Posts by Keir Leslie
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Georgism? Why not?
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I must say I'm in general agreement with Lyndon's 1:32 -- i.e, it's all pragmatic, and there isn't a Platonic ideal of copyright out there in the Empyrean. The only bit that I feel isn't arbitrary is the moral rights parts, but that's just because I'm a Romantic cult of Genius type.
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Currently your argument is about as useful as "sodomy is illegal, so gay people having sex should be arrested".
Daniel Davies has quite a brilliant take on this -- i.e, that copyright should continue as illegal because then lots of people break the law, and this incubates a healthy distrust of the law. See this and this.
Which is why the state doesn't take a third of your net creative output into a copyright equivalent of the general fund every year.
Er, it does -- I'm pretty sure you pay tax on royalties. Likewise, the state doesn't confiscate land per se, but it does take income arising from land.
Or, to use something still in copyright, a Colin McCahon painting?
Just to make the point about people still being quite at liberty to build on McCahon's work, you might be interested in this artist, Imants Tillers. (Actually, a bit of a bad example, 'cause some of that's cultural stuff about the artist's will being law etc, but eh, I like Tillers.)
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that's just plain stupid prejudice.
Er. Do you know what I mean by the Californian Ideology? I honestly don't see how it is at all prejudiced, or at all stupid, and I certainly don't see how Doctorow's passport makes any odds. The place I first met the term was a rather scholarly MIT Press anthology of writing about sovereignty and cyberspace. ( Crypto anarchy, cyberstates, and pirate utopias. Edited by Peter Ludlow. Published by MIT Press 2001.)
I actually think that it is a very useful analytical tool for working through the implications of the Wired model of the future. It is a completely valid method to use.
And that's what I see lying behind a lot of the free culture stuff -- the idea that the marvellous technological future will deliver unto us, and that we should sweep aside the debris of the past, and a failure to actually come back down and work through, in solid terms, what these changes will consist of at the micro-level. Tofflerianism, if you will.
I mean,
I think he works bloody hard.
?
Of course he works bloody hard; that's the whole point. He works very hard at, and is very good at, publicising his causes and himself. Authors don't want to work bloody hard at self-promotion & publishing; that's what the publisher is for, and it doesn't have much of anything to do with their core competency, writing. Can you imagine Kornbluth -- or MacLeod or Purnelle even -- trying to follow the Doctorow model?
More realistic is the n true fans model, but even that relies on a very active & personable creator.
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If an author aged 20 releases a stunning new book which has a huge impact on society, then lives to 103, that's 83+50 years before anyone can do more than comment on it.
This is nonsense -- look at Modern art and observe people using and reusing ideas without needing to do anything that breaks copyright.
You don't need to be Cory Doctorow
No, to make the Doctorow model work, you need to be Cory Doctorow. And not an inch to the side, either -- John Scalzi couldn't do it, Charles Stross couldn't do it, Ken MacLeod certainly couldn't. I mean, I've no idea about Doctorow's finances etc, but being an SF author is probably the third most significant activity he engages in -- Boing Boing, free culture advocacy, and then SF authoring.
He gets huge amounts of publicity via Boing Bong, he does high-profile copyright work, he networks and he writes books. Most authors can only expect to be very good at writing books; telling them to be like Doctorow is pointless. He took the Californian Ideology and made it work for himself; very few people can do that.
And suddenly I see why I dislike the copyfight people -- it's the good ol' Californian Ideology in full roar.
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Um, you might find that Tor is a better site to look at for Tor's forward movingness on publishing, especially the free download promo ebooks.
You can also look at Making Light (PNH (head editor at Tor) & TNH and various other fannish types), especially their discussions on copyright and fan fiction.
Note that neither PNH nor TNH think that publishing is dead, at all, or that they're `just middlemen' (esp. not TNH, for obvious reasons!) I'm pretty sure there's a post somewhere about what will publishing be like in the 21st century, but I can't be bothered looking.
However, Doctorow's a crap model, because his books tend to be Hugo-nominated bestsellers written by a Locus award winning fan, who's got huge amounts of social capital behind him, who is very well tied into a particular set of SF/FLOSS networks, and has a very interdisciplinary practice.
Most tech-savvy SF authors couldn't be Cory Doctorow, let alone 60-y.o children's authors.
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Jeebus, I need to remember that <i> doesn't work. I apologise, and pretend there's italics, would you.
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<i>artificially maintain the price</i>
What does `artificial' actually mean here? After all, all prices are essentially artificial -- or rather, what society agrees will be the price, via the market or other mechanism.
This is what I really, really dislike about the Lessig/Doctorow axis -- the slipping in of moral/subjective claims as objective fact.
Like, imagine it was ridiculously easy to pinch apples, thus leading to a cratering in the price of apples. Nobody would claim that anti-theft measures were artificially inflating the price of apples. They might claim that draconian anti-apple theft measures were stupid, or out of proportion to the threat, or infringements on civil liberties, or that apple-owners should have to pay the cost of protecting their own property, not the state, or --.
But not that apple prices were being unfairly manipulated, because people know that taking apples is against the rules, whereas people don't feel, on the same level, that copyright infringement is against the rules.
Also, I'm pretty sure you're wrong about the comparative cost to infringe pre-internet -- how much would it actually cost to set up a cheap printing press and churn out bootleg whatever -- see: China.
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Blah.
- It is being used as a tool to protect outdated business models
What does this actually mean? `Outdated' seems to be doing an awful lot of work here.
Sorry.
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<i>- It is being used as a tool to protect outdated business models</i>
What does this actually mean? `Outdated' seems to be doing an awful lot of work here.