Not Relying On Copyright Doesn't Mean You Don't Make Money

from the sad dept

Copycense recently pointed me to a really depressing post by the author David Glass, discussing his views on copyright. I found it depressing because it opened with such hope and recognition about how important remixing and sharing are to culture and creativity, and how little any of that has to do with copyright:

For centuries, people have enjoyed a shared pool of story, riffing with the same old themes, playing with each others' work. After that and after my Walkman childhood came the Internet, and fun new worlds of mash-ups and sharing, open source and Creative Commons.

I love it all. Creativity should come from a spirit of communication, maybe cooperation, not the egotistic holding to oneself that copyright suggests. I like musicians to sample each other, and authors to reference each other, and film-makers to pastiche each other. I'm all for intertextuality and a sense of fun and play. I'm pretty much a copyleft sort of guy.

With such a great opening, why is the article depressing? Because it's followed by the inevitable "but..." And that "but" is that he wants to make money from his writing and the "old industry" relies on copyright, and if he wants to make money he has to play ball with their ways of thinking.

People ask to see what I’ve written and I have little to show them online. I want to be published and broadcast and paid for my work and I fear that sticking things on the net puts that at risk. For example, if I sell a short story to a magazine they will want first rights, and if I’ve put that story on the web already, there is a grey area as to whether that counts as prior publication. I play it safe and put very little of my writing up, in the hope that through conversation I can keep people interested in me anyway, in the hope that a time will come when I can send people off to read a book of mine, or hear my play on the radio.

In other words, copyright isn't promoting progress at all here. Instead, it's really doing the opposite, causing this author to hide his works and hope that some old gatekeeper decides to publish it.

This is a much more mild version of an argument we've seen elsewhere. Copyright defenders, for example, like to assume that when folks like myself talk about doing things without copyright, we mean either doing things for no money or through some sort of "charitable" set up. That's simply not true, of course. We talk about all sorts of business models that let people make more money than they could have otherwise -- and we're certainly seeing that happen in the world of writing. We're hearing more and more success stories in the world of self-publishing of ebooks or using platforms like Kickstarter or testing other business models selling additional scarcities.

There are lots of business models that seem to work quite well for people who can and do connect with their fans -- and one of the best ways to connect is to get the actual writing out there and get people hungry for more and more and more. Those who are doing the math (and are fanatical about connecting with fans) are starting to argue that there's a lot more money to be made in going with some new business models -- even for those who can make a lot of money the traditional way.

Compare that to going the old gatekeeper route: you have to deal with a lot of making no money while you deal with rejections. If you get a book deal you may get an advance, but then you're unlikely to ever see much more than that, unless the book is fabulously successful. That's not to say that there aren't still roles for those gatekeepers, but relying on them solely and feeling the need to hide your works away -- especially when you recognize the overall benefit to creativity from sharing and openness -- just seems like a really depressing statement on copyright.

Filed Under: business models, copyright, david glass, writing

If You Think Writing For Free Undermines Your Profession, Just Don't Do It!

from the makes-me-want-to-write-for-the-huffington-post dept

I had kind of hoped we were done last month with the silly arguments about how writers should boycott writing for the Huffington Post because it doesn't pay people, when we explained how clueless the argument was. People who wrote for the Huffington Post for free did so out of their own free will. They did so for a variety of reasons, including the (free) exposure it gave their works. Assuming that any of those writers leveraged those works into greater success elsewhere (as some have), wouldn't we all think it's insane if Arianna Huffington suddenly called them up and demanded money for helping them get attention?

Of course we would. So why is anyone making the exact opposite argument? The latest is the Newspaper Guild, which should know better, but seems to be hellbent on attacking any innovative news platform that isn't a member of its old boys' club. It has called on all its members to boycott the Huffington Post with some really tortured logic. Let's dig in.

The Newspaper Guild is calling on unpaid writers of the Huffington Post to withhold their work in support of a strike launched by Visual Arts Source in response to the company’s practice or using unpaid labor. In addition, we are asking that our members and all supporters of fair and equitable compensation for journalists join us in shining a light on the unprofessional and unethical practices of this company.

Once again, "unpaid" is in the eye of the beholder. For many writers, the Huffington Post gave them a massive platform for attention, and attention is an incredibly valuable commodity. That the Newspaper Guild, of all places, doesn't understand this says some worrying things about the Newspaper Guild. As for "unprofessional and unethical," I would argue that the Newspaper Guild willfully misrepresenting the situation here is significantly more unethical and unprofessional than anything done by the Huffington Post. No one who wrote for the Huffington Post was misled about the arrangement. It's made quite clear upfront that if you're a blogger on the site, you don't get paid. You do get attention, however. It's then up to you to make the determination if it's worth it. If not, there are literally billions of other websites to go write for, or you can go create your own. Many people felt this was a fair trade: attention and platform in exchange for writing. Why claim it's unethical when so many people entered into it willingly?

Just as we would ask writers to stand fast and not cross a physical picket line, we ask that they honor this electronic picket line.

Good luck with that. The Huffington Post draws readers like almost no one else out there. If Newspaper Guild fans want to shut themselves off from that traffic firehose, that's their decision, just like it was their decision to use that firehose for free to get attention to their work.

In response to the Huffington Post’s refusal to compensate its thousands of writers in the wake of its $315 million merger with AOL, the Newspaper Guild has requested a meeting with company officials to discuss ways the Huffington Post might demonstrate its commitment to quality journalism. Thus far, the request has been ignored.

This is the part that bugs me the most. The whole $315 million merger bit is a total red herring, used to drum up emotion, but is meaningless. Again, would the Newspaper Guild support Arianna in asking someone who became successful, in part, by writing for the HuffPo for a cut of their earnings? Or, if the Huffington Post had run out of money, would the Guild have supported a request that the writers help hand over money to keep it running? Of course not. The investors and founders of the Huffington Post put the money in and took the risk. And they got rewarded for it. The writers did not. They didn't put their own money or equity on the line. They got the benefit of those who did. To then demand a piece of the $315 million suggests a complete misunderstanding of how basic capitalism works.

As Cherie Turner, one of the former writers, explained, "Certainly, we all have written for free for the great exposure the Huffington Post can give us, but what's the cost? Those of us on strike feel it undermines the value of our profession and is unethical, especially in light of great profits by those at the top. We are only asking for a fair share of what we are helping to create. We are also speaking out against real journalism being run side-by-side with advertorial.

"We feel it is unethical to expect trained and qualified professionals to contribute quality content for nothing. It is unethical to cannibalize the investment of other organizations that bear the cost of compensation and other overhead without payment for the usage of their content. It is extremely unethical to not merely blur but eradicate the distinction between the independent and informed voice of news and opinion and the voice of a shill.

In other words, Turner and her group want to get double paid. They know the deal they made: to get exposure. But apparently now that's not enough. They want to get paid for the exposure they got as well? And if they didn't get their "fair share" then why did Turner and her friends write for HuffPo in the first place? It's like the Newspaper Guild is flat out admitting that it's completely clueless on basic economics.

Honestly, I get two key urges out of this move by the Newspaper Guild: (1) figure out if there's any way to "short" the Newspaper Guild for pure economic cluelessness and (2) suddenly I feel like writing for the Huffington Post in protest against those who are now "boycotting." Oh, and one final point: it's not a boycott. It just means you're turning down the traffic that HuffPo gave you. I'm sure HuffPo can survive fine without you. Whether or not you can survive without that attention... well, we'll see.

Filed Under: payment, writing
Companies: aol, huffington post, newspaper guild

Teen Remixes The Works Of Others Into Best Selling Novel... And Critics Love It

from the collaborative-writing dept

Here's a story that will get traditionalists up in arms about "stealing" and "laziness," but they'll all be missing the point. We've see for decades how remix culture works in music. The ability to take the works of someone else, mix them up with others, change them around and create something new and powerful, is a wonderful expression of culture, that shows how artistic culture is often about shared experiences and sharing works of art. But what about in the literary world?

There has been some exploration of this concept in the past, such as when author Jonathan Lethem wrote a very eloquent defense of plagiarism that was entirely plagiarized. Separately, we've discussed how many (especially younger people) who have grown up on things like Wikipedia often point out that they don't view it as plagiarism so much as collaborative writing. And they have a point (even if there's one patent lawyer in particular who links back to that article every few weeks to mock Techdirt). There will always be those who don't recognize how this is, in fact, collaboration and does create new and unique pieces of artwork and culture -- but they're the same sorts of people who have decried every new artform from the Waltz ("The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced... we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion") to romance novels and plays ("The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge") to comic books ("All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers This kind of thing is not good mental nourishment for children!").

But the good news is that this form of collaborative creation is gaining a bit of acceptance. Duane alerts us to the story of a 17-year-old German woman whose critically acclaimed book has been found to have large chunks plagiarized from other sources. A few years back, when a similar situation arose in the US, the author Kaavya Viswanathan, was shunned -- even if some of us thought that was ridiculous and unfair. In this case, however, the author, Helene Hegemann, readily admits that she was "remixing" other works into her book -- and the critics still love it. Her book was nominated for the $20,000 prize of the Leipzig Book Fair even though the judges already knew about the plagiarism.

And, really, what's the problem here? Some might claim that it's unfair to the original authors whose work she used -- but the author of the largest segments, named Airen, is getting a ton of attention for Airen's own book, which received little actual attention when originally published. In fact, Amazon now notes that "customers who bought" Hegemann's book also ended up buying Airen's book. In the same way that remixes and mashups often drive people to buy the original music, it seems like remixed/mashedup books can do the same. It may be a big cultural leap for those who think there is "a way things must be done," but it seems that the younger generation has other ideas.

Filed Under: airen, books, collaboration, copyright, helen hegemann, plagiarism, remix, writing

Did Pencils Make Us Dumber?

from the moral-panics-through-the-ages dept

We've talked about the popularity of moral panics for any new kind of technology, and shown how various reports of new technologies somehow being "bad" are almost always unfounded and over exaggerated. Claims of pretty much every modern technology somehow making us dumber are almost never supported by the facts, but still, you get people just trying to drum up book sales telling us that Google makes us dumber by encouraging people not to read as much -- when actual evidence shows people are reading more long-form works.

It appears there's a recent book out, A Better Pencil, by Dennis Baron, that explores how these same fears and totally unsubstantiated moral panics seem to have come about with pretty much every new communications platform out there. Baron recently did an interview with Salon, where he pointed out that these same sorts of fears go back all the way to Plato:

I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

So, forgive me for being skeptical about each new fear about each new communications technology that comes about. For all the cries of "but this time, it's different," it's the same exact story we've seen pretty much throughout history. The technology makes it easier to communicate, and those who benefited from the older restrictions get most afraid of what the new technologies allow. Often, it just seems to be a fear that there will be more competition and more innovation, and the old-timers are afraid they're not equipped or able to keep up.

Filed Under: a better pencil, dennis baron, innovation, moral panics, pencils, writing

Even More Research: Technology Is Making Kids Better Writers, Not Worse

from the and-again-and-again-and-again dept

Every few months or so, we read about some freaked out reporter/columnist/pundit/politician complaining about how the internet and texting are destroying kids' ability to write. Yet, pretty much every study on the subject has found the opposite to be true. Study after study after study after study after study have all found that kids today are better writers than in the past.

Clive Thompson writes about even more research on the subject, talking to a professor who suggests that, rather than "the death of writing" this is a renaissance:

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization."

That's because people are constantly writing. Almost all of this communication actually involves writing. In the past, outside of school -- or certain job functions, many people barely wrote at all. And, yes, kids use txt spk at times, but every generation changes and morphs the language. But, more importantly, kids are smart enough to know what's appropriate when in most cases:

Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

But there's also an interesting philosophical shift that he highlights. Since the type of writing and the audience is different than in the past, many younger people today approach writing in a different manner, and even have rethought what they consider to be good writing:

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

This is really fascinating when you think about it. Historically, many people haven't been that concerned about their writing, because it didn't matter. But, the more it matters, the more seriously they take it. This certainly doesn't mean that everyone has become a good writer -- far from it (just view any open comment forum). But, when people really care about what they're saying, they tend to get better at it, and the internet gives more people more reasons to care. As for all the bad writing out there? It's not a sign of the destruction of written English. Those people probably wouldn't be writing much at all without the internet. So it's actually a step up, relatively, from what they would have been doing in an alternate internetless universe.

Filed Under: literacy, skills, texting, writing

What's Wrong With Paying Homage To A Literary Classic By Writing A Sequel?

from the trying-to-figure-it-out dept

Against Monopoly points us to a NY Times article that discusses some of the recent "controversies" over unauthorized sequels/prequels/re-imaginings of certain classic books, including the ban on an unauthorized "sequel" to Catcher in the Rye -- as well as the awesome addition of zombies to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, now known as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But the key point is made towards the end:

Yet the urge to write sequels and prequels is almost always an homage of sorts. We don't want more of books we hate. The books that get re-written and re-imagined are beloved. We don't want them ever to be over. We pay them the great compliment of imagining that they're almost real: that there must be more to the story, and that characters we know so well -- Elizabeth Bennet, for one, or Sherlock Holmes, who has probably inspired more sequels than any other fictional being -- must have more to their lives. In a couple of quite good sequels recently -- "A Slight Trick of the Mind," by Mitch Cullin, and "Final Solution: A Story of Detection," by Michael Chabon -- we even get to watch Holmes grow old and discover love of a sort.

Certain books are more than mere texts -- words on a page or, these days, an electronic reading device. They're part of our mental furniture. And yet it's their familiarity, their well-wornness, that makes them such tempting targets. If zombies were to turn up, for example, in Mrs. Gaskell's "Cranford," it wouldn't be nearly so funny.

And, then when you think about it, if copyright is designed to encourage more creativity, wouldn't these sorts of re-imaginings of already existing fictional worlds fit that criteria exactly?

Filed Under: copyright, creativity, homage, sequels, writing

Opening Up Your Entire Writing Process Isn't Such A Ridiculous Idea

from the not-that-everyone-has-to-do-it... dept

Last week, when we wrote about how author Stephenie Meyer seemed to be overreacting to the leak of her latest manuscript, one of our regular critical commenters (an IP lawyer, who fully supports the IP system) posted a mocking comment pretending to mimic us by saying that maybe she should have opened up her whole writing process and put it up as a wiki. Of course, we never suggested any such thing, we merely pointed out that once the reality of the leak had happened, there were good and bad ways to react to it, and she chose a bad way, that punished her biggest fans.

However, it's worth noting that the more wide open process of creativity isn't necessarily worth mocking either. In fact, Boing Boing points out that Wired Magazine has opened up its storyboarding process for a feature for the next issue, so that people can follow the process of building the story. The mocking commenter-type folks would insist that this would somehow hurt the magazine and the writer by somehow "revealing" the process too soon, but the reality is that it's likely to help build more interest in the story by better connecting with fans who will feel a bigger connection to the story by seeing the whole process, rather than just the finished product.

Of course, this isn't to say that everyone has to embrace such an open process, but that it's not such a ridiculous process, no matter how much it may offend the sensibilities (or billing ability) of an IP attorney.

Filed Under: open, open process, storyboarding, writing
Companies: wired