Next Techdirt Book Club Book: Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema

from the join-us dept

It's time to announce the latest Techdirt Book Club book: Cory Doctorow's excellent new book Pirate Cinema. Many of you may have picked it up in the recent Humble Ebook Bundle that it was a part of. If not, you can, as always download it from Cory's site. Of course, if you'd like to support Cory, there are plenty options for buying the book as well. Sometime at the end of the month or (more likely, given the holidays) beginning of January, Cory will join us here for a video chat like previous authors. If you haven't read it already, please check it out.

Filed Under: cory doctorow, pirate cinema, techdirt book club

David Byrne: One Of My Albums Sat On The Shelf For A Year Because Label Wanted DRM And I Didn't

from the drm-helping-musicians? dept

David Byrne, who has definitely been one of the more enlightened musicians for quite some time (using Creative Commons all the way back in 2004? Yup) when it comes to understanding both technology and new business models, recently sat down for an interview with Cory Doctorow about how the music business works today (which must have been really fun to watch given the two participants). The whole article is interesting, but one part in particular caught my attention:

As an artist, Byrne said that he has had his own problems with digital rights management. Following the Sony/BMG rootkit scandal—which saw thousands of CDs recalled after the built-in DRM software rendered computers vulnerable to viruses and malware—he asked his label to make sure there was no DRM software on an upcoming release. They were less than obliging.

“I’ve run up against this a couple of times,” Byrne said. “I was in the process of negotiating a record contract at the time, and I went in to the subsidiary of Warner Brothers and said, ‘I’m adding a clause into my contract that you’ll never put DRM on my record.’ And they said ‘Oh, oh, oh…’ The record was done, and the negotiation went on for a year. The record just sat on the shelf. It was very frustrating for me.”

Byrne, of course, has embraced direct to fan efforts a lot lately, and if I remember correctly, was the very first publicly announced musician to use TopSpin's direct-to-fan tools. Some will, of course, argue that he should have just dropped working with major labels, but especially at that time there were distribution advantages to signing a deal. But the fact that they would sit around and argue over DRM -- even right as the whole mess with the rootkit was happening -- shows the kind of thinking that major labels have gone through with DRM.

Filed Under: copyright, cory doctorow, david byrne, drm
Companies: warner music

RiP: A Remix Manifesto... Taken Offline Due To Copyright Claim?

from the remix-this dept

A few years ago, we wrote about the ridiculous hoops filmmaker Brett Gaylor had to jump through in making his film, RiP: A remix manifesto. If you haven't seen it, you should. As you might imagine, it's a movie all about culture and remixing, focusing quite a bit on the artist Girl Talk, but also featuring a number of other folks you probably know, including Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig. Here's the trailer: It's absolutely worth watching. Hell, if you've got an hour and a half to kill, you can watch it right here (via Vimeo): The full video is also available on Hulu and a number of other places -- including off of Brett Gaylor's own website, where you can pay what you want for it.

However, as I just discovered, if you head over to YouTube, you can find the movie in pieces... but apparently part I has been disappeared down the copyright hole thanks to a copyright claim by eOne, an "independent music company." Perhaps this isn't a surprise. Hell, in the very section that is not viewable, the voiceover by Gaylor says, quite clearly:

Whether or not you think this music is original isn't the point. Because the rules of this game don't depend on who made the songs. They depend on who owns the copyright. And according to the people who do, sampling even a single note is grounds for a lawsuit. That means these kids should not be dancing. And you shouldn't be watching, because using these songs in my movie is against the rules too. And the fact that there are people out there calling my favorite artist a criminal, is exactly why I need to make this film.

To be honest, I have no clue how long that clip has been down, but it does strike me as quite ironic. As far as I know neither Gaylor nor Gregg Gillis (who is Girl Talk) has been sued for infringement. And even though the movie (and Girl Talk's music) are widely available all over the place...apparently eOne decided that it couldn't have that on YouTube.

Filed Under: brett gaylor, cory doctorow, fair use, larry lessig, remix

The Ongoing War On Computing; Legacy Players Trying To Control The Uncontrollable

from the must-watch dept

I don't think I've ever had so many people all recommend I watch the same thing as the number of folks who pointed me to Cory Doctorow's brilliant talk at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin last week. You can watch the 55 minute presentation below... or if you're a speed reader, you can check out the fantastic transcript put together by Joshua Wise, which I'll be quoting from: The crux of his argument is pretty straightforward. The idea behind all these attempts to "crack down" on copyright infringement online, with things like DRM, rootkits, three strikes laws, SOPA and more, are really simply all forms of attacks on general purpose computing. That's because computers that can run any program screw up the kind of gatekeeper control some industries are used to, and create a litany of problems for those industries:

By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy, whatever the hell that was. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Now, information technology makes things efficient, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have. You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for one Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button at one penny per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, and another price in another, and so on, and so on; the fantasies of those days were a little like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament book of Numbers, a kind of tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information and the ways we could charge them for it.

[[355.5]] But none of this would be possible unless we could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was well and good to talk about selling someone the 24 hour right to a video, or the right to move music onto an iPod, but not the right to move music from the iPod onto another device, but how the Hell could you do that once you'd given them the file? In order to do that, to make this work, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.

[[395.8]] But as they say on the Internet, "now you have two problems". You also, now, have to stop the user from saving the file while it's in the clear, and you have to stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys, because if the user finds the keys, she'll just decrypt the file and throw away that stupid player app.

[[416.6]] And now you have three problems [audience laughs], because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to render the file in the clear from sharing it with other users, and now you've got four! problems, because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users how to do it too, and now you've got five! problems, because now you have to stop users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users what the secrets were!

From there he goes on to put together a fantastic analogy of how a confusion over analogies, rather than (perhaps) outright cluelessness (or evilness) explains why bad copyright laws keep getting passed:

It's not that regulators don't understand information technology, because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law! M.P.s and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and people, not disciplines and issues. We don't have a Member of Parliament for biochemistry, and we don't have a Senator from the great state of urban planning, and we don't have an M.E.P. from child welfare. (But perhaps we should.) And yet those people who are experts in policy and politics, not technical disciplines, nevertheless, often do manage to pass good rules that make sense, and that's because government relies on heuristics -- rules of thumbs about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue.

[[686.3]] But information technology confounds these heuristics -- it kicks the crap out of them -- in one important way, and this is it. One important test of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose is first, of course, whether it will work, but second of all, whether or not in the course of doing its work, it will have lots of effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress to write, or Parliament to write, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up and said "well, everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery? Can't we do something about this?", the answer would of course be "no". Because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys. And we can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies by changing wheels. Even if there were an /epidemic/ of bank robberies, even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies, no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

[[762.0]] But. If I were to show up in that same body to say that I had absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I said, "I would like you to pass a law that says it's illegal to put a hands-free phone in a car", the regulator might say "Yeah, I'd take your point, we'd do that". And we might disagree about whether or not this is a good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us would say "well, once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they stop being cars". We understand that we can keep cars cars even if we remove features from them. Cars are special purpose, at least in comparison to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one more feature to an already-specialized technology. In fact, there's that heuristic that we can apply here -- special-purpose technologies are complex. And you can remove features from them without doing fundamental disfiguring violence to their underlying utility.

[[816.5]] This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the general-purpose network -- the PC and the Internet. Because if you think of computer software as a feature, that is a computer with spreadsheets running on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that's running World of Warcraft has an MMORPG feature, then this heuristic leads you to think that you could reasonably say, "make me a computer that doesn't run spreadsheets", and that it would be no more of an attack on computing than "make me a car without a hands-free phone" is an attack on cars. And if you think of protocols and sites as features of the network, then saying "fix the Internet so that it doesn't run BitTorrent", or "fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resolves", then it sounds a lot like "change the sound of busy signals", or "take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network", and not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking.

The end result, then, is that any attempt to pass these kinds of laws really results not in building a task-specific computing system or application, but in deliberately crippling a general purpose machine -- and that's kind of crazy for all sorts of reasons. Basically, it effectively means having to put spyware everywhere:

[[1090.5]] Because we don't know how to build the general purpose computer that is capable of running any program we can compile except for some program that we don't like, or that we prohibit by law, or that loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware -- a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user's knowledge, over the objection of the computer's owner. And so it is that digital rights management always converges on malware.

[[1118.9]] There was, of course, this famous incident, a kind of gift to people who have this hypothesis, in which Sony loaded covert rootkit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs, and terminated them, and which also hid the rootkit's existence by causing the kernel to lie about which processes were running, and which files were present on the drive. But it's not the only example; just recently, Nintendo shipped the 3DS, which opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity check to make sure that you haven't altered the old firmware in any way, and if it detects signs of tampering, it bricks itself.

[[1158.8]] Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC bootloader, which restricts your computer so it runs signed operating systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from OSes unless they have covert surveillance operations.

[[1175.5]] And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. So, SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, bans tools like DNSSec because they can be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. And it blocks tools like Tor, because they can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too!

[audience laughs and applauds] Don't applaud me, applaud the MPAA!

But his point is much bigger than copyright. It's that the copyright fight is merely the canary in the coalmine to this kind of attack on general purpose computing in all sorts of other arenas as well. And those fights may be much bigger and more difficult than the copyright fight:

And it doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really... really... important to make sure that computers can't execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch... literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place -- "can't you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?"

[[1576.3]] And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we've spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.

And this is an important fight. It's why each of the moves to fight back against attempts to censor and break computing systems is so important. Because the next round of fights is going to be bigger and more difficult. And while they'll simply never succeed in actually killing off the idea of the all-purpose general computer (you don't put that kind of revelation back in Pandora's box), the amount of collateral damage that can (and almost certainly will) be caused in the interim is significant and worrisome.

His point (and presentation) are fantastic, and kind of a flip side to something that I've discussed in the past. When people ask me why I talk about the music industry so much, I often note that it's the leading indicator for the type of disruption that's going to hit every single industry, even many that believe they're totally immune to this. My hope was that we could extract the good lessons from what's happening in the music industry -- the fact that the industry has grown tremendously, that a massive amount of new content is being produced, and that amazing new business models mean that many more people can make money from music today than ever before -- and look to apply some of those lessons to other industries before they freak out.

But Cory's speech, while perhaps the pessimistic flip side of that coin, highlights the key attack vector where all of these fights against disruption will be fought. They'll be attacks on the idea of general purpose computing. And, if we're hoping to ward off the worst of the worst, we can't just talk about the facts and data and success stories, but also need to be prepared to explain and educate about the nature of a general purpose computer, and the massive (and dangerous) unintended consequences from seeking to hold back general computing power to stop "apps we don't like."

Filed Under: computing, copyright, cory doctorow, regulations, war

Saying That The NY Times Paywall Is Dumb Does Not Mean That We Don't Want The NY Times To Make Money

from the this-is-real? dept

Someone passed along Simon Dumenco's AdAge report in which he purports to debunk the bloggers who are criticizing the NY Times' paywall. Frankly, it may be the dumbest argument I've seen in a long time, in that it makes absolutely no sense. First Dumenco mocks BoingBoing (where Cory Doctorow is not a fan of the NYT paywall) because it didn't have employees kidnapped in Libya like the NY Times did. And... somehow, this is proof that a paywall makes sense. I'm not kidding.

Dumenco's demented argument appears to be "the NY Times does real journalism, the people complaining do not, and thus mocking a paywall is bad." But that completely and totally ignores the very point that people are making about the paywall. We're not mocking the paywall because we don't like news organizations doing real journalism, or we think they don't deserve to make money. We're mocking the paywall because it won't help the NY Times actually make that much money. It's a bad idea not because it'll help the NY Times continue to do serious reporting, but because it won't actually help them do that. That's the point that many of us -- including Doctorow -- were making. But instead of responding to that, Dumenco made up a complete straw man that somehow people against the paywall are against the NY Times doing reporting at all.

Even worse, he compounds the ridiculousness of the argument by then mocking Doctorow's support of business models that include "free" as a part of the business model by noting that Doctorow sells physical books, even as he gives away digital copies of all of his books. It's as if Dumenco's brain can't comprehend rather simple concepts. When people talk about the use of free as a part of a business model, it doesn't mean that everything must be free. For example, I read Dumenco's ridiculously stupid article online for free. Does this mean that Dumenco also doesn't believe that the NY Times should make money? That seems to be the logical conclusion of his illogical argument.

We see this kind of brain-dead logic all too frequently in discussions of business models in the digital age. I tend to think of it as the mental divide-by-zero error, wherein otherwise intelligent people simply stop thinking, the second someone mentions "free" as a part of a business model. Suddenly, they think that this means "absolutely everything must be free and no one should make any money at all." And yet, no one argues that. They're arguing about what things should be free, and what it doesn't make sense to charge for if you actually want to make money. For example, charging for a paywall online is probably not a very good business strategy to make money. Saying that doesn't mean I don't want the NY Times to make money. It means that I think they could make more money by putting in place an alternative business model -- such as by getting people to pay for added scarce value, rather than abundant content.

Filed Under: business models, cory doctorow, free, paywalls, simon demenco
Companies: ny times

Debunking The 'But People Just Want Stuff For Free' Myth

from the debunking-the-myths dept

One of the popular myths we always hear about content-based business models these days is that "but people just want stuff for free." This has been debunked so many times, it's silly, but it's worth debunking again. One of the easiest ways to debunk it is to show examples of people being more than happy to pay, even if the content at the core of what they're paying for is available for free. We saw this, a few years back, when Trent Reznor sold out of his $300 "Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition Package" of the Ghosts I-IV album, even though all of the tracks were available as a free download under a Creative Common license. To some extent, we saw this ourselves, when we offered our own CwF+RtB packages, and the more expensive packages outsold the cheaper ones.

Cory Doctorow now adds to the evidence pile, writing about the results of his recent experiment in self-publishing with tiered offerings, which included 250 specially bound limited edition hardcover versions for $250. In his latest update, he explains how those were so popular he's going back to create similar limited editions for older books as well:

You see, in trying everything--audiobooks, POD, limited editions--I've discovered the thing that captures the public's interest is also the thing that makes the most money is also the thing that has the least logistics: super-premium limited editions. Over and over again, when I describe With a Little Help to people, they fixate on the limited editions. I've had dozens of e-mails from people practically begging to buy the $275 editions I'm doing--and I stand to make $50,000 or more from them.

So that's my next project, I've decided, after With a Little Help is done and I'm back on my feet: limited editions, 100 copies each, of all my previous novels, each one elaborate, personal, beautiful, and amazing. It helps that my new office is underneath the London Hackspace, a co-op through which I have 24/7 access to a 3D printer and a laser cutter/etcher.

For my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves a Town (a fantasy that features a trio of brothers who nest like Russian dolls), I'm thinking I will do a full-size edition, bind it, then laser cut a 66% rectangle out of the middle of the pages; print and bind a 2/3 size miniature, slip it into the void; and then cut another void out of it, nestling a tiny quarter-sized hardcover in the middle. I'll charge whatever it costs me to print plus $150, and print and bind them on demand, in tens, and sell as many as I can up to 100. I also figure I'll hold back five copies from each limited, and in a decade or so, I can have custom wooden boxes made for five sets, and auction them off for whatever the market will bear.

But people just want stuff for free, right? Especially the folks who follow the likes of Cory Doctorow... Except, of course, that's simply not true.

Filed Under: business models, cory doctorow, free, limited editions

How Do You Measure The 'Benefits' Of Copyright?

from the evidence-based dept

One of the major problems we have with the way copyright law today is developed is how much of it is faith-based -- with supporters insisting that more stringent copyright law is obviously "better," without presenting any evidence to support that. The history of copyright law is filled with examples of this sort of argumentation in favor of stronger copyrights. Thomas Macauley famously (and quite eloquently) argued against such things in the UK House of Commons 160 years ago, and his words still stand today. Here are just some brief excerpts, though the whole thing is worth reading:

I believe, Sir, that I may safely take it for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad. And I may with equal safety challenge my honorable friend to find out any distinction between copyright and other privileges of the same kind; any reason why a monopoly of books should produce an effect directly the reverse of that which was produced by the East India Companys monopoly of tea, or by Lord Essexs monopoly of sweet wines. Thus, then, stands the case. It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good....

... consider this; the evil effects of the monopoly are proportioned to the length of its duration. But the good effects for the sake of which we bear with the evil effects are by no means proportioned to the length of its duration. A monopoly of sixty years produces twice as much evil as a monopoly of thirty years, and thrice as much evil as a monopoly of twenty years. But it is by no means the fact that a posthumous monopoly of sixty years gives to an author thrice as much pleasure and thrice as strong a motive as a posthumous monopoly of twenty years. On the contrary, the difference is so small as to be hardly perceptible. We all know how faintly we are affected by the prospect of very distant advantages, even when they are advantages which we may reasonably hope that we shall ourselves enjoy. But an advantage that is to be enjoyed more than half a century after we are dead, by somebody, we know not by whom, perhaps by somebody unborn, by somebody utterly unconnected with us, is really no motive at all to action...

The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures. I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty, I willingly submit even to this severe and burdensome tax. Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown that by so doing I should proportionally increase the bounty. My complaint is that my honorable and learned friend doubles, triples, quadruples, the tax and makes scarcely and perceptible addition to the bounty.

But, that, of course leads to the question of just what is the benefit that copyright provides. If you talk to many of today's copyright system supporters, they will claim the benefit (or even the entire purpose) of copyright, is to provide remuneration to creators. That, of course, ignores the basic history of copyright law, but even if we assume this is true, then copyright does not seem to serve that purpose. After all, very few content creators get remuneration for their creations, and among those who do, fewer still get enough remuneration to make a living.

In discussing how copyright law might be rethought, Cory Doctorow does a nice job pointing out the extremes which disprove the common claims of copyright. After all, he notes, if copyright is about helping content creators make a living, then the "best" solution would be to simply award content creators a living wage. So arguing that copyright is designed to serve that purpose is misleading. Similarly, in measuring the overall impact of copyright, you can't simply add up the aggregate amount made from copyright -- as some copyright system defenders love to do with the oft-cited $1.52 trillion dollar number. Doctorow again disproves that as the proper measuring stick, by again taking it to the extreme: if only one person were to make all that money thanks to copyright, no one would think that was a good program.

So, how do you judge the benefits of copyright? Cory's suggestion is the following:

In my world, copyright's purpose is to encourage the widest participation in culture that we can manage -- that is, it should be a system that encourages the most diverse set of creators, creating the most diverse set of works, to reach the most diverse audiences as is practical.

While this sounds nice, I still don't believe this is the proper way to measure copyright, either. After all, one could easily take this to the same extreme and note that if we get the widest participation but, in doing so, it creates disincentives for great artists to create their works, is that the best system? I'm not convinced that's the case either. This is also why I think Cory's piece, which starts out so promising, goes somewhat askew at the end, in proposing a blanket music tax for file sharing -- an idea that I believe is actually quite a bad one due to serious unintended consequences.

So I would posit that the way you judge the "benefit" of copyright is the way economists judge such things: you look at the aggregate marginal benefit across all stake holders. That is, what is the marginal benefit to everyone in society from a specific change to copyright. Does it increase output but decrease consumption? Thus, you should be looking at not just if it makes artists better off, but by how much, and whether or not it makes others better off and by how much. This may not be easy to measure, but it is how to best think about the impact of changes in copyright law. Look at both the increases and decreases in "benefits" to everyone in the ecosystem and see which maximizes the overall societal benefit.

This is also why I disagree with Cory's concept of "balance" -- a concept I have argued against in the past. If you are striving for "balance," you are arguing for what everyone must give up. Yet, if you are looking for the greatest marginal benefit, you are seeking the result where you are maximizing overall social benefit -- meaning, you are increasing opportunities for content creators to create and to make money, while at the same time increasing the social benefit that others can get out of their art by consuming it, by sharing the experience associated with it, by building on it, etc.

The goal should not be to "balance" what needs to be taken away or to just focus on one side of the equation (artists or "participants"), but to seek out what policies would actually maximize the marginal benefit to all.

Filed Under: benefits, copyright, cory doctorow, economics, licensing

Cory Doctorow Explains Why 'Free' Isn't His Concern; But Restrictions On Individual Rights Are

from the pay-attention dept

We had already covered Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall's absolutely ridiculous and logically tortured attack on people who recognize the value of "free," by mocking them for charging people to speak at their events. We already explained how misguided such an argument is, but one of the people she specifically called out, Cory Doctorow, had responded in a detailed manner in the comments, pointing out that Lindvall's claims about his own speaking fees were flat-out wrong, and the vast majority of his speaking is for free. He's now written a full response to Lindvall that is absolutely worth reading. You can skip over the stuff at the beginning about his "speaking" fees, and get down to the meat of the topic in the second half of the article.

Doctorow points out the simple fact that he doesn't tell people they should give away their works for free. He just points out that it's worked quite well for him, and he notes that if you understand the market, it makes a lot of sense. However, if you can figure out a way to do it differently, then go ahead. He just doesn't think it will work. But, what others do concerning what they charge isn't really a concern to him. Then he gets to what he really focuses on, related to this topic:

But here's what I do care about. I care if your plan involves using "digital rights management" technologies that prohibit people from opening up and improving their own property; if your plan requires that online services censor their user submissions; if your plan involves disconnecting whole families from the internet because they are accused of infringement; if your plan involves bulk surveillance of the internet to catch infringers, if your plan requires extraordinarily complex legislation to be shoved through parliament without democratic debate; if your plan prohibits me from keeping online videos of my personal life private because you won't be able to catch infringers if you can't spy on every video.

From there, he details the various plans in various countries to kick people off the internet and to censor the internet, all in some misguided attempt to hold back what technology allows, so that a few people can try to pretend that they can avoid economics. And that, reasonably, bothers him.

It's a fantastic response (not that you would have expected much less), though I doubt that will stop anyone who already wants to deny reality from simply claiming that Cory and others like him are telling everyone they "should" give away their works for free.

Filed Under: civil rights, cory doctorow, free, rights

Are Non-Commercial Creative Commons Licenses A Bad Idea? Nina Paley & Cory Doctorow Debate...

from the clash-of-the-titans dept

Venerable author Cory Doctorow and I engaged in a friendly email debate this Summer, with the intention of sharing it to illuminate some issues confronting Free Culture and Creative Commons licenses. It's quite long, but hits on many topics of interest to Techdirt readers.

Read Paley & Doctorow argue over Non-Commercial licenses

Cory releases his books under -NC ("Non-Commercial") licenses. The -NC restriction is Creative Commons' most popular, but has a lot of problems, including incompatibility with Free licenses. As an alternative, I recommend the Creator Endorsed Mark used with a copyleft (such as Share-Alike) license. The sparks fly from there! (Actually it's all very civil, but if I say sparks fly maybe more people will read it.)

I'm curious to read how the Techdirt community weighs on on these issues, so please comment.

Filed Under: cory doctorow, creative commons, nina paley, noncommercial
Companies: creative commons