Publishing does not exist in isolation . . .
Repeat after me: publishing does not exist in isolation.
I say this now because these blogs will rightly get very focused on ebook prices, unlawful copying and DRM, the timing of ebook release with reference to the hardback, the Amazon and Apple sales models, enhanced texts, and half a dozen other really interesting and troublesome issues.
In the course of all that, we’re inevitably going to get into conversations about online copyright enforcement, and it’s worth thinking through what the more draconian measures would look like in the real world. The Digital Economy Bill - now the Digital Economy Act, though not yet in full swing - contains measures which scare the bejeesus out of me – not for what they are, but for what they would inevitably become. We’re already a massively surveilled society, and privacy is one of the grand battles of the coming years. Just as in the 80s insurance companies notoriously hiked medical and life cover if you ever took an HIV test, so personal data of various kinds - and who can access it and for what purposes – will be battlegrounds over the next decade.
The question you have to ask yourself as you look at the enforcement strategies in documents like the DE Bill is: how far into your life you are prepared to allow your government’s gaze? In asking this, you have to realise that just because you’re sitting in your own living room or office does not make you anonymous. The false opacity of bricks and mortar lends a sense of privacy which is completely out of place. In the digital world you are probably walking around naked.
Yes, you. As a jaybird.
Consider some non-digital renderings of digital measures: you’re at a library and the librarian writes down every single book and magazine you look at in case the police or the publisher want to check up on you. Or: your car has a transmitter in it which logs where you go and how fast and reports the information to a database. Or: your son’s best friend, who is eleven, steals a chocolate bar from the local newsagent when you’re giving him a lift home – and as a consequence, you personally are charged with theft.
Laws are subject to a weird mission-creep at the moment. Anti-terror tools have been used to find out who smokes in the workplace, and who doesn’t recycle. The intrusion of ‘national crisis’ level powers into the everyday is already commonplace. Enforcement strategies like those in the DE Bill are not magically resistant to innovative (read “fatuous and inappropriate”) applications. Once in place, surveillance gets used.
So before we start to talk about the need for strong Intellectual Property laws – which, incidentally, I believe in, though not in all areas and not to the detriment of a vibrant public sphere – we have to ask ourselves exactly where the line is drawn. Because honestly: I do not believe any of us wants to trade the natural right to privacy of person and mind for alleged higher sales - and that is absolutely the end result of some of the things being advocated by the content giants.
Take a moment and consider what you want the world to look like when we’re done, so that we don’t accidentally create Orwell’s Britain in our quest to preserve the industry in which we work.
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to what point in your life
to what point in your life who are willing to allow his government to look? In asking this, you have to realize that just because you're sitting in your own living room or office does not make you anonymous. <a href="http://paraorkut9.org/mensagens/otimismo-recados-para-orkut/">Mensagens de Otimismo</a>
Opacity false bricks and
Opacity false bricks and mortar gives a feeling of intimacy that is completely out of place. In the digital world, you are probably walking naked. http://felizaniversario.net/
false bricks
Opacity false bricks and mortar gives a feeling of intimacy that is completely out of place. In the digital world, you are likely to walk naked.<a href="http://paraorkut9.org">recados para orkut</a>
Books can be rightly placed
Books can be rightly placed for sale by the manufacturer of the book...
People can sell their books if they have the copyrights...
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I stand corrected with
I stand corrected with respect to 'fatwa'. I should stick to English words. Mea culpa.
J. King, it is from our natural right to privacy that material and intellectual property arise, the physical boundary that surrounds our persons, houses, and other spaces that we can naturally protect and empower a government to help secure. The material and intellectual works we possess within (through labour, discovery, or exchange) are our private property and those who appropriate it without our permission are thieves.
However, when you sell or give your property to another it becomes their property.
It is only the 18th century privileges of copyright and patent that interfere with this, that reserve certain actions to the holders of the privilege such as manufacturing a device that utilises a registered design or further communicating a covered work to the public.
The argument against such privileges or monopolies is not with me, but with nature, with the nature of information and the innate need of people to freely communicate it, to share and build upon their collective knowledge. The Internet facilitates this need beyond the ability of the courts and those privileged to enforce their privileges against it.
Theresa, the last thing I'm saying is that authors cannot sell their work. Indeed the first thing I'm saying is that authors must sell their work - to their customers, their readers. They can no longer sell their work to manufacturers of copies because the bottom has fallen out of the market for copies. People can make their own copies (whether they have a compunction against infringing a publisher's monopoly or not).
One thing you can be sure of though, is that your readers cannot write your books. There will always be a good market for good writing for as long as people like to read it.
Try to get your arguments straight
Fitch, Aside from the fact that your arguments are pseudo-intellectual, pretentious hogwash, they make absolutely no sense. So you say "the last thing I'm saying is that authors cannot sell their work". But you also say copyright should be abolished. How on earth do you reconcile these two concepts? As soon as you sell something you need to be able to protect yourself against theft. Copyright is the tool do so. Duh.
You are right -- readers cannot write my books. But if they can simply steal my work whenever they feel like it because "copyright is an anachronism on the internet" and should be abolished -- then why should I even bother writing?
Get a grip.
It's like an optical illusion
J. King, perhaps you're missing the difference between intellectual work and printed copies?
Once upon a time each copy cost more to produce than the amortised intellectual work and other setup costs. Today the manufacturing cost of each copy is a tiny fraction even of the amortised costs, and is effectively so negligible that no-one needs to buy copies any more. People simply give them away - to each other - that's how cheap copies are.
Therefore printers can no longer sell copies.
Therefore printers can no longer commission and amortise the intellectual work they'd usually be able to persuade authors to sell to them (for a modest or paltry royalty).
So tomorrow, authors can no longer look to sell their work to manufacturers of copies. If a large publishing corporation can't extract profits from sale of copies even with economies of scale, then the author has no hope of selling copies singly at a profit (though people will still buy them through goodwill/loyalty/convenience). The author certainly can't afford to prosecute copyright against their many readers making and sharing their own copies.
Authors are left with the need to sell their intellectual work to a customer who wants it. Finding such a customer is not difficult. It's not the printer/publisher because they've gone out of business. The only customer left who still wants the author's intellectual work is the dear readers, the people who want the author to write the book so they can read it.
Believe it or not but people are beginning to figure out the difference between intellectual work and copies, and the difference between selling intellectual work and selling copies.
The advantage of selling intellectual work is that you leave it to your customers to produce all the copies they want and price them for whatever the market will bear (not much at all). There's no need for copyright, no need for lawyers, and no need to lose any sleep over the fact that a pirate in China is selling a copy of your work without paying you any royalties.
There's consequently a big difference between the need to prevent people stealing your intellectual work and protecting a reproduction monopoly. If you've sold the intellectual work, there's no need to worry about the monopoly (whether abolished or not).
If you're interested in reading more (whatever you think of my writing), my recent comments <a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100428/1416549224.shtml">here</a> touch on the difference between the author's exclusive right to their writings and the 18th century privilege of a reproduction monopoly intended for the press.
It's like an optical illusion. It's very difficult to describe how to see a different (and more correct) way of seeing something if you've learnt to see it another way for years.
That link
The link should have appeared like this.
Publishing does not exist in isolation . . .
I think you don't understand the situation. Books are products, and the producer of the product has the right to place it for sale, protect the copyright and in other ways prevent theft of its market worth. Many authors write for a living, not to give stuff away, and when the books are published there is a reasonable expectation that the authors' constitutional rights are not abridged either. So when you say that publisher have no right to protect copyrights, or that the authors are not communist enough to suit your taste, then you are free to violate the law on the books however you will, and I will welcome your eventual incarceration. You are abusing the same rights which grant you the freedom to say what you just did, so don't stand there and tell me I can't sell my books.
You've answered your own question
One cannot trade natural, inalienable rights. The state can abrogate or derogate from them as Queen Anne did in 1710 to grant the privilege of copyright. Some even like to pretend that this was a 'social contract', a wholehearted trade by the public of their cultural liberty in exchange for the enrichment of the Stationers' Guild (and the continued leverage of the state against sedition). No doubt people continue to give their unreserved blessing to the draconian enforcements of the Digital Economy Act to promote a thriving digital economy (preserving the publishing corporations' 18th century monopoly and the state's ability to censor the Internet from its citizens).
The only conclusion is that the natural right to copy properly belongs to the people and should never have been suspended in order to grant it as the privilege of a reproduction monopoly for the press.
There are only about three key aspects you need to satisfy when determining whether your act of communication is ethical:
1) It doesn't endanger life, e.g. a fatwa.
2) It doesn't violate privacy, e.g. a stolen diary.
3) It doesn't impair the public's apprehension of the truth, e.g. plagiarism.
This is what Thomas Paine has to say about privileges: "It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect — that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few . . . They . . . consequently are instruments of injustice."
Thus: The Statute of Anne, by annulling the (natural)right to copy (that is inherently in all the inhabitants),in the majority, leaves that right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few (copyright holders). The privilege ofcopyright is consequently an instrument of injustice.
And that is the ethical basis for copyright's abolition - aside from the Internet's rendering of copyright as an ineffective anachronism.
Theft is theft
Mr Fitch,
I am a writer. It takes me two years to finish a book.
I write nine hours a day. It is lonely work, which is taxing on my emotional energy. I do not command huge advances or impressive royalties. But I absolutely depend on this income to support myself.
No, my work does not "belong to the people." It belongs to me. It is the product of my skill, talent and very, very hard work. I will therefore vigorously enforce my copyright because I depend on it for my livelihood. It is not "an instrument of injustice." It is a tool with which I protect myself from people like you.
Anachronism? There is nothing anachronistic about theft. If you copy my work because of some misplaced sense of entitlement, then you, sir -- are a thief. You are stealing what I produced and theft has always been unethical, even in the time of Thomas Paine.
Would you walk into a bookstore and nick a book off the shelf? No? So why do you feel entitled to nick my book off the internet? Because it is easy? Because you can do it in the privacy of your home? Because the internet is a "new" medium? Why is it that people like you think because the medium is different, it makes it acceptable to take what does not belong to you? Whether paper, ink or binary code the principle stays the same. Thou shalt not steal. Trying to dress up a grubby little crime by calling it "cultural liberty" won't wash.
I am a writer. It takes me
I am a writer. It takes me two years to finish a book.
To make a living as a creative person, isn't easy, It is lonely work and taxes your emotional energy. I write nine hours a day. I do not command huge advances or royalties. But I do absolutely depend on my writing income to support myself.
I will therefore vigorously enforce my copyright because it is essential to my livelihood. I certainly do not believe my work to "belong to the people". It belongs to me. It is my intellectual property and the product of my imagination and hours of very hard work. I should have the right to dispose of it the way I see fit. This is not unethical, this is not wielding "an instrument of injustice."
Anachronism? There is nothing anachronistic about theft. And if you start copying my work without my receiving any financial compensation, then you, sir -- are a thief. And taking freely what is not yours, has always been theft, even in the time of Thomas Paine.
Would you walk into a bookstore and nick a book off the shelf? No? So why do you think it is ethical to nick my work off the internet? Just because the medium is different? What kind of logic is that? What kind of skewed ethics?
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