September 2000, Vol. 11, No. 9

Big Brass ones

Microsoft veep challenges the 'information wants to be free' culture

Silicon-back book: The Casio Cassiopeia EM-500, running Microsoft’s Pocket PC operating system, and Microsoft Reader which delivers digital books.

SAN FRANCISCO -- It took a certain amount of, as the Spanish say, cajones, to get up in front of the first-day audience of Seybold San Francisco 2000, held Aug. 28-Sept. 1, and say that, in fact, information doesn't want to be free -- it wants to compensate its creator.

"If a person creates a book or a piece of music and puts it for sale to the marketplace," said Dick Brass, vice president of the eMerging Technology Group at Microsoft, "the consumer really has two choices. They can buy it or they can skip it. Stealing it is not a third option because the price doesn't seem to be right or because the person isn't inclined to pay."

The crowd let out a groan. Not because of the huge number of references to e-books uttered at the meeting. Surveying the attendees, it was clear that many were from the Napster generation -- proselytizers of the notion that because the music or the words are in bits on the Internet, the niceties of copyright and intellectual property don't apply.

I shuddered when his words sank in. Not because I'm on the free-information side of the fence -- I'm not -- but because I found myself agreeing with a Microsoft executive.

Brass, though, is not your typical Microsoft executive: a former newspaper reporter and editor (New York Daily News), Brass pioneered the concept of licensing dictionaries for word processing spell-checkers. He once told me that one day in the late ’70s he was sitting at his Atex terminal and said, "Why can't this thing use a real dictionary?" When Atex people couldn't answer him, he went to Random House and found they would be quite happy to license its dictionary for electronic use -- at such a small pittance that Brass pulled together all his pennies, quit the newspaper, started a company called Dictronics, licensed the dictionary (as well as Roget’s Thesaurus and the Chicago Manual of Style) and made a fortune. Subsequently he has started other businesses and worked for the likes of Wang Laboratories and Oracle Inc. before going to Microsoft.

Today Brass is in charge of Microsoft’s e-book initiative and used the Seybold session to not only discourse on free-information (which included a pitch for a multimillion-dollar education campaign to awaken the public to bit-stealing), but also on his company’s Pocket PC operating system and its Microsoft Reader application, which makes reading a book on a hand-held device less than unpleasant.

And speaking of unpleasant, Brass hit a chord when he said, "As unpleasant as those of us who grew up in the ’60s might feel, it is necessary occasionally to point out to people that they're breaking the law -- to piracy gangs and to companies who are manufacturing products that are essentially designed for the illegal redistribution of content."

Inside, you'll find not only my admittedly prejudiced look at the rest of the conference, but also a trip through the Seybold trade show from Correspondent George Powell. Overall, Seybold was certainly bigger than in the past and had an energy that has been missing in recent years.

Also inside, Correspondent Marion J. Love takes a tour of the cross-media publishing products that are currently available from our traditional suppliers; interestingly, those who supply exclusively to the new media realm don't seem to understand little things like word processing software or pre-press issues.

Lastly, Correspondent L. Carol Christopher gives us a profile of a company that is pioneering publishers' abilities to gain income from digital content. Clickshare, which has agreements with on-line newspapers, is poised to be one of the big players in this arena.

Intriguingly, the person I think best encapsulates Brass' thoughts is someone from the open-source software movement. Larry Wahl, the "mastermind" behind the Perl programming language, addressed the first Perl Conference in 1997. In his speech, Wahl said that, "information wants to be valuable."

Information is valuable. And the scary part is that Microsoft seems to be leading the way in getting that message out.

-- David M. Cole, dmc@colepapers.net