All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites | Page 3

over the
two-hundred-million-dollar budgets for making films. As far as
Hollywood is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug. Two weeks ago, I

heard the VP of Technology for Warners give a presentation in Dublin
on the need to adopt DRM for digital TV, and his money-shot, his big
convincer of a slide went like this:
"With advances in processing power, storage capacity and broadband
access... EVERYBODY BECOMES A BROADCASTER!"
Heaven forfend.
Simple ecosystems are the goal of proceedings like CARP, the panel
that set out the ruinously high royalties for webcasters. The recording
industry set the rates as high as they did so that the teeming millions of
webcasters would be rendered economically extinct, leaving behind a
tiny handful of giant companies that could be negotiated with around a
board room table, rather than dealt with by blanket legislation.
The razing of the rainforest has a cost. It's harder to send a legitimate
email today than it ever was -- thanks to a world of closed SMTP relays.
The cries for a mail-server monoculture grow more shrill with every
passing moment. Just last week, it was a call for every
mail-administrator to ban the "vacation" program that sends out
automatic responses informing senders that the recipient is away from
email for a few days, because mailboxes that run vacation can cause
"spam blowback" where accounts send their vacation notices to the
hapless individuals whose email addresses the spammers have
substituted on the email's Reply-To line.
And yet there is more spam than there ever was. All the costs we've
paid for fighting spam have added up to no benefit: the network is still
overrun and sometimes even overwhelmed by spam. We've let the
network's neutrality and diversity be compromised, without receiving
the promised benefit of spam-free inboxes.
Likewise, DRM has exacted a punishing toll wherever it has come into
play, costing us innovation, free speech, research and the public's rights
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

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