The Internet's Apostle Of Free Content

Esther Dyson says copying on the Net is too easy. Her solution: Charge for ads and services.

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By Eric R. Chabrow
Issue date: March 25, 1996

Intellectual property that can be copied easily is likely to be copied, according to Esther Dyson. It's something like the latest mantra for advocates of "content wants to be free."

Dyson, president of EDventure Holdings, a New York consulting firm and publisher of the Release 1.0 newsletter, believes that most of what we now consider content- including software-will soon be distributed on the Internet for free. Payment will be made instead for ads for other services, such as support and training. "The value of intellectual property is realized not by selling it directly, but by attaching it to other things," Dyson says. "Intellectual property has value, but not in the form of something you sell. It's used to sell something else."

Dyson believes this paradigm shift is being driven mainly by the ease of copying information on the Internet. Before the Net, transferring information required a manufacturing process to produce a book, magazine, diskette, CD-ROM, videotape, or even paper for a photocopying machine. But the Internet makes duplicating information easy. Content owners, Dyson says, should not try to control copies of their work, but rather should focus on their relationships with their customers.

According to this theory, software makers in the cyber-age will profit from installing, customizing, and supp orting their products, training people how to use them, and porting their free systems to vendors' hardware systems.

Dyson cites Netscape Communications Corp. as an example of a company that's giving away free software-its Navigator World Wide Web browser-to promote its other offerings. Though Novell's NetWare network operating system isn't free, the company still profits from training certified NetWare engineers, instructors, and administrators, she notes. Software makers trying to profit from their creations face bleak prospects, because competitors will make products that meet the same standards, driving down prices. Thus, Dyson asserts, most software products have become commodities because they're easy to imitate.

But Ken Wasch, president of the Software Publishers Association, a Washington trade group, calls Dyson's views elitist. "Lots of sole proprietorships earn their living with protections afforded by copyright," he says. "Why force a proprietorship to be in a bus iness it doesn't want to be in? It's like saying to the latest novel writer, 'Get out of the novel writing business.' "

Dyson counters by saying the marketplace, not government, will determine how business gets conducted on the Net. "I'm not trying to create problems for people," she says, "But if they want to make money, they have to consider a new business model."

See related story: "Five Major Myths Of Copyright Law"

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