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Meet the face of your imminent demise, publishing. No, it’s not Drew Carey on Slim Fast, it’s Canadian sci-fi writer and uber-blogger Cory Doctorow, muthatruckahs. And he’s here to bust an affable, common sense cap in your ass. That or he’s the anti-Christ. Are we supposed to be mad at him because he makes money? Because his analogies are sensationally brutal? Because he cornered the black plastics market with those glasses? Can anyone tell me what this ridiculous article is actually saying?
As an example of that, Doctorow cites Amazon.com’s decision to delete – unilaterally and by remote control – thousands of electronic copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four it had previously sold to users of its Kindle e-readers.
“They gave everybody back their copies and promised they would never do it again – unless they had a court order,” Doctorow said. “I’ve worked as a bookseller, and no bookseller has ever had to make a promise at the cash register: ‘Here’s your books. I promise I won’t come to your house and take them away again – unless I have a court order.’”
Traditional copyright law is like a tank mine, according to Doctorow, a fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights watchdog. It exists to regulate the activities of large commercial interests. “A civilian can’t set it off by stepping on it.” But new corporate models born of digital technology are changing that, so that penalties for comparatively petty violations – like sharing a book – are targeting individual readers. “They’re redesigning tank mines to blow the legs off children.”
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November 16th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Not to be a pedant, but as a former tank crewman, it’s called an anti-tank mine, Cory. That’s because it’s for blowing up tanks. Do you take histamines for your frigging allergies?
November 16th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
This article, like most interviews with Doctorow, is saying that a reasonably proficient and very prolific genre writer with an established fan base and access to several gigantic PR and marketing avenues is going to make a very nice living in the business pretty much no matter the distribution method. Ask Dan Brown or Stephen King if they spend much time worrying that people are going to discover and or somehow manage to buy their books.
No-one should be mad at Doctorow for his own success as a writer. But yes, his copyright analogies are ridiculous (not to mention hypocritical), and make most of his arguments in that arena very difficult for me to take seriously. He is the boy who yelled “Fascist.”
November 16th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
It really seems that copyright isn’t the issue. What this should be a warning sign for is the shift from buying content to the renting of access. In this case Amazon didn’t actually have the right to sell the e-book they were selling (in which case it’s closer to buying stolen goods — you do have to give them back when it’s discovered they were stolen and you don’t get compensated) but what we should be concerned with is that the connection to what’s on your reader is two-way — and always will be.
We’re seeing it with music already, the monthly fee for access to a huge library – access that stops if you miss a payment. Unless we really believe that all this access will be “free.”
Mostly what Doctorow is talking about is the internet acting as the library – that is where almost all of us discovered our favourite books and it didn’t cost us anything. And it is what turned us into book buyers.
The problem is that the library isn’t broken, it doesn’t need to be fixed and we shouldn’t be looking for more ways to keep kids from getting off their asses and leaving the house.
November 16th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
“We’re seeing it with music already, the monthly fee for access to a huge library – access that stops if you miss a payment. Unless we really believe that all this access will be “free.””
The market is going this way because people want it. Streaming music instead of owning it is slowly but surely winning out (think YouTube, not Pirate Bay). The analogy is not renting it, but subscribing to a service like cable TV. (Though a minority will always want to own).
A subscription model for books is essentially the library system. Either you pay yourself to belong to a private lending library, or the community makes book downloads available through the public library.
Obviously there are issues to be worked out about the privacy of your computer and so forth, but these really are minor hiccups in ironing out what it is people actually want (hysterical copy-fighter rantings notwithstanding).
November 16th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
I can’t quite get past how poorly the article is written, and just how rife with errors it is.