All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites by Cory Doctorow (mind reading books .txt) 📖

in copyright. And likewise, DRM has not stopped infringement: today, infringement is more widespread than ever. All those costs borne by society in the name of protecting artists and stopping infringement, and not a penny put into an artist’s pocket, not a single DRM-restricted file that can’t be downloaded for free and without encumbrance from a P2P network.

Everywhere we look, we find people who should know better calling for a parasite-free Internet. Science fiction writers are supposed to be forward looking, but they’re wasting their time demanding that Amazon and Google make it harder to piece together whole books from the page-previews one can get via the look-inside-the-book programs. They’re even cooking up programs to spoof deliberately corrupted ebooks into the P2P networks, presumably to assure the few readers the field has left that reading science fiction is a mug’s game.

The amazing thing about the failure of parasite-elimination programs is that their proponents have concluded that the problem is that they haven’t tried hard enough — with just a few more species eliminated, a few more policies imposed, paradise will spring into being. Their answer to an unsuccessful strategy for fixing the Internet is to try the same strategy, only moreso — only fill those niches in the ecology that you can sanction. Hunt and kill more parasites, no matter what the cost.

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 hummus carpeting the jungle floor and the tiny frogs living in the bromeliads.

The long tail — Chris Anderson’s name for the 95% of media that isn’t top sellers, but which, in aggregate, accounts for more than half the money on the table for media vendors — is the tail of bottom-feeders and improbable denizens of the ocean’s thermal vents. We’re unexpected guests at the dinner table and we have the nerve to demand a full helping.

Your ideas are cool and you should go and make them real, even if they demand that the kind of ecological diversity that seems to be disappearing around us.

You may succeed — provided that your plans don’t call for a simple ecosystem where only you get to provide value and no one else gets to play.

eof