What happened to my library?

I was 17 when I first got on the internet. My first internet account was a dial-up shell account, meaning that I ran all programs through a terminal. For you folks that got on later and only know the World Wide Web, you cannot appreciate what the Internet used to be.

It was a library. It was our public repository of knowledge, and it already had an amazing collection of articles and fiction. Using databases with names like Gopher, WAIS and VERONICA, one could find all kinds of articles. Or, if you wanted to talk to folks in the “forums” of the day, you used NNTP, which is also known as Usenet News.

This was all very complicated, and not at all user friendly, and when the next wave of engineers showed up with graphical browsing on the WWW network, almost all of us embraced it as being better.

At first, it was better. After all, HTML was so easy that even a brain-dead pot junkie like me could figure it out, and I can’t understand any other coding methods. (Well, aside from BASIC, and that’s a threaded language, where almost all programs are now object oriented.)

But as the browser interface and HTML language evolved, the corporations took over the net. Now, the Internet and the World Wide Web aren’t a library. This is a shopping mall, and any attempts to share information among users is treated as stealing from someone, somewhere.

Within the last three years, the corporations have imposed international sales barriers, so it isn’t possible for me to watch a lot of broadcasts online that originate from the US. This makes no sense whatsoever. People in the US get to see the programs for free online, but “dang foreigners” must wait until a season DVD comes out in their local format. (assuming it ever comes out) Why? If it’s free for the US, why must everyone else pay for access? And what do we do if there simply is no DVD released?

We resort to stealing it. Not because we want to, but because we don’t have a choice.

With the decision of Google to put books online, writers everywhere cried foul because they are more concerned with profits than readers. On the one hand, I can’t blame them. The corporate publishers pay the writers very little, and so every lost sale is painful to their bottom line.

But would you go into a public library and take your book out to prevent people from reading it? Would you make a list of every person who borrowed the book to sue them for piracy? Would you follow them home to make sure only the person who borrowed the book read it? No? Well, that’s what you’re doing to the Internet. You’ve made the world’s largest international library into a shopping mall. You’re defending the rights of your corporate master to not only continue to fuck you in the ass, but also to fuck everyone else as well.

You might say, “Well Zoe, don’t you sell your books online?” I sure do, but I also give most of them away for free. The ones I don’t give away have a different copyright, making it clear that it’s not okay to distribute the work without my express permission. But even with those books, I’m charging as little as I can. This is because I want readers, not buyers. I want comments and feedback, not profits.

It isn’t like my books have much chance of mainstream success anyway, so why shouldn’t I take advantage of the virtual library by lending out copies to as many people as I can? Why should I demand money from every reader? If the reader feels my words have value and decides to buy the books, great! But I’m more concerned with getting readers than I am with getting dollars.

Lately, I feel very frustrated by this commercial takeover of our public venues. Blogs are shut down by mega corporations even if the blogger has permission to use the material as outlined by copyright laws. The corporations aren’t even bothering to look at the laws. They’re enforcing their own codes of conduct now, and they’re bypassing the courts and governments to do it. They’re enforcing they’re own barriers, creating blockades among international users in order to profit more off of everyone.

Funny, because wasn’t it PIRATES who were known for blocking ports of commerce and demanding a ransom? In fact isn’t the behavior of corporations very pirate-like, while the so-called pirates online are actually just thieves? But of course, the corporations have also begun to demand control on the definitions of words, so even if their behavior is pirate-like, they wouldn’t admit it.

When writing up new laws on Internet regulations, our governments have gone along with this trend. Through corporate lobbying, they’ve allowed a public network to become a corporate tool, one where all of us low-level users are just plebes to be treated like shit. We have no rights on the files we purchase. We have no rights to share our interests with other users. We have more and more limited access even to articles and non-fiction information that used to be free. Now companies want to charge for access to reference periodical PDFs and prevent people from using the Internet as a library at all.

When I first got online, I was so excited by the idea of sharing everything online. I was excited by the idea that online, we were all anonymous. There was no race or gender, or national identity, unless we chose to label ourselves. We were all equal netizens.

We are no longer all equal, and it wasn’t inviting the “unwashed masses” online that stripped us of our equality. It was corporate America who stepped in to enforce their ideals of commerce onto a public library. It was corporate America who shut down the free exchange of ideas, and it was corporate America who took away our anonymity. They demanded that we sign up for every service, so they know what we do. So then they can have a better idea of how to advertise to us more. They want to track our every move, all so they can figure out how to squeeze every last dime of profits out of us.

I don’t see that trend reversing, because no one really cares. The world is a big block of apathy, and even as more and more rights are stripped from us, we just can’t bring ourselves to care.

So today, I’m not attempting a rallying call. That would be both naive and egotistical. Instead, I’m posting a eulogy to mourn the death of the Internet I knew, back when I first got on line in ’97.

The library is dead. Long live the shopping mall

Edited to add: The always eloquent Tycho of Penny arcade has some posts up on DRM and the “dialogue” between publishers and pirates that touches on similar themes, so I want to share a few links.

First, the comic, A Cyclical Argument With A Literal Strawman:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/2/19/

Then the articles on DRM:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/2/19/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/2/26/

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