Regalare conviene

Ci sono due cose che mi consentono di fare questo post: il fatto che Cory Doctorow ha distribuito la sua racconta di saggi Content sotto licenza Creative Commons, quindi rendendola liberamente redistribuibile, e il fatto che l'ha distribuita in formato digitale, quindi facilmente riproducibile.

Così facendo, Doctorow non ha perso un lettore ma ne ha guadagnati due: me, che oltre ad aver scaricato e letto il libro sul cellulare poi l'ho anche comprato, e almeno uno dei lettori di questo blog, che incuriosito dalle citazioni qui sotto scaricherà il libro, e probabilmente lo comprerà anche.

E forse ci farà un post, e via così...



da Content:

Here’s the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall.

The thing that made the Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more popular because it was more proliferate: all success factors for a new medium pale beside its profligacy. The most successful organisms on earth are those that reproduce the most: bugs and bacteria, nematodes and virii. Reproduction is the best of all survival strategies.

Here are the two most important things to know about computers and the Internet:
1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits
2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to another very cheaply and quickly
Any new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with computers will embrace these two facts, not regret them.
New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media
at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.

Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we’ve changed copyright. Copyright isn’t an ethical proposition, it’s a utilitarian one.

An “information economy” can’t be based on selling information. Information technology makes copying information easier and easier. The more IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to copy information from here on in. The information economy is about selling everything except information.

The future is conversational: when there’s more good stuff that you know about that’s one click away or closer than you will ever click on, it’s not enough to know that some book is good. The least substitutable good in the Internet era is the personal relationship.
Conversation, not content, is king. If you were stranded on a desert island and you opted to bring your records instead of your friends, we’d call you a sociopath

In Huxley’s Brave New World, the rationale for the totalitarian system was that technology was too dangerous and needed to be controlled. But that just pushes technology underground where it becomes less stable.

An email system that can be controlled is an email system without complexity. Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled.

We are proud parasites, we Emerging Techers. We’re engaged in Perl whirling, Pythoneering, lightweight Javarey — we hack our cars and we hack our PCs. We’re the rich humus carpeting the jungle floor and the tiny frogs living in the bromeliads.