The line doesn't move; the people in the line do

An engineer friend once commented, while we were waiting in line somewhere (it may be have been for fast food) that the line doesn't move; it's the people in the line who move.

The difference between the line and the people in line is a subtle one, yet obvious once it is brought to your attention. At 10:00, there is a line from the cash register out onto the floor. An hour later, the line will still be there, from the cash register out onto the floor. The line (a collection of people) has not moved -- it's still in the same store, starting at the same location. The fact that the people in the line have changed does not mean the line has moved. (If the line were to move, it would start in a different place or extend to another part of the shop.)

There is a similar subtle difference with bits and bit-built entities like songs and books and on-line magazines. We think that buying a song means buying bits, when in fact we're buying not a bunch of bits but a bunch of bits in a sequence. It's not the bits that make the song, it's the sequence of bits.

A sequence is not a tangible thing.

For a long time, sequences of bits were embedded in atoms. Books were sequences of characters (bits) embedded in ink on paper. Copying the sequence of bits meant collecting your own atoms to hold the copy of bits. In the Middle Ages, manuscripts were copied by hand and creating the new set of atoms was an expensive operation. The printing press and movable type made the copy operation less expensive, but there was still a significant cost for the atom "substrate".

In the twenty-first century, the cost of the atom substrate has dropped to a figure quite close to zero. The cost of the copy operation has also dropped to almost zero. the physical barriers to copies are gone. All that is left (to save the recording industry) is tradition, social norms, and law (and law enforcement). And while tradition and social norms may prevent folks born prior to 1980 from making copies, they don't seem to be holding back the later generations.

The RIAA, record labels, and other copyright holders want it both ways. They want bit sequences to be cheap to copy (for them) but hard to copy (for everyone else). They want bit sequences that are easily copied and distributed to consumers. Once the bits arrive in our in-box, or on our iPod, they wants the bits to magically transform into non-movable, non-copyable bits. They want bit sequences that are easy to move until they want them to be fixed in place. That's not how bits work.

In the end, physics wins. Wily E. Coyote can run off the cliff into air and hang there, defying gravity. But when he looks down, gravity kicks in.