The hyperbole that surrounds the digital “revolution” (for instance, the use of that word) can be a little dizzying. I would encourage all of us to make sure we are taking in sufficient oxygen, and realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Or at least to a predictable course, as a stream does after recovering from storm-related flooding. Specifically, please understand that our digital world is not entirely “new,” and as a result we don’t need to discard well-established principles of rights and ownership for creators.

My latest frustration was spurred by a fairly thoughtful but absurdly sweeping speech by Gerd Leonhard, one of many self-described “futurists,” who gave a talk at Google’s London office; his presentation was modestly titled “The Future.” (He explains in the beginning that it originally was on the future of media but he realized while preparing it that his vision was far broader than that. No hubris there!)

In a nutshell, he makes an argument that many have made before him; we are moving from a mass-media world of central distributors and consumers (as I call it, point-to-multipoint) to a world where we are individually networked with many others (point-to-point).

Your point, Mr. Leonhard?

Yes, this is a shift, a real one. It is not revolutionary, however. As I have previously noted — I encourage you to read this past blog entry on the subject, which has cool charts and graphs, as cool as I can make them anyway — this is actually a return to the methods of communication common throughout recorded history.

The mass-media age folks the age of Mr. Leonhard and I grew up in was the historical aberration. In fairness to Mr. Leonhard, he is not the only one to miss this point; very smart people such as Professor Yochai Benkler also fall into the trap of extrapolating beyond the reasonable; in his case, he seems to view our planet of 6 billion people as capable of operating as a kibbutz.

This notion of a return to point-to-point norms is an important baseline to operate from; we are returning to a historic equilibrium.

But it is also important to keep to a minimum the hyperbole of point-to-point communications.

In nearly all communication we refer to as point-to-point, there are actually facilitators, distributors. Twitter the company serves as a distributor of tweets, Facebook and MySpace act likewise. Google is the ultimate aggregator, but there are more human ones as well such as The Drudge Report and Huffington Post.

This myth of bottom-up distribution can perhaps best be found with Wikipedia, the site that makes many digital “revolutionaries” all tingly. Do you perpetuate the meme that Wikipedia is the ultimate town square, the completely democratic entity that gives equal weight on the thoughts related to dinosuars as precursors to birds to a high-school dropout and a decorated paleontologist?

Sorry to burst your bubble.

Wikipedia repeatedly has clamped down on its editing process, most recently last month. The site is becoming increasingly hierarchical, although it should be noted that the editing itself is largely voluntary. Still, the Wikimedia Foundation has acknowledged that the Pareto Principle is in effect with their operation; a very small cadre of volunteers oversee vast quantities of content, not unlike a traditional encyclopedia. We see this same pattern with Facebook and Twitter, where the vast majority of posts are done by a tiny minority of participants.

Think this wiki model, regardless of how hierarchical it is, is “revolutionary?” Try reading Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman. It took seventy years to write the Oxford English Dictionary, known as the OED. How was it done? A private society of individuals began asking lovers of books to mail in slips of paper of references they saw to words in books, not just exotic words but mundane ones as well. Millions of slips of paper were sent in over the years, with motivations of the senders ranging from just wishing to contribute to something larger than themselves to others enjoying the rare books the society would mail to them to read (they were obligated to return the books but didn’t always do so).

Here’s what happened. The project, expected to just take a few years, soon became too big for a private philological society to manage. Oxford University brought the project into their fold, and a large new building was built to manage it, complete with numerous cubbyholes to hold slips of paper. Numerous editors and sub-editors were brought in to sift through the slips of paper, and find the few references that would be included in the dictionary. (Generally they were looking for the first recorded reference for each meaning of each word, plus some ones that well-represented the meaning of the word in the quotation itself.) Of course, the editors wrote the final dictionary entries.

This was a classic example of a hybrid network, centralization overseeing decentralization. It is what we are seeing in the digital world today.

There are many more sources for music today than fifteen years ago, but there generally are facilitators of transport, from iTunes to Pandora to, yes, LimeWire. The same is true for other creative works.

Are there point-to-point connections between individuals in which creative works are passed? Yes. Is this in fact the most efficient system for transport, even in the digital age? Of course not.

Look at the growth of the Internet itself. DARPA didn’t sit down and draw a map of what the Internet would look like in 2009 and then proceed to dig trenches for cables. No, the Internet has grown, almost like a living organism, by adapting to need. When bottlenecks occur bits follow new paths, and engineers then build out where the most need occurs. The Internet backbone, and the ISP layer on top of it, has evolved as a series of hubs and spokes, not unlike the same model that has emerged in air travel. Why? Efficiency. There may be a flight directly from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but it will be a lot cheaper to connect through Atlanta. It’s just more efficient for the airline.

A few years ago I heard a brilliant thinker arguing that wireless networks would soon be passe. There would be no cell phone towers, no wi-fi routers. Our own devices would serve both as receivers and transmitters. If I stood in D.C. and texted my daughter in Alexandria, my text would bounce across hundreds of individuals’ mobile devices in nanoseconds and reach her. Is this technologically possible? Yes. Is it going to become a reality? No. Why? Because customizing all of our electronic devices to perform these tasks is simply less efficient than our current hub-and-spoke model.

What does this mean for copyright? It means that futurists are absolutely correct that the 20th Century model of a few large distributors directly providing us most of our creative works is becoming less and less of a reality. But it also means there will still be distributors, just more of them operating on smaller scales. This will make more challenging the licensing of rights, but in no way means rights don’t remain important. There will be more producers of works, as we are already seeing, but economies of scale will mean there will continue to be large ones along with small.

Each of us can be a producer, and each of us can be a distributor. But most distribution will go through larger channels. How does a creator monetize distribution when it is truly point-to-point, when it is your Uncle Fred downloading a file from your computer? I don’t know. Multiple attempts by copyright owners and P2P companies to figure out how to do that on a broad file-sharing scale thus far have not been successful.

But let us not be lulled into the vision of Leonhard, or of Benkler, who speaks lovingly of individuals donating unused bandwidth to the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project without really focusing on the fact that SETI is actually managed by a team of full-time scientists operating out of Berkeley. There is a center to that doughnut.

Celebrate the increase in production and distribution options in the digital age, a return to societies of our ancestors. But also note that an increase in production and distribution options does not mean there must be a reduction in creators’ rights in production and distribution.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 3:19 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators, culture, internet, licensing, p2p, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.