ChapterZero

“A Library of Echoes”: that sounds like a good title for a novel, kind of like “The Constant Gardener”. But in this case, I saw this promoted as a metaphor for the effect that counter-piracy schemes will have on our society:

What these kinds of dependencies create in our society is a library of echos, things that once existed, but now are lost. Things locked in a closet somewhere never to see the light of day again. And the worst part, we won’t know what we are missing. Just imagine now, if you will, if the content locking mechanisms now being proposed and implemented in our time existed much earlier in history. Just imagine.

The full article is at K5, but it may be more interesting to do the Gedanken experiment suggested in the excerpt before reading it.

I’ve been musing about creation for a while now, so this article hit me hard. Although, I was thinking more along the tune of how almost no one does any original work– most people work in throw-away jobs, and are very replaceable (in the sense of utility, not humanity). Even among those that get ‘higher’ educations, not everyone turns out to make useful original contributions. The author of a survival guide for mathematicians I was reading earlier to prepare for my grad school admission process was almost fatalistic about this: he said 90% of PHds in mathematics don’t do any original work (i.e. other than relatively unimaginative extensions and generalizations and specializations of others’ works), and of those who do, most of them remain within the area they wrote their thesis on.

If creativity, imaginativity is such a rare thing, it begs the question of how best to foster it, and let the whole world reap the benefits. Or at least, it does the latter if you think that it should be a common resource. Sadly, it seems that the best way to achieve this first goal is to have copyright protection laws, because then the fruits of a person’s creative labors can be sold, so they are motivated to make the effort. But this also means that the second goal can’t be perfectly achieved, because not everyone has money.