Book Review: "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free"
"Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age" by Cory Doctorow, is an incredibly important book for the 21st century. It aims to protect bloggers or any digital content creators from the abuse of distributer, service providers, and publishers, such that they are not taken advantage of (like the majority of performers in the music industry that signed with major labels during the 20th century). The book speaks out against overarching legislature, all pushed in the name of copyright control or DRM, such as SOPA and PIPA (we've also condemned similar bills on this blog before). I'm glad to see prolific writers sticking up for such important issues, it's good to know that people of all walks are fighting for this freedom. This is also the crux of the book, that information dosn't have an intrinsic desire to be copied, but humans have an innate desire to be free, or at least not be spied on via corporations or big brother. Overall, I give the book 7 out of 10 stars, for being provocative, presenting important lessons to original content creators, and being easy to digest, albeit a little exaggerated. I paid ~$10 for the book, at about 200 pages, and it is well worth that value. I read the paperback over several weeks and the content was a lot denser than I expected, yet formated very well for casual print reading. Overall, I really enjoyed the book, it gave me a new lease on my creative efforts and how I engage my community. I recommend the book to bloggers, artists, hackers, or anyone performing a creative or Internet job and trying to get paid for it in some way. I also recommend Doctorow's Laws to all readers, as generally good principals for viewing the world around you. You can see these laws clearly highlighted in the chapters below.
0.0: Introduction: Detente
0.1: What Makes Money?
0.2: Don't Quit Your Day Job - Really
1.0: Doctorow's First Law: Any Time Someone Puts a Lock on Something That Belongs to You and Won't Give You the Key, That Lock Isn't There for Your Benefit
1.1: Anti-Circumvention Explained
1.2: Is This Copyright Protection?
1.3: So Is This Copy Protection?
1.4: Digital Locks Always Break
1.5: Understanding General-Purpose Computers
1.6: Rootkits Everywhere
1.7: Appliances
1.8: Proto-Appliances: The Inkjet Wars
1.9: Worse Than Nothing
2.0: Doctorow's Second Law: Fame Won't Make You Rich, But You Can't Get Paid Without It
2.1: Good at Spreading Copies, Good at Spreading Fame
2.2: An Audience Machine
2.3: Getting People to Care About Your Work
2.4: Content Isn't King
2.5: How do I Get People to Pay Me?
2.6: Does This Mean You Should Ditch Your Investor and Go Indie?
2.7: Love
2.8: The New Intermediaries
2.9: Intermediary Liability
2.10: Notice and Takedown
2.11: So What's Next?
2.12: More Intermediary Liability, Fewer Checks and Balances
2.13: Disorganized Channels Are Good for Creators
2.14: Freedom Can Be Expensive, but Censorship Costs Us the World
3.0: Doctorow's Third Law: Information Dosn't Want to Be Free, People Do
3.1: What The Copyfight Is About
3.2: Two Kinds of Regulation
3.3: Anti-Tank Mines and Land Mines
3.4: Who's Talking?
3.5: Censorship Dosn't Solve Problems
3.6: The Problem with Cutting Off Access
3.7: Copyright and Human Rights
3.8: A World Made of Computers
3.9: Renewability: Digital Locks' Sinister Future
3.10: A World of Control and Surveillance
3.11: What Copyright Means in the Information Age
3.12: Copyright: Fit for Purpose
3.13: Term Extension Versus Samplers
3.14: What Works?
3.15: Copyright's Not Dead
3.16: Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral
3.17: It's Different This Time
3.18: All Revolutions Are Bloody
3.19: Cathedrals Versus the Protestant Reformation
3.20: Three-Hundred-Million-Dollar Movies
3.21: What Is Copyright For?
4.0: Epilogue
4.1: What Does the Future Hold?
5.0: Afterword
The last law is probably the most important to information security professionals. It always bothered me as a defender when people used the quip, "Information wants to be free", because an entire industry was thriving around ways to protect information. Cory aptly explains that information is an abstraction and has no innate desire or proclivity, but rather enables those who control it, thus information can be controlled to influence a population that is dependent on those services. And this is the basis for the entire book, Doctorow is warning us that letting service providers control our information flow, even with simple copyright protections, is downright dangerous to the integrity of The Internet. Cory also touches on the Snowden revelations, and how once corporations start doing these shady spying activities, we lose the open transparency as to what else they start doing. No longer can consumers keep services in check, and they are forced to use backdoored services or switch platforms completely. It's a really important message, and I urge you to watch his presentation below, which aptly summarizes the majority of the book into a single talk. That said, the book goes into each subject in more depth, so I urge you to read the book as well, if the talk below resonates with you:
