Who Owns the Facts?
by A. D. Coleman

Access to and control of information is a major concern of every culture. The dynamic tension between the centralization and the decentralization of information -- between what is secret or privileged and what is commonly available -- defines a culture in a most basic way. Recently, a new twist on this issue has been manifesting itself: the corporate world's proprietary relationship to information, the actual ownership of data (even, sometimes, data generated under government contract). It is a question that affects writers and photographers alike.

Anita R. and Herbert I. Schiller have termed this the "privatization of information." The Schillers, with overtones of dismay, express the view that "Information today is being treated as a commodity" and "Books are 'products.'"(2) I share their view, but not the naive, simplistic quality of their disturbance. Information has been a commodity since at least the fifteenth century A.D.; books have been products for much longer; and I know too much history to find either of these facts startling. I worry about different aspects of the situation -- including the all-too-common failure to distinguish between the concept of freedom of information and the notion that this somehow means that all information can or should be "free," meaning divorced from economic premises.

I come to this issue not only as a media critic concerned with communication systems and their cultural consequences, but also as a working professional writer. From the latter standpoint, it seems to me that the results of one's labors can be a product, a service, or some combination of the two. (The same would hold true for a professional photographer, whether in the applied or fine-arts fields.) My labors as a critic have generated hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, plus several books, all of which, to some extent, qualify as "information." My work as an editor on another project resulted in a compilation of basic data on extant photography-related A-V programming -- unquestionably "information," intended as a resource and reference tool.(2)

Whether I choose to conceptualize my activity as the production of goods or the provision of services, I must market the results of that activity in order to make it effectual in the world, enable its continuance, and be recompensed for it. Certainly, therefore, this information -- whether generated by me as a writer or compiled by me as an editor -- constitutes a "commodity" and/or a "product." This is neither shocking nor shameful. As a worker, I've invested time, physical and mental effort, and money in its making. One of my purposes in doing so has been to get it into the hands of others; another has been to earn a living thereby.

The three principal forms of recompense available for such work are: 1) the economic support of public and/or private grant monies; 2) the indirect support of staff positions on publications or academic sinecures; and 3) the direct marketing of the work.

Though I have had some public grant support, and also teach part-time, I've never been a salaried staff writer. I've remained a free lance; at least 50 percent of my income for the past twenty-odd years has come from the licensing of various publication rights to my writings and (in a very few cases, back when I was young and ignorant) the outright transfer of copyright. Given that those "rentals" and occasional sales of my writings have been to publishers who transform them into the physical objects we call books, magazines, and newspapers -- products whose creation and dissemination require the considerable economic investment of material, labor, and a merchandising system for distribution -- there's no way not to think of my share in that process, on one level, as the manufacture of a product and a commodity.

The kicker, of course, is that "given." The fact is that, as a writer, I'm caught in a brief but highly problematic transition period in the evolution of communication systems. It's the transitional nature of this phase that must be emphasized.

At the moment, the dominant outlet for my work in the form in which I've chosen to cast it -- the written word -- is the publishing industry as we know it today, a dinosaur whose premises go back half a millenium and whose antiquatedness has been exhaustively demonstrated and annotated of late.

As it happens, I love books, magazines, newspapers -- the feel of them as objects, the quality of their presence in my living space, their physical existence in multiples as social vehicles for thought and feeling. I hope that some version of book and periodical form remains viable during my lifetime, so that I can embody such of my work in it as seems appropriate.

But these forms are rapidly becoming slow, cumbersome, inefficient and expensive vehicles: the Cadillacs of the written word. And fond as I am of them, my commitment as a writer is to the dissemination of my work to the broadest possible audience -- which means I want it to take as cheap and accessible a form as it possibly can.

Presently, that form -- for writers, and photographers too -- is the printed page. A decade or so hence, it'll be a network of electronic bulletin boards and/or a central information bank (administered, perhaps, by the Library of Congress), to which the nation's computers will be linked. These repositories will draw their materials from writers like me, photographers like many of this magazine's readers, and countless other sources. For some nominal per-word fee, we'll be able to copyright our writings and imagery as we generate them, enter them into such a bank, and have them automatically cross-indexed into various bibliographies, reading lists, and other references.(3)

Then people at their computers -- at home, at work, at school, or at public terminals -- can locate and call up that material. They'll read or view it on the screen and, if they wish, obtain a hard-copy version of all or part of it as a computer printout. The costs of this will be covered either by some tax-subsidized system or by the imposition of a nominal fee charged to users; in either case, a percentage of those revenues will be credited to the accounts of those who provide the specific material scrutinized and printed out. That way, we'll be subsidized by, and more directly accountable to, our readers and viewers. (A rudimentary version of this -- lacking the technological elegance of my suggestion, but compensating authors and publishers for the photocopying of material -- is already in place in the U.K., France, Germany and Australia, through national organizations known generically as Reproduction Rights Organizations or RROs. The U.S. version of this, still in its infancy, is called the Copyright Clearance Center.)

That'll be a very different "given." My scenario may be inexact, but some version of it stares us in the face. The new electronic imaging systems -- computers, scanners, laser discs and the like -- surely foretell something parallel for those involved in the creation of photographs, especially those whose purpose is primarily informational. Perhaps this will force us to examine and accept the commodity/product nature of information-encoding and information-transmission systems other than the printed page. Perhaps it will allow writers, photographers, editors and others to conceptualize their output as disembodied ideas rather than tangible objects, as service rather than product.

But those ideas, that service, still won't be "free" -- meaning without cost to produce and distribute -- even though that system may provide even readier access to information than we now enjoy. Certainly it will not be conflict-free. We may simply exchange the familiar and tedious problems of the present-day publishing industry for novel and barely predictable ones. I would not put a damper on the legitimate alarm the Schillers and others are sounding in regard to ownership of and access to information. Without question, we will need a Freedom of Information Act to cover computerized data under government control, and should begin working for that now.

But I've stressed the transitional nature of the present situation. It is true that information -- and, for that matter, information-processing equipment -- is presently concentrated in corporate hands. However, some consideration must be given to the following matters, all of which will begin to have an increasingly visible impact on contemporary communication systems within the next few years:

The corporate state is actively encouraging the citizenry to acquire "personal computers," which within the decade may begin to become as ubiquitous as the standard TV set is today. This will create an enormously versatile and sophisticated nationwide grass-roots communication system at the disposal of the polity. In such a context, it will be difficult if not impossible to keep information hidden. Inevitably, there will be deliberate leaks. And accidental discoveries. And the results of sophisticated snooping.

Incidents along all three of those lines already abound. My own urban perambulations, combined with observation of my students and cohabitation with my son and his ethnically/politically/economically diversified social circle, indicates that we're rapidly breeding a sizable cadre of electronic whiz kids who thrive on a diet of what I've described elsewhere as "fiche and chips," and from whom I predict even the most elaborate and restricted information system will have few secrets. (There have already been a sufficient number of widely publicized and well-documented cases of system break-ins via youthful computer "hacking" to prove this point; the film War Games offered a fictionalized version of one such scenario.)(4)

Nor is this potential restricted to the highly educated and well-to-do. The largest computers are indeed owned by and operated under the aegis of the military/governmental/corporate sectors, and can thus be thought of as controlled by the power elite; and most of the nation's fourteen million personal home computers are owned by members of the middle and upper classes. But computer programming as a skill and a profession is still largely in the hands of the working class. Treated essentially as drone work, roughly on a par with stenography, the basic programming and running of computers has been widely promoted as an outlet for the upward-mobility ambitions of high-school graduates.

Consequently, the percentage of working-class computer operators and programmers is far greater than you'll find in the nation's executive suites. Assuming that enlightened self-interest will be demonstrated by these workers in this time of economic, social and political crisis, it would not be unreasonable to expect them to use the weapons at their disposal: sabotage, anonymous disclosure, theft, and the myriad other options available to the computer-literate person who chooses to "work late at the office."(5)

Indeed, the inability to keep any computerized data private may prove to be the real problem, instead of what the Schillers call "privatization." The day may not be too far off on which we'll look back with nostalgia at a time in which anyone was able to imagine that anything entered into a computer could be kept secret. 

Notes

(1) "The 'Privatizing' of Information: Who Can Own What America Knows?" The Nation, Vol. 234, no. 15 (April 17, 1982), pp. 461-63. This essay began its life as a letter to the editor in response to the Schillers' commentary, was revised at the editor's request for possible publication and, when unpublished in that forum, expanded into its present form for presentation in a different venue. As often happened, one thing led to another, and it became the first in a series of columns for Camera & Darkroom.

(2) Coleman, Douglas I. Sheer and Patricia Grantz, The Photography A-V Program Directory (New York: Photography Media Institute, 1981).

(3) As a charter member of the National Writers Union, in a May 1990 letter to the editor of the union's journal of record I proposed the creation of an on-line syndication service under the union's auspices, with two components. "The first would be the creation of a database, to be made available via CompuServe or some such system, in which I and other members could briefly describe our columns, selected features, subject area(s) of interest, and give our addresses to facilitate further inquiry. The second would be the periodic (perhaps twice-yearly) conversion of this database into a simple, inexpensive, desktop-published catalogue that would be mailed to a list of periodicals here and abroad." "A Writers' Syndicate?" American Writer, Vol. 9, no. 1 (Summer 1990), p. 2.

(4) For assorted accounts of these activities, see Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1984), and Kathie Hafner and John Markoff, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), among other chronicles.

(5) Recall, in this regard, the behavior of the character played by Melanie Griffith in the 1988 film Working Girl -- and the delighted approval it evoked from office workers around the country.

This essay first appeared in Camera & Darkroom Photography, Vol. 13, no. 8 (August 1991). It subsequently appeared in my book The Digital Evolution: Visual Communication in the Electronic Age, Essays, Lectures and Interviews 1967-1998 (Nazraeli Press, 1998; second edition, Villa Florentine Books, 2002).

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