Narrator: Imagine buying a new inkjet printer for a great price, only to discover the real cost comes later. When the ink runs out, you find that the manufacturer’s replacement cartridges are exorbitantly expensive, costing more per ounce than vintage champagne. You try to buy a cheaper, third-party cartridge, but the printer refuses to work. A tiny chip on the official cartridge acts as a digital lock, and your printer is designed to reject anything without it. This lock isn't there to improve your printing experience or protect you; it's there to protect the company's profits by forcing you into their expensive ecosystem. This scenario, known as the "Inkjet Wars," is a perfect microcosm of a much larger battle being waged over technology, control, and freedom. In his book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, author and activist Cory Doctorow dismantles the complex world of digital rights, arguing that the locks placed on our digital lives are not for our benefit and that the fight over copyright has become a fight for the future of the internet itself.

Narrator: At the heart of Doctorow's argument is his First Law: "Any Time Someone Puts a Lock on Something That Belongs to You and Won’t Give You the Key, That Lock Isn’t There for Your Benefit." This law directly confronts the world of Digital Rights Management (DRM), the technological locks placed on e-books, movies, music, and even physical devices. While often framed as "copyright protection," Doctorow argues that DRM is actually "middleman protection."

These locks don't just prevent piracy; they fundamentally alter the balance of power. For example, when a publisher like Hachette sells an e-book through Amazon's Kindle store, that book is locked by Amazon's DRM. This creates a "roach motel" where content checks in but can't check out. Readers cannot move their purchased books to a competitor's e-reader, and Hachette cannot authorize them to do so. This gives Amazon immense leverage. During a 2014 contract dispute, Amazon was able to make Hachette’s titles unavailable, knowing that Hachette was powerless to help its own customers move their locked Kindle books to another platform. The lock, supposedly there to protect the publisher, was instead used as a weapon against them by the distributor.

This principle extends beyond media. The "Inkjet Wars" saw printer companies use chipped cartridges to lock out competitors, forcing customers to buy overpriced ink. In both cases, the lock serves the intermediary, not the creator or the consumer, by creating vendor lock-in and stifling competition.

Narrator: In an age of digital abundance, Doctorow posits a Second Law for creators: "Fame Won’t Make You Rich, But You Can’t Get Paid Without It." He argues that for most artists, the biggest threat isn't piracy; it's obscurity. With millions of creators vying for attention, the primary challenge is getting noticed. The internet, while being a formidable copying machine, is also an unparalleled audience machine.

Doctorow suggests that creators should embrace the internet's ability to spread their work far and wide, even for free, as a way to build a dedicated following. Once an audience cares about the work, there are numerous ways to convert that appreciation into income. This is powerfully illustrated by the career of musician Amanda Palmer. As a street performer, she stood silently as "The Eight-Foot Bride," offering flowers to those who put money in her case. She learned a fundamental lesson: people want to support artists they appreciate. Later, when fans who had pirated her band's music offered her cash at shows to assuage their guilt, it reinforced her belief in a trust-based system. This philosophy culminated in a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign that raised over a million dollars, proving that a direct, authentic connection with fans is a powerful and viable business model. Similarly, Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd, allows noncommercial sharing of his work, which acts as free advertising that drives sales of high-margin merchandise like T-shirts and posters.

Narrator: Doctorow’s Third Law reframes the entire debate: "Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, People Do." The fight is not about the abstract desires of data but about the fundamental freedoms of individuals. The battle to control copying has escalated into a battle to control our computers and, by extension, our lives.

This is because general-purpose computers are designed to run any program, including programs that copy files. To prevent this, DRM systems must behave like spyware, hiding their operations from the user and restricting what the computer can do. This creates massive security vulnerabilities. In 2005, Sony BMG shipped millions of music CDs with a secret "rootkit" that hid its anti-copying software from the user's view. This rootkit created a backdoor that virus writers immediately exploited to hide their own malicious software, turning a flawed copyright protection scheme into a global security threat.

Furthermore, the legal mechanisms created to enforce these locks, like the Notice and Takedown system, are frequently abused. Powerful entities have used copyright takedown notices to silence critics, remove embarrassing videos of police misconduct, or suppress leaked documents that are in the public interest. When we build systems of censorship and surveillance to protect entertainment industry business models, we create tools that can be used to dismantle our privacy and freedom of speech.

Narrator: Given that the internet is a copying machine, Doctorow argues that trying to stop copying is a futile and destructive goal. Instead, we must design a copyright system fit for the 21st century—one that accepts copying as a fact and regulates the industry, not the public.

A proven model for this already exists: the blanket license. Just as radio stations and karaoke bars pay a flat fee to a collecting society for the right to play any song in a catalog, a similar system could be applied to the internet. Internet Service Providers could pay a modest monthly fee per subscriber to a collecting society in exchange for a blanket license. This would legalize all non-commercial file-sharing, compensating artists based on the popularity of their work while ending the war on fans. This approach encourages competition, as any new service could legally access the full catalog of music, and it focuses on a system of compensation rather than a futile system of control.

This isn't a radical departure but a return to copyright's original purpose. The first U.S. Copyright Act of 1790 gave authors a 14-year term, renewable only by the author for another 14 years. This clever system gave publishers a short-term monopoly to recoup their investment, but ensured that if a work became a long-term success, the creator had the leverage to renegotiate a better deal. It was a system designed to balance the interests of investors and creators, a principle that has been lost in the modern era of endless copyright terms and digital locks.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free is that the copyright war is not a niche debate about intellectual property. It is a battle for the soul of the internet and the future of free society. The laws and technologies we create to regulate movies and music will inevitably define the computers in our cars, the devices in our homes, and even the medical implants in our bodies. By prioritizing the business models of a handful of entertainment companies over the fundamental principles of a free and open internet, we risk building a world of pervasive surveillance and control.

Doctorow challenges us to ask a critical question: What is copyright for? Is it to permanently entrench last year's winners, or is it to foster the most diverse ecosystem of creators, works, and audiences? The choice is not between paying artists and letting them starve. The choice is between building a system that empowers creators and trusts users, or one that criminalizes fans and treats every computer as a potential threat.