Cypherpunks, e-money and the technologies of disconnection - encryption technology; includes related articles; excerpt from book, 'Out of Control'

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1993 by Kevin Kelly

"Free the bits!" shouts Tim May. This sense of the word "free" shifts Stewart Brand's oft-quoted maxim, "Information wants to be free" -- as in "without cost" -- to the more subtle "without chains or imprisonment." Information wants to be free to wander and reproduce. Success, in a networked world of decentralized nodes, belongs to those plans that do not resist either the replication or roaming urges of information.

Sprague's encrypted meter capitalizes on the distinction between pay and copy. "It is easy to make software count how many times it has been invoked, but hard to make it count how many times it has been copied," says software architect Brad Cox. In a message broadcast on the Internet, Cox writes:

Software objects differ from tangible objects in being fundamentally unable to monitor their copying but trivially able to monitor their use....So why not build an information age market economy around this difference between manufacturing age and information age goods? If revenue collection were based on monitoring the use of software inside a computer, vendors could dispense with copy protection altogether.

Cox is a software developer specializing in a new species of modular software code called object-oriented programming (OOP). OOP delivers two magnificent improvements over conventional software. First, OOP provides the user with applications that are more fluid, more interoperable with various tasks -- sort of like a house with movable "object" furniture instead of a house saddled with built-in furniture. Second, OOP provides software developers the ability to "reuse" modules of software, whether they wrote the modules themselves or purchased them from someone else. To build a database, an OOP designer like Cox takes a sort routine, a field manager, a form generator, an icon handler, etc., and assembles the program, instead of rewriting a working whole from scratch. Cox developed a set of cool OOP objects that he sold to Steve Jobs to use in his Next machine, but selling small bits of modular code as a regular business has been slow. It is similar to trying to peddle limericks one by one. To recoup the great cost of writing an individual object by selling it outright would garner too few sales, but selling it by copy is too hard to monitor or control. But if objects could generate revenue each time a user activated them, then an author could make a living creating them.

While contemplating the possible market for OOP objects that were sold on a "per-use" plan, Cox uncovered the natural grain in networked intelligence: Let the copies flow, and pay per use. He says, "The premise is that copy protection is exactly the wrong idea for intangible, easily copied goods such as software. You want information-age goods to be freely distributed and freely acquired via whatever distribution means you want. You are positively encouraged to download software from networks, give copies to your friends, or send it as junk mail to people you've never met. Broadcast my software from satellites. Please!"