You probably saw the New York Times story today about publishers imposing still more artificial scarcity on e-books by liming the number of times they can be “lent” (a verb already odd enough in the context of e-books).
Ask yourself, in all seriousness: is this helping you?
If you’re an author who makes their whole living from royalty income, then at least in a short-term economic sense, this policy might help you in a way (though the system is still hurting you in other ways). But for anyone else, if you’re not lucky enough to have a publisher who gets it, and instead you have a publisher like HarperCollins who apparently thinks their job is to limit the number of people who can read your book, ask yourself how exactly this helps you.
HarperCollins has become a filter that prevents people from reading its authors books. This is a historical reversal from everything a publisher should be. The last thing I want, as an author, is someone who thinks it’s their job to stand between my readers and my writing. There are already enough forces in the world doing that, starting with all the other demands on my readers’ attention. Why on earth would I bring in a special service to do it even more? That’s crazy.
Just say no. HarperCollins can’t do anything without you.
Despite the stated revolutionary potential of E-books for widespread access, E-books have been increasingly restricted due to DRM and draconian licensing agreements from publishers. Recently, HarperCollins announced its new policy in which ebooks they supply to Overdrive (a vendor to public and academic libraries across the US) would disappear after 26 checkouts. In response to this, librarians have been reclaiming readers’ rights and challenging publishers who insert DRM and demanding licensing agreements that do not restrict libraries and users from downloading, sharing and preserving ebooks. Here are some voices from the library community:
Please help spread the word and support your local librarians. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.
The Academy Awards happened Sunday night, as you, and perhaps James Franco, may be aware. Over breakfast Monday morning, I reviewed the hilarious snark about the Oscars that had filled my tweetstream overnight. Among the catty epigrams, I found the intriguing observation that in awarding the Oscar for Best Original Score to Atticus Ross and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor for The Social Network, Hollywood had given its approval to a musician who has capitalized on remix culture in recognition of work that lifted straight from a classical composer.
On February 24, 1876, Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, loosely based on a Norwegian fairy tale, made its debut with incidental music by Ibsen’s countryman Edvard Grieg. “In the Hall of the Mountain King” has since joined the canon of Classical Music’s Greatest Hits. It has been used in movies, TV shows, commercials, and video games, and has been arranged and covered by numerous musical artists outside of the classical genre. In last year’s The Social Network, Reznor’s version of “Mountain King” made the “Winklevii”’s Oxford boat race one of the film’s most memorable scenes.
Did Grieg get name-checked by the Academy alongside Reznor and Ross on Sunday night? No. Did the duo have to license “Mountain King” from Grieg’s family (or, more likely, from TONO, Norway’s music copyright collection society) before including it in their score? No. Grieg’s Peer Gynt is in the public domain. “Mountain King” has long since joined the European fairy tales that motivated Ibsen in the shared cultural treasure trove to which artists in America and elsewhere continually turn for inspiration and raw material, whether intentionally or unconsciously.
Reznor clearly understands the value of a vibrant public domain. As Nine Inch Nails, he achieved fame through his artistry with samplers and synthesizers before becoming one of the first big-name acts to recognize fans as creators, not just consumers. He has sampled everything from Star Wars to the “Amen” break and credits punk legend Iggy Pop for informing the driving beat to “Closer,” NIN’s biggest hit. For 2007’s Year Zero, NIN released several tracks as audio files for fans to remix, subsequently creating an interactive website devoted to fan remixes (including mixes of The Social Network tracks). NIN released its two most recent albums under a free-for-non-commercial-use Creative Commons license, allowing downloads free of charge, and has distributed high-definition concert footage through torrent files.
The result: thousands of remixes and millions of downloads. Relinquishing tight-fisted control of his work, distribution, and revenue stream has not caused the demise of Reznor’s livelihood. Trent Reznor is still a rock star.
And now he’s an Oscar winner too, thanks to the same interest group responsible for the remarkably effective industry capture of national and international lawmakers with respect to copyright issues. Lobbying by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), among others, resulted in the passage of the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which, besides doing what its name suggests, also pulled back under copyright works that had already fallen into the public domain. On the international stage, the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement calls for criminal penalties for copyright infringers and could subject Internet Service Providers to liability for their subscribers’ actions. (The MPAA was one of the few outside entities to be made privy to the draft text of ACTA, whose negotiations have been conducted in secret.) If adopted, ACTA’s chilling effects would make it much more difficult for artists such as NIN (and its fans) to share and build upon each other’s work, even when their activities are entirely legal.
With its sinister melody and increasingly frenetic pace, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” would make the perfect theme song for Hollywood’s escalating efforts to impose its supramaximalist view of copyright on the entire globe. Yet on Sunday, Hollywood gave its highest award to the poster child for remix culture. In an age when Disney claims to own the rights to ancient fairy tales, the Best “Original” Score includes a version of a public-domain piece written for a play inspired by folklore.
The immense irony of the award evidently got lost during the commercial break, and the Academy called in thirtysomethings’ nostalgia for their gothy teenage years as a seat-filler. And so the battle for enclosure of the cultural commons raged on unacknowledged in the background Sunday night. Meanwhile, Reznor accepted his Academy Award, his fans uploaded more remixes of his winning score, and Edvard Grieg’s descendants slept soundly in Norway. They weren’t waiting for Reznor outside the Kodak Theatre with their hands out for royalties, 135 years almost to the day after Peer Gynt’s debut. Yet locking up our cultural treasure chest seems to be exactly where we’re headed, if the people who fill out the Oscar ballots have their way. Now that’s a nightmare worthy of the Trent Reznor treatment.
UPDATE 3/7/11: The Supreme Court has granted cert in Golan v. Holder. This will be a case to watch!
If you’ve read Karl Fogel’s “A Tale of Two Authors: Why Translations Happen, or Don’t”, you’re sighing and nodding along. This artwork has a multinational fanbase, interesting things to say about an influential cultural artifact and the society it reflects — and no English translation, till now. Tolkien, who’s dead, doesn’t get any more or less money. But Kirill Eskov, a living author, is deprived of an opportunity to benefit commercially from his efforts (likewise for Yisroel Markov, the translator).
From The New York Times: it’s amateurs, not big publishing companies, who are crowdsourcing free access to the sheet music of the Western heritage. Where can a student, musician, or teacher anywhere in the world find scores from hundreds of years ago? The International Music Score Library Project. At least one music publisher has tried to arbitrage different countries’ copyright laws to sue IMSLP. As commenters note:
And from The New York Times again, Randy Cohen as The Ethicist touches on several major problems with copyright as currently practiced. Highlights:
[T]he new Hollywood operates less by stealing other people’s ideas than by girding its own with mighty armies of lawyers who claim everything the studio produces as its perpetual possession, a sort of legalistic King Midas: Everything I touch turns to mine. Forever. This is a major expansion of copyright, and it stifles creativity….
The added twist is that while Disney, like its industry cohort, seeks an eternal hammerlock on its productions, many of them originate in our common literary heritage — “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” “The Little Mermaid.” Such an overreaching concept of intellectual property obstructs the exchange of ideas, the referencing and reworking of earlier works that stimulate invention. For Hollywood to thwart this by appropriating our common cultural legacy is as ethically dubious as plagiarism — innovation, perhaps, but not actual progress. Like 3-D.
I’d go further and say it’s worse than plagiarism, but all the same, I welcome Cohen in the battle against copyright maximalism.
If you think it’s because it’s hard to find willing translators, or because the skills required are too rare, I’d like to offer two case studies below that point to another explanation:
The reason translations don’t happen is that we prohibit them. That is to say, translations are what happens naturally, except when copyright restrictions suppress them.
If you’re skeptical, consider the following tale of two authors, one whose books are free to be translated by anyone, another whose books are not.
We’ll even stack the deck a bit. The author whose books are freely translatable will be a relatively minor author, one whose books are not, to be perfectly honest, of earth-shaking importance. Whereas some of the the books by the other author are acknowledged masterpieces in their original language, and you will see quotes from a prominent scholar about how the absence of translations is “one of the great intellectual scandals of our time”.
The first author is me. I’ve written two books, both available under free licenses, and although I’m proud of them and glad I wrote them, neither is of any great historical significance. The first, published in 1999, was a semi-technical manual on how to use some collaboration software. Despite its limited audience and my having put it online in a somewhat cumbersome format, several volunteer translation efforts sprang up quickly, and at least one (into German) was completed. The other efforts may have been completed as well; I’m not sure, and since the book is old now and I can’t read the translations anyway I haven’t bothered to track them down. Note I’m really just talking about the volunteer translations — the ones that people started because they wanted to, without asking anyone’s permission first. There was also a translation into Chinese, which was completed and which I have a paperback copy of, but we won’t count it as evidence here because it went through publisher-controlled channels.
My next book, first published in 2005, likewise appeals to a fairly limited audience: it’s about how to manage collaborative, open source software projects — I wasn’t exactly aiming for the top of the bestseller lists. But with the gracious cooperation of my publisher, O’Reilly Media, I put it online under a free license, this time in a somewhat more amenable format, and volunteer translation efforts sprang up almost immediately. Several of them have completed their translations: the Chinese, Japanese, Galician, German, Dutch, and French. The Spanish is almost done, and there are others still under way that I’m not even bothering to list here.
(Yes, by the way, some of those translations are available in high-quality commercial paper versions, and I have copies of them at home. Commercial activity is perfectly compatible with non-restrictive distribution models, as we have pointed out before.)
So… all this for a book on open source software collaboration? Really? What does this tell us?
Well, let’s look at a contrasting example.
The author Hans Günther Adler (published as “H.G. Adler”) died in 1988 having produced what are widely accepted as some of the core works of Holocaust literature in German. Very few of his works have been translated into English, but recently one, the novel Panorama, was published in English and was widely reviewed.
A look at two of the reviews shows why here at QuestionCopyright.org we consider reframing the public conversation around copyright to be our primary mission. Both reviewers — obviously intelligent, obviously in agreement about Adler’s significance, and writing for two of the most influential literary publications in the English language — comment on the shameful absence of Adler translations in English, yet collapse into a curious kind of passive voice when it comes to the reasons for that absence.
First, Judith Shulevitz in the New York Times:
Every so often, a book shocks you into realizing just how much effort and sheer luck was required to get it into your hands. “Panorama” was the first novel written by H.G. Adler, a German-speaking Jewish intellectual from Prague who survived a labor camp in Bohemia, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and a particularly hellish underground slave-labor camp called Langenstein, near Buchenwald. Adler wrote the first draft in less than two weeks in 1948… He wound up in England, but couldn’t find anyone willing to publish the book until 1968, 20 years and two drafts later. The book is coming out in English for the first time only now.
It’s hard to fathom why we had to wait so long. … [Adler] is almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world. Only three of his books have been translated: a historical work, “Jews in Germany”; a novel called “The Journey”; and now, “Panorama.” That American and British readers have had such limited access to Adler’s writing and thought for so long is, as the eminent scholar of modern German literature Peter Demetz has written, “one of the great intellectual scandals of our time.” [emphasis added]
And this from Ruth Franklin writing for the New Yorker:
…Hermann Broch wrote that the book [“Theresienstadt 1941-1945”] would become the standard work on the subject, and that Adler’s “cool and precise method not only grasps all the essential details but manages further to indicate the extent of the horror in an extremely vivid form.” (The book was published in Germany in 1955 and quickly became a touchstone in German Holocaust studies, but it has never been translated into English.) [emphasis added]
Now, to be fair, Shulevitz and Franklin were writing reviews of Adler’s work itself, not analyses of why those works have been so little translated into English. Yet it is striking that both choose to comment on the absence of translations, at some length, and yet they don’t speculate on the reasons at all. They merely describe the situation and express regret, as though it were bad weather. There is no outrage or frustration at the fact that the reason we don’t have those translations is simply that they have been suppressed before they could be started.
I’m not even going to put qualifiers like “probably” or “likely” before that. It should be treated as a finding of fact, at this point. If my books — my little tomes aimed a small sub-demographic of the software development world — get translated multiple times from English into languages with smaller readerships, then there is simply no way that H.G. Adler’s much more important books, on a much more important topic, would not have been translated from German into English already, if only anyone (or more importantly, any group) who had the ambition to do so had been free to. English and German have a huge overlap in terms of people fluent in both languages, and there is wide interest in Holocaust studies among speakers of both languages. Furthermore, there are non-profit and state funding sources that would have gladly supported the work. That happened even with mine, for example: the Dutch translation was published in book form by SURFnet, who paid the translators to guarantee completion. It would be incomprehensible if funding could be found for that but somehow not for Adler translations.
The fact that the reason for the lack of Adler translations — and the lack of translations for other important works — is not immediately understood by all to be copyright restrictions points a glaring weakness in public debate about copyright. Right now, translators can’t translate if they don’t secure the rights first, and since the default stance of copyright is that you don’t have those rights unless someone explicitly gives them to you, most potential translators give up without even trying. Or more likely, they never even think of trying, because they have become habituated to the permission-based culture. The process of merely tracking down whom to ask for permission is daunting enough, never mind the time-consuming and uncertain negotiations that ensue once you find them.
It is no wonder that so many worthy works remain untranslated, given these obstacles. But it is a wonder that we continue to hide our eyes from the reason why, even as it stares us in the face.
Peter Jaworski is a contributor to the libertarian Canadian blog The Volunteer. In a post reprinted below, he wrestles with the idea of intellectual property, proposals to reform copyright law, and the use of copyleft licenses. We ran across his essay because he draws extensively on the comic strips (and one of the Minute Memes) of Nina Paley, artist-in-residence here at QuestionCopyright.org. Peter’s discussion expresses very well the deliberations of many people who are open to the critiques and proposals advanced on this site but who are, nevertheless, hesitant.
We’re reprinting it here partly to get your reactions. Peter is honest about his emotional response to the idea that someone who puts a lot of effort into their art is entitled to something — reward, or control, or recognition — and this makes him doubt his support for sharing. Interestingly, he reverses the usual position: he says “on most days, I […] think intellectual property is bunk. But I’m open to being persuaded, if you’ve got a good story to tell.” He starts from a pro-sharing stance, but wonders if he’s right. People like Peter are the “independent voters” of the copyright reform movement, if you will, and understanding their instincts is central to our mission. What would you ask Peter?
Mimi and Eunice: Hyphenated Liberty
by Peter Jaworski on November 3, 2010
Mimi and Eunice is a cartoon strip drawn by Nina Paley. Nina does not believe in intellectual property. She lets just anyone reprint her comic strips, provided no one pretends that the work is theirs. That’s the only restriction she views as legitimate — no fraud or attempt to mislead people about the originator of the work.
Nina endorses “copyleft.” Go ahead and click the link for an explanation. For an extended explanation of just what copyleft means, and why Nina is often grumpy, check out her blog post on the branding confusion with Creative Commons licences here.
Here’s a little video she put together highlighting her views on the difference between ordinary theft, and intellectual property “theft”:
And here are a couple of Nina’s older cartoons that capture some of her attitudes about copyright:
What makes Nina really interesting is that she isn’t opposed to copyright because she’s opposed to the market or to capitalism. Far from it (or so it seems to me). She likes the idea of people making money. Take these as an example:
I’m often unsure about how to view intellectual property. On most days, I agree with Nina. But I’d be curious to hear if anyone has a particularly strong opinion about copyright.
The video highlights an interesting fact about intellectual property “theft” — the first person doesn’t really “lose” anything. When I make a copy of a CD, for example, I haven’t taken away your ability to enjoy that CD. We both get to listen to that CD. And that’s different from me taking your physical property, taking your CD. Now I have the CD, and you don’t. I get to enjoy something that you can no longer enjoy.
I’m aware of the argument that copyright protection promotes new ideas, and promotes investment in things like music and movies and so on. On its face, that’s pretty persuasive, if it’s true. I don’t want there to be less music and fewer Disney cartoons. I want more music, more cartoons, more books, and more movies. If I’m going to spend a lot of my time writing a book, I’d like to be compensated financially. If there were no copyright protection, the first idiot with a bit torrent client can just take my work and no one would ever have to pay me for all the work that I’ve put into making the song, the movie, the book, the idea.
One counter to that argument is the “first-mover advantage” claim made by economists. The first entrant into a market has a surprisingly strong benefit, for many possible reasons. If you come up with an idea, you can be the first mover. That may be sufficient to motivate the making of just the same amount of thinking-based stuff. Maybe. Then the argument from outcomes would be overcome by appeal to what would happen without copyright.
When it comes to music and movies, I tend to think that what needs changing is the method of making money, not the enforcement of copyright protections. If we’re honest with each other, we can admit that we already operate on a system where people volunteer to pay for music. You don’t have to pay for music any more. Music is too readily available on the internet, and no amount of resources thrown at enforcement will end the torrent of, well, torrents.
In my mind, artists should view their music as reason for people to go to their concerts and buy their merchandise. They get paid for concerts, not for the music. The music is what entices the consumer to go to concerts.
Maybe.
I have friends in the music industry. Lindy Vopnfjord, in particular. I know how much work he puts into his music. I know that he should be, if the world were just and aware of what is good, rich as bananas. I still remember the first time I listened to his CD, Suspension of Disbelief, on a drive to Waterloo with my sister. I was like, “who’s this?” and she was like, “that’s my friend Lindy,” and I was like, “oh my God, this is going to be a disaster. But I’ll just be polite, swallow hard, and listen nicely.”
I listened nicely. And then I insisted we play the CD over again. And then again, for a third time. And then I was shocked that my sister knew this guy, and then I insisted that she introduce me.
True story.
Now Lindy and I are good pals and chums, and he fills me in on what’s happening in the Toronto music scene, as well as how musicians try to make money. It’s not easy. And I can understand how I’d feel if I spent all this time writing lyrics, putting together a melody, etc., and some douche sitting behind a computer clicked some keys and, voila, all my work is right there available for anyone and everyone to take and listen to without having to give me a shiny dime. All those pleasant moments punctuated by Beautifully Undone (one of Lindy’s songs), and no benefit accrues to the artist. Seems unfair.
Still, like I said, on most days, I agree with Nina, and think intellectual property is bunk. But I’m open to being persuaded, if you’ve got a good story to tell. I’m all ears.
Addendum: The argument from effort above, if we can call it that, gets real short shrift from Nina. She has a running gag that makes use of poop as the central artefact to mock intellectual property. Here’s that series:
(P.S., you don’t have to pay me for writing all of this, even if you liked it. It took me a while to get all the links for you, and to embed all those videos, and to think about the story I’ll tell you, and how to construct the argument or two that I’ve included in this post. You can’t claim that you wrote it, not that I’m suggesting that you would. But here it is, free for you to look at, read, excerpt and otherwise make use of. It’s interesting to note the proliferation of blogs — essentially free content — that exists out there in cyber-inter-web-world with something approaching zero per cent of bloggers making money off of blogging. But just look at all the content that is produced! Is it really true that, without copyright protection, we’d have less intellectual property? Blogs make me think there wouldn’t be less…)
Calling all law students — or at least the ones who weren’t planning to work for the RIAA later:
Our legal intern position is open! We’re looking for someone interested in learning more about copyright law and using it to promote freedom. Several of our projects have legal components, so the responsibilities of the position are varied. They will involve research in U.S. and international copyright law, non-profit law (federal and CA state), some trademark law, tracking legislative developments, some writing, etc. The minimum time commitment is about five hours a week, with more available if you want it. A New York City location is preferred but not required. There may be some limited travel (which we pay for), at your discretion.
The position is unpaid, but you would be working with an experienced lawyer (our counsel, Karen Sandler), and we’re happy to meet reasonable requirements for law school credit.
Interested? Contact us. We’ll keep the posting open until we get the right candidate — it could be you!
Dear Authors,
The result: thousands of remixes and millions of downloads. Relinquishing tight-fisted control of his work, distribution, and revenue stream has not caused the demise of Reznor’s livelihood. Trent Reznor is still a rock star.
