Truth In Erroring: IETF Proposal Includes New 451 Censorship Error Code

from the it'll-probably-be-nixed-by-the-Bradbury-estate dept

As nations around the world work to chip away at the liberated internet for such compelling reasons as "um, children!", or "um, cyberwar!", or even "um, piracy!", all while lambasting other countries for censorship mind you, the general population may still be shrugging their shoulders in confusion. One reason for that may be a lack of an in-your-face approach to educating people as to what all this proposed policy may mean in their lives, which have only become more reliant on a functioning internet.

That's where internet developer advocate Tim Bray comes in. Business Week has the story of Bray's proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force to add a new error code for websites: the 451 Censorship Code. You can read Bray's formal proposal here, but the short version is that any site that is unreachable due to legal reasons (normally because of ISP blocking, but not always), would return a 451 error along with a short explanation as to why the connection was blocked. So, for instance, if an ISP decided to block The Pirate Bay, you would get the 451 error along with an explanation that copyright fights were preventing the traffic (or something like that). The 451 code, of course, is an homage to Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," a book that most people think is about censorship, but Bradbury insists is just about how everything you love sucks, including the internet.

Many of you may have seen this circulated in June, but Bray is now saying that it will go before the IETF beginning this weekend:

"I've been told by the chair of the IETF HTTP Working Group that he'll give the proposal some agenda time at the next IETF meeting," Bray told CNNMoney by email. "It's not a big proposal; shouldn't take long."

When asked why he felt compelled to put this proposal together, Bray pointed to Terrance Eden (a UK blogger) who had put a call out for a censorship code after having a connection to The Pirate Bay blocked and receiving a common 403 error:

"Eden's Internet provider had been ordered to block out the site, but Eden wasn't happy with the 403 error response it generated.

'As far as I am concerned, this response is factually incorrect,' Eden wrote on his blog."

That's because a 403 error is what you get when the server you're connecting to won't let you in. But that isn't what's happening in Eden's case. Eden's ISP is blocking the connection. That's a distinction that should matter to the consumer, who ought to be properly informed of who is keeping them from going where they want on the internet. 

And that's Bray's point. It's not that traffic should never be blocked, but the user should know what's actually going on. As he says himself:

"I think most people agree that censorship is sometimes justified, but it's just common sense that when it happens, it should happen out in the open." 

Filed Under: 451, censorship, error codes, free speech, ray bradbury, tim bray

Ray Bradbury Discovers The Internet Is Real After All; Publishers Force Him To Offer Ridiculously Overpriced Ebooks

from the does-it-burn? dept

It's pretty firmly established that acclaimed author Ray Bradbury is a bit of a technological curmudgeon (understatement alert). Way back in 2001 we wrote about an interview where he bitched about the internet, and how it was really a big scam perpetrated by the computer companies. Video games? Those are "male ego crap." In 2009, he expanded on his complaints, talking about how "the internet is a big distraction" and "it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere." Not surprisingly, he has absolutely and steadfastly refused to allow his classic work Fahrenheit 451 to be published as an ebook... until now.

A bunch of press reports are noting that Bradbury has finally joined the latest millennium by allowing an ebook of Fahrenheit 451... but the details suggest that this wasn't a choice he made willingly. Basically, his contracts were up, and no publisher would take him on without ebooks:

Bradbury's agent, Michael Congdon, said Tuesday that rights for Bradbury's book were expiring and that the growing digital market, estimated at 20 percent or higher of overall sales, made a deal for e-books inevitable....

"We explained the situation to him (Bradbury) that a new contract wouldn't be possible without e-book rights," said Congdon, who added that six publishers had been interested. "He understood and gave us the right to go ahead."

Of course, if Bradbury is worried that people are going to leave behind his precious paper (more on that in a minute), perhaps his publishers are saving him... by pricing the ebook at a ridiculous $9.99. This is for a book that you can buy in a paper copy used for a penny and new for $2.84. And the publisher thinks $9.99 for a version that doesn't require materials, packaging or shipping should be many times the cost? Of course, some people like to point out that Bradbury's hatred of ebooks is kind of ironic, given that they believe Fahrenheit 451 is about censorship and book burning. But it's not. As we've noted in the past, Bradbury has long maintained that the book had nothing whatsoever to do with censorship, but was about the dangers of new media, specifically television, to entertain people in a way that made them no longer care about physical books. To Bradbury, it seems, the physical book is everything.

Either way, it appears that Bradbury, despite his visionary nature, simply can't get past the idea of a flashy screen, and still fails to realize that his fears were totally unfounded, and digital technologies mean that more people read today than in the past. But, who knows how many will read his ebooks at that ridiculous price.

Filed Under: ebooks, fahrenheit 451, internet, ray bradbury

Tomorrow Is National Book Burning Day; Thank Your Friendly Entertainment Industry Lobbyists

from the burn-baby-burn dept

January 1st of each year should be National Public Domain Day, when many different creative works enter the public domain, where they can be made useful. In years past, it was a regular occurrence as tons of creative works went into the public domain each year. Often this was by choice on the part of the copyright holder. That's because copyright used to have a renewal requirement, and the vast majority of copyright holders found little reason to renew their copyright. In 1958-59, only 7% of book copyright holders chose to renew their copyrights, meaning that 93% of books that could have been covered by copyright were allowed to enter the public domain. The small number that did have their copyrights renewed were (not surprisingly) the books that were still huge commercial successes, whose authors and publishers wished to retain their monopoly rights.

But a change happened in 1976 in the US, with the adoption of a new Copyright Act that not only took away the renewal setup, but also made very lengthy copyrights automatic on works. Add to that continued copyright extension at the urging of the entertainment industry lobbyists, and we haven't had an actual Public Domain Day in ages -- and many of us may never see another one in our lifetimes. Considering the incredible value that the public domain has on our culture, this is a huge culture killer.

James Boyle is noting that, assuming he would have renewed his copyright, tomorrow is the day that Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 would have gone into the public domain under the law as it was before 1976. But now it won't be. Instead of the "book burning" found in that book, we've created a different kind of book burning. Thanks to lawyers, lobbyists and politicians, we've locked up a massive number of works that should be available for all, and the vast majority of which are available for none.

Unlike Fahrenheit 451, the vast majority of the culture swept into this 20th century black hole, was not commercially available and, in most cases, the authors are unknown. The works are locked up -- with no benefit to anyone -- and no one has the key that would unlock them. We have cut ourselves off from our own culture, left it to molder -- and in the case of nitrate film, literally disintegrate -- with no benefit to anyone. The works may not be physically destroyed -- although many of them are; disappearing, disintegrating, or simply getting lost in the vastly long period of copyright to which we have relegated them. But for the vast majority of works and the vast majority of citizens who do not have access to one of our great libraries, they are gone as thoroughly as if we had piled up the culture of the 20th century and simply set fire to it; and all this right at the moment when we could have used the Internet vastly to expand the scope of cultural access. Bradbury's firemen at least set fire to their own culture out of deep ideological commitment, vile though it may have been. We have set fire to our cultural record for no reason; even if we had wanted retrospectively to enrich the tiny number of beneficiaries whose work keeps commercial value beyond 56 years, we could have done so without these effects. The ironies are almost too painful to contemplate.

And, of course, it's not just Bradbury's book that is still locked up. Among the many things that would have/should have gone into the public domain tomorrow are Marilyn Monroe's Playboy cover, JD Salinger's Nine Stories and Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. But, again, it's not these works that we should really be mourning. It's the other works that no one really has access to any more. What a shame.

Filed Under: copyright, public domain, ray bradbury

Ray Bradbury Still Hates The Internet

from the well,-he's-way-over-30 dept

Karl points us to an interview with Ray Bradbury where he rails against the internet:

"The Internet is a big distraction," Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

"Yahoo called me eight weeks ago," he said, voice rising. "They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? 'To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.'

"It's distracting," he continued. "It's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere."

Tell us what you really think, Ray. Though, actually, this isn't a surprise. Way back in 2001, we wrote about another interview with him, where he called the internet a "scam" perpetrated by computer companies. If all this seems strange for the guy who wrote Farenheit 451 about the evils of book burning and the wonders of being able to access all kinds of information... it turns out that's because we all (including his biographer) misunderstood Farenheit 451. In an interview a couple years ago, Bradbury explained that the book wasn't about censorship at all. It was really about the evils of technology such as television:

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

So it turns out he just loves books. That's it. Not the ability to get more content or be able to read more. Books. Physical books. None of this "air" stuff and those annoying "factoids." Perhaps, as he gets close to being 90 years old, he's simply proving the point that fellow science fiction author Douglas Adams once wrote:

1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

I would imagine that point 3 gets worse over time... even if you're an acclaimed science fiction writer.

Filed Under: ray bradbury