Precious and libraries

Today's blog post has two parts. First off, I went and saw Precious tonight, and I highly recommend it. It's really intense and depressing at times, but in the end it turns out positively, maybe even a bit inspiring. It's one of those movies that you walk out of kind of stunned, but later glad that you went.

Second, a very interesting post I found today in an online discussion. For context, the discussion was over whether paper books will eventually die off in favor of e-books. Someone asked what everyone thinks about libraries, and someone else replied:

Frankly, I'm worried about libraries -- not because I think e-books will replace their dead tree counterparts specifically, but rather because the library as an institution is an anathema to today's notions of intellectual property. It's a loophole left over from a more permissive and libertarian era.

As an example of how much people's perspectives have changed, a few years back on Slashdot there was an article about DRM where the story submitter indicated that he had found a good use for DRM: electronic libraries. DRM in e-books could be used, he suggested, to enforce check-out periods and late fines. There was broad agreement from the masses, who were overwhelmingly tech-savvy and anti-DRM.

And then someone pointed out, insightfully, that the whole reason libraries had check-out periods and late fines in the first place was because of inventory limitations, i.e., scarcity. With only limited copies of a book and many more people wanting to read it, forcing people to return it in a timely manner was a requirement, not an ideal. Fines were not created to fund the library, which is a government subsidized institution -- they were created as a punitive measure, to encourage people to return books they had checked out so that others could read them.

In an e-library, such measures are stupid -- you have a system where scarcity no longer matters, where me checking out a book can't possibly keep anyone else from reading it.

See, this is the thing: libraries are socialist and subversive, and always have been. The media companies have always vehemently opposed them conceptually. Why should any member of the public be able to walk into a public library, obtain (for free) a library card, and borrow -- share -- something that they didn't pay to create?

They didn't like them in the 19th century and they don't like them now. But the dead tree library is an institution that dates back to antiquity -- so killing it was never a politically viable thing to do.

Because really, the natural modern analog of the library is government subsidized Bittorrent. People sharing information and knowledge without thought of profit -- for the common good