Information Wants to Be Worthless by Bruce Sterling

"But one scenario was way too far-fetched and idealistic, even for the likes of us. What if it turned out that the Net was just plain too much for business to handle? That it was downright toxic to free enterprise?...

Lack of money, though, is not stopping the innovation. It never did. The Internet now reaches half the population of the USA. It is starting big seismic rumblings in China, Iran, and India, societies that lack their own AOL Time Warner and therefore have some dead-serious uses for cheap global network communication. Worldwide, people use the Net for e-mail. E-mail never had a real business model, but it was one feature everybody always wanted. The Net is becoming the planet's water cooler. It's all about the schmoozing and the gossip." [More Like This WebLog]

And of course, libraries have been here all along. Information is most definitely not worthless to us.

SSSCA Hearing

"arsoncc writes: "According to this article on CNET, a Senate Bill will likely force the issue of adding copy protection to hardware. They are giving the industry 12 to 18 months to come up with a voluntary solution to the "problem" of copies, and if not... Well, you just have to read the article. Insane." Wired also has a story. The IP list published two interesting documents: an account of the hearing by an attendee, and a letter from Intel published immediately after the hearing. Read the letter carefully - note that the disagreement between the tech industry and Hollywood is not over whether or not copy protection will be implemented into every electronic device, but only whether or not this should be written into law. If the SSSCA isn't passed, Intel (and others) get a lot of leverage over Hollywood. If it is, Intel's leverage disappears. But since both sides want to build copy protection into everything, they only differ over the process, we're in trouble either way." [Slashdot]

This is great because I was going to note all of the links contained in the Slashdot article, but now they've done the work for me. The only difference would be that I would capitalize the T in "trouble either way." Even disregarding the principles at stake here, there are two direct impacts on library budgets and services.

1. Many libraries provide workstations where their patrons can search databases or use desktop software to create documents. Naturally, these folks want to save the results of their searches or the work they did on the documents. In the past, this has been done on floppy disks, but as the software grows and people do more, the files inevitably become too big for a single disk (think Powerpoint here). So many libraries have added hardware that allows patrons to save their work on to Zip disks or writable CDs. If the type of legislation discussed above is mandated, either by law or by hardware, we won't be able to offer this service anymore. Even if we tried to continue the service and you could prove that you created your own Word document and it's not copyrighted and it doesn't contain anything that is copyrighted, it may not be readable on a different PC.
2. In addition to losing a valuable service that we provide for the millions of people that don't have a computer at home, we would probably have to upgrade all of our hardware, too, in order to include the new copyright protection schemes. Otherwise, we'd face criminal lawsuits for providing unauthorized access to copyrighted materials. It's hard enough keeping up with technology, but are the RIAA and MPAA going to help pay for all of this new hardware? Somehow I doubt it.

Now do you understand why this is an important issue for libraries that directly affects us?

The FirstGov Web site has been re-designed. It certainly does a better job of showing the breadth of information available. I do like that when you click on Online Services for Citizens, one of the options towards the top is Find a School, College or Library. Unfortunately, when I did a search for information about the newly-incorporated village in which I live, the search results were not terribly helpful, and some of the descriptions displayed HTML tags instead of content. The first hit looked promising, but it went to a 404 on the main State of Illinois site. They need better usability for their search results, too, because the descriptions don't show the part of the page that contains your keywords.

They also don't categorize the results. That's why we need State Library initiatives like the Illinois Government Information service. We're trying to get webmasters at all levels of government to add meta data to their pages. We're also automatically indexing and classifying their pages as best we can in order to allow better browsing and retrieval. We just changed software vendors for IGI so we're still busy tweaking everything, but hopefully it will improve the situation in Illinois.

The previous post from Kuro5hin asks:

"Finally, Mr. Greene what were record sales like before Napster? During Napster? After Napster was shut down? Doesn't it appear that MP3 trading actually helps to sell more music?"

Well, here's one answer from Slashdot.

"Not that it's really hurting money-wise. All this week's numbers mean is that the RIAA's total revenue has declined almost to 1998 levels. In 1998 they made $13.71 billion; after peaking in the mid-$14-billions, last year they made $13.74 billion.

This probably is due party to the crummy economy, partly to their failure to find any new sound to co-opt and mainstream recently, and partly to lack of big artists releasing megahits like they did in 1999. You know music officially sucks when the labels have to pay someone $28 million not to sing.

Oh, and partly due to the RIAA raising CD prices by $1.16, which is $0.25 over and above inflation (which has been higher than wage growth lately anyway). CDs are 94% of their revenue. Most industries, faced with declining sales, try lowering their prices. Not this one."

So record sales are as good as they were in 1998 despite the fact that three students downloaded 6,000 songs in three days. However does your industry survive on only $14 billion a year? We should definitely give up our rights to help you make even more money.