So they developed high quality
sound interfaces, which is something all audio producers have to have, and use
their catalog of exclusive software plugins as a "value added differentiator."

CEDAR is the pre-eminent developer of specialized software dedicated to
challenging issues of noise reduction. For a long time, they limited the use
of their algorithms to their own DSP hardware. If you wanted these industry
best algorithms, you had to buy their, relatively, expensive systems. While
they now do offer some of their software as plugins, they continue to use
dedicated hardware as part of their product strategy.

One interesting possibility is the embedding of otherwise unremarkable
software into dedicated hardware, because of the user interface advantages. By
giving the user access to physical controls, that do nothing but mimic their
virtual cousins, the goal would be to dramatically increase the usability of
the software. There has been some movement in this direction, which is
actually a kind of throwback to how the first generations of audio DSP
devices, back when dedicated hardware was the only way to implement such
processing.

You can see this tension around user interface play out in the realm of audio
mixers for life performance. They use dedicated interfaces to run the real
time DSP, but combine various virtualization strategies. Some of the biggest
audio plugin companies, like Waves, have released versions of their popular
software plugins to run on some of the modern live mixing hardware systems,
thereby generating new revenue streams from existing products.

At this point, while it is entirely possible to run an entire mix of a live
show on a PC with a mouse and keyboard, it is such a sub-optimal user
experience, that I have never witnessed anyone do this. (Though I'm sure some
foolish, Braveheart do, and budget challenged audio engineers have done it!)

------
incompatible
"Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it
will be copied, and those copies never leave."

Not really true at all. So many times I've found a dead link, archive.org
doesn't have a copy, it's gone. Entire domains loaded with content have
disappeared. In general, people don't copy and save other people's material,
except temporarily for viewing.

~~~
Iv
Unexpectedly, we have managed to squash the initial carefree copying of the
internet with just a few ridiculous court cases. Even the pirate bay founders
are starting to feel tired of maintaining it.

~~~
wruza
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but to layman's cryptoanalyst like me, TPB and
torrents in general seem like the easiest things to move entirely into
blockchain-like network. Just embed it into torrent clients, done, right?
Torrents are far more real, stable and necessary than some ethereal entities.

Btw, afaik, entire tpb/kat archive is around few gigabytes.

~~~
jackyinger
I'm not a blockchain expert, but I don't think it would help in this case.
Blockchains are for creating a valid, secure public ledger of transactions. I
don't think you want to keep an accurate public log of everything you torrent
;)

You probably want something more like Tor. However Tor's design makes it no
good for large transactions thanks to all the obfuscating hops.

There's always a price to pay when attempting to secure something... the trick
is making design decisions such that the price is negligible. (Think HTTPS)

~~~
problems
I think what he's more talking about is something more akin to a distributed
search system than a blockchain - you could make the magnet links last forever
in a blockchain, but that doesn't really make sense if no one holds the files
anymore you're just keeping useless links around and storing them on every
single node for no reason.

A search DHT makes much more sense, look up keywords based on hash. Think the
Kademlia network from the ED2K days. Maybe I'm being too academic by even
suggesting a DHT be used, you could do it in simpler ways like flood search in
the style of Gnutella - any distributed search means would work really.

I believe there are a few attempts at this in the bittorrent world, like
Tribler, which is probably the most practical implementation to date, there's
a few others too, none of which look particularly mature yet:

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/aresgalaxy/editorial/?sourc...](https://sourceforge.net/projects/aresgalaxy/editorial/?source=psp)
[https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net](https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-
net)
[https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico](https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico)

The problem with distributed search is that perfecting it is hard - bittorrent
has won out because websites could be used to prevent spamming of malware,
track reputation and discussion of torrents and individuals, etc. Tribler has
some proposed alternatives here and I seem to remember Kad having done a
decent job preventing this from becoming a significant problem, but it never
had the popularity.

If someone manages to knock out all the big torrent and usenet indexes
overnight, these systems will become a lot more necessary and probably get a
lot more popular.

------
teach
Thank you so much for posting this! I saw this when it was originally posted
back in 2008 and think of it often but could never craft the google-fu needed
to unearth it again!

(Findability, anyone?)

------
dang
Discussed (a bit) at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108559).

------
mortiester
Thus whoever can seize control of things that can be copied and stop the
copying can sell them at any price as long as people need it...an internet
monopoly.

------
superasn
This guy gets it. This is one of the reasons that the best way to sell product
online is to create a cheap front-end product that delivers insane amounts of
value to the Customer and then make profits with the back-end sales over and
over, i.e. Repeat customers (because now you have their trust and good will).

~~~
amelius
But it only works in small niche markets, not mass markets.

------
davidgerard
> A couple of high profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make
> their living doing exactly that.

Apache??

~~~
kasbah
Yeah, I think Kevin Kelly got the facts wrong on that.

>In the 2010–11 fiscal year, the Foundation took in $539,410, almost entirely
from grants and contributions

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation#Fin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation#Financials)

------
dredmorbius
I agree with Kelly that the Internet is the modern outgrowth of the publishing
and media industry, though I find his focus and conclusions beyond that point
lacking.

For starters, the Internet itself is far more about _distribution_ than
_duplicating_. It's _effect_ is to achieve _distribution_ of information.
Computers alone are sufficient to achieve _copying_ , but it was the
_distribution_ component which computers alone, or even low-speed or fixed-
location Internet failed to achieve. And though the Internet's distribution
involves copying of bits, that's not the critical function.

Information theory itself concerns the _origination_ , _distribution_ ,
_receipt_ , _comprehension_ (or decoding), and possibly _redistribution_ of
messages. Those are instantiated through such systems as webservers (or
application engines), the Internet, protocols, and ultimately some human or
nonhuman interpretation engine.

Kelly is _also_ correct in that the Internet removes costs and frictions. Or
alternatively, it _shifts_ the cost points of media, and generally _reduces_
the costs of originating and duplicating information, without increasing
individual capacity to comprehend or filter it. This gets to the core of
what's been called the attention economy, forseen in the 1970s and earlier by
Herbert Simon and Alvin Toffler.

I've been looking at quantifications of information absorption capacity of
people and suspect that that's generally quite _low_ \-- a few tens, possibly
hundreds, of messages per day, but not much above that. The consequence of
filter overload is a real problem. And the _attention_ we can give any one
message is directly _inversely_ proportional to the number of messages
received, divided by our time to dedicate to such messages.

Reducing costs gives rise to the Jevons paradox: It's not that the high-
barrier-to-entry messages of the high-cost era suddenly become more available,
but that a new flood of low-barrier, low-value (or negative-value) messages
appear. Spam. Viruses. Junk mail. Phone solicitations. Web advertising.
Clickbait.

There's also Woozle's Law of Epistemic Systems: as the audience using any
given communications medium increases in number (and especially: in
significance), the value of _manipulating_ that audience will increase.

In market economics, low marginal costs become a problem as _marginal cost is
the mechanism by which markets set prices_. For goods with high _fixed_ and
low _marginal_ costs, market prices are simply insufficient to reward
producers (or creators). This is the subject of recent books by Paul Mason (
_Postcapitalism_ ) and Jeremy Rifkin ( _The Zero Marginal Cost Society_ ).

Gresham's Law is another challenge, multiple ways. The popular form is "Bad X
drives out good", though the general mechanism is more nuanced: Greshams
mechanisms are complexity constraints applied where a "better" (more complex)
good is valued identically to a "worse" one, for whatever reasons, within a
given domain. The general result is that the worse goods predominate. The
capacity to distinguish better from worse itself affects this, which is why a
larger market tends to incentivise worse goods. And, if there is an
alternative market in which the better goods _are_ more highly rewarded,
you'll see a flight of those goods to those markets. This is often exhibited
as brain-drain: flight from low-paid professions such as teaching, government
work, politics, or academia, to business, trades, or finance, for example.

It can also be exhibited as international flows of capital, coin, or talent.

And this plays out in information markets, where the lack of sufficient reward
will see authors and creators either depart for realms in which they are
appropriately rewarded, or to other fields. Political and ethnic persecution
can have similar effects -- the flight of European Jews to the US in the 1930s
and 1940s, or the flight of American blacks to Europe from the 1930s through
the 1970s and even beyond, as examples.

Sorting out the implications of _changing relative costs and rewards_ is key,
and that's what Kelly, and a great many others, fail to do.

------
majewsky
tl;dr: Reasons why people will still pay for digital content even though it
can be reproduced at no cost: immediacy, personalization, interpretation,
authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability.
Advertising is notably absent from the list. Quoting:

> Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said
> nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution, almost
> the ONLY solution, to the paradox of the free. Most of the suggested
> solutions I’ve seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of
> advertising. I think ads are only one of the paths that attention takes, and
> in the long-run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made
> selling the free. But that’s another story.

Since this is (2008), does anyone know if that blog covered that "other story"
at some point? I'm currently digging through a Google search for

    
    
      advertisement site:kk.org inurl:thetechnium
    

...but cannot see anything useful so far.

------
danboarder
Published January 31, 2008

~~~
ralfd
I am a bit confused by the website (blog?), as the sidebar links to unrelated
strange stuff (graphic novel, pictures of asia). But the site should make
sense as a two letter .org url is quite prestigious.

~~~
jwilk
It's someone's personal website.

------
amelius
Immediacy -- who really needs it?

I mean, for a movie, just wait a few months and you can download it.

If you don't want to wait, you still have to wait for the next movie to come
out, so it makes no difference really.

To say it another way: no matter where you are in the pipeline, you still have
to wait the same amount of time for new data to arrive.

~~~
coldtea
> _Immediacy -- who really needs it?_

Needs it? Nobody. Who _wants_ its? Billions.

But nobody really _needs_ music and movies either.

> _I mean, for a movie, just wait a few months and you can download it._

You must be new to earth.

> _If you don 't want to wait, you still have to wait for the next movie to
> come out, so it makes no difference really._

No, it really does make a difference. Waiting for something that isn't yet
available is acceptable (and in any case, inevitable). Waiting for something
that it's out already is not acceptable to most people.

~~~
ASipos
> You must be new to earth.

explain this

