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Copyrighted publishing comes to Internet: The Electronic Newsstand [ long
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1993 06:13:50 -0500
From: jonabbey () cs utexas edu (Jonathan David Abbey) Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk Subject: Copyrighted publishing comes to Internet: The Electronic Newsstand Date: 12 Sep 93 00:00:37 GMT Organization: CS Dept, University of Texas at Austin The following is a letter that I sent to the proprietors of the Electronic Newstand, a new gopher service that publishes excerpts from commercial magazines on the Internet. Their information comes with a statement that the information cannot be redistributed in any fashion. I found that this bothered me quite a lot, and so I have written this letter to these folks trying to explain my feelings. I'd appreciate any comments or discussion on these themes.. what will be the effect of Internet commercialization? Will the culture of information sharing be subsumed by the big publishers as they become aware of Internet? To see the Electronic Newsstand, gopher to: gopher.internet.com, port 2100 or use NCSA Mosaic to access URL gopher://gopher.internet.com:2100/11/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have looked over the information you have published on your Internet Gopher, and I have some questions and comments. My first question is, why should we care that you are doing this? You only publish a very small amount of information from a smattering of publications. The articles you do include are interesting, but there is a vast wealth of information available on the Internet elsewhere, information that is part of a free and dynamic exchange of ideas rather than a static broadcast of one person's opinions. Obviously, there is a place for static publication on the Internet. However, your service is rather different from the vast majority of Internet information services in that you explicitly deny permission to copy or share the information you publish. Why should we be interested in accessing your information if we cannot redirect the information to people that we think would be interested in receiving it? One of the primary strengths of the Internet and USENET is that it allows us to share information with the people that we think would be most interested in it. When each of us has the ability to publish and distribute information, why should we care to act as passive recipients of someone else's proprietary information? That's a model appropriate to print and broadcast media. On Internet, there is not one information publisher on high and many information recipients down below. On Internet, we all produce, we all share. Your model and your restrictions imply that sharing of information might not really be what you are about. I'm afaid that the subscription invitations are more important to your endeavour than is the sharing of information. At one point you refer to your new information providers as your clients. What is your business model? If you are in the business of providing your clients with access to customers, I'd like to know that. I see no reason to be a product for someone else to sell without my knowledge. I am willing to sell my attention to someone else if the rewards for doing so are sufficiently high. But the rewards must be significantly higher than I can get without having to sell myself in such a way. The information you are providing does not meet these criteria -- I can get better information elsewhere without being told who I may or may not share it with. I really have more questions than I can very well articulate here, and I really don't know how the information economy is going to work. But I do know that I am willing to work hard to produce and share information with the world if they are willing to do likewise and share the fruits with me. I am willing to pay cash for interesting and educational information, and do so with great regularity. So why am I upset with your service? I guess I feel that it just doesn't seem terribly honorable. Internet is the result of a tremendous amount of work that a very large number of people have done to build a world in which we can so easily share information. To come in and take advantage of it to provide information that we cannot share, for the sake of your clients, seems rather crass. A naive viewpoint, I know. I suppose I am just mourning the loss of an innocence that was never really there. cc: comp.org.eff.talk, editors () wired com, wer () well sf ca us -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Whole Earth Review Manifesto wer () well sf ca us WER #74, Spring 1992 If you pick up Whole Earth Review without knowing what Whole Earth Review is about, you'll probably be surprised. Yes, we do regularly publish articles about ecology. But that's only part of the mix.. It isn't easy to pin us down by looking over the table of contents. Twenty years ago, Stewart Brand's statement of purpose for the Whole Earth Catalog was: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory -- as via government, big business, formal education, church -- has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains, a realm of intimate, personal power is developing -- the power of individuals to conduct their own education, find their own inspiration, shape their own environment, and share the adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog." We still believe that. But we're a different team and it's a different world. We think we can be more precise about "tools that aid this process." So the Whole Earth Review staff has thought and talked and composed this statement of purpose. We're eager to hear what you think of it. -o- WE ARE DEDICATED TO DEMYSTIFICATION, TO SELF-TEACHING, AND TO ENCOURAGING PEOPLE TO THINK FOR THEMSELVES. THUS OUR MOTTO: "ACCESS TO TOOLS AND IDEAS." Tools in the Whole Earth sense include hammers, books, and computer conferencing systems. Our readers are a community of tool-users who share information with one another. The ideas we make accessible have not often been found in university courses, but are becoming recognized as part of what you need to know to be truly educated. Our readers contribute to the editorial content as well, with both reviews and articles. -o- WE RECOMMEND RATHER THAN ATTACK. Our magazine is an evaluation and access device. It can help you discover what is worth getting and how to get it. We're here to point, not to sell. We have no financial obligation or connection to any of the suppliers reviewed. We only review stuff we think is great. Why waste your time with anything else? -o- WE CHANGE WITH THE TIMES THAT WE HELP CHANGE. Our publications are a call to, and support for, individual action. The first Whole Earth Catalogs were aimed at the so-called counter-culture, the back-to-the-land folks who were attempting to live as much as possible outside the system. As we hoped, many of the attributes of the counterculture movement became mainstream, especially ecological issues and related concern with energy efficiency. Our publications have been influential. But we don't spend much time thinking about the same things we thought about in the sixties, and neither do our readers. This magazine and our catalogs progressed from being part of a social movement to being a trusted reference like a good encyclopedia. -o- WE UPDATE OURSELVES CONTINUALLY. By not accepting display advertising, we have extraordinary editorial freedom to publish anything we think our readers need to know. Conventional magazines exist and profit because they can deliver readers to advertisers; subscriptions are a much less important source of income. Most magazines fish for readers and feed them to adver- tisers. We fish for information and feed it to readers, who sustain us with their subscriptions. For readers, this means unobstructed and challenging editorial material and unbiased reviews. -o- WE'RE NOT A "POLITICAL" MAGAZINE. We are committed to providing political tools and new ways of thinking about politics, but we are not a forum for partisan politics. -o- WE ARE DELIBERATELY ECLECTIC. Our content is addressed to many communities of readers who lead different kinds of lives, and who may disagree with one another about many things. We provide tools for environmental activists; we give technology-watchers and tinkerers a window on tomorrow's scientific trends. Our readers are men and women, young and old, urban and rural, from all around the world. They like to have their worldviews expanded and their assumptions challenged. They don't mind taking the time to read, to think, and to discuss new ideas. We offer tools for generalists. --The Staff of Whole Earth Review Copyright Whole Earth Review 1992. Permission granted to redistribute electronically. -- Jonathan Abbey jonabbey () cs utexas edu Applied Research Laboratories The University of Texas at Austin "National Security" is the root password to the constitution. -- the Net Read: The Shockwave Rider -- John Brunner -- ISBN 0-345-32431-5
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