Living Data

The problem with data is that it’s dead. We should bring it to life … One proposal is to make every last hunk of computerized data its own intelligent software agent, storing information about itself and exchanging a stream of messages with all other relevant data. Having done that, we’d then have to redefine the other basic concepts of computing so that those millions of operations per second compute something meaningful – not just something that looks good. Sounds inefficient, doesn’t it? But basic processor speeds will keep on accelerating, and the computers of the world will keep on getting connected through networks. Let’s spend some of that exponential growth on the production of useful answers and the prevention of computerized hassles.

Wanted: Net.Census

The Internet has changed dramatically in size, character, and economic importance, but may not evolve further without careful measurement of its users. Until then, the lack of accurate and credible information about Internet users is likely to hinder the continued health and positive development of electronic commerce.

Pipeline: How Did James Gleick, Famous Science Writer, Come to Be a Franchiser of Internet Service?

I believe the magic of the Internet is its multifarious, noncentralized, democratic, and even anarchic quality. I think it’s already clear that the era of the giant private online service has come and gone … All of us together are competing against places like CompuServe and America Online, which are dinosaurs. As large as they’ve grown, I just don’t think that kind of service represents the future.

The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for Patents and Copyrights in the Digital Age (Everything You Know About Intellectual Property is Wrong)

In the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns.

The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for Patents and Copyrights in the Digital Age (Everything You Know About Intellectual Property is Wrong)

The economy of the future will be based on relationship rather than possession. It will be continuous rather than sequential.

The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for Patents and Copyrights in the Digital Age (Everything You Know About Intellectual Property is Wrong)

Encryption will be the technical basis for most intellectual property protection. (And should, for many reasons, be made more widely available.)

The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for Patents and Copyrights in the Digital Age (Everything You Know About Intellectual Property is Wrong)

In the absence of the old containers, almost everything we think we know about intellectual property is wrong. We’re going to have to unlearn it. We’re going to have to look at information as though we’d never seen the stuff before. The protections that we will develop will rely far more on ethics and technology than on law.

The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for Patents and Copyrights in the Digital Age (Everything You Know About Intellectual Property is Wrong)

If the payment process can be automated, as digital cash and signature will make possible, I believe that soft-product creators will reap a much higher return from the bread they cast upon the waters of cyberspace. Moreover, they will be spared much of the overhead presently attached to the marketing, manufacture, sales, and distribution of information products, whether those products are computer programs, books, CDs, or motion pictures. This will reduce prices and further increase the likelihood of noncompulsory payment.

The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for Patents and Copyrights in the Digital Age (Everything You Know About Intellectual Property is Wrong)

Files that possess the independent ability to communicate upstream sound uncomfortably like the Morris Internet Worm. “Live” files do have a certain viral quality. And serious privacy issues would arise if everyone’s computer were packed with digital spies. The point is that cryptography will enable protection technologies that will develop rapidly in the obsessive competition that has always existed between lock-makers and lock-breakers.

The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for Patents and Copyrights in the Digital Age (Everything You Know About Intellectual Property is Wrong)

[Software] upgrades will smooth into a constant process of incremental improvement and adaptation, some of it manmade and some of it arising through genetic algorithms. Pirated copies … may become too static to have much value to anyone. Even in [fixed information], the unencrypted file could still be interwoven with code which could continue to protect it … The file would be “alive” with permanently embedded software that could “sense” the surrounding conditions and interact with them … Other methods might give the file the ability to “phone home” through the Net to its original owner. The continued integrity of some files might require periodic ‘feeding’ with digital cash from their host, which they would then relay back to their authors.