The other great distinction between Nelson's docuverse and the library of my youth that affects current Web activity is related to the idea of "micropayment." It is a simple idea: that there be a cost for every sentence, every word, every link followed, every byte of image. Nelson advocates a small cost, referring to micropayment as "mists" of money--circulating, settling, and pooling in the hands of large content providers. Many of those envisioning a future for the Web advocate larger payments. In essence, however, the viewpoints are the same. A simple idea: trading the social idea represented by libraries for that represented by pay-per-view cable--turning the simple regressive idea that only those who can pay should be able to read and write into the explicit foundation of our recorded culture. The simplicity is seductive. It can almost seem like "common sense" to extract a payment for every unit of the docuverse--just as we seem to be doing with books, whether they are sold to individuals or libraries. And it might also seem that, after all, we don't have to ask ourselves difficult questions about the freedom to read and write, because anything but regressive micropayment would violate a copyright holder's entitlement to make money every time their material is viewed. Seductive as this thinking may seem, it is also completely inaccurate. Copyright has never represented the entitlement that micropayment advocates want to have us believe it does. Rather, copyright represents an attempt at public good, something particularly important as we recreate our spaces and activities of reading and writing. In the U.S. Constitution, copyright exists to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts." As Richard Stallman puts it, "Copyright is justified if the benefits of progress exceed the burden that copyright imposes on everyone except the copyright holder." [See "The Right Way to Tax DAT" in Wired (Issue 1.3, July/August 1993) and at http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/dat.html] Stallman and a few others have been reminding the computer community of this for years. More recently, the notorious 1995 "White Paper" proposal by the Clinton Administration (under the leadership of former copyright industry lobbyist Bruce Lehman) has brought forth a score of others to fight for a public-interest vision of copyright.* Beyond this ill-founded simplicity, however, micropayment has another seductive pull for those of us who are artists and writers--"content providers" as the techno-jargon would now have us. In print culture, very few of us are provided anything approaching a living wage through our writing or art. Micropayment might seem to hold the promise of allowing a somewhat larger percentage of us to support ourselves with our work, and of making it possible for others of us to receive a greater percentage of our income from these pursuits. While the main outcome of micropayment will be to funnel large amounts of money to supplement the advertising revenue (the mainstay of most commercial publishing) of media companies, it might also serve to support a small amount of work that does not currently attract the interest of distributors, publishers, agents, merchandisers, and advertisers. But at what cost? Are we willing, for the possibility of making a few dollars, to participate in making reading and writing activities by definition restricted to those who can make the payments? Are we willing to leave the preservation of freedom of speech to "market forces"? Are we willing to make the experience of a library impossible for future generations? Some would argue that these are not the necessary consequences of choosing the simple micropayment solution over some more equitable, perhaps more complex, approach. They put forth plans such as giving information credits to the poor. But a credit that diminishes as it is used is the defeat of free speech, of the library ideal, of the idea that one's ability to use information and ideas should expand the more it is practiced. It is the defeat, even, of the idea of copyright--for such a restriction on the flow and recombination and generation of ideas will not lead to a public good. * Of course, on some level nothing can be done to stop micropayment from happening, at least in a limited fashion. Micropayment schemes are already in use in some places on the Web, and others wait in the wings. As the content providers, technological facilitators, and readers on the Web, we will have to decide whether to participate. And that is why my memory of the library is one I have recently been thinking about a lot. Libraries--as a memory, an ideal, and as a day-to-day part of my life--are too important to me; I cannot take part, in any capacity, in any micropayment scheme. I prefer to work with others to raise these issues to public consciousness, to enlarge this conversation, to work toward a public-interest vision of the future of reading and writing. The alternative, I'm afraid, is that a regressive redefinition of reading and writing becomes taken for granted, that this becomes the starting point for discussion. If we have chosen to give our lives to the arts, to education, to ideas. What have we gained when we choose to make these pursuits incrementally easier for ourselves at the price of making them impossible for others?