Information Commands To Be Shared, Denying It Will Cost You

STOP the deforestation of ideas

Photo Credit: The Pug Father

"Nothing is original.

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows.

Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.

And don’t bother concealing your thievery. celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said:“It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.”"

Jim Jarmusch (January 22, 2004)

Share Me!

You can't stop it. No matter how hard you try, how many technological barriers (DRM) or laws (copyright, DMCA) you try to put in place. It's the most powerful and unstoppable force we have ever seen. 

Ideas.

They must be shared. They simply, command it.

Before we dive in, for the sake of simplicity I have broadened the scope of the word "idea" to include any discrete idea or meme or observation. From a song, to a riff. To a book, poem or phrase. But not the work itself, which can best be described as the tangible medium of expression. Such as a sound recording or a paperback book.

The notion that you can somehow own a single idea, the idea of copyright, must disappear because it simply does not work. I'm not the first to think along these lines either. Back in August of 1813 in a letter to Isaac McPherson, Thomas Jefferson mused about the legitimacy of copyright, "It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property."

And more recently Lawrence Lessig said in May the Source Be With You back in 2001, "Our trend in copyright law has been to enclose as much as we can; the consequence of this enclosure is a stifling of creativity and innovation."

In the old world of physical controllable distribution, copyright was not a major issue. It did limit the procreation of new ideas to an extent, but at the time it was far outweighed by the gains of mass distribution, it brought.

Now the internet offers what is effectively free distribution of ideas, and copyright is rearing its ugly head like never before. It is no longer required to enable distribution, now it serves to do not much more than slow it, and creation of new ideas.

To understand why the ability to freely share ideas is so important we need to understand how ideas evolve and grow.

Evolution of Ideas

Just as life evolved from simple beings to complex beings (single celled to multi-celled organisms), so too do ideas. Ideas consist of many ancestral ideas. They take small incremental steps each time. There are no major jumps. You may think there are, but those major ideas will always have a few simple precursors - little influences.

A new idea is created when a filter (be it a single mind or a collective mind), draws on influence from other ideas for the purpose of either scientific endeavor, intellectual gain, or creative expression. Whatever the purpose of the filter the output will always be a new idea in the filters mind, as it never previously existed.

Ideas evolve from simple to complex all the time. They feed off each other, join with each other, get mixed and matched, adapted and changed. A few simple and complex ideas can evolve into an even greater and more complex idea than ever before.

Take the idea of modern computing. A thousand years ago the thought of such a thing would be impossible. No one could conceive what we have now. But a thousand years of slow incremental thoughts and ideas, simpler ideas being filtered, adapted, curated and changed to create newer complex ideas, did lead to modern computing and the modern computer.

For a good complex idea to form, simpler ideas must first be filtered and interpreted and then published back into the public discourse. Where they then become simple ideas again and are filtered and used to create an even more complex idea.

The process continues ad infinitum creating a never ending, forever forking, interrelated lineage of ideas. This is, culture.

In Part II, I am going to discuss where the real value is. And why denying the sharing of information will really cost you.