The Internet is like a million-page a second photocopier (or is that a series of tubes)

Marxist analysis link is broken.

On footnote two the Soviet government prior to Gorbachev did greatly restrict access to photocopying machines. But, I am not sure how much difference it would have made if they had not. Samizdat and dissent were limited to a small portion of the Soviet population. While there was a lot of activism by certain ethnic groups for limited causes such as Jews demanding the right to emigrate, Crimean Tatars the right to return to Crimea, and Estonians the restoration of their independence there was little demanding a complete replacement of the Soviet system. There was almost no Central Asian excluding the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks or Azerbaijani samizdat or dissent.

Russian samizdat even among the most anti-communist writers contained very little complaint about socialist economics. In fact all three major strands of Russian samizdat, socialist, democratic, and slavophile basically supported a continuation of the Soviet economic system. It was the political system that they wished to reform. But, the restoration of capitalism and elimination of the Soviet welfare state is not something that dissidents generally advocated in samizdat. Most people in the USSR including dissidents thought that the basic economic arrangements with the state ownership of the means of production were fine. The welfare provisions and social benefits like education were genuinely popular. The Harvard interview project found this was true even of most anti-communist Ukrainian refugees from areas that had been part of the USSR prior to 1939. The dissidents wanted the state to be more receptive to the concerns of ordinary people and to pursue more liberal policies regarding intellectual freedom and nationality policies. But, none of these ideas were considered incompatible with the existing Soviet economic system.

I think the whole issue can be stated much briefer, and in microelectronic terms: Over time in a competitive environment, the price of any goods will approach the (short-term) marginal cost of production.

5: good point. It’s not like it would be possible for Ellsberg to develop his own photographs. I mean, yes, he was a Harvard PhD, a Marine officer, and a Top Secret-cleared RAND analyst, but to develop photographs you need the kind of highly specialised skills and technology that are only available to an elite cadre of Boy Scouts.

ajay, the point that it would be *possible* is granted. *Feasibility* is another thing.

I am not sure that the Ellsberg/allegedly-Manning comparison looks so good for the Big Copying Machine. The real cost of the action, for each, was the potential cost of discovery, and by that measure Manning has suffered worse.

It’s good news that the campaign against SOPA is bearing fruit, but (at least in my breakfast-time state of mind) I prefer the analysis at Jacobin Mag.

This thread has made my morning.

The real cost of the action, for each, was the potential cost of discovery, and by that measure Manning has suffered worse.

Hmm. “Potential cost”? In both cases it seems like the anticipated ex ante costs of discovery would have been about the same: a very long term of imprisonment (and the possibility, at least, of facing the death penalty). I suppose factors like trial under the UCMJ rather than a civilian court or the general political climate might make a difference, so arguably Manning could have anticipated generally harsher punishment, but the potential costs of discovery are so severe in both cases that I’m not sure such differences really mean much.

The potential for (premature) discovery seems like the more significant factor. It’s difficult to say anything for certain from a sample size of 2, but smuggling a thumb drive into a computer room certainly seems far less risky than physically copying thousands of pages, especially when you consider that Ellsberg had to trust helpers. It’s not as if Manning was caught out by some sneaky technical countermeasure[1] – AFAIK, he got away with the actual copying and transmission completely cleanly. He only ran into difficulties when he chose to trust Lamo too much.

Which is another factor – to release the papers, Ellsberg had little choice but to trust dozens of people. Senators, reporters, activists, etc. Manning, on the other hand, at least could have transmitted his files to Assange or others completely anonymously (not sure if he actually did, but there’s little technical difficulty). He eventually revealed himself to Lamo, but apparently only out of a desire for friendship, certainly not as an integral component of the leaking itself.

—–
fn1.: Nor would I place any bets on (effective) countermeasures having been put in place post-Manning.

Ellsberg’s documents had a bigger effect on the Vietnam war than Manning’s had on today’s conflict…. I don’t see how you can use the history to argue that today’s environment is more favourable for the release of damaging documents than 1968.

That’s a different argument. We’re talking about logistical ease here, and the corresponding risk of discovery. There are no doubt a lot of political and cultural factors to explain the difference in impact, but it seems like they’re mostly going to be pretty orthogonal to the existence of better copying technology.

Aside from the ex post observation that Manning has suffered worse, what’s the actual argument that surreptitiously copying thousands of documents was easier to pull off in 1968?

OP: And given their past performances, they aren’t going to have a lot of credences

USAGE QUERY: “Credence” means “belief.” “Credibility” means “believability” or “plausibility.” Shouldn’t the above be: “… they aren’t going to have a lot of credibility …”?

I’d love to see some references around the idea that the orthodox economic view of existing copyright law is that it is inefficient. Of course creative commons etc. have been saying this for years but I was not aware that there was an economic consensus too.

Espen Anderson @6 I think the whole issue can be stated much briefer, and in microelectronic terms: Over time in a competitive environment, the price of any goods will approach the (short-term) marginal cost of production.

I think this model applies perfectly here. Art is a very cheap good with huge externalities. I think it should be a major goal of society (not necessarily for the state, but maybe that too) to internalize these externalities (meaning, to reward artists appropriately). The honor system or voluntary donations is one way to do this.

An idea I’ve been kicking around in my head is to devise a way to keep track of how often particular works (songs, pieces of art, books, articles) are shared on the web, and have a big pot of money (funded by the government and/or private philanthropists) that is distributed “proportionately” according to some transparent, agreed-upon, but potentially flexible system. I put scare quotes on proportionately because that need not be a linear relationship of X shares of the pot per download of a song , Y per download of a book, &c.. It could be X * ln(# of downloads) or sqrt(# of downloads) or something like that (for the less-mathematically-inclined, this means every additional download of your song gives you a bit less than the last one, so as to favor less popular artists and not create superstars just from the pot alone). Enforcement would rely on there being very little incentive to cheat the system by “pirating”.

(When I say I had the idea “to devise a way to do this”, I don’t mean I devise it myself, I would have no idea how to develop something like this.)

Over time in a competitive environment, the price of any goods will approach the (short-term) marginal cost of production.

Not true, at all.

It would be closer to the truth to say that the price of goods will approach a markup over marginal costs of 1/(e-1), where e is the price elasticity of demand. There are essentially no economically important cases where price elasticity is infinite and the markup is zero (where this might otherwise be approximately the case, there is inevitably a floor on the markup imposed by regulation or convention.) The elasticity int urn is determined by the degree of competition in that particular market.

Meanwhile, in the real world — the thing that formalisms like the one quoted above are specifically intended to avoid looking at — we see goods sold way above their marginal cost *all the time*. Maybe electronic information is moving toward free distribution — I hope so, tho I’m not as confident as John Q. But the thing is, the marginal cost of an electronic version of a book or song or movie has been pretty much zero for many years now, and people are still selling the things. It’s a funny mindset that sees a theory making one prediction and the world behaving entirely differently, and concludes, not that a different theory is needed, but that the world will be cathcing up with the theory real soon, any day now, just watch.

In terms of the original post, it may be that IP as we know it and the Internet as we know it are increasingly in conflict. But like Atrios says, we should not take it for granted that the Internet will necessarily win.

Henri:

Most samizdat was produced on manual typewriters with carbon paper making copies of the manuscript. These copies were then passed on to other people who typed up another few issues. The Chronicle of Current Events in fact recommended this method for distribution. Compared to other industrial societies the USSR was computer poor during the 70s and 80s. Neither dissidents or more trusted members of Soviet society had much access to computers during the entire Soviet era. Those few that existed were largely employed by the military.

I beg to differ, Otto, even though I only have anecdotal evidence. In the 1980s there were IBM mainframe clones in many computer centers, easily accessible by most of the staff there, while (you’re right) the xerox machines were indeed kept behind steel doors, and making a copy required multiple signatures.

Samizdat wasn’t just political. Porn as well. Unpublished, but more or less apolitical literature, like Nabokov or Kharms. And it wasn’t dangerous to own it in the 80s; people were reading it in the Metro.

“There were already computers in 1969. You could type the text into an IBM 360 (on punchcards or via TSO), and then print as many copies as you want. Which is the way a lot of Soviet samizdat stuff was produced. It would take a data entry person a few days to enter 7000 pages, but certainly not months.”

Since the thread has already been derailed … Is any of this at all plausible ie in the sense of Ellsberg and/or cronies commandeering a IBM 360 or whatever was current in those days, and typing away for days etc. I doubt it.

Not necessarily a derailment, it shows how difficult it is to control information this way. I mean, seriously, a DNS filter? Good luck with that.

I’ve been working on a piece for years about the importance of transactions costs and monopoly rights (eg copyright) in a situation where marginal costs are falling towards zero. I will have to finish it and get it out

Please do, I’d be very interested in seeing it.

Not necessarily a derailment, it shows how difficult it is to control information this way. I mean, seriously, a DNS filter? Good luck with that.

The internet is not valuable because it allows people to access information. Full stop. The internet is valuable because it allows people to access information without putting hardly any effort into it. A spotty and surmountable DNS filter would still effectively prevent access for at least the 80% or so of the population who wouldn’t bother to find workarounds.

Since Ellsberg is still alive and well, someone should ask him whether photographing all those documents would have been feasible.

“And what about the scenario of getting 7000 pages of a super-secret document out of RAND in the first place?”

What’s remarkable about it ? There are dozens of examples of spies sneaking thick dossiers out of secret facilities.

oops, left off my blog address. can’t have that. :)

…well, I guess at that would be EBCDIC-art.

= = =
(iii) To repeat myself, there was no way an ordinary citizen, working in secret, could have produced 20 copies of a 7000 page document in 1950. Today, anyone can do much more than that in seconds. That is what has changed.
= = =

It is now known that all high-resolution color printers sold in the US add a pattern of dots to the page to uniquely identify the printer that produced it; one has to suspect that scanners and more capable b&w laser printers have a similar mechanism of some type. So perhaps not as easy as it seems.

Cranky

Fernand Braudel reported making 2000-3000 photos per day during his archival research in the 1920s:

I had to wait for the summer vacation of 1927 to undertake my’ lengthy labors in the archives of Simancas. But I had an unusual piece of luck: when I tried to buy an ordinary camera (microfilm is a postwar invention), an American cameraman offered me an ancient apparatus intended for making movies, and proved to me that it could perform marvels in photographing documents. I aroused envy and admiration among the archivists and buscadores of Simancas by taking 2,000- 3,000 photos a day and rolling some thirty meters of film. I used it and abused it, in Spain and in Italy. Thanks to this ingenious cameraman, I was no doubt the first user of true microfilms, which I developed myself and later read, through long days and nights, with a simple magic lantern.

See Fernand Braudel, “Personal Testimony,” The Journal of Modern History , Vol. 44, No. 4 (Dec., 1972): 448-467. (JSTOR link)

Where ‘the internet’ did get things right is in the ability to have some sort of timeous response to sophisticated ‘gaming’ of systems. Thus google, tripadvisor, et. al. continuously improve their algorithms to counter-act gaming. In the legal space, and particularly in the IP space, this has not always been the case. So, the big companies (for example) abuse/game the system by (another example) registering patents with no intention of using these patents other than to knock down a potential competitor when it grows to the point where it becomes a threat, while simultaneously (and quite rightly) also complaining of their R&D efforts being ‘stolen’ . These type of gaming instances mixed with real concerns need much more sophisticated responses than is currently the case. What is my suggestion? That IP law be reformed through the focussed involvement of real experts and that it is acknowledged that this is a much more complex effort that the current ones.

I think a lot of that 80% (or something) of the population already doesn’t know to or bother to look beyond TV news and newspapers for their news,

Oh, oops, I didn’t just mean news, and I meant to be more specific like “80% of the Internet-using subpopulation” not “80% of the entire-citizen-population” — sorry, my original phrasing was badly unclear. I’m not even sure 80% or more of U.S. citizens access the Internet, much less rely upon it.

Henri:

Having certain political samizdat was punishable sometimes by incarceration. But, by the 1970s activists usually had a number of run ins with the KGB before being sent off to Perm or some other prison camp. Threats and intimidation were the preferred first line of repression at this time. The Jewish and German emigration movements were two large sources of political samizdat. I am pretty familiar with the German stuff published after 1973. There was also Crimean Tatar, Meshketian Turk, Baltic, and Ukrainian samizdat. The national movements accounted for a large percentage of dissent and samizdat in the USSR.

RL collected much of the samizdat of the period on microfilm. There is also the Chronicle of Current Events, a clearing house of dissident news out of Moscow during the 1970s. Amnesty International has translated most of the issues into English.

While technically samizdat means any self published literature, in terms of significance it is usually meant to refer the type of political literature above. Works advocating the restoration of Estonian independence, the restoration of the Crimean ASSR, or an unlimited right to emigrate to Germany or Israel for Germans and Jews was not legal to even own until the mid-1980s.

Henri:

Yes, this is basically right. Although Soviet political trials were hardly bastions of due process there was some attempt at socialist legality after Stalin. None the less, written material opposing Soviet policies regarding things like nationality policies were effectively illegal. Most activists were not arrested on their first encounter with the KGB and procurator’s office. Other means were usually employed first to try and deter future activism. But, in some cases an active dissident could be charged and sentenced for mere possession of anti-Soviet samizdat. Their previous activities providing evidence of anti-Soviet intent.

(iii) To repeat myself, there was no way an ordinary citizen, working in secret, could have produced 20 copies of a 7000 page document in 1950. Today, anyone can do much more than that in seconds. That is what has changed.
(iv) The potential legal consequences for Ellsberg were much the same as for Bradley Manning. He went to trial and faced a long prison term, but the government’s case (and eventually, the Nixon Administration) fell over when it was revealed they had burgled his psychiatrists office in search of material for blackmail/dirtdishing.

iii. Maybe if he had access to a microfilm camera – they were using those to capture millions of pages of newspaper and historical archives by the 1930s. The prints would have been more difficult though.

iii. and iv. – I wonder if the relative ease of downloading the data actually made it more dangerous for Manning. Ellsberg had to really think through and plan what he was doing, and involve several other people. The amount of effort involved in keeping from getting caught in those circumstances can help to impress the seriousness of the act. Manning, on the other hand, downloaded the info in a matter of minutes. It’s almost too easy.