On November 13, Cory Doctorow spoke to a crowd of about a hundred librarians, educators, publishers, authors, and students on “How to Destroy the Book,” as part of the National Reading Summit held at the ROM.
Doctorow has a pretty impressive bio: co-editor of Boing Boing, former Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, visiting Senior Lecturer at Open University, and New York Times bestselling author. He has been called (okay, admittedly by Entertainment Weekly) “The William Gibson of his generation.”
What I don’t like about such bios is how they leave you without much sense for how the accolades were earned in the first place. Not to give the impression that it’s his best work, but for evidence of Doctorow’s refreshing attitude, look no further than his email signature. Whereas a typical email from Maclean’s might conclude:
This e-mail (and attachment(s)) is confidential, proprietary, may be subject to copyright and legal privilege and no related rights are waived. If you are not the intended recipient or its agent, any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail or any of its content is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. All messages may be monitored as permitted by applicable law...
and so on for another couple of lines, and then in French, Cory Doctorow’s emails end thusly:
READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
For this alone the man deserves a medal.
In October, Doctorow’s latest, Makers, hit real, physical bookshelves to generally happy thoughts from Publishers Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, and The Globe and Mail. Makers is also available as a free download, as are all of Doctorow’s books, from his website.
Here is Part One to his talk.
An elegy for the book
I’d like to start my talk today with an elegy for the book. The first part of the elegy is called “Pirates.”
Pirates
There is a group of powerful anti-copyright activists out there who are trying to destroy the book. These pirates would destroy copyright, and they have no respect for our property. They dress up their thievery in high-minded rhetoric about how they are the true defenders and inheritors of creativity, and they have sold this claim around the world to regulators and lawmakers alike. There are members of Parliament and Congress-people who are unduly influenced by them. They say they’re only trying to preserve the way it’s always been. They claim that their radical agenda is somehow conservative. But what they really see is a future in which the electronic culture market grows by leaps and bounds and they get to be at the centre of it. They claim that this is about ethics, but anyone who thinks about it for a minute can see that it’s about profit.
Part two of this elegy is called “The people of the book.”
The people of the book
We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.
Copyright recognizes this. It says that when you buy a book, you own the book. It’s yours to give away, yours to keep, yours to license or to borrow, to inherit or to be included in your safe for your children. For centuries, copyright has acknowledged that sacred connection between readers and their books. We think of copyright as something that regulates things within a bunch of buckets—DVDs, video games, records—but books are more than all of these things. Books are older than copyright. Books are older than publishing. Books are older than printing!
The anti-copyright activists have no respect for our copyright and our books. They say that when you buy an ebook or an audiobook that’s delivered digitally, you are demoted from an owner to a licensor. From a reader to a mere user. These thieves deliver our digital books and our audiobooks wrapped in license agreements and technologies that might as well be designed to destroy the emotional connection that readers have with their books.
These licenses of course can run up to thousands of words. If you have an iPhone and buy an audiobook from Audible using the iTunes store with it, you agree to an estimated 26,000 words of license agreement. The Canadian Copyright Act itself only runs to 33,000 words. The premise of these licenses is forget copyright. Forget the law in the public realm that gave you the rights to your books. From now on, we write the law.
These licenses are of course built with unenforceable clauses. You can tell, because they’re liberally peppered with language like “If any part of this license is found to be unenforceable, the rest of it will remain in effect.” This is of course the lawyers’ way of saying, “We didn’t limit this to the things we thought a judge would smile upon. We put everything in here. It’s a kind of possible wish list and the only way that you’ll find out which parts are real and which parts are imaginary is to sue us over every point.”
It’s basically a way of saying that copyright is nonsense, and that readers should stop paying attention to it, and only agree to these crazy, abusive licenses.
And on top of those licenses, they add digital rights management technology. Digital rights management technology, of course, has never stopped the book from escaping onto the Internet. To those publishers here today who believe that you can buy DRM that will stop your books from appearing on the Internet without restriction, I say to you, “Behold, the typist.”
So if DRM doesn’t stop people from copying books, what does it do? What it does is makes it illegal for someone to create a reader that can display a book or play an audiobook. Imagine if a giant book chain did a deal with Ikea so that Ikea would be the exclusive supplier of reading chairs and shelves and light bulbs for its books, and actually got a law passed that made it illegal to sell chairs and bookcases and light bulbs that were compatible with their books. This would not be in the interests of readers nor of publishers nor of writers. It would very much be in the interest of Ikea, because they would then have a lock in over our readers that would allow them to exercise undo power in the marketplace.
We’ve heard publishers and writers and other people involved in various creative industries bemoaning for years the undue influence exerted by chains like Wal-Mart, because they control a critical distribution channel. But imagine if that control continued beyond the grave, after the sale, so that any after-market use of your collection required you have an ongoing relationship with a mere retailer or distributor. Imagine how bad that would be for publishing.
So part three of this elegy is called “Saving the book.”
Saving the book
After years of writing and talking and thinking about books, I’ve come to a simple but important realization: I love books. Not just reading them or owning them—I have a deeply sentimental attachment to the very idea of the book.
And it’s not just me. It’s social. It’s across our entire society. If you’re making a short film, and you want to illustrate a society that’s falling into tyranny, you can just cut away to a scene of a pile of books burning, and everyone will know exactly what you meant. If you want to indicate that a character in a book is very sympathetic, and you mention how much she loves reading and going to the library, then your readers will immediately show sympathy for her. Books have this penumbra of virtues, they ooze virtue, and it’s long beyond anything rational or reasonable, because all of you who are people of the book know that there are many books that are absolutely unworthy of that virtue, and yet—and yet—when I worked in a bookstore and had to strip paperbacks to send them back, it was painful to tear the covers off of books. I can barely bring myself to recycle the phone book every year.
And yes, it’s a wonderful place to be for publishing, because they get a free ride on this sentimental attachment that people have to books. People go on buying books because they love the idea of books. Publishers are going out today and paying high-priced marketing consultants to help them understand “the electronic experience” of a digital book. The experience of how a book could be consumed.
Which brings me to the second half of that important realization: the most important part of the experience of a book is knowing that it can be owned. That it can be inherited by your children, that it can come from your parents. That libraries can archive it, they can lend it, that patrons can borrow it. That the magazines that you subscribe to can remain in a mouldering pile of National Geographics in someone’s attic so you can discover it on a rainy day—and that they don’t disappear the minute you stop subscribing to it. It’s a very odd kind of subscription that takes your magazines away when you’re done [as is the case with most institutional subscriptions with Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of medical and scientific journals].
Having your books there like an old friend, following you from house to house for all the days and long nights of your life: this is the invaluable asset that is in publishing’s hands today. But for some reason publishing has set out to convince readers that they have no business reading their books as property—that they shouldn’t get attached to them. The worst part of this is that they may in fact succeed.
Part four is called “Respect copyright.”
Respect copyright
People keep showing me ebook readers that try to recreate the book experience with cute animations showing the turning of pages. But if you want to recreate the important part of the book experience, the part that keeps people buying books for their whole lives, filling their homes with treasured friends that they would not part with for love nor money, then we need to restore and safeguard ownership of books. When I buy a book, it’s mine. There’s no mechanism, not even in the face of a court order, whereby a retailer can take a book away from me, and yet Amazon—there’s the most extraordinary thing that they had to do in the United States—you’ve heard of course that someone put a copy of Orwell’s 1984 in the Kindle Store, and it wasn’t licensed for distribution in the U.S.—of course, Orwell is in the public domain outside the U.S., in copyright in the U.S.—and Amazon responded to this intelligence by revoking the book 1984 from its customers’ ebook readers. After they’d bought it, they woke up one morning to discover their book had gone. But Amazon was actually pretty good. After thinking about it for a day, and confronting the media storm, they decided to restore the books—they gave them back to the people, and they made a promise: “We will never ever ever ever ever give your books away again. Unless we have to.”
Now I worked as a bookseller for a number of years in this city, and I never had to make that promise to any of my customers when they bought books. Designing a book reader so that books can be removed from it without the reader’s knowledge or consent violates Chekhov’s first law of narrative: any gun on the mantelpiece in Act One is bound to go off by Act Three.
When I buy an audiobook on CD, it’s mine. The license agreement, such as it is, is “don’t violate copyright law,” and I can rip that CD to mp3, I can load it to my iPod or any number of devises—it’s mine; I can give it away, I can sell it; it’s mine. But when you buy an audiobook through Audible, which now controls 90 per cent of the [downloadable] audiobook market, you get a license agreement, not a property interest. The things that you can do with it are limited by DRM; the players you can play it on are limited by the license agreements with Audible. Audible doesn’t do this because the publishers ask them to. Audible and iTunes, because Audible is the sole supplier to iTunes, do this because it’s in their own interest.
To explain to you how I know this: my last book was a Random House audiobook. We went to Audible and said, “Will you do this book in your store without DRM,” and they said, “No.” When we asked them with this one, Makers, which just came out this week—again, a Random House audiobook—Random House is of course the largest publisher in the world, a major customer—we went to Audible and said “Will you do this?” And Audible said, “Why, yes, we will. But iTunes won’t carry it.”
Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.
So that’s the end of the elegy.
Comments
I need to read this a few times, coordinates galore!
Dec 15, 2009 at 05:50 PM
This is one of the best articles I have ever read regarding reading, copyright of books, and where things are going and where they need to go so we don't lose what books really are.
Thank you so much Cory for laying it it so clearly!
BTW: I just bought Little Brother hardcover. I already read it in eBook, but wanted a copy of it for my personal library! I will also be getting a hardcover copy of Makers despite the fact that I am reading it in ebook! :-)
Dec 16, 2009 at 10:17 AM
Beautiful and powerful! Bravo, Cory. Gonna keep some of those arrows in my quiver too...
Dec 16, 2009 at 12:30 PM
Another challenge, perhaps to be discussed in a future post, is the fact that the people of the book are a dying breed. Thoughtful discourse has given way to sass in 140 characters, and the commodification of everything (and the marketing implications that follow).
:(
Dec 17, 2009 at 01:08 PM
Well spoken, as always, Cory. Thanks.
Dec 18, 2009 at 09:48 AM
I found this article like the proverbial parson's egg: good in parts.
I ended up confused, though.
Under copyright, ebooks are not like physical books. The author has the absolute right to control reproduction and distribution.
So, yes, you can download your legal purchase of a book and put it on your CD for your personal enjoyment, and you may make a spare as a back up, but you cannot burn that ebook onto 10 CDs and sell 9 of them on EBay.
You may give away your one CD, but if you do, you must not create other CDs.
Dec 18, 2009 at 02:07 PM
Excellent! You took it that one step further and clarified license vs. property. Kudos.
Dec 18, 2009 at 03:30 PM
I am a book person who grew up with book people parents. I still own some of my childhood books. I still own my children's books which will be passed down to my grandkids.
I understand the need to know that when I buy a book, I'll be able to go back to it ten years from now, whether it's a print book or ebook. However, I also hung onto LPs and cassettes, and even the infamous eight-tracks, until I finally realized I wasn't going to one day buy the required equipment when my original equipment wore out. This is a chance we take when we buy ebooks - the format may become obsolete.
I agree that Amazon goofed big-time when they took back the book in question. If I wanted a time limit on how quickly I have to read my books, I'd go to the library. I also understand the frustration with the hoops we have to jump through to open our books on our various gadgets. I do hope someone comes up with a universal method like they did with videos and other visual media. We need our books to be available to everyone.
However, as an ebook author, I take issue with people who complain they can't share the ebooks, or are limited in their ability to do so. In an ideal world, you could take your one copy of an ebook and pass it to a friend who might pass it on, like you did with hard copies. But who actually deletes their original ebook? If they share with six friends, who share with six friends, it suddenly becomes an issue of "Why did I want to be a writer, again?"
If you want the ability to be able to share your books, perhaps you need to go after the pirates who are handing ebook collections out on the virtual street corners. Educate users to see that most of us epublished authors didn't get a $50,000.00 advance. We only get paid for copies sold through legitimate sources.
The rules have changed because of abuse by a few. Work toward finding a mutual meeting ground, if you want to make things more user friendly. Somehow in the battle over copyright, the blame and anger has gotten aimed at the wrong source. Blame the bad guys, and help do something to fix the problem.
Dec 18, 2009 at 03:34 PM
I recently blogged about why I no longer buy e-books (linked as my website). I bought quite a few e-books, and had an e-book reader, but losing it meant that I can no longer read some books without breaking the DRM, and I'm severely limited in what reader I can buy, because of format support. Cory Doctorow says it very well. I might have gotten used to not being able to share, but not being able to read books I bought is something I can't accept.
Dec 29, 2009 at 12:54 PM
Okay, seems like that didn't link. It's here: http://my.opera.com/ET3D/blog/2009/12/15/farewell-farewell-e-book-readers-from-hell
Dec 29, 2009 at 12:54 PM
It's possible to be a lover of books without being a matriculator of books. Please visit and support your local library to experience the connection with an author, and the warmth and pleasure of an honest to goodness page turning experience you desire. The public library needs your support!
Dec 29, 2009 at 04:14 PM
It is an important topic, and there are some interesting thoughts here, but the essay oversimplifies many complex issues, inadvertently promotes serious misconceptions about copyright, and, to be honest, most of it has been said elsewhere, and better.
The author says: "Copyright [...] says that when you buy a book, you own the book. [NO IT DOESN'T, NOT IN THE US - YOU OWN IT IF YOU WROTE IT] It’s yours to give away, yours to keep, yours to license or to borrow, to inherit or to be included in your safe for your children." Not true. You own the physical copy of the book. That's it. Contrary to what the article says, it's not "yours to license" [in the legal sense of the word, unless lending is meant, and even so, the activity would be limited in scope - you couldn't lend it for money, for example, or read it to a public of 500 people, and charge admission]. You can't [legally] make 20 copies and sell them, or even give away as gifts to friends. The problem here is that the author shifts between two very different meanings of the word "book": once he treats the book as a physical object [which you buy and yes, you own this single, physical manifestation of it], but then he also says "book" when he really means the content, not the object [i.e., the ideas you can encode in different formats and media, and then circulate], and THIS "book" you do not own when you buy [a physical object called] a book.
Articles like this do all of us a disservice, by muddying up the waters when they should be clarifying things. For good, clear, carefully thought out, and legally accurate take on these, and related issues, check out any of Lawrence Lessig's books (some are free of charge for personal use, and available online as PDFs under CC licenses), essays, or podcasts. Kudos to Aileen Fish for an articulate post in the comments above.
Dec 30, 2009 at 11:35 AM
Yes, why did you? Was it to roll in the big Tom Clancy pile of dough, or to have people read your ideas?
Surely it can be both, but claims that insinuate property rights over zero-cost copyable items are ridiculous.
Dec 31, 2009 at 08:44 AM
There is no middle ground anymore. The pro copy restrictions fanatics have destroyed it. We are the people of culture, which is encapsulated in our pictures, songs and words.
Culture will find a way to survive, but we must realize that since the culture fascists made copyright their vehicle, copyright is doomed as a broken contract. It has become a hollow shell that is respected on no side of the fence. Copyright and it's related laws have become the means by which monopolization and cultural oppression is perpetuated, and as such it does more harm then good.
We are gridlocked in a stale system of laws and governing that can't evolve to adapt. This system will fail, regardless of copyright abolishment or not. It's my hope that out of the ashes of this imminent collapse, our culture can raise again.
Dec 31, 2009 at 10:12 AM
I love the "BOGUS AGREEMENTS" legal mumbo jumbo so much that I've added it as a signature to my emails!!
Dec 31, 2009 at 10:24 AM
What is the copyright license for this speech? Can I reproduce it in emails to my local librarians? Much of Cory's work is CC-NC-BY, so is it the same with his speech? Please provide these details.
Dec 31, 2009 at 12:42 PM
Quality writing by quality authors will always spread via both traditional and non-traditional means. If it's good enough it will end up in printed form. Otherwise, like web commentary, blogs, emails, instant messages, and texting...they may or may not be collected and redistributed in all the usual digital methods. We agree with Cory that obscurity is an author's biggest hurdle. Take Ron Paul's grass-roots campaign for example. Whereas the official campaign reported around forty million(IIRC) in official contributions, the grass-roots side of the campaign stretched into the hundreds of millions. All that publicity did wonders for sales of his books and visits to the websites featuring him or following and extending his works and philosophy. Tom Baugh is another author who is gaining an army of grass-roots warriors spreading word of his books in an incredible wild-fire.
Sincerely, John and Dagny Galt Atlas Shrugged, Owners Manual For The Universe!(tm)
.
Dec 31, 2009 at 04:55 PM
"We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children."
Good luck with that. In the early 1900s the papermakers switched from hemp and linen to wood pulp and an acid-based process. All those books--nearly all the books in nearly all the libraries--are slowly crumbling to dust.
Yet another reason to thank the corporations.
Dec 31, 2009 at 05:40 PM
While I appreciate this piece from a rhetorical point of view it doesn't really seriouslly address the nature and implications of digitization for "ownership." Furthermore it confuses the issues of ownership vs. licensing and restrictive DRM schemes that are illegal to break. Congress made doing certain things with your property illegal in the DMCA, you might still legally own it but just can legally use it certain ways.
Now maybe that's just terminology. Doctorow isn't using ownership as a technical legal term but in reference to our intuitive notion. However, this just begs the question of what it means to own digital content. I sure as hell don't know. I mean if congress sets a limit on how many copies I can make or how many devices they can be on or requires I ensure that no one else use the same content concurrently which of those mean I don't "own" the digital content.
Finally and most importantly Doctorow doesn't seem to address the real economic concerns with allowing people to lend digital books.
If I really have that unrestricted right to lend digital content it would be perfectly legal to set up a book sharing network that lends out every single book I own whenever I'm not using them and recalls them when I want them back. By the law of large numbers this system would only require slightly more people lending a given book than the average number of concurrent readers to virtually guarantee the book is always instantly available to anyone who wants it on their digital devices.
If such a system really is reliable the practical effect will be to radically reduce the number of books purchased. Likely by at least two orders of magnitude. Sure, from a theoretical perspective you could then charge two orders of magnitude more for the book since each purchaser could charge lending fees to recover the money but practically speaking people will be reluctant to invest 1500 to buy a novel.
If you take this problem seriously I think you need to replace the notion of copyright with some other kind of compensation scheme. Say sample book usage and directly pay authors out of governmet funds proportional to their popularity.
Jan 1, 2009 at 04:03 AM
@Roweena
That's the same as with books. Legally, as I have always understood it, you could give away, lend, or sell your printed books, but you could not make ten copies and distribute them. If you bought one copy, your disposal choices affect only that sole copy.
No, I am not an attorney, and this is not legal advice. Just saying.
Jan 1, 2009 at 02:03 PM
FREE IS THE NEW BLACK!!
rock on
Martin Atkins
Jan 1, 2009 at 08:21 PM
In general I thought that this speech was very well presented and pretty accurate (well, except especially the nonsense about the Genesis creation account copying from the Babylonian account; the whole spirit of the two accounts is entirely different, and the idea that one had been copied from the other has been generally discounted since the 1940s).
@George: Other than the word "license" thrown in there where perhaps it should have said "lend," as you mentioned, I didn't notice any confusion about this issue of the physical book versus the information contained therein. To be clear, when you buy a book you do own it, i.e., the physical copy.
As to the book as it exists in the abstract, of course, nobody owns that (not even the author), since it's impossible to own something abstract. What the author has is copyright, not ownership. Please don't bother to try to illustrate ownership of something abstract by pointing out that we use possessives when referring to them. We also use possessives about many other things we don't own, like "my father" (I'm pretty sure he would object to the idea that I owned him), "my headache," or "my best time" (I got that time; you can't have it!).
That is why it is the term "intellectual property" that is confusing. We need to make clear the difference between property (the book itself) and rights (the legal ability to reproduce the book). The term "intellectual property" tries to obscure this issue rather than clarify it.
Jan 3, 2009 at 03:58 AM
When I went to look up copyright law in my country, I was expecting to see something that would print on reams and reams of paper. I got this: http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p01_uk_copyright_law
Observe:
Restricted acts
It is an offence to perform any of the following acts without the consent of the owner: Copy the work. Rent, lend or issue copies of the work to the public. Perform, broadcast or show the work in public. Adapt the work.
The author of a work, or a director of a film may also have certain moral rights: The right to be identified as the author. Right to object to derogatory treatment.
There. Done. Now I know what can and can't be done with copyrighted work (presuming, "All rights reserved" implies it falls into this copyright law).
What's interesting is the wording of, "Rent, lend or issue copies of the work to the public". It implies that I CAN give the book to a friend or family member, as long as I don't make it available publicly.
Call me a bit biassed, but I really like the way the guys at Creative Commons have done it: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/
It's just a nice, bare-bones display of what you can and can't do (and, incidentally, I picked the license I would most likely use for electronic books). That's a much nicer representation than this: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode Which is what most companies would give you.
This is how licensing should be done, if at all - make it as easy for anyone and everyone to understand the license as possible: the licensor, the customer, everyone.
Jan 3, 2009 at 08:51 AM
I'm impressed by the fact that Doctorow includes Authors as the possible victims. As an editor I find authors are reluctant to have our Quarterly placed on line for fear of misuse and non-payment. We writers all like to get something for our creative effort not just accolades and hand-claps. Writers of Journal articles are now finding they can't write a thing without giving it up to some online provider who then sells it with the writer getting absolutely nothing in return...or in the case of Hi-Beam.com they use an author's work for a come on for their pay to play game which is still hijacking the article for their own advertising. The digital field is slowly killing off the incentive for writers to write, even when it makes getting published quickly an easy event. Just as Varsity itself "reserves the right to use the comment in the print edition of the newspaper," I shudder that this in itself cancels out what used to be known as the "first rights only" for which journalists and writers fought over and won in Tasini vs. NYT.
Jan 6, 2010 at 09:54 PM
I am also a person who loves books. I am typing this message as I am surrounded by them in my office. This article does appeal to my emotions and I found myself almost ready to defend the people of the books, or the book people or whatever. But instead, I decided to read a few of the comments that were left on this particular post. I will not copy and paste it, but I would encourage folks to look at the comment by Eileen Fish at the end of the article.
I agree halfheartedly with Eileen. Yes, something needs to be done. The trouble becomes, what can be done? The answer should be simple. Apply and enforce copyright law. Done. Well, not so fast. We have become a society famous for parsing words. Rather than apply the basic principles of copyright law, we must now make specific laws to meet every possible commutation of elements in question. It is the idea that every specific must be declared and addressed before adequate protection may be applied and enforced.
Part of this problem is deeply rooted in liberalism. That is, basic laws are not good enough, so we must define everything in the universe to ensure protection of each and every variation. In the U.S., lawmakers are working diligently to establish layers of laws that are no longer effective because it has become impossible to interpret them the same way two times in a row. However, before you attack me for my sometimes conservative views, please bear with me as I offer the root cause for this free for all below.
The fundamental idea of copyright law can be applied to all media. Jurisdiction becomes a bit of an issue, so there is a need for a basic international law that would address the problem globally. No matter what media, the law is designed to protect the content, its owners and assigns. Enforce it! Send people to jail when they violate the law. If an ISP (Internet Service Provider) enables a foreign entity to distribute pirated content, shut it down! But wait, this is perhaps a clue to the root cause of this problem.
It is too easy to steal copyrighted material and there is little risk of any recourse. That is the fundamental problem, which is partially due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA essentially removed the teeth from copyright law. The new remedies under the DMCA are no more than a slap on the wrist for ISP's. The idea was the global economy would flourish without pesky copyright laws affecting e-commerce and redistribution. Indeed, we did see a boom following this legislation. But, at what cost?
Meanwhile, we argue with ourselves over the various forms of media. Again, it is not the media, it's the content that matters. Not only are we confused as consumers, but the courts also seem to be confused over these issues. I believe we need to repeal, or rewrite, the DMCA. Furthermore, I believe we need to apply and enforce the previously existing laws that were intended to protect content.
As a final note, most folks who write or create original content seem to agree that our property should be protected. Guess what? There is a bigger problem, and most of us can probably find it on our computers. If we are honest with ourselves and if we look really hard, we might find that we have contributed to this problem as consumers. Take a minute to look or think about the content that you have downloaded. Did you pay for it all? Chances are, if you are like 99% of most folks with a computer, you have pirated material on your computer. This is a cultural problem that needs to be addressed. We really need a campaign on ethics and piracy to reverse the thievish culture that we have created.
Jan 7, 2010 at 02:32 PM
Correx:
1) People of the Book section, 3rd to last paragraph: change "undo" to "undue," unless it's a pun; we are talking about pirates who essentially undo sales, after all. :)
2) Respect Copyright section, last line of first paragraph: does this mean to say, "take your books away" rather than "give . . ."?
Jan 8, 2010 at 10:15 PM
Random thoughts / reaction:
I'm sure many corporations would like to institute a pay-per-page e-book policy (and a pay-per-play audio / video policy).
However, with iTunes removing their DRM policy, maybe things are changing (although you still can't get Beatles albums).
Honestly, I don't know how to enforce fair use / sharing with online digital media. Hopefully the average person will get their online digital content cheaper and more abundant than the old, physical-copy economic model. That's what's most important to me.
Jan 16, 2010 at 04:48 PM
Thank you for the insightful take on this subject. I've been writing about the same exact thing. As an author,I know the importance of copyrights. I cannot imagine a world without the physical book. Sure, a book can be read electronically, but this world needs the beautiful art of illustrations on paper, printed words etc. What if we had no electricity? Batteries will last only so long. The book will last a lifetime. I own many antique books which are a joy to look at.
Jan 19, 2010 at 10:05 AM
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