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Preprints & Reprints A Lawless Web? Our civilisation and commerce is founded on the processing of atoms - making and shipping things on a human scale - a world moving at a modest pace, where control and laws are key to success and sustainability. But we are in the midst of a transformation from a reasonably well behaved, understood, and comfortable world of randomness, to a non-linear world of complexity and chaos. A slow paper based world of irrelevant processes, backward looking rules, regulation and laws is being overtaken and overpowered by IT. Geography and international boundaries have long been by-passed by radio, TV and telephone, and are now transcended by computer, optical fibre and satellite. There are mountains of legal and ethical problems presented by the new realms of telemedicine, telecare, tele-education, tele-working, publishing, electronic commerce and just communicating what and how we wish. Like wireless licences for cars, CB and pirate radio stations of the past, we may have to abandon all efforts at control. Soon artificial intelligence (AI) will introduce a further degree of freedom (or irresponsibility). It is already difficult to detect an electronic crime, define where it was committed, what and whose laws (if any) were broken, and by whom. Even worse, it will be difficult to decide what was responsible. People may not even be involved. Suppose I sell you an (AI) system that trades on the stock market, manages your bank account and takes you out of the loop of financial management. It makes you progressively richer by trading on the short-term marginals, negotiates the best price with the utilities and suppliers. But the programme is truly intelligent and I keep upgrading for you as part of your purchase agreement. Over a period of years it gets much smarter, gets to know you and your needs intimately. In response, you encourage it to be more efficient, take more risks and generally make more money. Well it's still not a perfect world and the Tax Inspector remotely logs on to conduct an audit and discovers the system has been committing crimes to make money. Who is responsible? The hardware, software, you or me? Clearly, if the law has changed and I have not upgraded your software, I am culpable. But if I have gone bankrupt in the intervening period? If you have reloaded an older version of the software because it made more money, or if you have tampered with it, are you obviously guilty, but could it be proved? If unbeknown to both of us, the software has evolved by mutation, and communicating with other systems on the global net to achieve a better performance by circumventing the law, then is it alone guilty? This may all seem a remote prospect, but is it? Until recently the predominant search subjects on the net have been sex and health. Well now there is a new leader - music in the compressed MP3 format at about a minute a MByte - or about 10% of that for a CD. Across the planet MP3 players are available for in-pocket, on-belt, in-hand, in-bag, on-PC, and are soon to be integrated into mobile phones. The first MP3 car radios are on sale in the USA with enough capacity for over 7000 pop tracks, and much more is to come. Searching for MP3 sites is now a challenge as there are so many that are transient because they are illegal and get closed down. But it is hard not to be able to find the music you are looking for - it is out there somewhere. Despite the best efforts of the music industry, music bits have found freedom, and they might as well try and stop a tidal wave with a feather. So far CD sales don't seem to have been damaged, but no doubt they have always undersold because of piracy, and it is only a matter of time before MP3 starts to bite. Unfortunately for this old industry there is far worse to come. Imagine the impact of a small MP3 player with a 10Mbit/s Infrared port. Two people standing hip to hip or a group sitting across a café will be able to exchange hours of free listening in less than a minute. So who will be buying CDs and tapes, and who will be making money? Perhaps a few collectors will continue to covet tapes and CDs in the same way some still collect vinyl records today, but it is clearly a market just waiting to be toppled. The people who are going to make money will be the artists and recording studios who put their material on line. And those who sell music along with fashion items as a package with other goods and experiences look set to make the most of all. It will be a market limited by imagination rather than copyright, old laws and restrictive practices. What chance encryption will protect an old industry that delighted in tripling the price of music when they made the transition from vinyl disc to CD? Not a lot! Every attempt to encrypt or limit the copying-on of music has so far failed with a software or hardware fix on the net within days of a system being announced. And there is always the hard-wired solution with analogue music out to digital encoder - just two PCs back to back. So this looks like pay back time in a big way - and more especially as the production costs for CDs was an order of magnitude less than that for vinyl records. It is hard not to have seen or heard of the legal battle currently underway between the USA Music Industry and Napster the new on-line song swap company. If you have music files on your PC and you log onto the Napster site (www.napster.com), then all your music files can be made available to the rest of the planet and vice-versa. Every PC logged on to the net is available to you in terms of all the MP3 music files held can be downloaded. You can search by song, artist and composer, and the listing shown will indicate the size of file and the speed of modem connection. So you can choose the best sites and at a click download all the MP3 music files as you wish - for free. Of course the music industry and artists see this as a great threat - how will they get paid - how will they avoid being defrauded? The answer is that a new business model is required, the old one is tired, out of date, and out of step with technology. When Sony introduced the VHS machine just over two decades ago the movie industry did all it could to prevent this new threat to their established business model and prosperity. Fortunately for them (and us) they failed, and today moviemakers enjoy more income from VHS sales and rentals than they ever did from the box office. Will the music industry win the battle and turn off Napster? I doubt it, and we won't know for a few more months, but even if they do we can rely on a succession of new service providers to keep this radical paradigm alive. For example, www.audiogalaxy.com, spinfrenzy.com, junglemonkey.net, napigator.com et al. If Napster is killed then it will quickly be replaced by ten more, and so on. There is even software that can realise the same function without any central server - and you can't take 100M individuals to court. And it won't stop at music, we already see sites such as gnutella.wego.com, scour.com and cutemx.com et al providing for music, photos, videos, spreadsheets and other file types. This new paradigm really is about a world where more bits are free than constrained, where we can choose to make what we own, produce, like or know available to everyone, it is the epitome of what the web is about - freedom. So does this new freedom pose a significant threat to anyone? I think not. It is likely to be about as damaging as the camera has been to the artists painting in oils, or the printing press to the writer, or indeed the PC to the magazine market. We have to imagine a world where we as individuals choose to make a given selection of all our material publicly accessible. Inside companies and their Intranets it is even more important that we take this very simple route to communication and meme propagation. This really is about moving on from a past of controlism and power to a future of sharing and being influential. Beyond music and movies I suspect that those providing servers may also be alarmed by the coming change as storage becomes distributed across the planet, and networking bypasses concentration. Consumers can look forward to a far greater diversity of music at a significantly lower cost, with everyone able to afford to make there own tracks, put them on line, and perhaps even sell. For the old industry it looks like good night Vienna. For over a decade now Artificial Life (AL) systems have seen the solution of many complex problems that defy mathematics. Simple organisms and systems have realized highly effective and complex outcomes in much the same way as ant colonies and wasps nests. With minimal communications computing, and sensory capability, plus a few hundred lines of software, these simple social systems create amazing outcomes. In recent weeks there have been unprecedented displays of similar organic behavior across Europe with human networks epitomizing the advantages of evolution over hierarchy. How could a fuel revolt spontaneously erupt in so many countries at the same time and be so devastatingly effective? This was not some unionized action, there was no central organization, or intelligence, just heavily taxed populations using mobile phones and the Internet to great advantage. The governments did not see the rebellion coming, their radar was ineffective and their shields down. By the time the heads of state appeared on TV it was far too late, the protesters were in distributed control, better informed and organized. As soon as government spokesmen made accusations of intimidation and violence to bolster the position of the police and/or military, a TV reporter would be on screen with a denial involving people on the ground. What a coup, credibility lost for the politicians, and more public support for the blockades. Just picture it, information arrives at some far tentacle of government to be filtered and distorted as it passes from one layer to another. Advisors are consulted, and committees formed to decide the best course of action. The strategists, PR people and spin-doctors apply their wisdom, the politicians give it a convenient tweak, and it is ready for presenting to the electorate. In the meantime the protestors had disseminated the latest developments across the country and moved onto the next phase. In some cases the final curtain was superbly timed. At the point where each country was close to collapse, and a state of emergency declared, when the military were going to be brought in, the blockades spontaneously evaporated, and even more public support gained. In this situation zero hierarchy and speed of communication are clear winners, and so it seems, is the process of honing strategy. In this game it is speed and direction of decision that wins the day. A parallel situation preceded the fuel rebellion with the tragic loss of a Russian submarine, and an even better example of not getting IT. Here was an old party machine accustomed to controlling the media and the flow of information. Delays, untruths, attempts at a cover up, and accusations of interference from outside forces were all revealed as falsehoods. The communication channels were ahead of the military and political machine. The bits just out-maneuvered and outpaced the atoms, and the distributed intelligence on the net went far beyond that of the military and political players. Public anger quickly mounted and political credibility was lost at an accelerating rate. I think we can safely assume that the world will never be the same. All of our technologies are pushing us toward a democracy where we all have our hand on the tiller at the same time. |