Brin's Take on Owning Information

In chapter four of "The Transparent Society," a 1998 non-fiction publication by science-fiction author David Brin, the author discusses a one aspect of his book's thesis that liberty will be better protected by light than shadows: how the elements of society treat information.

Brin makes a strong case that there is no way to be a pragmatic purist. Life is just far too complex. Some ideals can be held but many cannot hold through all eras and social circumstances. Even the freedom of speech has been compromised at certain junctures in American history for the basic fact of what Brin calls "idea toxicity," the reality that some ideas have to be presented to a mind that has been primed to accept those ideas. A decent example in our own times is that the average taxpayer is not exposed to the gruesome realities of war as they were in the Vietnam era--it was a public relations nightmare for non-soldiers to be intimately acquainted with the war through the visual medium--television broadcasts have been blamed (or credited, depending on your vantage point) with bringing about the massive public response and protest that eventually forced leaders to end the Vietnam conflict. Frankly, the media is no longer granted the freedoms that it used to incite public outrage toward the Vietnam conflict. It isn't allowed and, perhaps as a result, the public accepts the conflict in Iraq because the gruesomeness of that war is not made obvious or unavoidable. Even our awareness of what is happening in Guantanamo Bay has only resulted to a few blips on the media radar, thanks largely to the sparseness of images coming out of that prison.

What all this boils down to is that information is bound to be controlled by someone, somewhere, for what can be understood by a thinking person as--at the least, somewhat--legitimate reasons. It resounds with me that the quality of art will eventually suffer if professionals are not given fair market value for their creations, simply because art will become a part-time undertaking by artists due to economic necessity. It also makes sense that businesses want to retain a first-mover advantage when they discover valuable, commercially-exploitable innovations. It seems accurate to present the modern conundrum of intellectual property rights as a battle between the original goals of the patent: the value of disseminating knowledge and the value of giving creators long-term payment for their inventiveness. As always, the only thing to do is attempt to balance the different interests at play, trying to look out for the greater good of a species that is inherently resistant to change.