CONTENT - Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future
Cory Doctorow
Copyright (C) Cory Doctorow, 2008.;
Selected Essays
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CONTENT - Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the
Future of the Future,
2
1. Introduction by John Perry Barlow
3
San Francisco - Seattle - Vancouver - San Francisco
4
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
5
"Content," huh? Ha! Where's the container?
6
Perhaps these words appear to you on the pages of a book, a physical
object that might be said to have "contained" the thoughts of my friend
and co-conspirator Cory Doctorow as they were transported in boxes and
trucks all the way from his marvelous mind into yours. If that is so, I
will concede that you might be encountering "content". (Actually, if
that's the case, I'm delighted on Cory's behalf, since that means that
you have also paid him for these thoughts. We still know how to pay
creators directly for the works they embed in stuff.)
7
But the chances are excellent that you're reading these liquid words as
bit-states of light on a computer screen, having taken advantage of his
willingness to let you have them in that form for free. In such an
instance, what "contains" them? Your hard disk? His? The Internet and
all the servers and routers in whose caches the ghosts of their passage
might still remain? Your mind? Cory's?
8
To me, it doesn't matter. Even if you're reading this from a book, I'm
still not convinced that what you have in your hands is its container,
or that, even if we agreed on that point, that a little ink in the
shape of, say, the visual pattern you're trained to interpret as
meaning "a little ink" in whatever font the publisher chooses, is not,
as Magritte would remind us, the same thing as a little ink, even
though it is.
9
Meaning is the issue. If you couldn't read English, this whole book
would obviously contain nothing as far as you were concerned. Given
that Cory is really cool and interesting, you might be motivated to
learn English so that you could read this book, but even then it
wouldn't be a container so much as a conduit.
10
The real "container" would be process of thought that began when I
compressed my notion of what is meant by the word "ink" - which, when
it comes to the substances that can be used to make marks on paper, is
rather more variable than you might think - and would kind of end when
you decompressed it in your own mind as whatever you think it is.
11
I know this is getting a bit discursive, but I do have a point. Let me
just make it so we can move on.
12
I believe, as I've stated before, that information is simultaneously a
relationship, an action, and an area of shared mind. What it isn't is a
noun.
13
Information is not a thing. It isn't an object. It isn't something
that, when you sell it or have it stolen, ceases to remain in your
possession. It doesn't have a market value that can be objectively
determined. It is not, for example, much like a 2004 Ducati ST4S
motorcycle, for which I'm presently in the market, and which seems -
despite variabilities based on, I must admit, informationally- based
conditions like mileage and whether it's been dropped - to have a value
that is pretty consistent among the specimens I can find for a sale on
the Web.
14
Such economic clarity could not be established for anything "in" this
book, which you either obtained for free or for whatever price the
publisher eventually puts on it. If it's a book you're reading from,
then presumably Cory will get paid some percentage of whatever you, or
the person who gave it to you, paid for it.
15
But I won't. I'm not getting paid to write this forward, neither in
royalties nor upfront. I am, however, getting some intangible value, as
one generally does whenever he does a favor for a friend. For me, the
value being retrieved from going to the trouble of writing these words
is not so different from the value you retrieve from reading them. We
are both mining a deeply intangible "good," which lies in interacting
with The Mind of Cory Doctorow. I mention this because it demonstrates
the immeasurable role of relationship as the driving force in an
information economy.
16
But neither am I creating content at the moment nor are you "consuming"
it (since, unlike a hamburger, these words will remain after you're
done with them, and, also unlike a hamburger you won't subsequently,
well never mind.) Unlike real content, like the stuff in a shipping
container, these words have neither grams nor liters by which one might
measure their value. Unlike gasoline, ten bucks worth of this stuff
will get some people a lot further than others, depending on their
interest and my eloquence, neither of which can be quantified.
17
It's this simple: the new meaning of the word "content," is plain
wrong. In fact, it is intentionally wrong. It's a usage that only arose
when the institutions that had fattened on their ability to bottle and
distribute the genius of human expression began to realize that their
containers were melting away, along with their reason to be in
business. They started calling it content at exactly the time it ceased
to be. Previously they had sold books and records and films, all nouns
to be sure. They didn't know what to call the mysterious ghosts of
thought that were attached to them.
18
Thus, when not applied to something you can put in a bucket (of
whatever size), "content" actually represents a plot to make you think
that meaning is a thing. It isn't. The only reason they want you to
think that it is because they know how to own things, how to give them
a value based on weight or quantity, and, more to the point, how to
make them artificially scarce in order to increase their value.
19
That, and the fact that after a good 25 years of advance warning, they
still haven't done much about the Economy of Ideas besides trying to
stop it from happening.
20
As I get older, I become less and less interested in saying "I told you
so." But in this case, I find it hard to resist. Back during the
Internet equivalent of the Pleistocene. I wrote a piece for an ancestor
of Wired magazine called Wired magazine that was titled, variously,
"The Economy of Ideas" or "Wine without Bottles." In this essay, I
argued that it would be deucedly difficult to continue to apply the
Adam Smithian economic principles regarding the relationship between
scarcity and value to any products that could be reproduced and
distributed infinitely at zero cost.
21
I proposed, moreover, that, to the extent that anything might be scarce
in such an economy, it would be attention, and that invisibility would
be a bad strategy for increasing attention. That, in other words,
familiarity might convey more value to information that scarcity would.
22
I did my best to tell the folks in what is now called "The Content
Industry" - the institutions that once arose for the useful purpose of
conveying creative expression from one mind to many - that this would
be a good time to change their economic model. I proposed that
copyright had worked largely because it had been difficult, as a
practical matter, to make a book or a record or motion picture film
spool.
23
It was my theory that as soon as all human expression could be reduced
into ones and zeros, people would begin to realize what this "stuff"
really was and come up with an economic paradigm for rewarding its
sources that didn't seem as futile as claiming to own the wind.
Organizations would adapt. The law would change. The notion of
"intellectual property," itself only about 35 years old, would be
chucked immediately onto the magnificent ash-heap of Civilization's
idiotic experiments.
24
Of course, as we now know, I was wrong. Really wrong.
25
As is my almost pathological inclination, I extended them too much
credit. I imputed to institutions the same capacities for adaptability
and recognition of the obvious that I assume for humans. But
institutions, having the legal system a fundamental part of their
genetic code, are not so readily ductile.
26
This is particularly true in America, where some combination of
certainty and control is the actual "deity" before whose altar we
worship, and where we have a regular practice of spawning large and
inhuman collective organisms that are a kind of meta-parasite. These
critters - let's call them publicly-held corporations - may be made out
of humans, but they are not human. Given human folly, that
characteristic might be semi-ok if they were actually as cold-bloodedly
expedient as I once fancied them - yielding only to the will of the
markets and the raw self-interest of their shareholders. But no. They
are also symbiotically subject to the "religious beliefs" of those
humans who feed in their upper elevations.
27
Unfortunately, the guys (and they mostly are guys) who've been running
The Content Industry since it started to die share something like a
doctrinal fundamentalism that has led them to such beliefs as the
conviction that there's no difference between listening to a song and
shop-lifting a toaster.
28
Moreover, they dwell in such a sublime state of denial that they think
they are stewarding the creative process as it arises in the creative
humans they exploit savagely - knowing, as they do, that a creative
human would rather be heard than paid - and that they, a bunch of sated
old scoundrels nearing retirement would be able to find technological
means for wrapping "containers" around "their" "content" that the
adolescent electronic Hezbollah they've inspired by suing their own
customers will neither be smart nor motivated enough to shred whatever
pathetic digital bottles their lackeys design.
29
And so it has been for the last 13 years. The companies that claim the
ability to regulate humanity's Right to Know have been tireless in
their endeavors to prevent the inevitable. The won most of the
legislative battles in the U.S. and abroad, having purchased all the
government money could buy. They even won most of the contests in
court. They created digital rights management software schemes that
behaved rather like computer viruses.
30
Indeed, they did about everything they could short of seriously
examining the actual economics of the situation - it has never been
proven to me that illegal downloads are more like shoplifted goods than
viral marketing - or trying to come up with a business model that the
market might embrace.
31
Had it been left to the stewardship of the usual suspects, there would
scarcely be a word or a note online that you didn't have to pay to
experience. There would be increasingly little free speech or any
consequence, since free speech is not something anyone can own.
32
Fortunately there were countervailing forces of all sorts, beginning
with the wise folks who designed the Internet in the first place. Then
there was something called the Electronic Frontier Foundation which I
co-founded, along with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, back in 1990.
Dedicated to the free exchange of useful information in cyberspace, it
seemed at times that I had been right in suggesting then that
practically every institution of the Industrial Period would try to
crush, or at least own, the Internet. That's a lot of lawyers to have
stacked against your cause.
33
But we had Cory Doctorow.
34
Had nature not provided us with a Cory Doctorow when we needed one, it
would have been necessary for us to invent a time machine and go into
the future to fetch another like him. That would be about the only
place I can imagine finding such a creature. Cory, as you will learn
from his various rants "contained" herein was perfectly suited to the
task of subduing the dinosaurs of content.
35
He's a little like the guerilla plumber Tuttle in the movie Brazil.
Armed with a utility belt of improbable gizmos, a wildly over-clocked
mind, a keyboard he uses like a verbal machine gun, and, best of all, a
dark sense of humor, he'd go forth against massive industrial forces
and return grinning, if a little beat up.
36
Indeed, many of the essays collected under this dubious title are not
only memoirs of his various campaigns but are themselves the very
weapons he used in them. Fortunately, he has spared you some of the
more sophisticated utilities he employed. He is not battering you with
the nerdy technolingo he commands when stacked up against various
minutiacrats, but I assure you that he can speak geek with people who,
unlike Cory, think they're being pretty social when they're staring at
the other person's shoes.
37
This was a necessary ability. One of the problems that EFF has to
contend with is that even though most of our yet-unborn constituency
would agree heartily with our central mission - giving everybody
everywhere the right to both address and hear everybody everywhere else
- the decisions that will determine the eventual viability of that
right are being made now and generally in gatherings invisible to the
general public, using terminology, whether technical or legal, that
would be the verbal equivalent of chloroform to anyone not conversant
with such arcana.
38
I've often repeated my belief that the first responsibility of a human
being is to be a better ancestor. Thus, it seems fitting that the
appearance of this book, which details much of Cory's time with the
EFF, coincides with the appearance of his first-born child, about whom
he is a shameless sentimental gusher.
39
I would like to think that by the time this newest prodigy, Poesy
Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow - you see what I mean about
paternal enthusiasm - has reached Cory's age of truly advanced
adolescence, the world will have recognized that there are better ways
to regulate the economy of mind than pretending that its products are
something like pig iron. But even if it hasn't, I am certain that the
global human discourse will be less encumbered than it would have been
had not Cory Doctorow blessed our current little chunk of space/time
with his fierce endeavors.
40
And whatever it is that might be "contained" in the following.
41
2. Microsoft Research DRM Talk
42
Greetings fellow pirates! Arrrrr!
43
I'm here today to talk to you about copyright, technology and DRM, I
work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright stuff
(mostly), and I live in London. I'm not a lawyer -- I'm a kind of
mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff
me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN
to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing
completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.
44
I lead a double life: I'm also a science fiction writer. That means
I've got a dog in this fight, because I've been dreaming of making my
living from writing since I was 12 years old. Admittedly, my IP-based
biz isn't as big as yours, but I guarantee you that it's every bit as
important to me as yours is to you.
45
Here's what I'm here to convince you of:
46
1. That DRM systems don't work
47
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
48
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
49
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
50
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
51
It's a big brief, this talk. Microsoft has sunk a lot of capital into
DRM systems, and spent a lot of time sending folks like Martha and
Brian and Peter around to various smoke-filled rooms to make sure that
Microsoft DRM finds a hospitable home in the future world. Companies
like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of
forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the
engine block back into the driver's compartment. At best I think that
Microsoft might convert some of that momentum on DRM into angular
momentum, and in so doing, save all our asses.
52
Let's dive into it.
53
1. DRM systems don't work
54
This bit breaks down into two parts:
55
1. A quick refresher course in crypto theory
56
2. Applying that to DRM
57
Cryptography -- secret writing -- is the practice of keeping secrets.
It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker
(actually, there can be more attackers, senders and recipients, but
let's keep this simple). We usually call these people Alice, Bob and
Carol.
58
Let's say we're in the days of the Caesar, the Gallic War. You need to
send messages back and forth to your generals, and you'd prefer that
the enemy doesn't get hold of them. You can rely on the idea that
anyone who intercepts your message is probably illiterate, but that's a
tough bet to stake your empire on. You can put your messages into the
hands of reliable messengers who'll chew them up and swallow them if
captured -- but that doesn't help you if Brad Pitt and his men in
skirts skewer him with an arrow before he knows what's hit him.
59
So you encipher your message with something like ROT-13, where every
character is rotated halfway through the alphabet. They used to do this
with non-worksafe material on Usenet, back when anyone on Usenet cared
about work-safe-ness -- A would become N, B is O, C is P, and so forth.
To decipher, you just add 13 more, so N goes to A, O to B yadda yadda.
60
Well, this is pretty lame: as soon as anyone figures out your
algorithm, your secret is g0nez0red.
61
So if you're Caesar, you spend a lot of time worrying about keeping the
existence of your messengers and their payloads secret. Get that?
You're Augustus and you need to send a message to Brad without Caceous
(a word I'm reliably informed means "cheese-like, or pertaining to
cheese") getting his hands on it. You give the message to Diatomaceous,
the fleetest runner in the empire, and you encipher it with ROT-13 and
send him out of the garrison in the pitchest hour of the night, making
sure no one knows that you've sent it out. Caceous has spies
everywhere, in the garrison and staked out on the road, and if one of
them puts an arrow through Diatomaceous, they'll have their hands on
the message, and then if they figure out the cipher, you're b0rked. So
the existence of the message is a secret. The cipher is a secret. The
ciphertext is a secret. That's a lot of secrets, and the more secrets
you've got, the less secure you are, especially if any of those secrets
are shared. Shared secrets aren't really all that secret any longer.
62
Time passes, stuff happens, and then Tesla invents the radio and
Marconi takes credit for it. This is both good news and bad news for
crypto: on the one hand, your messages can get to anywhere with a
receiver and an antenna, which is great for the brave fifth columnists
working behind the enemy lines. On the other hand, anyone with an
antenna can listen in on the message, which means that it's no longer
practical to keep the existence of the message a secret. Any time Adolf
sends a message to Berlin, he can assume Churchill overhears it.
63
Which is OK, because now we have computers -- big, bulky primitive
mechanical computers, but computers still. Computers are machines for
rearranging numbers, and so scientists on both sides engage in a
fiendish competition to invent the most cleverest method they can for
rearranging numerically represented text so that the other side can't
unscramble it. The existence of the message isn't a secret anymore, but
the cipher is.
64
But this is still too many secrets. If Bobby intercepts one of Adolf's
Enigma machines, he can give Churchill all kinds of intelligence. I
mean, this was good news for Churchill and us, but bad news for Adolf.
And at the end of the day, it's bad news for anyone who wants to keep a
secret.
65
Enter keys: a cipher that uses a key is still more secure. Even if the
cipher is disclosed, even if the ciphertext is intercepted, without the
key (or a break), the message is secret. Post-war, this is doubly
important as we begin to realize what I think of as Schneier's Law:
"any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't
think of how to break it." This means that the only experimental
methodology for discovering if you've made mistakes in your cipher is
to tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to think of
ways to break it. Without this critical step, you'll eventually end up
living in a fool's paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher
ages ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your messages,
snickering at you.
66
Best of all, there's only one secret: the key. And with dual-key crypto
it becomes a lot easier for Alice and Bob to keep their keys secret
from Carol, even if they've never met. So long as Alice and Bob can
keep their keys secret, they can assume that Carol won't gain access to
their cleartext messages, even though she has access to the cipher and
the ciphertext. Conveniently enough, the keys are the shortest and
simplest of the secrets, too: hence even easier to keep away from
Carol. Hooray for Bob and Alice.
67
Now, let's apply this to DRM.
68
In DRM, the attacker is also the recipient . It's not Alice and
Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. Alice sells Bob a DVD. She
sells Bob a DVD player. The DVD has a movie on it -- say, Pirates of
the Caribbean -- and it's enciphered with an algorithm called CSS --
Content Scrambling System. The DVD player has a CSS un-scrambler.
69
Now, let's take stock of what's a secret here: the cipher is
well-known. The ciphertext is most assuredly in enemy hands, arrr. So
what? As long as the key is secret from the attacker, we're golden.
70
But there's the rub. Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the Caribbean
from her. Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if he can
descramble the CSS-encrypted VOB -- video object -- on his DVD player.
Otherwise, the disc is only useful to Bob as a drinks-coaster. So Alice
has to provide Bob -- the attacker -- with the key, the cipher and the
ciphertext.
71
Hilarity ensues.
72
DRM systems are usually broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely,
months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid. It's
not because the people who break them are smart. It's not because
there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day, all DRM
systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their attackers with
ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point, the secret isn't a
secret anymore.
73
2. DRM systems are bad for society
74
Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But DRM doesn't
have to be proof against smart attackers, only average individuals!
It's like a speedbump!"
75
Put your hand down.
76
This is a fallacy for two reasons: one technical, and one social.
They're both bad for society, though.
77
Here's the technical reason: I don't need to be a cracker to break your
DRM. I only need to know how to search Google, or Kazaa, or any of the
other general-purpose search tools for the cleartext that someone
smarter than me has extracted.
78
Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But NGSCB can solve
this problem: we'll lock the secrets up on the logic board and goop it
all up with epoxy."
79
Put your hand down.
80
Raise your hand if you're a co-author of the Darknet paper.
81
Everyone in the first group, meet the co-authors of the Darknet paper.
This is a paper that says, among other things, that DRM will fail for
this very reason. Put your hands down, guys.
82
Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest
is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us that their
technology is meant to be proof against average users, not organized
criminal gangs like the Ukrainian pirates who stamp out millions of
high-quality counterfeits. It's not meant to be proof against
sophisticated college kids. It's not meant to be proof against anyone
who knows how to edit her registry, or hold down the shift key at the
right moment, or use a search engine. At the end of the day, the user
DRM is meant to defend against is the most unsophisticated and least
capable among us.
83
Here's a true story about a user I know who was stopped by DRM. She's
smart, college educated, and knows nothing about electronics. She has
three kids. She has a DVD in the living room and an old VHS deck in the
kids' playroom. One day, she brought home the Toy Story DVD for the
kids. That's a substantial investment, and given the generally
jam-smeared character of everything the kids get their paws on, she
decided to tape the DVD off to VHS and give that to the kids -- that
way she could make a fresh VHS copy when the first one went south. She
cabled her DVD into her VHS and pressed play on the DVD and record on
the VCR and waited.
84
Before I go farther, I want us all to stop a moment and marvel at this.
Here is someone who is practically technophobic, but who was able to
construct a mental model of sufficient accuracy that she figured out
that she could connect her cables in the right order and dub her
digital disc off to analog tape. I imagine that everyone in this room
is the front-line tech support for someone in her or his family:
wouldn't it be great if all our non-geek friends and relatives were
this clever and imaginative?
85
I also want to point out that this is the proverbial honest user. She's
not making a copy for the next door neighbors. She's not making a copy
and selling it on a blanket on Canal Street. She's not ripping it to
her hard-drive, DivX encoding it and putting it in her Kazaa
sharepoint. She's doing something honest -- moving it from one
format to another. She's home taping.
86
Except she fails. There's a DRM system called Macrovision embedded --
by law -- in every VHS that messes with the vertical blanking interval
in the signal and causes any tape made in this fashion to fail.
Macrovision can be defeated for about $10 with a gadget readily
available on eBay. But our infringer doesn't know that. She's "honest."
Technically unsophisticated. Not stupid, mind you -- just naive.
87
The Darknet paper addresses this possibility: it even predicts what
this person will do in the long run: she'll find out about Kazaa and
the next time she wants to get a movie for the kids, she'll download it
from the net and burn it for them.
88
In order to delay that day for as long as possible, our lawmakers and
big rightsholder interests have come up with a disastrous policy called
anticircumvention.
89
Here's how anticircumvention works: if you put a lock -- an access
control -- around a copyrighted work, it is illegal to break that lock.
It's illegal to make a tool that breaks that lock. It's illegal to tell
someone how to make that tool. One court even held it illegal to tell
someone where she can find out how to make that tool.
90
Remember Schneier's Law? Anyone can come up with a security system so
clever that he can't see its flaws. The only way to find the flaws in
security is to disclose the system's workings and invite public
feedback. But now we live in a world where any cipher used to fence off
a copyrighted work is off-limits to that kind of feedback. That's
something that a Princeton engineering prof named Ed Felten and his
team discovered when he submitted a paper to an academic conference on
the failings in the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a watermarking
scheme proposed by the recording industry. The RIAA responded by
threatening to sue his ass if he tried it. We fought them because Ed is
the kind of client that impact litigators love: unimpeachable and
clean-cut and the RIAA folded. Lucky Ed. Maybe the next guy isn't so
lucky.
91
Matter of fact, the next guy wasn't. Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian
programmer who gave a talk at a hacker con in Vegas on the failings in
Adobe's e-book locks. The FBI threw him in the slam for 30 days. He
copped a plea, went home to Russia, and the Russian equivalent of the
State Department issued a blanket warning to its researchers to stay
away from American conferences, since we'd apparently turned into the
kind of country where certain equations are illegal.
92
Anticircumvention is a powerful tool for people who want to exclude
competitors. If you claim that your car engine firmware is a
"copyrighted work," you can sue anyone who makes a tool for interfacing
with it. That's not just bad news for mechanics -- think of the
hotrodders who want to chip their cars to tweak the performance
settings. We have companies like Lexmark claiming that their printer
cartridges contain copyrighted works -- software that trips an "I am
empty" flag when the toner runs out, and have sued a competitor who
made a remanufactured cartridge that reset the flag. Even garage-door
opener companies have gotten in on the act, claiming that their
receivers' firmware are copyrighted works. Copyrighted cars, print
carts and garage-door openers: what's next, copyrighted light-fixtures?
93
Even in the context of legitimate -- excuse me, "traditional" --
copyrighted works like movies on DVDs, anticircumvention is bad news.
Copyright is a delicate balance. It gives creators and their assignees
some rights, but it also reserves some rights to the public. For
example, an author has no right to prohibit anyone from transcoding his
books into assistive formats for the blind. More importantly, though, a
creator has a very limited say over what you can do once you lawfully
acquire her works. If I buy your book, your painting, or your DVD, it
belongs to me. It's my property. Not my "intellectual property" -- a
whacky kind of pseudo-property that's swiss-cheesed with exceptions,
easements and limitations -- but real, no-fooling, actual tangible
property -- the kind of thing that courts have been managing
through property law for centuries.
94
But anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting
copyrights for themselves -- to write private laws without
accountability or deliberation -- that expropriate your interest in
your physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are an example
of this: there's no copyright here or in anywhere I know of that says
that an author should be able to control where you enjoy her creative
works, once you've paid for them. I can buy a book and throw it in my
bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever
I am: I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where
the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local
publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price. When I'm done
with it, I can sell it on or give it away in the UK. Copyright lawyers
call this "First Sale," but it may be simpler to think of it as
"Capitalism."
95
The keys to decrypt a DVD are controlled by an org called DVD-CCA, and
they have a bunch of licensing requirements for anyone who gets a key
from them. Among these is something called region-coding: if you buy a
DVD in France, it'll have a flag set that says, "I am a European DVD."
Bring that DVD to America and your DVD player will compare the flag to
its list of permitted regions, and if they don't match, it will tell
you that it's not allowed to play your disc.
96
Remember: there is no copyright that says that an author gets to do
this. When we wrote the copyright statutes and granted authors the
right to control display, performance, duplication, derivative works,
and so forth, we didn't leave out "geography" by accident. That was
on-purpose.
97
So when your French DVD won't play in America, that's not because it'd
be illegal to do so: it's because the studios have invented a
business-model and then invented a copyright law to prop it up. The DVD
is your property and so is the DVD player, but if you break the
region-coding on your disc, you're going to run afoul of
anticircumvention.
98
That's what happened to Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager who wanted
to watch French DVDs on his Norwegian DVD player. He and some pals
wrote some code to break the CSS so that he could do so. He's a wanted
man here in America; in Norway the studios put the local fuzz up to
bringing him up on charges of unlawfully trespassing upon a computer
system . When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon trespassed
upon?" the answer was: "His own."
99
His no-fooling, real and physical property has been expropriated by the
weird, notional, metaphorical intellectual property on his DVD: DRM
only works if your record player becomes the property of whomever's
records you're playing.
100
3. DRM systems are bad for biz
101
This is the worst of all the ideas embodied by DRM: that people who
make record-players should be able to spec whose records you can listen
to, and that people who make records should have a veto over the design
of record-players.
102
We've never had this principle: in fact, we've always had just the
reverse. Think about all the things that can be plugged into a parallel
or serial interface, which were never envisioned by their inventors.
Our strong economy and rapid innovation are byproducts of the ability
of anyone to make anything that plugs into anything else: from the
Flo-bee electric razor that snaps onto the end of your vacuum-hose to
the octopus spilling out of your car's dashboard lighter socket,
standard interfaces that anyone can build for are what makes
billionaires out of nerds.
103
The courts affirm this again and again. It used to be illegal to plug
anything that didn't come from AT&T into your phone-jack. They
claimed that this was for the safety of the network, but really it was
about propping up this little penny-ante racket that AT&T had in
charging you a rental fee for your phone until you'd paid for it a
thousand times over.
104
When that ban was struck down, it created the market for third-party
phone equipment, from talking novelty phones to answering machines to
cordless handsets to headsets -- billions of dollars of economic
activity that had been suppressed by the closed interface. Note that
AT&T was one of the big beneficiaries of this: they also got
into the business of making phone-kit.
105
DRM is the software equivalent of these closed hardware interfaces.
Robert Scoble is a Softie who has an excellent blog, where he wrote an
essay about the best way to protect your investment in the digital
music you buy. Should you buy Apple iTunes music, or Microsoft DRM
music? Scoble argued that Microsoft's music was a sounder investment,
because Microsoft would have more downstream licensees for its
proprietary format and therefore you'd have a richer ecosystem of
devices to choose from when you were shopping for gizmos to play your
virtual records on.
106
What a weird idea: that we should evaluate our record-purchases on the
basis of which recording company will allow the greatest diversity of
record-players to play its discs! That's like telling someone to buy
the Betamax instead of the Edison Kinetoscope because Thomas Edison is
a crank about licensing his patents; all the while ignoring the world's
relentless march to the more open VHS format.
107
It's a bad business. DVD is a format where the guy who makes the
records gets to design the record players. Ask yourself: how much
innovation has there been over the past decade of DVD players? They've
gotten cheaper and smaller, but where are the weird and amazing new
markets for DVD that were opened up by the VCR? There's a company
that's manufacturing the world's first HDD-based DVD jukebox, a thing
that holds 100 movies, and they're charging $27,000 for this
thing. We're talking about a few thousand dollars' worth of components
-- all that other cost is the cost of anticompetition.
108
4. DRM systems are bad for artists
109
But what of the artist? The hardworking filmmaker, the ink-stained
scribbler, the heroin-cured leathery rock-star? We poor slobs of the
creative class are everyone's favorite poster-children here: the RIAA
and MPAA hold us up and say, "Won't someone please think of the
children?" File-sharers say, "Yeah, we're thinking about the artists,
but the labels are The Man, who cares what happens to you?"
110
To understand what DRM does to artists, you need to understand how
copyright and technology interact. Copyright is inherently
technological, since the things it addresses -- copying, transmitting,
and so on -- are inherently technological.
111
The piano roll was the first system for cheaply copying music. It was
invented at a time when the dominant form of entertainment in America
was getting a talented pianist to come into your living room and pound
out some tunes while you sang along. The music industry consisted
mostly of sheet-music publishers.
112
The player piano was a digital recording and playback system.
Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes printed on
it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape, which they sold by
the thousands -- the hundreds of thousands -- the millions. They did
this without a penny's compensation to the publishers. They were
digital music pirates. Arrrr!
113
Predictably, the composers and music publishers went nutso. Sousa
showed up in Congress to say that:
114
These talking machines are going to ruin the
115
The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create a law
that said that any new system for reproducing music should be subject
to a veto from their industry association. Lucky for us, Congress
realized what side of their bread had butter on it and decided not to
criminalize the dominant form of entertainment in America.
116
But there was the problem of paying artists. The Constitution sets out
the purpose of American copyright: to promote the useful arts and
sciences. The composers had a credible story that they'd do less
composing if they weren't paid for it, so Congress needed a fix. Here's
what they came up with: anyone who paid a music publisher two cents
would have the right to make one piano roll of any song that publisher
published. The publisher couldn't say no, and no one had to hire a
lawyer at $200 an hour to argue about whether the payment should be two
cents or a nickel.
117
This compulsory license is still in place today: when Joe Cocker sings
"With a Little Help from My Friends," he pays a fixed fee to the
Beatles' publisher and away he goes -- even if Ringo hates the idea. If
you ever wondered how Sid Vicious talked Anka into letting him get a
crack at "My Way," well, now you know.
118
That compulsory license created a world where a thousand times more
money was made by a thousand times more creators who made a thousand
times more music that reached a thousand times more people.
119
This story repeats itself throughout the technological century, every
ten or fifteen years. Radio was enabled by a voluntary blanket license
-- the music companies got together and asked for a consent decree so
that they could offer all their music for a flat fee. Cable TV took a
compulsory: the only way cable operators could get their hands on
broadcasts was to pirate them and shove them down the wire, and
Congress saw fit to legalize this practice rather than screw around
with their constituents' TVs.
120
Sometimes, the courts and Congress decided to simply take away a
copyright -- that's what happened with the VCR. When Sony brought out
the VCR in 1976, the studios had already decided what the experience of
watching a movie in your living room would look like: they'd licensed
out their programming for use on a machine called a Discovision, which
played big LP-sized discs that were read-only. Proto-DRM.
121
The copyright scholars of the day didn't give the VCR very good odds.
Sony argued that their box allowed for a fair use, which is defined as
a use that a court rules is a defense against infringement based on
four factors: whether the use transforms the work into something new,
like a collage; whether it uses all or some of the work; whether the
work is artistic or mainly factual; and whether the use undercuts the
creator's business-model.
122
The Betamax failed on all four fronts: when you time-shifted or
duplicated a Hollywood movie off the air, you made a non-transformative
use of 100 percent of a creative work in a way that directly undercut
the Discovision licensing stream.
123
Jack Valenti, the mouthpiece for the motion-picture industry, told
Congress in 1982 that the VCR was to the American film industry "as the
Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone."
124
But the Supreme Court ruled against Hollywood in 1984, when it
determined that any device capable of a substantial non-infringing use
was legal. In other words, "We don't buy this Boston Strangler
business: if your business model can't survive the emergence of this
general-purpose tool, it's time to get another business-model or go
broke."
125
Hollywood found another business model, as the broadcasters had, as the
Vaudeville artists had, as the music publishers had, and they made more
art that paid more artists and reached a wider audience.
126
There's one thing that every new art business-model had in common: it
embraced the medium it lived in.
127
This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful new
medium: it is true to itself. The Luther Bible didn't succeed on the
axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable: they were ugly, they
weren't in Church Latin, they weren't read aloud by someone who could
interpret it for his lay audience, they didn't represent years of
devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by someone who had given his life over
to God. The thing that made the Luther Bible a success was its
scalability: it was more popular because it was more proliferate: all
success factors for a new medium pale beside its profligacy. The most
successful organisms on earth are those that reproduce the most: bugs
and bacteria, nematodes and virii. Reproduction is the best of all
survival strategies.
128
Piano rolls didn't sound as good as the music of a skilled pianist: but
they scaled better . Radio lacked the social elements of live
performance, but more people could build a crystal set and get it aimed
correctly than could pack into even the largest Vaudeville house. MP3s
don't come with liner notes, they aren't sold to you by a
hipper-than-thou record store clerk who can help you make your choice,
bad rips and truncated files abound: I once downloaded a twelve-second
copy of "Hey Jude" from the original Napster. Yet MP3 is outcompeting
the CD. I don't know what to do with CDs anymore: I get them, and
they're like the especially nice garment bag they give you at the fancy
suit shop: it's nice and you feel like a goof for throwing it out, but
Christ, how many of these things can you usefully own? I can put ten
thousand songs on my laptop, but a comparable pile of discs, with liner
notes and so forth -- that's a liability: it's a piece of my monthly
storage-locker costs.
129
Here are the two most important things to know about computers and the
Internet:
130
1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits
131
2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to another
very cheaply and quickly
132
Any new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with computers will
embrace these two facts, not regret them. A newspaper press is a
machine for spitting out cheap and smeary newsprint at speed: if you
try to make it output fine art lithos, you'll get junk. If you try to
make it output newspapers, you'll get the basis for a free society.
133
And so it is with the Internet. At the heyday of Napster, record execs
used to show up at conferences and tell everyone that Napster was
doomed because no one wanted lossily compressed MP3s with no liner
notes and truncated files and misspelled metadata.
134
Today we hear ebook publishers tell each other and anyone who'll listen
that the barrier to ebooks is screen resolution. It's bollocks, and so
is the whole sermonette about how nice a book looks on your bookcase
and how nice it smells and how easy it is to slip into the tub. These
are obvious and untrue things, like the idea that radio will catch on
once they figure out how to sell you hotdogs during the intermission,
or that movies will really hit their stride when we can figure out how
to bring the actors out for an encore when the film's run out. Or that
what the Protestant Reformation really needs is Luther Bibles with
facsimile illumination in the margin and a rent-a-priest to read aloud
from your personal Word of God.
135
New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only
better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the
stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media
are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution,
low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being
everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so
malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn
it into a page-a-day mailing list.
136
The only really successful epublishing -- I mean, hundreds of
thousands, millions of copies distributed and read -- is the bookwarez
scene, where scanned-and-OCR'd books are distributed on the darknet.
The only legit publishers with any success at epublishing are the ones
whose books cross the Internet without technological fetter: publishers
like Baen Books and my own, Tor, who are making some or all of their
catalogs available in ASCII and HTML and PDF.
137
The hardware-dependent ebooks, the DRM use-and-copy-restricted ebooks,
they're cratering. Sales measured in the tens, sometimes the hundreds.
Science fiction is a niche business, but when you're selling copies by
the ten, that's not even a business, it's a hobby.
138
Every one of you has been riding a curve where you read more and more
words off of more and more screens every day through most of your
professional careers. It's zero-sum: you've also been reading fewer
words off of fewer pages as time went by: the dinosauric executive who
prints his email and dictates a reply to his secretary is
info-roadkill.
139
Today, at this very second, people read words off of screens for every
hour that they can find. Your kids stare at their Game Boys until their
eyes fall out. Euroteens ring doorbells with their hypertrophied,
SMS-twitching thumbs instead of their index fingers.
140
Paper books are the packaging that books come in. Cheap
printer-binderies like the Internet Bookmobile that can produce a full
bleed, four color, glossy cover, printed spine, perfect-bound book in
ten minutes for a dollar are the future of paper books: when you need
an instance of a paper book, you generate one, or part of one, and
pitch it out when you're done. I landed at SEA-TAC on Monday and burned
a couple CDs from my music collection to listen to in the rental car.
When I drop the car off, I'll leave them behind. Who needs 'em?
141
Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed
copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utilitarian
one. There's nothing moral about paying a composer tuppence for
the piano-roll rights, there's nothing immoral about not paying
Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just
the best way of balancing out so that people's physical property rights
in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get
enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books
and paintings.
142
Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies and
cheapens creation, reproduction and distribution. The existing
copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old production,
reproduction and distribution system, and they'll be weakened by the
new technology. But new technology always gives us more art with a
wider reach: that's what tech is for .
143
Tech gives us bigger pies that more artists can get a bite out of.
That's been tacitly acknowledged at every stage of the copyfight since
the piano roll. When copyright and technology collide, it's copyright
that changes.
144
Which means that today's copyright -- the thing that DRM nominally
props up -- didn't come down off the mountain on two stone tablets. It
was created in living memory to accommodate the technical reality
created by the inventors of the previous generation. To abandon
invention now robs tomorrow's artists of the new businesses and new
reach and new audiences that the Internet and the PC can give them.
145
5. DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
146
When Sony brought out the VCR, it made a record player that could play
Hollywood's records, even if Hollywood didn't like the idea. The
industries that grew up on the back of the VCR -- movie rentals, home
taping, camcorders, even Bar Mitzvah videographers -- made billions for
Sony and its cohort.
147
That was good business -- even if Sony lost the Betamax-VHS format
wars, the money on the world-with-VCRs table was enough to make up for
it.
148
But then Sony acquired a relatively tiny entertainment company and it
started to massively screw up. When MP3 rolled around and Sony's
walkman customers were clamoring for a solid-state MP3 player, Sony let
its music business-unit run its show: instead of making a high-capacity
MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music Clips, low-capacity devices that
played brain-damaged DRM formats like Real and OpenMG. They spent good
money engineering "features" into these devices that kept their
customers from freely moving their music back and forth between their
devices. Customers stayed away in droves.
149
Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. The market
leaders are poky Singaporean outfits like Creative Labs -- the kind of
company that Sony used to crush like a bug, back before it got borged
by its entertainment unit -- and PC companies like Apple.
150
That's because Sony shipped a product that there was no market demand
for. No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, "Damn, I wish Sony
would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do
less with my music." Presented with an alternative, Sony's customers
enthusiastically jumped ship.
151
The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used to rip their
CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced smaller,
better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but you also fixed it so
that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their PCs. What that
meant is that when they backed up their music to another hard-drive and
reinstalled their OS (something that the spyware and malware wars has
made more common than ever), they discovered that after they restored
their music that they could no longer play it. The player saw the new
OS as a different machine, and locked them out of their own music.
152
There is no market demand for this "feature." None of your customers
want you to make expensive modifications to your products that make
backing up and restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your
customers will be less forgiving than the moment that they are
recovering from catastrophic technology failures.
153
I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten
months, and because I always order the new models the day they're
announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means that I hit
Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early on and
found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth of iTunes
songs I'd bought because one of my authorized machines was a lemon that
Apple had broken up for parts, one was in the shop getting fixed by
Apple, and one was my mom's computer, 3,000 miles away in Toronto.
154
If I had been a less good customer for Apple's hardware, I would have
been fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evangelist for Apple's
products -- if I hadn't shown my mom how iTunes Music Store worked -- I
would have been fine. If I hadn't bought so much iTunes music that
burning it to CD and re-ripping it and re-keying all my metadata was
too daunting a task to consider, I would have been fine.
155
As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control
spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own
music, at a time when my Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a time
when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to Apple.
156
I'm an edge case here, but I'm a leading edge case. If Apple
succeeds in its business plans, it will only be a matter of time until
even average customers have upgraded enough hardware and bought enough
music to end up where I am.
157
You know what I would totally buy? A record player that let me play
everybody's records. Right now, the closest I can come to that is an
open source app called VLC, but it's clunky and buggy and it didn't
come pre-installed on my computer.
158
Sony didn't make a Betamax that only played the movies that Hollywood
was willing to permit -- Hollywood asked them to do it, they proposed
an early, analog broadcast flag that VCRs could hunt for and respond to
by disabling recording. Sony ignored them and made the product they
thought their customers wanted.
159
I'm a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft customers, I
want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and I think that you
are just the company to give it to me.
160
Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Microsoft has
been making tools of piracy that change copyright law for decades now.
Outlook, Exchange and MSN are tools that abet widescale digital
infringement.
161
More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and serve
copies of documents without their authors' consent, something that, if
it is legal today, is only legal because companies like Microsoft went
ahead and did it and dared lawmakers to prosecute.
162
Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and won so
decisively that most people never even realized that there was a fight.
163
Do it again! This is a company that looks the world's roughest,
toughest anti-trust regulators in the eye and laughs. Compared to
anti-trust people, copyright lawmakers are pantywaists. You can take
them with your arm behind your back.
164
In Siva Vaidhyanathan's book The Anarchist in the Library, he talks
about why the studios are so blind to their customers' desires. It's
because people like you and me spent the 80s and the 90s telling them
bad science fiction stories about impossible DRM technology that would
let them charge a small sum of money every time someone looked at a
movie -- want to fast-forward? That feature costs another penny.
Pausing is two cents an hour. The mute button will cost you a quarter.
165
When Mako Analysis issued their report last month advising phone
companies to stop supporting Symbian phones, they were just writing the
latest installment in this story. Mako says that phones like my P900,
which can play MP3s as ringtones, are bad for the cellphone economy,
because it'll put the extortionate ringtone sellers out of business.
What Mako is saying is that just because you bought the CD doesn't mean
that you should expect to have the ability to listen to it on your MP3
player, and just because it plays on your MP3 player is no reason to
expect it to run as a ringtone. I wonder how they feel about alarm
clocks that will play a CD to wake you up in the morning? Is that
strangling the nascent "alarm tone" market?
166
The phone companies' customers want Symbian phones and for now, at
least, the phone companies understand that if they don't sell them,
someone else will.
167
The market opportunity for a truly capable devices is enormous. There's
a company out there charging $27,000 for a DVD jukebox -- go and
eat their lunch! Steve Jobs isn't going to do it: he's off at the D
conference telling studio execs not to release hi-def movies until
they're sure no one will make a hi-def DVD burner that works with a PC.
168
Maybe they won't buy into his BS, but they're also not much interested
in what you have to sell. At the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group
meetings where the Broadcast Flag was hammered out, the studios'
position was, "We'll take anyone's DRM except Microsoft's and
Philips'." When I met with UK broadcast wonks about the European
version of the Broadcast Flag underway at the Digital Video
Broadcasters' forum, they told me, "Well, it's different in Europe:
mostly they're worried that some American company like Microsoft will
get their claws into European television."
169
American film studios didn't want the Japanese electronics companies to
get a piece of the movie pie, so they fought the VCR. Today, everyone
who makes movies agrees that they don't want to let you guys get
between them and their customers.
170
Sony didn't get permission. Neither should you. Go build the record
player that can play everyone's records.
171
Because if you don't do it, someone else will.
172
3. The DRM Sausage Factory
173
Otto von Bismarck quipped, "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to
see them being made." I've seen sausages made. I've seen laws made.
Both pale in comparison to the process by which anti-copying technology
agreements are made.
174
This technology, usually called "Digital Rights Management" (DRM)
proposes to make your computer worse at copying some of the files on
its hard-drive or on other media. Since all computer operations involve
copying, this is a daunting task -- as security expert Bruce Schneier
has said, "Making bits harder to copy is like making water that's less
wet."
175
At root, DRMs are technologies that treat the owner of a computer or
other device as an attacker, someone against whom the system must be
armored. Like the electrical meter on the side of your house, a DRM is
a technology that you possess, but that you are never supposed to be
able to manipulate or modify. Unlike the your meter, though, a DRM that
is defeated in one place is defeated in all places, nearly
simultaneously. That is to say, once someone takes the DRM off a song
or movie or ebook, that freed collection of bits can be sent to anyone
else, anywhere the network reaches, in an eyeblink. DRM crackers need
cunning: those who receive the fruits of their labor need only know how
to download files from the Internet.
176
Why manufacture a device that attacks its owner? A priori, one would
assume that such a device would cost more to make than a friendlier
one, and that customers would prefer not to buy devices that treat them
as presumptive criminals. DRM technologies limit more than copying:
they limit ranges of uses, such as viewing a movie in a different
country, copying a song to a different manufacturer's player, or even
pausing a movie for too long. Surely, this stuff hurts sales: who goes
into a store and asks, "Do you have any music that's locked to just one
company's player? I'm in the market for some lock-in."
177
So why do manufacturers do it? As with many strange behaviors, there's
a carrot at play here, and a stick.
178
The carrot is the entertainment industries' promise of access to their
copyrighted works. Add DRM to your iPhone and we'll supply music for
it. Add DRM to your TiVo and we'll let you plug it into our satellite
receivers. Add DRM to your Zune and we'll let you retail our music in
your Zune store.
179
The stick is the entertainment industries' threat of lawsuits for
companies that don't comply. In the last century, entertainment
companies fought over the creation of records, radios, jukeboxes, cable
TV, VCRs, MP3 players and other technologies that made it possible to
experience a copyrighted work in a new way without permission. There's
one battle that serves as the archetype for the rest: the fight over
the VCR.
180
The film studios were outraged by Sony's creation of the VCR. They had
found a DRM supplier they preferred, a company called Discovision that
made non-recordable optical discs. Discovision was the only company
authorized to play back movies in your living room. The only way to get
a copyrighted work onto a VCR cassette was to record it off the TV,
without permission. The studios argued that Sony -- whose Betamax was
the canary in this legal coalmine -- was breaking the law by unjustly
endangering their revenue from Discovision royalties. Sure, they
could just sell pre-recorded Betamax tapes, but Betamax was a
read-write medium: they could be copied . Moreover, your personal
library of Betamax recordings of the Sunday night movie would eat into
the market for Discovision discs: why would anyone buy a pre-recorded
video cassette when they could amass all the video they needed with a
home recorder and a set of rabbit-ears?
181
The Supreme Court threw out these arguments in a 1984 5-4 decision, the
"Betamax Decision." This decision held that the VCR was legal because
it was "capable of sustaining a substantially non-infringing use." That
means that if you make a technology that your customers can use
legally, you're not on the hook for the illegal stuff they do.
182
This principle guided the creation of virtually every piece of IT
invented since: the Web, search engines, YouTube, Blogger, Skype, ICQ,
AOL, MySpace... You name it, if it's possible to violate copyright with
it, the thing that made it possible is the Betamax principle.
183
Unfortunately, the Supremes shot the Betamax principle in the gut two
years ago, with the Grokster decision. This decision says that a
company can be found liable for its customers' bad acts if they can be
shown to have "induced" copyright infringement. So, if your company
advertises your product for an infringing use, or if it can be shown
that you had infringement in mind at the design stage, you can be found
liable for your customers' copying. The studios and record labels and
broadcasters love this ruling, and they like to think that it's
even broader than what the courts set out. For example, Viacom is suing
Google for inducing copyright infringement by allowing YouTube users to
flag some of their videos as private. Private videos can't be found by
Viacom's copyright-enforcement bots, so Viacom says that privacy should
be illegal, and that companies that give you the option of privacy
should be sued for anything you do behind closed doors.
184
The gutshot Betamax doctrine will bleed out all over the industry for
decades (or until the courts or Congress restore it to health),
providing a grisly reminder of what happens to companies that try to
pour the entertainment companies' old wine into new digital bottles
without permission. The tape-recorder was legal, but the digital
tape-recorder is an inducement to infringement, and must be stopped.
185
The promise of access to content and the threat of legal execution for
non-compliance is enough to lure technology's biggest players to the
DRM table.
186
I started attending DRM meetings in March, 2002, on behalf of my former
employers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. My first meeting was the
one where Broadcast Flag was born. The Broadcast Flag was weird even by
DRM standards. Broadcasters are required, by law, to deliver TV and
radio without DRM, so that any standards-compliant receiver can receive
them. The airwaves belong to the public, and are loaned to broadcasters
who have to promise to serve the public interest in exchange. But the
MPAA and the broadcasters wanted to add DRM to digital TV, and so they
proposed that a law should be passed that would make all manufacturers
promise to pretend that there was DRM on broadcast signals,
receiving them and immediately squirreling them away in encrypted form.
187
The Broadcast Flag was hammered out in a group called the Broadcast
Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) a sub-group from the MPAA's "Content
Protection Technology Working Group," which also included reps from all
the big IT companies (Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and so on), consumer
electronics companies (Panasonic, Philips, Zenith), cable companies,
satellite companies, and anyone else who wanted to pay $100 to attend
the "public" meetings, held every six weeks or so (you can attend these
meetings yourself if you find yourself near LAX on one of the upcoming
dates).
188
CPTWG (pronounced Cee-Pee-Twig) is a venerable presence in the DRM
world. It was at CPTWG that the DRM for DVDs was hammered out. CPTWG
meetings open with a "benediction," delivered by a lawyer, who reminds
everyone there that what they say might be quoted "on the front page of
the New York Times," (though journalists are barred from attending
CPTWG meetings and no minutes are published by the organization) and
reminding all present not to do anything that would raise eyebrows at
the FTC's anti-trust division (I could swear I've seen the Microsoft
people giggling during this part, though that may have been my
imagination).
189
The first part of the meeting is usually taken up with administrative
business and presentations from DRM vendors, who come out to promise
that this time they've really, really figured out how to make computers
worse at copying. The real meat comes after the lunch, when the group
splits into a series of smaller meetings, many of them closed-door and
private (the representatives of the organizations responsible for
managing DRM on DVDs splinter off at this point).
190
Then comes the working group meetings, like the BPDG. The BPDG was
nominally set up to set up the rules for the Broadcast Flag. Under the
Flag, manufacturers would be required to limit their "outputs and
recording methods" to a set of "approved technologies." Naturally,
every manufacturer in the room showed up with a technology to add to
the list of approved technologies -- and the sneakier ones showed up
with reasons why their competitors' technologies shouldn't be
approved. If the Broadcast Flag became law, a spot on the "approved
technologies" list would be a license to print money: everyone who
built a next-gen digital TV would be required, by law, to buy only
approved technologies for their gear.
191
The CPTWG determined that there would be three "chairmen" of the
meetings: a representative from the broadcasters, a representative from
the studios, and a representative from the IT industry (note that no
"consumer rights" chair was contemplated -- we proposed one and got
laughed off the agenda). The IT chair was filled by an Intel
representative, who seemed pleased that the MPAA chair, Fox Studios's
Andy Setos, began the process by proposing that the approved
technologies should include only two technologies, both of which Intel
partially owned.
192
Intel's presence on the committee was both reassurance and threat:
reassurance because Intel signaled the fundamental reasonableness of
the MPAA's requirements -- why would a company with a bigger turnover
than the whole movie industry show up if the negotiations weren't worth
having? Threat because Intel was poised to gain an advantage that might
be denied to its competitors.
193
We settled in for a long negotiation. The discussions were drawn out
and heated. At regular intervals, the MPAA reps told us that we were
wasting time -- if we didn't hurry things along, the world would move
on and consumers would grow accustomed to un-crippled digital TVs.
Moreover, Rep Billy Tauzin, the lawmaker who'd evidently promised to
enact the Broadcast Flag into law, was growing impatient. The warnings
were delivered in quackspeak, urgent and crackling, whenever the
discussions dragged, like the crack of the commissars' pistols, urging
us forward.
194
You'd think that a "technology working group" would concern itself with
technology, but there was precious little discussion of bits and bytes,
ciphers and keys. Instead, we focused on what amounted to contractual
terms: if your technology got approved as a DTV "output," what
obligations would you have to assume? If a TiVo could serve as an
"output" for a receiver, what outputs would the TiVo be allowed to
have?
195
The longer we sat there, the more snarled these contractual terms
became: winning a coveted spot on the "approved technology" list would
be quite a burden! Once you were in the club, there were all sorts of
rules about whom you could associate with, how you had to comport
yourself and so on.
196
One of these rules of conduct was "robustness." As a condition of
approval, manufacturers would have to harden their technologies so that
their customers wouldn't be able to modify, improve upon, or even
understand their workings. As you might imagine, the people who made
open source TV tuners were not thrilled about this, as "open source"
and "non-user-modifiable" are polar opposites.
197
Another was "renewability:" the ability of the studios to revoke
outputs that had been compromised in the field. The studios expected
the manufacturers to make products with remote "kill switches" that
could be used to shut down part or all of their device if someone,
somewhere had figured out how to do something naughty with it. They
promised that we'd establish criteria for renewability later, and that
it would all be "fair."
198
But we soldiered on. The MPAA had a gift for resolving the worst
snarls: when shouting failed, they'd lead any recalcitrant player out
of the room and negotiate in secret with them, leaving the rest of us
to cool our heels. Once, they took the Microsoft team out of the room
for six hours , then came back and announced that digital video
would be allowed to output on non-DRM monitors at a greatly reduced
resolution (this "feature" appears in Vista as "fuzzing").
199
The further we went, the more nervous everyone became. We were headed
for the real meat of the negotiations: the criteria by which
approved technology would be evaluated: how many bits of crypto would
you need? Which ciphers would be permissible? Which features would and
wouldn't be allowed?
200
Then the MPAA dropped the other shoe: the sole criteria for inclusion
on the list would be the approval of one of its member-companies, or a
quorum of broadcasters. In other words, the Broadcast Flag wouldn't be
an "objective standard," describing the technical means by which video
would be locked away -- it would be purely subjective, up to the whim
of the studios. You could have the best product in the world, and they
wouldn't approve it if your business-development guys hadn't bought
enough drinks for their business-development guys at a CES party.
201
To add insult to injury, the only technologies that the MPAA were
willing to consider for initial inclusion as "approved" were the two
that Intel was involved with. The Intel co-chairman had a hard time
hiding his grin. He'd acted as Judas goat, luring in Apple, Microsoft,
and the rest, to legitimize a process that would force them to license
Intel's patents for every TV technology they shipped until the end of
time.
202
Why did the MPAA give Intel such a sweetheart deal? At the time, I
figured that this was just straight quid pro quo, like Hannibal said to
Clarice. But over the years, I started to see a larger pattern:
Hollywood likes DRM consortia, and they hate individual DRM vendors.
(I've written an entire article about this, but here's the gist: a
single vendor who succeeds can name their price and terms -- think of
Apple or Macrovision -- while a consortium is a more easily divided
rabble, susceptible to co-option in order to produce ever-worsening
technologies -- think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD). Intel's technologies were
held through two consortia, the 5C and 4C groups.
203
The single-vendor manufacturers were livid at being locked out of the
digital TV market. The final report of the consortium reflected this --
a few sheets written by the chairmen describing the "consensus" and
hundreds of pages of angry invective from manufacturers and consumer
groups decrying it as a sham.
204
Tauzin washed his hands of the process: a canny, sleazy Hill operator,
he had the political instincts to get his name off any proposal that
could be shown to be a plot to break voters' televisions (Tauzin found
a better industry to shill for, the pharmaceutical firms, who rewarded
him with a $2,000,000/year job as chief of PHARMA, the pharmaceutical
lobby).
205
Even Representative Ernest "Fritz" Hollings ("The Senator from Disney,"
who once proposed a bill requiring entertainment industry oversight of
all technologies capable of copying) backed away from proposing a bill
that would turn the Broadcast Flag into law. Instead, Hollings sent a
memo to Michael Powell, then-head of the FCC, telling him that the FCC
already had jurisdiction to enact a Broadcast Flag regulation, without
Congressional oversight.
206
Powell's staff put Hollings's letter online, as they are required to do
by federal sunshine laws. The memo arrived as a Microsoft Word file --
which EFF then downloaded and analyzed. Word stashes the identity of a
document's author in the file metadata, which is how EFF discovered
that the document had been written by a staffer at the MPAA.
207
This was truly remarkable. Hollings was a powerful committee chairman,
one who had taken immense sums of money from the industries he was
supposed to be regulating. It's easy to be cynical about this kind of
thing, but it's genuinely unforgivable: politicians draw a public
salary to sit in public office and work for the public good. They're
supposed to be working for us, not their donors.
208
But we all know that this isn't true. Politicians are happy to give
special favors to their pals in industry. However, the Hollings memo
was beyond the pale. Staffers for the MPAA were writing Hollings's
memos, memos that Hollings then signed and mailed off to the heads of
major governmental agencies.
209
The best part was that the legal eagles at the MPAA were wrong. The FCC
took "Hollings's" advice and enacted a Broadcast Flag regulation that
was almost identical to the proposal from the BPDG, turning themselves
into America's "device czars," able to burden any digital technology
with "robustness," "compliance" and "revocation rules." The rule lasted
just long enough for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to strike it down
and slap the FCC for grabbing unprecedented jurisdiction over the
devices in our living rooms.
210
So ended the saga of the Broadcast Flag. More or less. In the years
since the Flag was proposed, there have been several attempts to
reintroduce it through legislation, all failed. And as more and more
innovative, open devices like the Neuros OSD enter the market, it gets
harder and harder to imagine that Americans will accept a mandate that
takes away all that functionality.
211
But the spirit of the Broadcast Flag lives on. DRM consortia are all
the rage now -- outfits like AACS LA, the folks who control the DRM in
Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, are thriving and making headlines by issuing fatwas
against people who publish their secret integers. In Europe, a DRM
consortium working under the auspices of the Digital Video Broadcasters
Forum (DVB) has just shipped a proposed standard for digital TV DRM
that makes the Broadcast Flag look like the work of patchouli-scented
infohippies. The DVB proposal would give DRM consortium the ability to
define what is and isn't a valid "household" for the purposes of
sharing your video within your "household's devices." It limits how
long you're allowed to pause a video for, and allows for restrictions
to be put in place for hundreds of years, longer than any copyright
system in the world would protect any work for.
212
If all this stuff seems a little sneaky, underhanded and even illegal
to you, you're not alone. When representatives of nearly all the
world's entertainment, technology, broadcast, satellite and cable
companies gather in a room to collude to cripple their offerings, limit
their innovation, and restrict the market, regulators take notice.
213
That's why the EU is taking a hard look at HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. These
systems aren't designed: they're governed, and the governors are
shadowy group of offshore giants who answer to no one -- not even their
own members! I once called the DVD-Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA)
on behalf of a Time-Warner magazine, Popular Science, for a comment
about their DRM. Not only wouldn't they allow me to speak to a
spokesman, the person who denied my request also refused to be
identified.
214
The sausage factory grinds away, but today, more activists than ever
are finding ways to participate in the negotiations, slowing them up,
making them account for themselves to the public. And so long as you,
the technology-buying public, pay attention to what's going on, the
activists will continue to hold back the tide.
215
4. Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America chose Hollywood and
Wal-Mart, and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway
216
Back in 1985, the Senate was ready to clobber the music industry for
exposing America's impressionable youngsters to sex, drugs and
rock-and-roll. Today, the the Attorney General is proposing to give the
RIAA legal tools to attack people who attempt infringement.
217
Through most of America's history, the US government has been at odds
with the entertainment giants, treating them as purveyors of filth. But
not anymore: today, the US Trade Rep using America's political clout to
force Russia to institute police inspections of its CD presses (savor
the irony: post-Soviet Russia forgoes its hard-won freedom of the press
to protect Disney and Universal!).
218
How did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top trade priority?
I blame the "Information Economy."
219
No one really knows what "Information Economy" means, but by the early
90s, we knew it was coming. America deployed her least reliable
strategic resource to puzzle out what an "information economy" was and
to figure out how to ensure America stayed atop the "new economy" --
America sent in the futurists.
220
We make the future in much the same way as we make the past. We don't
remember everything that happened to us, just selective details. We
weave our memories together on demand, filling in any empty spaces with
the present, which is lying around in great abundance. In Stumbling on
Happiness, Harvard psych prof Daniel Gilbert describes an experiment in
which people with delicious lunches in front of them are asked to
remember their breakfast: overwhelmingly, the people with good lunches
have more positive memories of breakfast than those who have bad
lunches. We don't remember breakfast -- we look at lunch and
superimpose it on breakfast.
221
We make the future in the same way: we extrapolate as much as we can,
and whenever we run out of imagination, we just shovel the present into
the holes. That's why our pictures of the future always seem to
resemble the present, only moreso.
222
So the futurists told us about the Information Economy: they took all
the "information-based" businesses (music, movies and microcode, in the
neat coinage of Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash) and projected
a future in which these would grow to dominate the world's economies.
223
There was only one fly in the ointment: most of the world's economies
consist of poor people who have more time than money, and if there's
any lesson to learn from American college kids, it's that people with
more time than money would rather copy information than pay for it.
224
Of course they would! Why, when America was a-borning, she was a pirate
nation, cheerfully copying the inventions of European authors and
inventors. Why not? The fledgling revolutionary republic could copy
without paying, keep the money on her shores, and enrich herself with
the products and ideas of imperial Europe. Of course, once the US
became a global hitter in the creative industries, out came the
international copyright agreements: the US signed agreements to protect
British authors in exchange for reciprocal agreements from the Brits to
protect American authors.
225
It's hard to see why a developing country would opt to export its GDP
to a rich country when it could get the same benefit by mere copying.
The US would have to sweeten the pot.
226
The pot-sweetener is the elimination of international trade-barriers.
Historically, the US has used tariffs to limit the import of
manufactured goods from abroad, and to encourage the import of raw
materials from abroad. Generally speaking, rich countries import poor
countries' raw materials, process them into manufactured goods, and
export them again. Globally speaking, if your country imports sugar and
exports sugar cane, chances are you're poor. If your country imports
wood and sells paper, chances are you're rich.
227
In 1995, the US signed onto the World Trade Organization and its
associated copyright and patent agreement, the TRIPS Agreement, and the
American economy was transformed.
228
Any fellow signatory to the WTO/TRIPS can export manufactured goods to
the USA without any tariffs. If it costs you $5 to manufacture and ship
a plastic bucket from your factory in Shenjin Province to the USA, you
can sell it for $6 and turn a $1 profit. And if it costs an American
manufacturer $10 to make the same bucket, the American manufacturer is
out of luck.
229
The kicker is this: if you want to export your finished goods to
America, you have to sign up to protect American copyrights in your own
country. Quid pro quo.
230
The practical upshot, 12 years later, is that most American
manufacturing has gone belly up, Wal-Mart is filled with Happy Meal
toys and other cheaply manufactured plastic goods, and the whole world
has signed onto US copyright laws.
231
But signing onto those laws doesn't mean you'll enforce them. Sure,
where a country is really over a barrel (cough, Russia, cough), they'll
take the occasional pro forma step to enforce US copyrights, no matter
how ridiculous and totalitarian it makes them appear. But with the
monthly Russian per-capita GDP hovering at $200, it's just not
plausible that Russians are going to start paying $15 for a CD, nor is
it likely that they'll stop listening to music until their economy
picks up.
232
But the real action is in China, where pressing bootleg media is a
national sport. China keeps promising that it will do something about
this, but it's not like the US has any recourse if China drags its
heels. Trade courts may find against China, but China holds all the
cards. The US can't afford to abandon Chinese manufacturing (and no one
will vote for the politician who hextuples the cost of WiFi cards,
brassieres, iPods, staplers, yoga mats, and spatulas by cutting off
trade with China). The Chinese can just sit tight.
233
The futurists were just plain wrong. An "information economy" can't be
based on selling information. Information technology makes copying
information easier and easier. The more IT you have, the less control
you have over the bits you send out into the world. It will never,
ever, EVER get any harder to copy information from here on in. The
information economy is about selling everything except information.
234
The US traded its manufacturing sector's health for its entertainment
industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of
the rustbelt. The US bet wrong.
235
But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn't
know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants,
asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its
business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check.
Turn the world's copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT
industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check.
236
It'll never work. It can never work. There will always be an
entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to
published digital works. Once it's in the world, it'll be copied. This
is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the
printed editions: I'm not going to stop people from copying the
electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to
buy the printed objects.
237
But there is an information economy. You don't even need a computer to
participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique
motorcycles and doesn't own a PC, benefited from the information
economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my
neighborhood.
238
Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson
plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit
from the information economy when they move their patient files to
efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the
information economy through better access to fresh data used in the
preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information
economy when office-slaves look up the weekend's weather online and
decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend's sailing. Families of
migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons
and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union
terminal.
239
This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the
country and improves our lives.
240
And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but
not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected
to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying -- no
matter what that does to productivity -- they cannot co-exist. Where
our operating systems are rendered inoperable by "copy protection,"
they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned
into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist.
241
The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it
will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that
stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is
about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile.
242
What country do you want to live in?
243
5. Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars?
244
Hollywood loves sequels -- they're generally a safe bet, provided that
you're continuing an already successful franchise. But you'd have to be
nuts to shoot a sequel to a disastrous flop -- say, The Adventures of
Pluto Nash or Town and Country.
245
As disastrous as Pluto Nash was, it was practically painless when
compared to the Napster debacle. That shipwreck took place six years
ago, when the record industry succeeded in shutting down the pioneering
file-sharing service, and they show no signs of recovery.
246
The disastrous thing about Napster wasn't that it it existed, but
rather that the record industry managed to kill it.
247
Napster had an industry-friendly business-model: raise venture capital,
start charging for access to the service, and then pay billions of
dollars to the record companies in exchange for licenses to their
works. Yes, they kicked this plan off without getting permission from
the record companies, but that's not so unusual. The record companies
followed the same business plan a hundred years ago, when they started
recording sheet music without permission, raising capital and garnering
profits, and then working out a deal to pay the composers for
the works they'd built their fortunes on.
248
Napster's plan was plausible. They had the fastest-adopted technology
in the history of the world, garnering 52,000,000 users in 18 months --
more than had voted for either candidate in the preceding US election!
-- and discovering, via surveys, that a sizable portion would happily
pay between $10 and $15 a month for the service. What's more, Napster's
architecture included a gatekeeper that could be used to lock-out
non-paying users.
249
The record industry refused to deal. Instead, they sued, bringing
Napster to its knees. Bertelsmann bought Napster out of the ensuing
bankruptcy, a pattern that was followed by other music giants, like
Universal, who slayed MP3.com in the courts, then brought home the
corpse on the cheap, running it as an internal project.
250
After that, the record companies had a field day: practically every
venture-funded P2P company went down, and millions of dollars were
funneled from the tech venture capital firms to Sand Hill Road to the
RIAA's members, using P2P companies and the courts as conduits.
251
But the record companies weren't ready to replace these services with
equally compelling alternatives. Instead, they fielded inferior
replacements like PressPlay, with limited catalog, high prices, and
anti-copying technology (digital rights management, or DRM) that
alienated users by the millions by treating them like crooks instead of
customers. These half-baked ventures did untold damage to the record
companies and their parent firms.
252
Just look at Sony: they should have been at the top of the heap. They
produce some of the world's finest, best-designed electronics. They own
one of the largest record labels in the world. The synergy should have
been incredible. Electronics would design the walkmen, music would take
care of catalog, and marketing would sell it all.
253
You know the joke about European hell? The English do the cooking, the
Germans are the lovers, the Italians are the police and the French run
the government. With Sony, it seemed like music was designing the
walkmen, marketing was doing the catalog, and electronic was in charge
of selling. Sony's portable players -- the MusicClip and others -- were
so crippled by anti-copying technology that they couldn't even play
MP3s, and the music selection at Sony services like PressPlay was
anemic, expensive, and equally hobbled. Sony isn't even a name in the
portable audio market anymore -- today's walkman is an iPod.
254
Of course, Sony still has a record-label -- for now. But sales are
falling, and the company is reeling from the 2005 "rootkit" debacle,
where in deliberately infected eight million music CDs with a hacker
tool called a rootkit, compromising over 500,000 US computer networks,
including military and government networks, all in a (failed) bid to
stop copying of its CDs.
255
The public wasn't willing to wait for Sony and the rest to wake up and
offer a service that was as compelling, exciting and versatile as
Napster. Instead, they flocked to a new generation of services like
Kazaa and the various Gnutella networks. Kazaa's business model was to
set up offshore, on the tiny Polynesian island of Vanuatu, and bundle
spyware with its software, making its profits off of fees from spyware
crooks. Kazaa didn't want to pay billions for record industry licenses
-- they used the international legal and finance system to hopelessly
snarl the RIAA's members through half a decade of wild profitability.
The company was eventually brought to ground, but the founders walked
away and started Skype and then Joost.
256
Meantime, dozens of other services had sprung up to fill Kazaa's niche
-- AllofMP3, the notorious Russian site, was eventually killed through
intervention of the US Trade Representative and the WTO, and was reborn
practically the next day under a new name.
257
It's been eight years since Sean Fanning created Napster in his college
dorm-room. Eight years later, there isn't a single authorized music
service that can compete with the original Napster. Record sales are
down every year, and digital music sales aren't filling in the crater.
The record industry has contracted to four companies, and it may soon
be three if EMI can get regulatory permission to put itself on the
block.
258
The sue-em-all-and-let-God-sort-em-out plan was a flop in the box
office, a flop in home video, and a flop overseas. So why is Hollywood
shooting a remake?
259
YouTube, 2007, bears some passing similarity to Napster, 2001. Founded
by a couple guys in a garage, rocketed to popular success, heavily
capitalized by a deep-pocketed giant. Its business model? Turn
popularity into dollars and offer a share to the rightsholders whose
works they're using. This is an historically sound plan: cable
operators got rich by retransmitting broadcasts without permission, and
once they were commercial successes, they sat down to negotiate to pay
for those copyrights (just as the record companies negotiated with
composers after they'd gotten rich selling records bearing those
compositions).
260
YouTube 07 has another similarity to Napster 01: it is being sued by
entertainment companies.
261
Only this time, it's not (just) the record industry. Broadcasters,
movie studios, anyone who makes video or audio is getting in on the
act. I recently met an NBC employee who told me that he thought that a
severe, punishing legal judgment would send a message to the tech
industry not to field this kind of service anymore.
262
Let's hope he's wrong. Google -- YouTube's owners -- is a grown-up of a
company, unusual in a tech industry populated by corporate adolescents.
They have lots of money and a sober interest in keeping it. They want
to sit down with A/V rightsholders and do a deal. Six years after the
Napster verdict, that kind of willingness is in short supply.
263
Most of the tech "companies" with an interest in commercializing
Internet AV have no interest in sitting down with the studios. They're
either nebulous open source projects (like mythtv, a free hyper-TiVo
that skips commercials, downloads and shares videos and is wide open to
anyone who wants to modify and improve it), politically motivated
anarchists (like ThePirateBay, a Swedish BitTorrent tracker site that
has mirrors in three countries with non-interoperable legal systems,
where they respond to legal notices by writing sarcastic and profane
letters and putting them online), or out-and-out crooks like the
bootleggers who use P2P to seed their DVD counterfeiting operations.
264
It's not just YouTube. TiVo, who pioneered the personal video recorder,
is feeling the squeeze, being systematically locked out of the digital
cable and satellite market. Their efforts to add a managed TiVoToGo
service were attacked by the rightsholders who fought at the FCC to
block them. Cable/satellite operators and the studios would much prefer
the public to transition to "bundled" PVRs that come with your TV
service.
265
These boxes are owned by the cable/satellite companies, who have
absolute control over them. Time-Warner has been known to remotely
delete stored episodes of shows just before the DVD ships, and many
operators have started using "flags" that tell recorders not to allow
fast-forwarding, or to prevent recording altogether.
266
The reason that YouTube and TiVo are more popular than ThePirateBay and
mythtv is that they're the easiest way for the public to get what it
wants -- the video we want, the way we want it. We use these services
because they're like the original Napster: easy, well-designed,
functional.
267
But if the entertainment industry squeezes these players out,
ThePirateBay and mythtv are right there, waiting to welcome us in with
open arms. ThePirateBay has already announced that it is launching a
YouTube competitor with no-plugin, in-browser viewing. Plenty of
entrepreneurs are looking at easing the pain and cast of setting up
your own mythtv box. The only reason that the barriers to BitTorrent
and mythtv exist is that it hasn't been worth anyone's while to
capitalize projects to bring them down. But once the legit competitors
of these services are killed, look out.
268
The thing is, the public doesn't want managed services with limited
rights. We don't want to be stuck using approved devices in approved
ways. We never have -- we are the spiritual descendants of the
customers for "illegal" record albums and "illegal" cable TV. The
demand signal won't go away.
269
There's no good excuse for going into production on a sequel to The
Napster Wars. We saw that movie. We know how it turns out. Every
Christmas, we get articles about how this was the worst Christmas ever
for CDs. You know what? CD sales are never going to improve. CDs
have been rendered obsolete by Internet distribution -- and the record
industry has locked itself out of the only profitable, popular music
distribution systems yet invented.
270
Companies like Google/YouTube and TiVo are rarities: tech companies
that want to do deals. They need to be cherished by entertainment
companies, not sued.
271
(Thanks to Bruce Nash and The-Numbers.com for research assistance with
this article)
272
6. You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen
273
"I don't like reading off a computer screen" -- it's a cliché of
the e-book world. It means "I don't read novels off of computer
screens" (or phones, or PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers), and often
as not the person who says it is someone who, in fact, spends every
hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a computer screen. It's like
watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how
much he hates chocolate.
274
But I know what you mean. You don't like reading long-form works off of
a computer screen. I understand perfectly -- in the ten minutes since I
typed the first word in the paragraph above, I've checked my mail,
deleted two spams, checked an image-sharing community I like,
downloaded a YouTube clip of Stephen Colbert complaining about the
iPhone (pausing my MP3 player first), cleared out my RSS reader, and
then returned to write this paragraph.
275
This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form
narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who's made cardboard
furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip's done, gotta start the music up)
(19 more RSS items). But that's not to say that it's not an
entertainment medium -- indeed, practically everything I do on the
computer entertains the hell out of me. It's nearly all text-based,
too. Basically, what I do on the computer is pleasure-reading. But it's
a fundamentally more scattered, splintered kind of pleasure. Computers
have their own cognitive style, and it's not much like the cognitive
style invented with the first modern novel (one sec, let me google that
and confirm it), Don Quixote, some 400 years ago.
276
The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological
changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The
cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of
the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the
cognitive style of the novel.
277
Computers want you to do lots of things with them. Networked computers
doubly so -- they (another RSS item) have a million ways of asking for
your attention, and just as many ways of rewarding it.
278
There's a persistent fantasy/nightmare in the publishing world of the
advent of very sharp, very portable computer screens. In the fantasy
version, this creates an infinite new market for electronic books, and
we all get to sell the rights to our work all over again. In the
nightmare version, this leads to runaway piracy, and no one ever gets
to sell a novel again.
279
I think they're both wrong. The infinitely divisible copyright ignores
the "decision cost" borne by users who have to decide, over and over
again, whether they want to spend a millionth of a cent on a millionth
of a word -- no one buys newspapers by the paragraph, even though most
of us only read a slim fraction of any given paper. A super-sharp,
super-portable screen would be used to read all day long, but most of
us won't spend most of our time reading anything recognizable as a book
on them.
280
Take the record album. Everything about it is technologically
pre-determined. The technology of the LP demanded artwork to
differentiate one package from the next. The length was set by the
groove density of the pressing plants and playback apparatus. The
dynamic range likewise. These factors gave us the idea of the
40-to-60-minute package, split into two acts, with accompanying
artwork. Musicians were encouraged to create works that would be
enjoyed as a unitary whole for a protracted period -- think of Dark
Side of the Moon, or Sgt. Pepper's.
281
No one thinks about albums today. Music is now divisible to the single,
as represented by an individual MP3, and then subdivisible into
snippets like ringtones and samples. When recording artists demand that
their works be considered as a whole -- like when Radiohead insisted
that the iTunes Music Store sell their whole album as a single,
indivisible file that you would have to listen to all the way through
-- they sound like cranky throwbacks.
282
The idea of a 60-minute album is as weird in the Internet era as the
idea of sitting through 15 hours of Der Ring des Nibelungen was 20
years ago. There are some anachronisms who love their long-form opera,
but the real action is in the more fluid stuff that can slither around
on hot wax -- and now the superfluid droplets of MP3s and samples.
Opera survives, but it is a tiny sliver of a much bigger, looser music
market. The future composts the past: old operas get mounted for living
anachronisms; Andrew Lloyd Webber picks up the rest of the business.
283
Or look at digital video. We're watching more digital video, sooner,
than anyone imagined. But we're watching it in three-minute chunks from
YouTube. The video's got a pause button so you can stop it when the
phone rings and a scrubber to go back and forth when you miss something
while answering an IM.
284
And attention spans don't increase when you move from the PC to a
handheld device. These things have less capacity for multitasking than
real PCs, and the network connections are slower and more expensive.
But they are fundamentally multitasking devices -- you can always stop
reading an e-book to play a hand of solitaire that is interrupted by a
phone call -- and their social context is that they are used in public
places, with a million distractions. It is socially acceptable to
interrupt someone who is looking at a PDA screen. By contrast, the TV
room -- a whole room for TV! -- is a shrine where none may speak until
the commercial airs.
285
The problem, then, isn't that screens aren't sharp enough to read
novels off of. The problem is that novels aren't screeny enough to
warrant protracted, regular reading on screens.
286
Electronic books are a wonderful adjunct to print books. It's great to
have a couple hundred novels in your pocket when the plane doesn't take
off or the line is too long at the post office. It's cool to be able to
search the text of a novel to find a beloved passage. It's excellent to
use a novel socially, sending it to your friends, pasting it into your
sig file.
287
But the numbers tell their own story -- people who read off of screens
all day long buy lots of print books and read them primarily on paper.
There are some who prefer an all-electronic existence (I'd like to be
able to get rid of the objects after my first reading, but keep the
e-books around for reference), but they're in a tiny minority.
288
There's a generation of web writers who produce "pleasure reading" on
the web. Some are funny. Some are touching. Some are enraging. Most
dwell in Sturgeon's 90th percentile and below. They're not writing
novels. If they were, they wouldn't be web writers.
289
Mostly, we can read just enough of a free e-book to decide whether to
buy it in hardcopy -- but not enough to substitute the e-book for the
hardcopy. Like practically everything in marketing and promotion, the
trick is to find the form of the work that serves as enticement, not
replacement.
290
Sorry, got to go -- eight more e-mails.
291
7. How Do You Protect Artists?
292
Artists have lots of problems. We get plagiarized, ripped off by
publishers, savaged by critics, counterfeited -- and we even get our
works copied by "pirates" who give our stuff away for free online.
293
But no matter how bad these problems get, they're a distant second to
the gravest, most terrifying problem an artist can face: censorship.
294
It's one thing to be denied your credit or compensation, but it's
another thing entirely to have your work suppressed, burned or banned.
You'd never know it, however, judging from the state of the law
surrounding the creation and use of internet publishing tools.
295
Since 1995, every single legislative initiative on this subject in the
UK's parliament, the European parliament and the US Congress has
focused on making it easier to suppress "illegitimate" material online.
From libel to copyright infringement, from child porn to anti-terror
laws, our legislators have approached the internet with a single-minded
focus on seeing to it that bad material is expeditiously removed.
296
And that's the rub. I'm certainly no fan of child porn or hate speech,
but every time a law is passed that reduces the burden of proof on
those who would remove material from the internet, artists' fortunes
everywhere are endangered.
297
Take the US's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has
equivalents in every European state that has implemented the 2001
European Union Copyright Directive. The DMCA allows anyone to have any
document on the internet removed, simply by contacting its publisher
and asserting that the work infringes his copyright.
298
The potential for abuse is obvious, and the abuse has been widespread:
from the Church of Scientology to companies that don't like what
reporters write about them, DMCA takedown notices have fast become the
favorite weapon in the cowardly bully's arsenal.
299
But takedown notices are just the start. While they can help silence
critics and suppress timely information, they're not actually very
effective at stopping widespread copyright infringement. Viacom sent
over 100,000 takedown notices to YouTube last February, but seconds
after it was all removed, new users uploaded it again.
300
Even these takedown notices were sloppily constructed: they included
videos of friends eating at barbecue restaurants and videos of
independent bands performing their own work. As a Recording Industry
Association of America spokesman quipped, "When you go trawling with a
net, you catch a few dolphins."
301
Viacom and others want hosting companies and online service providers
to preemptively evaluate all the material that their users put online,
holding it to ensure that it doesn't infringe copyright before they
release it.
302
This notion is impractical in the extreme, for at least two reasons.
First, an exhaustive list of copyrighted works would be unimaginably
huge, as every single creative work is copyrighted from the instant
that it is created and "fixed in a tangible medium".
303
Second, even if such a list did exist, it would be trivial to defeat,
simply by introducing small changes to the infringing copies, as
spammers do with the text of their messages in order to evade spam
filters.
304
In fact, the spam wars have some important lessons to teach us here.
Like copyrighted works, spams are infinitely varied and more are being
created every second. Any company that could identify spam messages --
including permutations and variations on existing spams -- could write
its own ticket to untold billions.
305
Some of the smartest, most dedicated engineers on the planet devote
every waking hour to figuring out how to spot spam before it gets
delivered. If your inbox is anything like mine, you'll agree that the
war is far from won.
306
If the YouTubes of the world are going to prevent infringement, they're
going to have to accomplish this by hand-inspecting every one of the
tens of billions of blog posts, videos, text-files, music files and
software uploads made to every single server on the internet.
307
And not just cursory inspections, either -- these inspections will have
to be undertaken by skilled, trained specialists (who'd better be
talented linguists, too -- how many English speakers can spot an
infringement in Urdu?).
308
Such experts don't come cheap, which means that you can anticipate a
terrible denuding of the fertile jungle of internet hosting companies
that are primary means by which tens of millions of creative people
share the fruits of their labor with their fans and colleagues.
309
It would be a great Sovietisation of the world's digital printing
presses, a contraction of a glorious anarchy of expression into a
regimented world of expensive and narrow venues for art.
310
It would be a death knell for the kind of focused, non-commercial
material whose authors couldn't fit the bill for a "managed" service's
legion of lawyers, who would be replaced by more of the same -- the
kind of lowest common denominator rubbish that fills the cable channels
today.
311
And the worst of it is, we're marching toward this "solution" in the
name of protecting artists. Gee, thanks.
312
8. It's the Information Economy, Stupid
313
Since the 1970s, pundits have predicted a transition to an "information
economy." The vision of an economy based on information seized the
imaginations of the world's governments. For decades now, they have
been creating policies to "protect" information -- stronger copyright
laws, international treaties on patents and trademarks, treaties to
protect anti-copying technology.
314
The thinking is simple: an information economy must be based on buying
and selling information. Therefore, we need policies to make it harder
to get access to information unless you've paid for it. That means that
we have to make it harder for you to share information, even after
you've paid for it. Without the ability to fence off your information
property, you can't have an information market to fuel the information
economy.
315
But this is a tragic case of misunderstanding a metaphor. Just as the
industrial economy wasn't based on making it harder to get access to
machines, the information economy won't be based on making it harder to
get access to information. Indeed, the opposite seems to be true: the
more IT we have, the easier it is to access any given piece of
information -- for better or for worse.
316
It used to be that copy-prevention companies' strategies went like
this: "We'll make it easier to buy a copy of this data than to make an
unauthorized copy of it. That way, only the uber-nerds and the
cash-poor/time-rich classes will bother to copy instead of buy." But
every time a PC is connected to the Internet and its owner is taught to
use search tools like Google (or The Pirate Bay), a third option
appears: you can just download a copy from the Internet. Every
techno-literate participant in the information economy can choose to
access any data, without having to break the anti-copying technology,
just by searching for the cracked copy on the public Internet. If
there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that an information economy
will increase the technological literacy of its participants.
317
As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room in Shanghai, behind the
Great Firewall of China. Theoretically, I can't access blogging
services that carry negative accounts of Beijing's doings, like
Wordpress, Blogspot and Livejournal, nor the image-sharing site Flickr,
nor Wikipedia. The (theoretically) omnipotent bureaucrats of the local
Minitrue have deployed their finest engineering talent to stop me.
Well, these cats may be able to order political prisoners executed and
their organs harvested for Party members, but they've totally failed to
keep Chinese people (and big-nose tourists like me) off the world's
Internet. The WTO is rattling its sabers at China today, demanding that
they figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at Bruce Willis
movies without permission -- but the Chinese government can't even
figure out how to stop Chinese people from looking at seditious
revolutionary tracts online.
318
And, of course, as Paris Hilton, the Church of Scientology and the King
of Thailand have discovered, taking a piece of information off the
Internet is like getting food coloring out of a swimming pool. Good
luck with that.
319
To see the evidence of the real information economy, look to all the
economic activity that the Internet enables -- not the stuff that it
impedes. All the commerce conducted by salarymen who can book their own
flights with Expedia instead of playing blind-man's bluff with a travel
agent ("Got any flights after 4PM to Frankfurt?"). All the garage
crafters selling their goods on Etsy.com. All the publishers selling
obscure books through Amazon that no physical bookstore was willing to
carry. The salwar kameez tailors in India selling bespoke clothes to
westerners via eBay, without intervention by a series of skimming
intermediaries. The Internet-era musicians who use the net to pack
venues all over the world by giving away their recordings on social
services like MySpace. Hell, look at my last barber, in Los Angeles:
the man doesn't use a PC, but I found him by googling for "barbers"
with my postcode -- the information economy is driving his cost of
customer acquisition to zero, and he doesn't even have to actively
participate in it.
320
Better access to more information is the hallmark of the information
economy. The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our
networks get and the better our search tools get, the more economic
activity the information economy generates. Many of us sell information
in the information economy -- I sell my printed books by giving away
electronic books, lawyers and architects and consultants are in the
information business and they drum up trade with Google ads, and Google
is nothing but an info-broker -- but none of us rely on curtailing
access to information. Like a bottled water company, we compete with
free by supplying a superior service, not by eliminating the
competition.
321
The world's governments might have bought into the old myth of the
information economy, but not so much that they're willing to ban the PC
and the Internet.
322
9. Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever
323
Let me start by saying that I love Amazon. I buy everything from books
to clothes to electronics to medication to food to batteries to toys to
furniture to baby supplies from the company. I once even bought an
ironing board on Amazon. No company can top them for ease of use or for
respecting consumer rights when it comes to refunds, ensuring
satisfaction, and taking good care of loyal customers.
324
As a novelist, I couldn't be happier about Amazon's existence. Not only
does Amazon have a set of superb recommendation tools that help me sell
books, but it also has an affiliate program that lets me get up to 8.5%
in commissions for sales of my books through the site - nearly doubling
my royalty rate.
325
As a consumer advocate and activist, I'm delighted by almost every
public policy initiative from Amazon. When the Author's Guild tried to
get Amazon to curtail its used-book market, the company refused to back
down. Founder Jeff Bezos (who is a friend of mine) even wrote, "when
someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that
book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone
understands this."
326
More recently, Amazon stood up to the US government, who'd gone on an
illegal fishing expedition for terrorists (TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS!
TERRORISTS!) and asked Amazon to turn over the purchasing history of
24,000 Amazon customers. The company spent a fortune fighting for our
rights, and won.
327
It also has a well-deserved reputation for taking care over copyright
"takedown" notices for the material that its customers post on its
site, discarding ridiculous claims rather than blindly acting on every
single notice, no matter how frivolous.
328
But for all that, it has to be said: Whenever Amazon tries to sell a
digital download, it turns into one of the dumbest companies on the
web.
329
Take the Kindle, the $400 handheld ebook reader that Amazon shipped
recently, to vast, ringing indifference.
330
The device is cute enough - in a clumsy, overpriced, generation-one
kind of way - but the early adopter community recoiled in horror at the
terms of service and anti-copying technology that infected it. Ebooks
that you buy through the Kindle can't be lent or resold (remember,
"when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell
that book...Everyone understands this.")
331
Mark Pilgrim's "The Future of Reading" enumerates five other Kindle
showstoppers: Amazon can change your ebooks without notifying you or
getting your permission; and if you violate any of the "agreement", it
can delete your ebooks, even if you've paid for them, and you get no
appeal.
332
It's not just the Kindle, either. Amazon Unbox, the semi-abortive video
download service, shipped with terms of service that included your
granting permission for Amazon to install any software on your
computer, to spy on you, to delete your videos, to delete any other
file on your hard drive, to deny you access to your movies if you lose
them in a crash. This comes from the company that will cheerfully ship
you a replacement DVD if you email them and tell them that the one you
just bought never turned up in the post.
333
Even Amazon's much-vaunted MP3 store comes with terms of service that
prevent lending and reselling.
334
I am mystified by this. Amazon is the kind of company that every
etailer should study and copy - the gold standard for e-commerce. You'd
think that if there was any company that would intuitively get the web,
it would be Amazon.
335
What's more, this is a company that stands up to rightsholder groups,
publishers and the US government - but only when it comes to physical
goods. Why is it that whenever a digital sale is in the offing, Amazon
rolls over on its back and wets itself?
336
10. What's the Most Important Right Creators Have?
337
Any discussion of "creator's rights" is likely to be limited to talk
about copyright, but copyright is just a side-dish for creators: the
most important right we have is the right to free expression. And these
two rights are always in tension.
338
Take Viacom's claims against YouTube. The entertainment giant says that
YouTube has been profiting from the fact that YouTube users upload
clips from Viacom shows, and they demand that YouTube take steps to
prevent this from happening in the future. YouTube actually offered to
do something very like this: they invited Viacom and other
rightsholders to send them all the clips they wanted kept offline, and
promised to programatically detect these clips and interdict them.
339
But Viacom rejected this offer. Rather, the company wants YouTube to
just figure it out, determine a priori which video clips are being
presented with permission and which ones are not. After all, Viacom
does the very same thing: it won't air clips until a battalion of
lawyers have investigated them and determined whether they are lawful.
340
But the Internet is not cable television. Net-based hosting outfits --
including YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, Scribd, and the Internet Archive --
offer free publication venues to all comers, enabling anyone to publish
anything. In 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress
considered the question of liability for these companies and decided to
offer them a mixed deal: hosting companies don't need to hire a million
lawyers to review every blog-post before it goes live, but
rightsholders can order them to remove any infringing material from the
net just by sending them a notice that the material infringes.
341
This deal enabled hosting companies to offer free platforms for
publication and expression to everyone. But it also allowed anyone to
censor the Internet, just by making claims of infringement, without
offering any evidence to support those claims, without having to go to
court to prove their claims (this has proven to be an attractive
nuisance, presenting an irresistible lure to anyone with a beef against
an online critic, from the Church of Scientology to Diebold's voting
machines division).
342
The proposal for online hosts to figure out what infringes and what
doesn't is wildly impractical. Under most countries' copyright laws,
creative works receive a copyright from the moment that they are "fixed
in a tangible medium" (hard drives count), and this means that the pool
of copyrighted works is so large as to be practically speaking
infinite. Knowing whether a work is copyrighted, who holds the
copyright, and whether a posting is made with the rightsholder's
permission (or in accord with each nation's varying ideas about fair
use) is impossible. The only way to be sure is to start from the
presumption that each creative work is infringing, and then make each
Internet user prove, to some lawyer's satisfaction, that she has the
right to post each drib of content that appears on the Web.
343
Imagine that such a system were the law of the land. There's no way
Blogger or YouTube or Flickr could afford to offer free hosting to
their users. Rather, all these hosted services would have to charge
enough for access to cover the scorching legal bills associated with
checking all material. And not just the freebies, either: your local
ISP, the servers hosting your company's website or your page for family
genealogy: they'd all have to do the same kind of continuous checking
and re-checking of every file you publish with them.
344
It would be the end of any publication that couldn't foot the legal
bills to get off the ground. The multi-billion-page Internet would
collapse into the homogeneous world of cable TV (remember when we
thought that a "500-channel universe" would be unimaginably broad?
Imagine an Internet with only 500 "channels!"). From Amazon to Ask A
Ninja, from Blogger to The Everlasting Blort, every bit of online
content is made possible by removing the cost of paying lawyers to act
as the Internet's gatekeepers.
345
This is great news for artists. The traditional artist's lament is that
our publishers have us over a barrel, controlling the narrow and vital
channels for making works available -- from big gallery owners to movie
studios to record labels to New York publishers. That's why artists
have such a hard time negotiating a decent deal for themselves (for
example, most beginning recording artists have to agree to have money
deducted from their royalty statements for "breakage" of records en
route to stores -- and these deductions are also levied against digital
sales through the iTunes Store!).
346
But, thanks to the web, artists have more options than ever. The
Internet's most popular video podcasts aren't associated with TV
networks (with all the terrible, one-sided deals that would entail),
rather, they're independent programs like RocketBoom, Homestar Runner,
or the late, lamented Ze Frank Show. These creators -- along with all
the musicians, writers, and other artists using the net to earn their
living -- were able to write their own ticket. Today, major artists
like Radiohead and Madonna are leaving the record labels behind and
trying novel, net-based ways of promoting their work.
347
And it's not just the indies who benefit: the existence of successful
independent artists creates fantastic leverage for artists who
negotiate with the majors. More and more, the big media companies'
"like it or leave it" bargaining stance is being undermined by the
possibility that the next big star will shrug, turn on her heel, and
make her fortune without the big companies' help. This has humbled the
bigs, making their deals better and more artist-friendly.
348
Bargaining leverage is just for starters. The greatest threat that art
faces is suppression. Historically, artists have struggled just to make
themselves heard, just to safeguard the right to express themselves.
Censorship is history's greatest enemy of art. A limited-liability Web
is a Web where anyone can post anything and reach everyone .
349
What's more, this privilege isn't limited to artists. All manner of
communication, from the personal introspection in public "diaries" to
social chatter on MySpace and Facebook, are now possible. Some artists
have taken the bizarre stance that this "trivial" matter is unimportant
and thus a poor excuse for allowing hosted services to exist in the
first place. This is pretty arrogant: a society where only artists are
allowed to impart "important" messages and where the rest of us are
supposed to shut up about our loves, hopes, aspirations, jokes, family
and wants is hardly a democratic paradise.
350
Artists are in the free expression business, and technology that helps
free expression helps artists. When lowering the cost of copyright
enforcement raises the cost of free speech, every artist has a duty to
speak out. Our ability to make our art is inextricably linked with the
billions of Internet users who use the network to talk about their
lives.
351
11. Giving it Away
352
I've been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and
boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.
353
When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published
by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of
the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that
encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were
30,000 downloads from my site (and those downloaders were in turn free
to make more copies). Three years and six printings later, more than
700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded from my site. The
book's been translated into more languages than I can keep track of,
key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects and there
are two competing fan audio adaptations online.
354
Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they
wouldn't have bought it in any event, so I haven't lost any sales, I've
just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free
e-book as a substitute for the printed book--those are the lost sales.
But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the
printed book. They're gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber
lost sales, I'm ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a
million copies of my book has cost me nothing.
355
The thing about an e-book is that it's a social object. It wants to be
copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a
mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom
of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself
over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal
recommendation--when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we
could hear were "My friend suggested I pick up...." The friend had made
the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online
friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth.
356
There are two things that writers ask me about this arrangement: First,
does it sell more books, and second, how did you talk your publisher
into going for this mad scheme?
357
There's no empirical way to prove that giving away books sells more
books--but I've done this with three novels and a short story
collection (and I'll be doing it with two more novels and another
collection in the next year), and my books have consistently
outperformed my publisher's expectations. Comparing their sales to the
numbers provided by colleagues suggests that they perform somewhat
better than other books from similar writers at similar stages in their
careers. But short of going back in time and re-releasing the same
books under the same circumstances without the free e-book program,
there's no way to be sure.
358
What is certain is that every writer who's tried giving away e-books to
sell books has come away satisfied and ready to do it some more.
359
How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It's not as if Tor is
a spunky dotcom upstart. They're the largest science fiction publisher
in the world, and they're a division of the German publishing giant
Holtzbrinck. They're not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe
that information wants to be free. Rather, they're canny assessors of
the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary
genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who
put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe,
every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as
markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import. They
evangelize the books they love, form subcultures around them, cite them
in political arguments, sometimes they even rearrange their lives and
jobs around them.
360
What's more, science fiction's early adopters defined the social
character of the Internet itself. Given the high correlation between
technical employment and science fiction reading, it was inevitable
that the first nontechnical discussion on the Internet would be about
science fiction. The online norms of idle chatter, fannish organizing,
publishing and leisure are descended from SF fandom, and if any
literature has a natural home in cyberspace, it's science fiction, the
literature that coined the very word "cyberspace."
361
Indeed, science fiction was the first form of widely pirated literature
online, through "bookwarez" channels that contained books that had been
hand-scanned, a page at a time, converted to digital text and
proof-read. Even today, the mostly widely pirated literature online is
SF.
362
Nothing could make me more sanguine about the future. As publisher Tim
O'Reilly wrote in his seminal essay, Piracy is Progressive Taxation,
"being well-enough known to be pirated [is] a crowning achievement."
I'd rather stake my future on a literature that people care about
enough to steal than devote my life to a form that has no home in the
dominant medium of the century.
363
What about that future? Many writers fear that in the future,
electronic books will come to substitute more readily for print books,
due to changing audiences and improved technology. I am skeptical of
this--the codex format has endured for centuries as a simple and
elegant answer to the affordances demanded by print, albeit for a
relatively small fraction of the population. Most people aren't and
will never be readers--but the people who are readers will be readers
forever, and they are positively pervy for paper.
364
But say it does come to pass that electronic books are all anyone
wants.
365
I don't think it's practical to charge for copies of electronic works.
Bits aren't ever going to get harder to copy. So we'll have to figure
out how to charge for something else. That's not to say you can't
charge for a copy-able bit, but you sure can't force a reader to pay
for access to information anymore.
366
This isn't the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone through one
of these transitions. Vaudeville performers had to transition to radio,
an abrupt shift from having perfect control over who could hear a
performance (if they don't buy a ticket, you throw them out) to no
control whatsoever (any family whose 12-year-old could build a crystal
set, the day's equivalent of installing file-sharing software, could
tune in). There were business models for radio, but predicting them a
priori wasn't easy. Who could have foreseen that radio's great fortunes
would be had through creating a blanket license, securing a
Congressional consent decree, chartering a collecting society and
inventing a new form of statistical mathematics to fund it?
367
Predicting the future of publishing--should the wind change and printed
books become obsolete--is just as hard. I don't know how writers would
earn their living in such a world, but I do know that I'll never find
out by turning my back on the Internet. By being in the middle of
electronic publishing, by watching what hundreds of thousands of my
readers do with my e-books, I get better market intelligence than I
could through any other means. As does my publisher. As serious as I am
about continuing to work as a writer for the foreseeable future, Tor
Books and Holtzbrinck are just as serious. They've got even more riding
on the future of publishing than me. So when I approached my publisher
with this plan to give away books to sell books, it was a no-brainer
for them.
368
It's good business for me, too. This "market research" of giving away
e-books sells printed books. What's more, having my books more widely
read opens many other opportunities for me to earn a living from
activities around my writing, such as the Fulbright Chair I got at USC
this year, this high-paying article in Forbes, speaking engagements and
other opportunities to teach, write and license my work for translation
and adaptation. My fans' tireless evangelism for my work doesn't just
sell books--it sells me.
369
The golden age of hundreds of writers who lived off of nothing but
their royalties is bunkum. Throughout history, writers have relied on
day jobs, teaching, grants, inheritances, translation, licensing and
other varied sources to make ends meet. The Internet not only sells
more books for me, it also gives me more opportunities to earn my keep
through writing-related activities.
370
There has never been a time when more people were reading more words by
more authors. The Internet is a literary world of written words. What a
fine thing that is for writers.
371
12. Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to
Steal on the Internet
372
(Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006)
373
As a science fiction writer, no piece of news could make me more
hopeful. It beats the hell out of the alternative -- a future where the
dominant, pluripotent, ubiquitous medium has no place for science
fiction literature.
374
When radio and records were invented, they were pretty bad news for the
performers of the day. Live performance demanded charisma, the ability
to really put on a magnetic show in front of a crowd. It didn't matter
how technically accomplished you were: if you stood like a statue on
stage, no one wanted to see you do your thing. On the other hand, you
succeeded as a mediocre player, provided you attacked your performance
with a lot of brio.
375
Radio was clearly good news for musicians -- lots more musicians were
able to make lots more music, reaching lots more people and making lots
more money. It turned performance into an industry, which is what
happens when you add technology to art. But it was terrible news for
charismatics. It put them out on the street, stuck them with flipping
burgers and driving taxis. They knew it, too. Performers lobbied to
have the Marconi radio banned, to send Marconi back to the drawing
board, charged with inventing a radio they could charge admission to.
"We're charismatics, we do something as old and holy as the first story
told before the first fire in the first cave. What right have you to
insist that we should become mere clerks, working in an obscure
back-room, leaving you to commune with our audiences on our behalf?"
376
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. Seventy years later,
Napster showed us that, as William Gibson noted, "We may be at the end
of the brief period during which it is possible to charge for recorded
music." Surely we're at the end of the period where it's possible to
exclude those who don't wish to pay. Every song released can be
downloaded gratis from a peer-to-peer network (and will shortly get
easier to download, as hard-drive price/performance curves take us to a
place where all the music ever recorded will fit on a disposable
pocket-drive that you can just walk over to a friend's place and copy).
377
But have no fear: the Internet makes it possible for recording artists
to reach a wider audience than ever dreamt of before. Your potential
fans may be spread in a thin, even coat over the world, in a
configuration that could never be cost-effective to reach with
traditional marketing. But the Internet's ability to lower the costs
for artists to reach their audiences and for audiences to find artists
suddenly renders possible more variety in music than ever before.
378
Those artists can use the Internet to bring people back to the live
performances that characterized the heyday of Vaudeville. Use your
recordings -- which you can't control -- to drive admissions to your
performances, which you can control. It's a model that's worked great
for jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish. It's also a model that
won't work for many of today's artists; 70 years of evolutionary
pressure has selected for artists who are more virtuoso than
charismatic, artists optimized for recording-based income instead of
performance-based income. "How dare you tell us that we are to be
trained monkeys, capering on a stage for your amusement? We're not
charismatics, we're white-collar workers. We commune with our muses
behind closed doors and deliver up our work product when it's done,
through plastic, laser-etched discs. You have no right to demand that
we convert to a live-performance economy."
379
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. As bands on MySpace --
who can fill houses and sell hundreds of thousands of discs without a
record deal, by connecting individually with fans -- have shown,
there's a new market aborning on the Internet for music, one with fewer
gatekeepers to creativity than ever before.
380
That's the purpose of copyright, after all: to decentralize who gets to
make art. Before copyright, we had patronage: you could make art if the
Pope or the king liked the sound of it. That produced some damned
pretty ceilings and frescos, but it wasn't until control of art was
given over to the market -- by giving publishers a monopoly over the
works they printed, starting with the Statute of Anne in 1710 -- that
we saw the explosion of creativity that investment-based art could
create. Industrialists weren't great arbiters of who could and couldn't
make art, but they were better than the Pope.
381
The Internet is enabling a further decentralization in who gets to make
art, and like each of the technological shifts in cultural production,
it's good for some artists and bad for others. The important question
is: will it let more people participate in cultural production? Will it
further decentralize decision-making for artists?
382
And for SF writers and fans, the further question is, "Will it be any
good to our chosen medium?" Like I said, science fiction is the only
literature people care enough about to steal on the Internet. It's the
only literature that regularly shows up, scanned and run through
optical character recognition software and lovingly hand-edited on
darknet newsgroups, Russian websites, IRC channels and elsewhere (yes,
there's also a brisk trade in comics and technical books, but I'm
talking about prose fiction here -- though this is clearly a sign of
hope for our friends in tech publishing and funnybooks).
383
Some writers are using the Internet's affinity for SF to great effect.
I've released every one of my novels under Creative Commons licenses
that encourage fans to share them freely and widely -- even, in some
cases, to remix them and to make new editions of them for use in the
developing world. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is
in its sixth printing from Tor, and has been downloaded more than
650,000 times from my website, and an untold number of times from
others' websites.
384
I've discovered what many authors have also discovered: releasing
electronic texts of books drives sales of the print editions. An SF
writer's biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy. Of all the people
who chose not to spend their discretionary time and cash on our works
today, the great bulk of them did so because they didn't know they
existed, not because someone handed them a free e-book version.
385
But what kind of artist thrives on the Internet? Those who can
establish a personal relationship with their readers -- something
science fiction has been doing for as long as pros have been hanging
out in the con suite instead of the green room. These conversational
artists come from all fields, and they combine the best aspects of
charisma and virtuosity with charm -- the ability to conduct their
online selves as part of a friendly salon that establishes a
non-substitutable relationship with their audiences. You might find a
film, a game, and a book to be equally useful diversions on a slow
afternoon, but if the novel's author is a pal of yours, that's the one
you'll pick. It's a competitive advantage that can't be beat.
386
See Neil Gaiman's blog, where he manages the trick of carrying on a
conversation with millions. Or Charlie Stross's Usenet posts. Scalzi's
blogs. J. Michael Straczynski's presence on Usenet -- while in
production on Babylon 5, no less -- breeding an army of rabid fans
ready to fax-bomb recalcitrant TV execs into submission and
syndication. See also the MySpace bands selling a million units of
their CDs by adding each buyer to their "friends lists." Watch Eric
Flint manage the Baen Bar, and Warren Ellis's good-natured growling on
his sites, lists, and so forth.
387
Not all artists have in them to conduct an online salon with their
audiences. Not all Vaudevillians had it in them to transition to radio.
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. SF writers are supposed
to be soaked in the future, ready to come to grips with it. The future
is conversational: when there's more good stuff that you know about
that's one click away or closer than you will ever click on, it's not
enough to know that some book is good. The least substitutable good in
the Internet era is the personal relationship.
388
Conversation, not content, is king. If you were stranded on a desert
island and you opted to bring your records instead of your friends,
we'd call you a sociopath. Science fiction writers who can insert
themselves into their readers' conversations will be set for life.
389
13. How Copyright Broke
390
The theory is that if the Internet can't be controlled, then copyright
is dead. The thing is, the Internet is a machine for copying things
cheaply, quickly, and with as little control as possible, while
copyright is the right to control who gets to make copies, so these two
abstractions seem destined for a fatal collision, right?
391
Wrong.
392
The idea that copyright confers the exclusive right to control copying,
performance, adaptation, and general use of a creative work is a polite
fiction that has been mostly harmless throughout its brief history, but
which has been laid bare by the Internet, and the disjoint is showing.
393
Theoretically, if I sell you a copy of one of my novels, I'm conferring
upon you a property interest in a lump of atoms -- the pages of the
book -- as well as a license to make some reasonable use of the
ethereal ideas embedded upon the page, the copyrighted work.
394
Copyright started with a dispute between Scottish and English
publishers, and the first copyright law, 1709's Statute of Anne,
conferred the exclusive right to publish new editions of a book on the
copyright holder. It was a fair competition statute, and it was silent
on the rights that the copyright holder had in respect of his
customers: the readers. Publishers got a legal tool to fight their
competitors, a legal tool that made a distinction between the corpus --
a physical book -- and the spirit -- the novel writ on its pages. But
this legal nicety was not "customer-facing." As far as a reader was
concerned, once she bought a book, she got the same rights to it as she
got to any other physical object, like a potato or a shovel. Of course,
the reader couldn't print a new edition, but this had as much to do
with the realities of technology as it did with the law. Printing
presses were rare and expensive: telling a 17th-century reader that he
wasn't allowed to print a new edition of a book you sold him was about
as meaningful as telling him he wasn't allowed to have it laser-etched
on the surface of the moon. Publishing books wasn't something readers
did.
395
Indeed, until the photocopier came along, it was practically impossible
for a member of the audience to infringe copyright in a way that would
rise to legal notice. Copyright was like a tank-mine, designed only to
go off when a publisher or record company or radio station rolled over
it. We civilians couldn't infringe copyright (many thanks to Jamie
Boyle for this useful analogy).
396
It wasn't the same for commercial users of copyrighted works. For the
most part, a radio station that played a record was expected to secure
permission to do so (though this permission usually comes in the form
of a government-sanctioned blanket license that cuts through all the
expense of negotiating in favor of a single monthly payment that covers
all radio play). If you shot a movie, you were expected to get
permission for the music you put in it. Critically, there are many uses
that commercial users never paid for. Most workplaces don't pay for the
music their employees enjoy while they work. An ad agency that produces
a demo reel of recent commercials to use as part of a creative briefing
to a designer doesn't pay for this extremely commercial use. A film
company whose set-designer clips and copies from magazines and movies
to produce a "mood book" never secures permission nor offers
compensation for these uses.
397
Theoretically, the contours of what you may and may not do without
permission are covered under a legal doctrine called "fair use," which
sets out the factors a judge can use to weigh the question of whether
an infringement should be punished. While fair use is a vital part of
the way that works get made and used, it's very rare for an
unauthorized use to get adjudicated on this basis.
398
No, the realpolitik of unauthorized use is that users are not required
to secure permission for uses that the rights holder will never
discover. If you put some magazine clippings in your mood book, the
magazine publisher will never find out you did so. If you stick a
Dilbert cartoon on your office-door, Scott Adams will never know about
it.
399
So while technically the law has allowed rights holders to infinitely
discriminate among the offerings they want to make -- Special discounts
on this book, which may only be read on Wednesdays! This film
half-price, if you agree only to show it to people whose names start
with D! -- practicality has dictated that licenses could only be
offered on enforceable terms.
400
When it comes to retail customers for information goods -- readers,
listeners, watchers -- this whole license abstraction falls flat. No
one wants to believe that the book he's brought home is only partly
his, and subject to the terms of a license set out on the flyleaf.
You'd be a flaming jackass if you showed up at a con and insisted that
your book may not be read aloud, nor photocopied in part and marked up
for a writers' workshop, nor made the subject of a piece of
fan-fiction.
401
At the office, you might get a sweet deal on a coffee machine on the
promise that you'll use a certain brand of coffee, and even sign off on
a deal to let the coffee company check in on this from time to time.
But no one does this at home. We instinctively and rightly recoil from
the idea that our personal, private dealings in our homes should be
subject to oversight from some company from whom we've bought
something. We bought it. It's ours. Even when we rent things, like
cars, we recoil from the idea that Hertz might track our movements, or
stick a camera in the steering wheel.
402
When the Internet and the PC made it possible to sell a lot of purely
digital "goods" -- software, music, movies and books delivered as pure
digits over the wire, without a physical good changing hands, the
copyright lawyers groped about for a way to take account of this. It's
in the nature of a computer that it copies what you put on it. A
computer is said to be working, and of high quality, in direct
proportion to the degree to which it swiftly and accurately copies the
information that it is presented with.
403
The copyright lawyers had a versatile hammer in their toolbox: the
copyright license. These licenses had been presented to corporations
for years. Frustratingly (for the lawyers), these corporate customers
had their own counsel, and real bargaining power, which made it
impossible to impose really interesting conditions on them, like
limiting the use of a movie such that it couldn't be fast-forwarded, or
preventing the company from letting more than one employee review a
journal at a time.
404
Regular customers didn't have lawyers or negotiating leverage. They
were a natural for licensing regimes. Have a look at the next
click-through "agreement" you're provided with on purchasing a piece of
software or an electronic book or song. The terms set out in those
agreements are positively Dickensian in their marvelous idiocy. Sony
BMG recently shipped over eight million music CDs with an "agreement"
that bound its purchasers to destroy their music if they left the
country or had a house-fire, and to promise not to listen to their
tunes while at work.
405
But customers understand property -- you bought it, you own it -- and
they don't understand copyright. Practically no one understands
copyright. I know editors at multibillion-dollar publishing houses who
don't know the difference between copyright and trademark (if you've
ever heard someone say, "You need to defend a copyright or you lose
it," you've found one of these people who confuse copyright and
trademark; what's more, this statement isn't particularly true of
trademark, either). I once got into an argument with a senior Disney TV
exec who truly believed that if you re-broadcasted an old program, it
was automatically re-copyrighted and got another 95 years of exclusive
use (that's wrong).
406
So this is where copyright breaks: When copyright lawyers try to treat
readers and listeners and viewers as if they were (weak and unlucky)
corporations who could be strong-armed into license agreements you
wouldn't wish on a dog. There's no conceivable world in which people
are going to tiptoe around the property they've bought and paid for,
re-checking their licenses to make sure that they're abiding by the
terms of an agreement they doubtless never read. Why read something if
it's non-negotiable, anyway?
407
The answer is simple: treat your readers' property as property. What
readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors,
is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight. The
Securities Exchange Commission doesn't impose rules on you when you
loan a friend five bucks for lunch. Anti-gambling laws aren't triggered
when you bet your kids an ice-cream cone that you'll bicycle home
before them. Copyright shouldn't come between an end-user of a creative
work and her property.
408
Of course, this approach is made even simpler by the fact that
practically every customer for copyrighted works already operates on
this assumption. Which is not to say that this might make some
business-models more difficult to pursue. Obviously, if there was some
way to ensure that a given publisher was the only source for a
copyrighted work, that publisher could hike up its prices, devote less
money to service, and still sell its wares. Having to compete with free
copies handed from user to user makes life harder -- hasn't it always?
409
But it is most assuredly possible. Look at Apple's wildly popular
iTunes Music Store, which has sold over one billion tracks since 2003.
Every song on iTunes is available as a free download from user-to-user,
peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa. Indeed, the P2P monitoring company
Big Champagne reports that the average time-lapse between a
iTunes-exclusive song being offered by Apple and that same song being
offered on P2P networks is 180 seconds.
410
Every iTunes customer could readily acquire every iTunes song for free,
using the fastest-adopted technology in history. Many of them do (just
as many fans photocopy their favorite stories from magazines and pass
them around to friends). But Apple has figured out how to compete well
enough by offering a better service and a better experience to realize
a good business out of this. (Apple also imposes ridiculous licensing
restrictions, but that's a subject for a future column).
411
Science fiction is a genre of clear-eyed speculation about the future.
It should have no place for wishful thinking about a world where
readers willingly put up with the indignity of being treated as
"licensees" instead of customers.
412
And now a brief commercial interlude:
413
If you're enjoying this book and have been thinking of buying a copy,
here's a chance to do so:
414
<
415
14. In Praise of Fanfic
416
I wrote my first story when I was six. It was 1977, and I had just had
my mind blown clean out of my skull by a new movie called Star Wars
(the golden age of science fiction is 12; the golden age of cinematic
science fiction is six). I rushed home and stapled a bunch of paper
together, trimmed the sides down so that it approximated the size and
shape of a mass-market paperback, and set to work. I wrote an
elaborate, incoherent ramble about Star Wars, in which the events of
the film replayed themselves, tweaked to suit my tastes.
417
I wrote a lot of Star Wars fanfic that year. By the age of 12, I'd
graduated to Conan. By the age of 18, it was Harlan Ellison. By the age
of 26, it was Bradbury, by way of Gibson. Today, I hope I write more or
less like myself.
418
Walk the streets of Florence and you'll find a copy of the David on
practically every corner. For centuries, the way to become a Florentine
sculptor has been to copy Michelangelo, to learn from the master. Not
just the great Florentine sculptors, either -- great or terrible, they
all start with the master; it can be the start of a lifelong passion,
or a mere fling. The copy can be art, or it can be crap -- the best way
to find out which kind you've got inside you is to try.
419
Science fiction has the incredible good fortune to have attracted huge,
social groups of fan-fiction writers. Many pros got their start with
fanfic (and many of them still work at it in secret), and many fanfic
writers are happy to scratch their itch by working only with others'
universes, for the sheer joy of it. Some fanfic is great -- there's
plenty of Buffy fanfic that trumps the official, licensed tie-in novels
-- and some is purely dreadful.
420
Two things are sure about all fanfic, though: first, that people who
write and read fanfic are already avid readers of writers whose work
they're paying homage to; and second, that the people who write and
read fanfic derive fantastic satisfaction from their labors. This is
great news for writers.
421
Great because fans who are so bought into your fiction that they'll
make it their own are fans forever, fans who'll evangelize your work to
their friends, fans who'll seek out your work however you publish it.
422
Great because fans who use your work therapeutically, to work out their
own creative urges, are fans who have a damned good reason to stick
with the field, to keep on reading even as our numbers dwindle. Even
when the fandom revolves around movies or TV shows, fanfic is itself a
literary pursuit, something undertaken in the world of words. The
fanfic habit is a literary habit.
423
In Japan, comic book fanfic writers publish fanfic manga called
dojinshi -- some of these titles dwarf the circulation of the work they
pay tribute to, and many of them are sold commercially. Japanese comic
publishers know a good thing when they see it, and these fanficcers get
left alone by the commercial giants they attach themselves to.
424
And yet for all this, there are many writers who hate fanfic. Some
argue that fans have no business appropriating their characters and
situations, that it's disrespectful to imagine your precious fictional
people into sexual scenarios, or to retell their stories from a
different point of view, or to snatch a victorious happy ending from
the tragic defeat the writer ended her book with.
425
Other writers insist that fans who take without asking -- or against
the writer's wishes -- are part of an "entitlement culture" that has
decided that it has the moral right to lift scenarios and characters
without permission, that this is part of our larger postmodern moral
crisis that is making the world a worse place.
426
Some writers dismiss all fanfic as bad art and therefore unworthy of
appropriation. Some call it copyright infringement or trademark
infringement, and every now and again, some loony will actually
threaten to sue his readers for having had the gall to tell his stories
to each other.
427
I'm frankly flabbergasted by these attitudes. Culture is a lot older
than art -- that is, we have had social storytelling for a lot longer
than we've had a notional class of artistes whose creativity is
privileged and elevated to the numinous, far above the everyday
creativity of a kid who knows that she can paint and draw, tell a story
and sing a song, sculpt and invent a game.
428
To call this a moral failing -- and a new moral failing at that! -- is
to turn your back on millions of years of human history. It's no
failing that we internalize the stories we love, that we rework them to
suit our minds better. The Pygmalion story didn't start with Shaw or
the Greeks, nor did it end with My Fair Lady. Pygmalion is at least
thousands of years old -- think of Moses passing for the Pharaoh's son!
-- and has been reworked in a billion bedtime stories, novels, D&D
games, movies, fanfic stories, songs, and legends.
429
Each person who retold Pygmalion did something both original -- no two
tellings are just alike -- and derivative, for there are no new ideas
under the sun. Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. That's why writers
don't really get excited when they're approached by people with great
ideas for novels. We've all got more ideas than we can use -- what we
lack is the cohesive whole.
430
Much fanfic -- the stuff written for personal consumption or for a
small social group -- isn't bad art. It's just not art. It's not
written to make a contribution to the aesthetic development of
humanity. It's created to satisfy the deeply human need to play with
the stories that constitute our world. There's nothing trivial about
telling stories with your friends -- even if the stories themselves are
trivial. The act of telling stories to one another is practically
sacred -- and it's unquestionably profound. What's more, lots of
retellings are art: witness Pat Murphy's wonderful There and Back Again
(Tolkien) and Geoff Ryman's brilliant World Fantasy Award-winning Was
(L. Frank Baum).
431
The question of respect is, perhaps, a little thornier. The dominant
mode of criticism in fanfic circles is to compare a work to the canon
-- "Would Spock ever say that, in 'real' life?" What's more, fanfic
writers will sometimes apply this test to works that are of the canon,
as in "Spock never would have said that, and Gene Roddenberry has no
business telling me otherwise."
432
This is a curious mix of respect and disrespect. Respect because it's
hard to imagine a more respectful stance than the one that says that
your work is the yardstick against which all other work is to be
measured -- what could be more respectful than having your work made
into the gold standard? On the other hand, this business of telling
writers that they've given their characters the wrong words and deeds
can feel obnoxious or insulting.
433
Writers sometimes speak of their characters running away from them,
taking on a life of their own. They say that these characters -- drawn
from real people in our lives and mixed up with our own imagination --
are autonomous pieces of themselves. It's a short leap from there to
mystical nonsense about protecting our notional, fictional children
from grubby fans who'd set them to screwing each other or bowing and
scraping before some thinly veiled version of the fanfic writer
herself.
434
There's something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks
of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure
out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It's unsurprising that
when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the
task. But that's exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your
book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to
interpret that character's actions through his own lens.
435
Writers can't ask readers not to interpret their work. You can't enjoy
a novel that you haven't interpreted -- unless you model the author's
characters in your head, you can't care about what they do and why they
do it. And once readers model a character, it's only natural that
readers will take pleasure in imagining what that character might do
offstage, to noodle around with it. This isn't disrespect: it's active
reading.
436
Our field is incredibly privileged to have such an active fanfic
writing practice. Let's stop treating them like thieves and start
treating them like honored guests at a table that we laid just for
them.
437
15. Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
438
0. ToC:
439
1. Introduction
440
Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords,
page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so
on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness,
especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a
number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard -- a
Document Type Definition or scheme -- for a given subject area, say
washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing
washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water
consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their
inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and
other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the
washing machine he's seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously
for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his
criteria.
441
If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata
for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information,
it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly
qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the
downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently
discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an
upcoming trip.
442
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a
pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically
inflated market opportunities.
443
2. The problems
444
There are at least seven insurmountable obstacles between the world as
we know it and meta-utopia. I'll enumerate them below:.
445
2.1 People lie
446
Metadata exists in a competitive world. Suppliers compete to sell their
goods, cranks compete to convey their crackpot theories (mea culpa),
artists compete for audience. Attention-spans and wallets may not be
zero-sum, but they're damned close.
447
That's why:
448
A search for any commonly referenced term at a search-engine like
Altavista will often turn up at least one porn link in the first ten
results.
449
Your mailbox is full of spam with subject lines like "Re: The
information you requested."
450
Publisher's Clearing House sends out advertisements that holler "You
may already be a winner!"
451
Press-releases have gargantuan lists of empty buzzwords attached to
them.
452
Meta-utopia is a world of reliable metadata. When poisoning the well
confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in
short order.
453
2.2 People are lazy
454
You and me are engaged in the incredibly serious business of creating
information. Here in the Info-Ivory-Tower, we understand the importance
of creating and maintaining excellent metadata for our information.
455
But info-civilians are remarkably cavalier about their information.
Your clueless aunt sends you email with no subject line, half the pages
on Geocities are called "Please title this page" and your boss stores
all of his files on his desktop with helpful titles like
"UNTITLED.DOC."
456
This laziness is bottomless. No amount of ease-of-use will end it. To
understand the true depths of meta-laziness, download ten random MP3
files from Napster. Chances are, at least one will have no title,
artist or track information -- this despite the fact that adding in
this info merely requires clicking the "Fetch Track Info from CDDB"
button on every MP3-ripping application.
457
Short of breaking fingers or sending out squads of vengeful info-ninjas
to add metadata to the average user's files, we're never gonna get
there.
458
2.3 People are stupid
459
Even when there's a positive benefit to creating good metadata, people
steadfastly refuse to exercise care and diligence in their metadata
creation.
460
Take eBay: every seller there has a damned good reason for
double-checking their listings for typos and misspellings. Try
searching for "plam" on eBay. Right now, that turns up nine typoed
listings for "Plam Pilots." Misspelled listings don't show up in
correctly-spelled searches and hence garner fewer bids and lower
sale-prices. You can almost always get a bargain on a Plam Pilot at
eBay.
461
The fine (and gross) points of literacy -- spelling, punctuation,
grammar -- elude the vast majority of the Internet's users. To believe
that J. Random Users will suddenly and en masse learn to spell and
punctuate -- let alone accurately categorize their information
according to whatever hierarchy they're supposed to be using -- is
self-delusion of the first water.
462
2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself
463
In meta-utopia, everyone engaged in the heady business of describing
stuff carefully weighs the stuff in the balance and accurately divines
the stuff's properties, noting those results.
464
Simple observation demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption. When
Nielsen used log-books to gather information on the viewing habits of
their sample families, the results were heavily skewed to Masterpiece
Theater and Sesame Street. Replacing the journals with set-top boxes
that reported what the set was actually tuned to showed what the
average American family was really watching: naked midget wrestling,
America's Funniest Botched Cosmetic Surgeries and Jerry Springer
presents: "My daughter dresses like a slut!"
465
Ask a programmer how long it'll take to write a given module, or a
contractor how long it'll take to fix your roof. Ask a laconic
Southerner how far it is to the creek. Better yet, throw darts -- the
answer's likely to be just as reliable.
466
People are lousy observers of their own behaviors. Entire religions are
formed with the goal of helping people understand themselves better;
therapists rake in billions working for this very end.
467
Why should we believe that using metadata will help J. Random User get
in touch with her Buddha nature?
468
2.5 Schemas aren't neutral
469
In meta-utopia, the lab-coated guardians of epistemology sit down and
rationally map out a hierarchy of ideas, something like this:
470
Nothing:
471
In a given sub-domain, say, Washing Machines, experts agree on
sub-hierarchies, with classes for reliability, energy consumption,
color, size, etc.
472
This presumes that there is a "correct" way of categorizing ideas, and
that reasonable people, given enough time and incentive, can agree on
the proper means for building a hierarchy.
473
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Any hierarchy of ideas
necessarily implies the importance of some axes over others. A
manufacturer of small, environmentally conscious washing machines would
draw a hierarchy that looks like this:
474
Energy consumption:
475
While a manufacturer of glitzy, feature-laden washing machines would
want something like this:
476
Color:
477
The conceit that competing interests can come to easy accord on a
common vocabulary totally ignores the power of organizing principles in
a marketplace.
478
2.6 Metrics influence results
479
Agreeing to a common yardstick for measuring the important stuff in any
domain necessarily privileges the items that score high on that metric,
regardless of those items' overall suitability. IQ tests privilege
people who are good at IQ tests, Nielsen Ratings privilege 30- and
60-minute TV shows (which is why MTV doesn't show videos any more --
Nielsen couldn't generate ratings for three-minute mini-programs, and
so MTV couldn't demonstrate the value of advertising on its network),
raw megahertz scores privilege Intel's CISC chips over Motorola's RISC
chips.
480
Ranking axes are mutually exclusive: software that scores high for
security scores low for convenience, desserts that score high for
decadence score low for healthiness. Every player in a metadata
standards body wants to emphasize their high-scoring axes and
de-emphasize (or, if possible, ignore altogether) their low-scoring
axes.
481
It's wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to
advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of
knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone
is equally miserable.
482
2.7 There's more than one way to describe something
483
"No, I'm not watching cartoons! It's cultural anthropology."
484
"This isn't smut, it's art."
485
"It's not a bald spot, it's a solar panel for a sex-machine."
486
Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something.
Arguably, your Self is the collection of associations and descriptors
you ascribe to ideas. Requiring everyone to use the same vocabulary to
describe their material denudes the cognitive landscape, enforces
homogeneity in ideas.
487
And that's just not right.
488
3. Reliable metadata
489
Do we throw out metadata, then?
490
Of course not. Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a
sufficiently large pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come into
being, but metadata is often a good means of making rough assumptions
about the information that floats through the Internet.
491
Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google
exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by
examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of
links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the
number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to
link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable
the information on that page is.
492
This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than the stuff
that human beings create for the purposes of having their documents
found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and
the vocabulary collisions.
493
Taken more broadly, this kind of metadata can be thought of as a
pedigree: who thinks that this document is valuable? How closely
correlated have this person's value judgments been with mine in times
gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far
better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the
world's schema combined.
494
16. Amish for QWERTY
495
I learned to type before I learned to write. The QWERTY keyboard layout
is hard-wired to my brain, such that I can't write anything of
significance without that I have a 101-key keyboard in front of me.
This has always been a badge of geek pride: unlike the creaking
pen-and-ink dinosaurs that I grew up reading, I'm well adapted to the
modern reality of technology. There's a secret elitist pride in
touch-typing on a laptop while staring off into space, fingers
flourishing and caressing the keys.
496
But last week, my pride got pricked. I was brung low by a phone. Some
very nice people from Nokia loaned me a very latest-and-greatest
camera-phone, the kind of gadget I've described in my science fiction
stories. As I prodded at the little 12-key interface, I felt like my
father, a 60s-vintage computer scientist who can't get his wireless
network to work, must feel. Like a creaking dino. Like history was
passing me by. I'm 31, and I'm obsolete. Or at least Amish.
497
People think the Amish are technophobes. Far from it. They're
ideologues. They have a concept of what right-living consists of, and
they'll use any technology that serves that ideal -- and mercilessly
eschew any technology that would subvert it. There's nothing wrong with
driving the wagon to the next farm when you want to hear from your son,
so there's no need to put a phone in the kitchen. On the other hand,
there's nothing right about your livestock dying for lack of care, so a
cellphone that can call the veterinarian can certainly find a home in
the horse barn.
498
For me, right-living is the 101-key, QWERTY, computer-centric mediated
lifestyle. It's having a bulky laptop in my bag, crouching by the
toilets at a strange airport with my AC adapter plugged into the
always-awkwardly-placed power source, running software that I chose and
installed, communicating over the wireless network. I use a network
that has no incremental cost for communication, and a device that lets
me install any software without permission from anyone else.
Right-living is the highly mutated, commodity-hardware- based, public
and free Internet. I'm QWERTY-Amish, in other words.
499
I'm the kind of perennial early adopter who would gladly volunteer to
beta test a neural interface, but I find myself in a moral panic when
confronted with the 12-button keypad on a cellie, even though that
interface is one that has been greedily adopted by billions of people
worldwide, from strap-hanging Japanese schoolgirls to Kenyan electoral
scrutineers to Filipino guerrillas in the bush. The idea of paying for
every message makes my hackles tumesce and evokes a reflexive moral
conviction that text-messaging is inherently undemocratic, at least
compared to free-as-air email. The idea of only running the software
that big-brother telco has permitted me on my handset makes me want to
run for the hills.
500
The thumb-generation who can tap out a text-message under their desks
while taking notes with the other hand -- they're in for it, too. The
pace of accelerated change means that we're all of us becoming wed to
interfaces -- ways of communicating with our tools and our world --
that are doomed, doomed, doomed. The 12-buttoners are marrying the
phone company, marrying a centrally controlled network that requires
permission to use and improve, a Stalinist technology whose centralized
choke points are subject to regulation and the vagaries of the telcos.
Long after the phone companies have been out-competed by the pure and
open Internet (if such a glorious day comes to pass), the kids of today
will be bound by its interface and its conventions.
501
The sole certainty about the future is its Amishness. We will all bend
our brains to suit an interface that we will either have to abandon or
be left behind. Choose your interface -- and the values it implies --
carefully, then, before you wed your thought processes to your fingers'
dance. It may be the one you're stuck with.
502
17. Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books
503
Forematter:
504
This talk was initially given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference [ <
505
For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I've
had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short
story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist
who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this
event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right Now," [eBooks suck right
now] and as funny as that is, I don't think it's true.
506
No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I'd call it:
"Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them." [Ebooks: You're Soaking in Them]
That's because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost
visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the
job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a
better understanding of that shape.
507
I haven't come to a perfect understanding. I don't know what the future
of the book looks like. But I have ideas, and I'll share them with you:
508
1. Ebooks aren't marketing. [Ebooks aren't marketing] OK, so ebooks
are marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks sells more
books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing, have found that
giving away electronic editions of the previous installments in their
series to coincide with the release of a new volume sells the hell out
of the new book -- and the backlist. And the number of people who wrote
to me to tell me about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the
paper-book far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said,
"Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna
buy it." But ebooks shouldn't be just about marketing: ebooks
are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people will
read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and
when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that
writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree
editions.
509
2. Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper books].
Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is
even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first
novel from the bound book, and printed the other half on scrap-paper to
read at the beach. Students write to me to say that it's easier to do
their term papers if they can copy and paste their quotations into
their word-processors. Baen readers use the electronic editions of
their favorite series to build concordances of characters, places and
events.
510
3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't 0wn the book [Unless you own the
ebook, you don't 0wn the book]. I take the view that the book is a
"practice" -- a collection of social and economic and artistic
activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a "practice"
instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and it begs the
question: just what the hell is a book? Good question. I write all of
my books in a text-editor [TEXT EDITOR SCREENGRAB] (BBEdit, from
Barebones Software -- as fine a text-editor as I could hope for). From
there, I can convert them into a formatted two-column PDF [TWO-UP
SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I
can turn them over to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys,
advanced review copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over
to my readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats
[DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile can
convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound,
laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten minutes, for about a
dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF or an html file or a text
file or a RocketBook or a printout for a buck in ten minutes! It's
ironic, because one of the frequently cited reasons for preferring
paper to ebooks is that paper books confer a sense of ownership of a
physical object. Before the dust settles on this ebook thing, owning a
paper book is going to feel less like ownership than having an open
digital edition of the text.
511
4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better deal for
writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin on the ground.
Amazing Stories , Hugo Gernsback's original science fiction
magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science fiction magazines
pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved are so minuscule,
they're not even insulting: they're quaint and
historical , like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a
pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're rounding
errors as compared to the total population of sf writers earning
some of their living at the trade. Almost all of us could be making
more money elsewhere (though we may dream of earning a stephenkingload
of money, and of course, no one would play the lotto if there were no
winners). The primary incentive for writing has to be artistic
satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Ebooks get you that.
Ebooks become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get
indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or
millions. They can be googled.
512
Even better: they level the playing field between writers and trolls.
When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers in a tight and
powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos were filling the
Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams at their work -- for,
if a personal recommendation is the best way to sell a book, then
certainly a personal condemnation is the best way to not sell a
book. Today, the trolls are still with us, but now, the readers get to
decide for themselves. Here's a bit of a review of Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom that was recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from
Redwood City, CA":
513
[QUOTED TEXT]
514
Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed me
off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name! My
stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that damning passage:
515
[PULL-QUOTE]
516
You see that? Hell, this guy is working for me ! [ADDITIONAL PULL
QUOTES] Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of paying off
Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his novel, "a
surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is "stiff, amateurish,
and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer out. And I can. In one
click. And then I can make up my own mind.
517
You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego and
insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all the things
that people are saying about your book is that it can play right into
your insecurities -- "all these people will have it in their minds not
to bother with my book because they've read the negative interweb
reviews!" But the flipside of that is the ego: "If only they'd give it
a shot, they'd see how good it is." And the more scathing the review
is, the more likely they are to give it a shot. Any press is good
press, so long as they spell your URL right (and even if they spell
your name wrong!).
518
5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. [Ebooks need to embrace their
nature.] The distinctive value of ebooks is orthogonal to the value of
paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of
electronic text. The more you constrain an ebook's distinctive value
propositions -- that is, the more you restrict a reader's ability to
copy, transport or transform an ebook -- the more it has to be valued
on the same axes as a paper-book. Ebooks fail on those axes.
Ebooks don't beat paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't
match them for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try
sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less than a
second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little stick of
flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a paper book for
every instance of a character's name to find a beloved passage. Hell,
try clipping a pithy passage out of a paper book and pasting it into
your sig-file.
519
6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one).
[Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one).]
Artists are always disappointed by their audience's attention-spans. Go
back far enough and you'll find cuneiform etchings bemoaning the
current Sumerian go-go lifestyle with its insistence on myths with
plotlines and characters and action, not like we had in the old days.
As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were
more tolerant of our penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a
lot more ideas without worrying about tarting them up with
easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think
of shortened attention spans as a product of the information age, but
check this out:
520
[Nietzsche quote]
521
In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not
paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but this
quote isn't from this century or the last. [Nietzsche quote with
attribution] It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy of
Morals," published in 1887 .
522
Yeah, our attention-spans are different today, but they aren't
necessarily shorter . Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the
storyline for Transmetropolitan [Transmet cover] in their minds for
five years while the story trickled out in monthly funnybook
installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry Potter series get
fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire forests are sacrificed
to long-running series fiction like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time
books, each of which is approximately 20,000 pages long (I may be off
by an order of magnitude one way or another here). Sure, presidential
debates are conducted in soundbites today and not the days-long oratory
extravaganzas of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay
attention to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to
finish.
523
7. We need all the ebooks. [We need all the ebooks] The
vast majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one
library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no one
person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written work. None
of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of human literature.
But that doesn't mean that we can stick with just the most popular
texts and get a proper ebook revolution.
524
For starters, we're all edge-cases. Sure, we all have the shared desire
for the core canon of literature, but each of us want to complete that
collection with different texts that are as distinctive and
individualistic as fingerprints. If we all look like we're doing the
same thing when we read, or listen to music, or hang out in a chatroom,
that's because we're not looking closely enough. The shared-ness of our
experience is only present at a coarse level of measurement: once you
get into really granular observation, there are as many differences in
our "shared" experience as there are similarities.
525
More than that, though, is the way that a large collection of
electronic text differs from a small one: it's the difference between a
single book, a shelf full of books and a library of books. Scale makes
things different. Take the Web: none of us can hope to read even a
fraction of all the pages on the Web, but by analyzing the link
structures that bind all those pages together, Google is able to
actually tease out machine-generated conclusions about the relative
relevance of different pages to different queries. None of us will ever
eat the whole corpus, but Google can digest it for us and excrete the
steaming nuggets of goodness that make it the search-engine miracle it
is today.
526
8. Ebooks are like paper books. [Ebooks are like paper books]. To round
out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are more like
paper books than you'd expect. One of the truisms of retail theory is
that purchasers need to come into contact with a good several times
before they buy -- seven contacts is tossed around as the magic number.
That means that my readers have to hear the title, see the cover, pick
up the book, read a review, and so forth, seven times, on average,
before they're ready to buy.
527
There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to
bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor. Some of
the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of the book is
like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking at the cover and
reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not having to come into
contact with the residual DNA and burger king left behind by everyone
else who browsed the book before you). Some writers are horrified at
the idea that three hundred thousand copies of my first novel were
downloaded and "only" ten thousand or so were sold so far. If it were
the case that for ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the
store, that would be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it
another way: if one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover
of my book bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads
cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the sales
are healthy.
528
We also like to think of physical books as being inherently
countable in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since
computers are damned good at counting things!). This is important,
because writers get paid on the basis of the number of copies of their
books that sell, so having a good count makes a difference. And indeed,
my royalty statements contain precise numbers for copies printed,
shipped, returned and sold.
529
But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a book, it
always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the run to make sure
that the setup is right and to account for the occasional rip, drop, or
spill. The actual total number of books printed is approximately the
number of books ordered, but never exactly -- if you've ever ordered
500 wedding invitations, chances are you received 500-and-a-few back
from the printer and that's why.
530
And the numbers just get fuzzier from there. Copies are stolen. Copies
are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some copies end up in
the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't order them and isn't
invoiced for them and end up on a sale table or in the trash. Some
copies are returned as damaged. Some are returned as unsold. Some come
back to the store the next morning accompanied by a whack of buyer's
remorse. Some go to the place where the spare sock in the dryer ends
up.
531
The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual. They
represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies shipped,
sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works pretty well:
well enough to run the juggernaut banking, insurance, and gambling
industries on. It's good enough for divvying up the royalties paid by
musical rights societies for radio airplay and live performance. And
it's good enough for counting how many copies of a book are distributed
online or off.
532
Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of electronic
books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.
533
And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books. However an
author earns her living from her words, printed or encoded, she has as
her first and hardest task to find her audience. There are more
competitors for our attention than we can possibly reconcile,
prioritize or make sense of. Getting a book under the right person's
nose, with the right pitch, is the hardest and most important task any
writer faces.
534
I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and
bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I was
lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I wanted to be a
writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later, I have three novels,
a short story collection and a nonfiction book out, two more novels
under contract, and another book in the works. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a
major award in my genre, science fiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm
nominated for another one, the 2003 Nebula Award for best novelette.
[NEBULA]
535
I own a lot of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in
storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY
LADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade: the
reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today. Most of the
literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears from the shelf
after just a few months, usually for good. Science fiction is
inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]
536
Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers are
fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed
books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was,
a "book" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe,
usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal
lambskin. [ILLUMINATED BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all
that, changed a book into something that could be simply run off a
press in a few minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping
than exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg
press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of the
ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than picking only a
few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge variety of subjects
could be addressed on paper and handed from person to person.
[KAPITAL/TIJUANA BIBLE]
537
Most new ideas start with a precious few certainties and a lot of
speculation. I've been doing a bunch of digging for certainties and a
lot of speculating lately, and the purpose of this talk is to lay out
both categories of ideas.
538
This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
[COVER], which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time, there was a
lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the one hand, the
dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the new and scary practice
of ebook "piracy." [alt.binaries.e-books screengrab] It was strikingly
weird that no one seemed to notice that the idea of ebooks as a
"failure" was at strong odds with the notion that electronic book
"piracy" was worth worrying about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure,
then who gives a rats if intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?
539
A brief digression here, on the double meaning of "ebooks." One meaning
for that word is "legitimate" ebook ventures, that is to say,
rightsholder-authorized editions of the texts of books, released in a
proprietary, use-restricted format, sometimes for use on a
general-purpose PC and sometimes for use on a special-purpose hardware
device like the nuvoMedia Rocketbook [ROCKETBOOK]. The other meaning
for ebook is a "pirate" or unauthorized electronic edition of a book,
usually made by cutting the binding off of a book and scanning it a
page at a time, then running the resulting bitmaps through an optical
character recognition app to convert them into ASCII text, to be
cleaned up by hand. These books are pretty buggy, full of errors
introduced by the OCR. A lot of my colleagues worry that these books
also have deliberate errors, created by mischievous book-rippers who
cut, add or change text in order to "improve" the work. Frankly, I have
never seen any evidence that any book-ripper is interested in doing
this, and until I do, I think that this is the last thing anyone should
be worrying about.
540
Back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [COVER]. Well, not yet. I
want to convey to you the depth of the panic in my field over ebook
piracy, or "bookwarez" as it is known in book-ripper circles. Writers
were joining the discussion on alt.binaries.ebooks using assumed names,
claiming fear of retaliation from scary hax0r kids who would presumably
screw up their credit-ratings in retaliation for being called thieves.
My editor, a blogger, hacker and
guy-in-charge-of-the-largest-sf-line-in-the-world named Patrick Nielsen
Hayden posted to one of the threads in the newsgroup, saying, in part
[SCREENGRAB]:
541
> Pirating copyrighted etext on Usenet and elsewhere is going to
542
Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18 years
old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me to a writers'
workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York in the mid-Nineties
when I showed him a bunch of Project Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot
and inspired him to start licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS
SCREENGRAB], to the turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then
published my first novel (he's bought three more since -- I really like
Patrick!).
543
Right as bookwarez newsgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly by
legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner for
carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup. This writer alleged that
AOL should have a duty to remove this newsgroup, since it carried so
many infringing files, and that its failure to do so made it a
contributory infringer, and so liable for the incredibly stiff
penalties afforded by our newly minted copyright laws like the No
Electronic Theft Act and the loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act
or DMCA.
544
Now there was a scary thought: there were people out there who thought
the world would be a better place if ISPs were given the duty of
actively policing and censoring the websites and newsfeeds their
customers had access to, including a requirement that ISPs needed to
determine, all on their own, what was an unlawful copyright
infringement -- something more usually left up to judges in the light
of extensive amicus briefings from esteemed copyright scholars [WIND
DONE GONE GRAPHIC].
545
This was a stupendously dumb idea, and it offended me down to my boots.
Writers are supposed to be advocates of free expression, not
censorship. It seemed that some of my colleagues loved the First
Amendment, but they were reluctant to share it with the rest of the
world.
546
Well, dammit, I had a book coming out, and it seemed to be an
opportunity to try to figure out a little more about this ebook stuff.
On the one hand, ebooks were a dismal failure. On the other hand, there
were more books posted to alt.binaries.ebooks every day.
547
This leads me into the two certainties I have about ebooks:
548
1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day
[GRAPHIC]
549
2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day
[GRAPHIC]
550
These two certainties begged a lot of questions.
551
[CHART: EBOOK FAILINGS]
552
Screen resolutions are too low to effectively replace paper
553
People want to own physical books because of their visceral appeal
(often this is accompanied by a little sermonette on how good books
smell, or how good they look on a bookshelf, or how evocative an old
curry stain in the margin can be)
554
You can't take your ebook into the tub
555
You can't read an ebook without power and a computer
556
File-formats go obsolete, paper has lasted for a long time
557
None of these seemed like very good explanations for the "failure" of
ebooks to me. If screen resolutions are too low to replace paper, then
how come everyone I know spends more time reading off a screen every
year, up to and including my sainted grandmother (geeks have a really
crappy tendency to argue that certain technologies aren't ready for
primetime because their grandmothers won't use them -- well, my
grandmother sends me email all the time. She types 70 words per minute,
and loves to show off grandsonular email to her pals around the pool at
her Florida retirement condo)?
558
The other arguments were a lot more interesting, though. It seemed to
me that electronic books are different from paper books, and
have different virtues and failings. Let's think a little about what
the book has gone through in years gone by. This is interesting because
the history of the book is the history of the Enlightenment, the
Reformation, the Pilgrims, and, ultimately the colonizing of the
Americas and the American Revolution.
559
Broadly speaking, there was a time when books were hand-printed on rare
leather by monks. The only people who could read them were priests, who
got a regular eyeful of the really cool cartoons the monks drew in the
margins. The priests read the books aloud, in Latin [LATIN BIBLE] (to a
predominantly non-Latin-speaking audience) in cathedrals, wreathed in
pricey incense that rose from censers swung by altar boys.
560
Then Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Martin Luther
turned that press into a revolution. [LUTHER BIBLE] He printed Bibles
in languages that non-priests could read, and distributed them to
normal people who got to read the word of God all on their own. The
rest, as they say, is history.
561
Here are some interesting things to note about the advent of the
printing press:
562
[CHART: LUTHER VERSUS THE MONKS]
563
Luther Bibles lacked the manufacturing quality of the illuminated
Bibles. They were comparatively cheap and lacked the typographical
expressiveness that a really talented monk could bring to bear when
writing out the word of God
564
Luther Bibles were utterly unsuited to the traditional use-case for
Bibles. A good Bible was supposed to reinforce the authority of the man
at the pulpit. It needed heft, it needed impressiveness, and most of
all, it needed rarity.
565
The user-experience of Luther Bibles sucked. There was no incense, no
altar boys, and who (apart from the priesthood) knew that reading was
so friggin' hard on the eyes?
566
Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated numbers.
Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any apocryphal text
he wanted -- and who knew how accurate that translation was? Monks had
an entire Papacy behind them, running a quality-assurance operation
that had stood Europe in good stead for centuries.
567
In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs patiently
explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't get any cover-art
or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if the rip was any good, and
sometimes the connection would drop mid-download. I'm sure that many
Cardinals espoused the points raised above with equal certainty.
568
What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways that
Luther Bibles kicked ass:
569
[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS]
570
They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them without
having to subject themselves to the authority and approval of the
Church
571
They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no longer had
to take the Church's word for it when its priests explained what God
really meant
572
They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books
flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship and so
on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial popularity
was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion.
573
Note that all of these virtues are orthogonal to the virtues of a
monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the Gutenberg
press a success were the things that made monk-Bibles a success.
574
By the same token, the reasons to love ebooks have precious little to
do with the reasons to love paper books.
575
[CHART: WHY EBOOKS KICK ASS]
576
They are easy to share. Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood went from a midlist
title to a bestseller by being passed from hand to hand by women in
reading circles. Slashdorks and other netizens have social life as rich
as reading-circlites, but they don't ever get to see each other face to
face; the only kind of book they can pass from hand to hand is an
ebook. What's more, the single factor most correlated with a purchase
is a recommendation from a friend -- getting a book recommended by a
pal is more likely to sell you on it than having read and enjoyed the
preceding volume in a series!
577
They are easy to slice and dice. This is where the Mac evangelist in me
comes out -- minority platforms matter. It's a truism of the
Napsterverse that most of the files downloaded are bog-standard top-40
tracks, like 90 percent or so, and I believe it. We all want to popular
music. That's why it's popular. But the interesting thing is the other
ten percent. Bill Gates told the New York Times that Microsoft lost the
search wars by doing "a good job on the 80 percent of common queries
and ignor[ing] the other stuff. But it's the remaining 20 percent that
counts, because that's where the quality perception is." Why did
Napster captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40
tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was because
80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn't available for sale
anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all the songs that
had ever touched us, all the earworms that had been lodged in our
hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile when we heard it. Those
songs are different for all of us, but they share the trait of making
the difference between a compelling service and, well, top-40
Clearchannel radio programming. It was the minority of tracks that
appealed to the majority of us. By the same token, the malleability of
electronic text means that it can be readily repurposed: you can throw
it on a webserver or convert it to a format for your favorite PDA; you
can ask your computer to read it aloud or you can search the text for a
quotation to cite in a book report or to use in your sig. In other
words, most people who download the book do so for the predictable
reason, and in a predictable format -- say, to sample a chapter in the
HTML format before deciding whether to buy the book -- but the thing
that differentiates a boring e-text experience from an exciting one is
the minority use -- printing out a couple chapters of the book to bring
to the beach rather than risk getting the hardcopy wet and salty.
578
Tool-makers and software designers are increasingly aware of the notion
of "affordances" in design. You can bash a nail into the wall with any
heavy, heftable object from a rock to a hammer to a cast-iron skillet.
However, there's something about a hammer that cries out for
nail-bashing, it has affordances that tilt its holder towards swinging
it. And, as we all know, when all you have is a hammer, everything
starts to look like a nail.
579
The affordance of a computer -- the thing it's designed to do -- is to
slice-and-dice collections of bits. The affordance of the Internet is
to move bits at very high speed around the world at little-to-no cost.
It follows from this that the center of the ebook experience is going
to involve slicing and dicing text and sending it around.
580
Copyright lawyers have a word for these activities: infringement.
That's because copyright gives creators a near-total monopoly over
copying and remixing of their work, pretty much forever (theoretically,
copyright expires, but in actual practice, copyright gets extended
every time the early Mickey Mouse cartoons are about to enter the
public domain, because Disney swings a very big stick on the Hill).
581
This is a huge problem. The biggest possible problem. Here's why:
582
[CHART: HOW BROKEN COPYRIGHT SCREWS EVERYONE]
583
Authors freak out. Authors have been schooled by their peers that
strong copyright is the only thing that keeps them from getting
savagely rogered in the marketplace. This is pretty much true: it's
strong copyright that often defends authors from their publishers'
worst excesses. However, it doesn't follow that strong copyright
protects you from your readers .
584
Readers get indignant over being called crooks. Seriously. You're a
small businessperson. Readers are your customers. Calling them crooks
is bad for business.
585
Publishers freak out. Publishers freak out, because they're in the
business of grabbing as much copyright as they can and hanging onto it
for dear life because, dammit, you never know. This is why science
fiction magazines try to trick writers into signing over improbable
rights for things like theme park rides and action figures based on
their work -- it's also why literary agents are now asking for
copyright-long commissions on the books they represent: copyright
covers so much ground and takes to long to shake off, who wouldn't want
a piece of it?
586
Liability goes through the roof. Copyright infringement, especially on
the Net, is a supercrime. It carries penalties of $150,000 per
infringement, and aggrieved rights-holders and their representatives
have all kinds of special powers, like the ability to force an ISP to
turn over your personal information before showing evidence of your
alleged infringement to a judge. This means that anyone who suspects
that he might be on the wrong side of copyright law is going to be
terribly risk-averse: publishers non-negotiably force their authors to
indemnify them from infringement claims and go one better, forcing
writers to prove that they have "cleared" any material they quote, even
in the case of brief fair-use quotations, like song-titles at the
opening of chapters. The result is that authors end up assuming
potentially life-destroying liability, are chilled from quoting
material around them, and are scared off of public domain texts because
an honest mistake about the public-domain status of a work carries such
a terrible price.
587
Posterity vanishes. In the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court hearing
last year, the court found that 98 percent of the works in copyright
are no longer earning money for anyone, but that figuring out who these
old works belong to with the degree of certainty that you'd want when
one mistake means total economic apocalypse would cost more than you
could ever possibly earn on them. That means that 98 percent of works
will largely expire long before the copyright on them does. Today, the
names of science fiction's ancestral founders -- Mary Shelley, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, HG Wells -- are still known,
their work still a part of the discourse. Their spiritual descendants
from Hugo Gernsback onward may not be so lucky -- if their work
continues to be "protected" by copyright, it might just vanish from the
face of the earth before it reverts to the public domain.
588
This isn't to say that copyright is bad, but that there's such a thing
as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good
copyright is a bad thing. It's like chilis in soup: a little goes a
long way, and too much spoils the broth.
589
From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the
pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference
for new media is its "democratic-ness" -- the ease with which it can
reproduced.
590
(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about
how the Internet's copying model is more disruptive than the
technologies that proceeded it. For Christ's sake, the Vaudeville
performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a
regime where they had one hundred percent control over who could
get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had
zero percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and
tune into a recording of them performing. For that matter, look at the
difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible -- next to that
phase-change, Napster is peanuts)
591
Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded off its
artifact-ness -- the degree to which it was populated by bespoke hunks
of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master craftspeople -- for ease
of reproduction. Piano rolls weren't as expressive as good piano
players, but they scaled better -- as did radio broadcasts, pulp
magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand illumination and leather
bindings are nice, but they pale in comparison to the ability of an
individual to actually get a copy of her own.
592
Which isn't to say that old media die. Artists still hand-illuminate
books; master pianists still stride the boards at Carnegie Hall, and
the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of musicians that are
richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet. The thing is, when all
you've got is monks, every book takes on the character of a monkish
Bible. Once you invent the printing press, all the books that are
better-suited to movable type migrate into that new form. What's left
behind are those items that are best suited to the old production
scheme: the plays that need to be plays, the books that are
especially lovely on creamy paper stitched between covers, the music
that is most enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of
humanity.
593
Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control: it's a lot
harder to control who can copy a book once there's a photocopier on
every corner than it is when you need a monastery and several years to
copy a Bible. And that decreased control demands a new copyright regime
that rebalances the rights of creators with their audiences.
594
For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed a new
copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was invented, the
Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the record labels in order
to secure a blanket license; when cable TV was invented, the government
just ordered the broadcasters to sell the cable-operators access to
programming at a fixed rate.
595
Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was
generated in response to the last generation of technology. The
temptation to treat copyright as though it came down off the mountain
on two stone tablets (or worse, as "just like" real property) is deeply
flawed, since, by definition, current copyright only considers the last
generation of tech.
596
So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this the end
of the world? Duh . If the Catholic church can survive the
printing press, science fiction will certainly weather the advent of
bookwarez.
597
Lagniappe [Lagniappe]
598
We're almost done here, but there's one more thing I'd like to do
before I get off the stage. [Lagniappe: an unexpected bonus or extra]
Think of it as a "lagniappe" -- a little something extra to thank you
for your patience.
599
About a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom, on the net, under the terms of the most restrictive Creative
Commons license available. All it allowed my readers to do was send
around copies of the book. I was cautiously dipping my toe into the
water, though at the time, it felt like I was taking a plunge.
600
Now I'm going to take a plunge. Today, I will re-license the text of
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom under a Creative Commons
"Attribution-ShareAlike-Derivs-Noncommercial" license [HUMAN READABLE
LICENSE], which means that as of today, you have my blessing to create
derivative works from my first book. You can make movies, audiobooks,
translations, fan-fiction, slash fiction (God help us) [GEEK
HIERARCHY], furry slash fiction [GEEK HIERARCHY DETAIL], poetry,
translations, t-shirts, you name it, with two provisos: that one, you
have to allow everyone else to rip, mix and burn your creations in the
same way you're hacking mine; and on the other hand, you've got to do
it noncommercially.
601
The sky didn't fall when I dipped my toe in. Let's see what happens
when I get in up to my knees.
602
The text with the new license will be online before the end of the day.
Check craphound.com/down for details.
603
Oh, and I'm also releasing the text of this speech under a Creative
Commons Public Domain dedication, [Public domain dedication] giving it
away to the world to do with as it see fits. It'll be linked off my
blog, Boing Boing, before the day is through.
604
18. Free(konomic) E-books
605
Can giving away free electronic books really sell printed books? I
think so. As I explained in my March column ("You Do Like Reading Off a
Computer Screen"), I don't believe that most readers want to read
long-form works off a screen, and I don't believe that they will ever
want to read long-form works off a screen. As I say in the column, the
problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, eyestrain, or
compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers are
seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a
long-form work impractical.
606
Sure, some readers have the cognitive quirk necessary to read
full-length works off screens, or are motivated to do so by other
circumstances (such as being so broke that they could never hope to buy
the printed work). The rational question isn't, "Will giving away free
e-books cost me sales?" but rather, "Will giving away free e-books win
me more sales than it costs me?"
607
This is a very hard proposition to evaluate in a quantitative way.
Books aren't lattes or cable-knit sweaters: each book sells (or
doesn't) due to factors that are unique to that title. It's hard to
imagine an empirical, controlled study in which two "equivalent" books
are published, and one is also available as a free download, the other
not, and the difference calculated as a means of "proving" whether
e-books hurt or help sales in the long run.
608
I've released all of my novels as free downloads simultaneous with
their print publication. If I had a time machine, I could re-release
them without the free downloads and compare the royalty statements.
Lacking such a device, I'm forced to draw conclusions from qualitative,
anecdotal evidence, and I've collected plenty of that:
609
Many writers have tried free e-book releases to tie in with the print
release of their works. To the best of my knowledge, every writer who's
tried this has repeated the experiment with future works, suggesting a
high degree of satisfaction with the outcomes
610
A writer friend of mine had his first novel come out at the same time
as mine. We write similar material and are often compared to one
another by critics and reviewers. My first novel had a free download,
his didn't. We compared sales figures and I was doing substantially
better than him -- he subsequently convinced his publisher to let him
follow suit
611
Baen Books has a pretty good handle on expected sales for new volumes
in long-running series; having sold many such series, they have lots of
data to use in sales estimates. If Volume N sells X copies, we expect
Volume N+1 to sell Y copies. They report that they have seen a
measurable uptick in sales following from free e-book releases of
previous and current volumes
612
David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD candidate in economics, published a
paper in 2004 in which he calculated that, for music, "piracy" results
in a net increase in sales for all titles in the 75th percentile and
lower; negligible change in sales for the "middle class" of titles
between the 75th percentile and the 97th percentile; and a small drag
on the "super-rich" in the 97th percentile and higher. Publisher Tim
O'Reilly describes this as "piracy's progressive taxation,"
apportioning a small wealth-redistribution to the vast majority of
works, no net change to the middle, and a small cost on the richest few
613
Speaking of Tim O'Reilly, he has just published a detailed,
quantitative study of the effect of free downloads on a single title.
O'Reilly Media published Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, in November
2005, simultaneously releasing the book as a free download. By March
2007, they had a pretty detailed picture of the sales-cycle of this
book -- and, thanks to industry standard metrics like those provided by
Bookscan, they could compare it, apples-to-apples style, against the
performance of competing books treating with the same subject.
O'Reilly's conclusion: downloads didn't cause a decline in sales, and
appears to have resulted in a lift in sales. This is particularly
noteworthy because the book in question is a technical reference work,
exclusively consumed by computer programmers who are by definition
disposed to read off screens. Also, this is a reference work and
therefore is more likely to be useful in electronic form, where it can
be easily searched
614
In my case, my publishers have gone back to press repeatedly for my
books. The print runs for each edition are modest -- I'm a midlist
writer in a world with a shrinking midlist -- but publishers print what
they think they can sell, and they're outselling their expectations
615
The new opportunities arising from my free downloads are so numerous as
to be uncountable -- foreign rights deals, comic book licenses,
speaking engagements, article commissions -- I've made more money in
these secondary markets than I have in royalties
616
More anecdotes: I've had literally thousands of people approach me by
e-mail and at signings and cons to say, "I found your work online for
free, got hooked, and started buying it." By contrast, I've had all of
five e-mails from people saying, "Hey, idiot, thanks for the free book,
now I don't have to buy the print edition, ha ha!"
617
Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for
print books. While I don't have controlled, quantitative data to refute
the proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and
all that experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is
selling the hell out of them.
618
More importantly, the free e-book skeptics have no evidence to offer in
support of their position -- just hand-waving and dark muttering about
a mythological future when book-lovers give up their printed books for
electronic book-readers (as opposed to the much more plausible future
where book lovers go on buying their fetish objects and carry books
around on their electronic devices).
619
I started giving away e-books after I witnessed the early days of the
"bookwarez" scene, wherein fans cut the binding off their favorite
books, scanned them, ran them through optical character recognition
software, and manually proofread them to eliminate the digitization
errors. These fans were easily spending 80 hours to rip their favorite
books, and they were only ripping their favorite books, books they
loved and wanted to share. (The 80-hour figure comes from my own
attempt to do this -- I'm sure that rippers get faster with practice.)
620
I thought to myself that 80 hours' free promotional effort would be a
good thing to have at my disposal when my books entered the market.
What if I gave my readers clean, canonical electronic editions of my
works, saving them the bother of ripping them, and so freed them up to
promote my work to their friends?
621
After all, it's not like there's any conceivable way to stop people
from putting books on scanners if they really want to. Scanners aren't
going to get more expensive or slower. The Internet isn't going to get
harder to use. Better to confront this challenge head on, turn it into
an opportunity, than to rail against the future (I'm a science fiction
writer -- tuning into the future is supposed to be my metier).
622
The timing couldn't have been better. Just as my first novel was being
published, a new, high-tech project for promoting sharing of creative
works launched: the Creative Commons project (CC). CC offers a set of
tools that make it easy to mark works with whatever freedoms the author
wants to give away. CC launched in 2003 and today, more than
160,000,000 works have been released under its licenses.
623
My next column will go into more detail on what CC is, what licenses it
offers, and how to use them -- but for now, check them out online at
creativecommons.org.
624
19. The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights
625
Of course, science fiction is a literature of the present. Many's the
science fiction writer who uses the future as a warped mirror for
reflecting back the present day, angled to illustrate the hidden
strangeness buried by our invisible assumptions: Orwell turned 1948
into Nineteen Eighty-Four. But even when the fictional future isn't a
parable about the present day, it is necessarily a creation of the
present day, since it reflects the present day biases that infuse the
author. Hence Asimov's Foundation, a New Deal-esque project to think
humanity out of its tribulations though social interventionism.
626
Bold SF writers eschew the future altogether, embracing a futuristic
account of the present day. William Gibson's forthcoming Spook Country
is an act of "speculative presentism," a book so futuristic it could
only have been set in 2006, a book that exploits retrospective
historical distance to let us glimpse just how alien and futuristic our
present day is.
627
Science fiction writers aren't the only people in the business of
predicting the future. Futurists -- consultants, technology columnists,
analysts, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurial pitchmen -- spill a
lot of ink, phosphors, and caffeinated hot air in describing a vision
for a future where we'll get more and more of whatever it is they want
to sell us or warn us away from. Tomorrow will feature faster, cheaper
processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous RFID tags, radically
democratic political processes dominated by bloggers, massively
multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the physical economy.
628
There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic."
Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is
often self-serving -- think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future
III -- and it generally doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.
629
SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully
conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped
with a range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices -- but
no one has installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software
on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo Marx. Or take the Starship
Enterprise, with a transporter capable of constituting matter from
digitally stored plans, and radios that can breach the speed of light.
630
The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size of a softball
(or whatever the minimum size for a warp drive, transporter, and
subspace radio would be). It would zip around the galaxy at FTL speeds
under remote control. When it reached an interesting planet, it would
beam a stored copy of a landing party onto the surface, and when their
mission was over, it would beam them back into storage, annihilating
their physical selves until they reached the next stopping point. If a
member of the landing party were eaten by a green-skinned interspatial
hippie or giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant, that member would be
recovered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the entire landing
party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective crewmember
onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk operating in
clonal harmony.
631
Futurism has a psychological explanation, as recounted in Harvard
clinical psych prof Daniel Gilbert's 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness.
Our memories and our projections of the future are necessarily
imperfect. Our memories consist of those observations our brains have
bothered to keep records of, woven together with inference and whatever
else is lying around handy when we try to remember something. Ask
someone who's eating a great lunch how breakfast was, and odds are
she'll tell you it was delicious. Ask the same question of someone
eating rubbery airplane food, and he'll tell you his breakfast was
awful. We weave the past out of our imperfect memories and our
observable present.
632
We make the future in much the same way: we use reasoning and evidence
to predict what we can, and whenever we bump up against uncertainty, we
fill the void with the present day. Hence the injunction on women
soldiers in the future of Starship Troopers, or the bizarre,
glassed-over "Progressland" city diorama at the end of the 1964 World's
Fair exhibit The Carousel of Progress, which Disney built for GE.
633
Lapsarianism -- the idea of a paradise lost, a fall from grace that
makes each year worse than the last -- is the predominant future
feeling for many people. It's easy to see why: an imperfectly
remembered golden childhood gives way to the worries of adulthood and
physical senescence. Surely the world is getting worse: nothing tastes
as good as it did when we were six, everything hurts all the time, and
our matured gonads drive us into frenzies of bizarre, self-destructive
behavior.
634
Lapsarianism dominates the Abrahamic faiths. I have an Orthodox Jewish
friend whose tradition holds that each generation of rabbis is
necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each
generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden.
Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears'
wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.
635
The natural endpoint of Lapsarianism is apocalypse. If things get
worse, and worse, and worse, eventually they'll just run out of
worseness. Eventually, they'll bottom out, a kind of rotten death of
the universe when Lapsarian entropy hits the nadir and takes us all
with it.
636
Running counter to Lapsarianism is progressivism: the Enlightenment
ideal of a world of great people standing on the shoulders of giants.
Each of us contributes to improving the world's storehouse of knowledge
(and thus its capacity for bringing joy to all of us), and our
descendants and proteges take our work and improve on it. The very idea
of "progress" runs counter to the idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it
is the idea that we, as a species, are falling in reverse, combing back
the wild tangle of entropy into a neat, tidy braid.
637
Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition -- if only
because we eventually run out of imaginary ways that the human
condition can improve. And science fiction has a name for the upper
bound of progress, a name for the progressive apocalypse:
638
We call it the Singularity.
639
Vernor Vinge's Singularity takes place when our technology reaches a
stage that allows us to "upload" our minds into software, run them at
faster, hotter speeds than our neurological wetware substrate allows
for, and create multiple, parallel instances of ourselves. After the
Singularity, nothing is predictable because everything is possible. We
will cease to be human and become (as the title of Rudy Rucker's next
novel would have it) Postsingular.
640
The Singularity is what happens when we have so much progress that we
run out of progress. It's the apocalypse that ends the human race in
rapture and joy. Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the Singularity "the rapture
of the nerds," an apt description for the mirror-world progressive
version of the Lapsarian apocalypse.
641
At the end of the day, both progress and the fall from grace are
illusions. The central thesis of Stumbling on Happiness is that human
beings are remarkably bad at predicting what will make us happy. Our
predictions are skewed by our imperfect memories and our capacity for
filling the future with the present day.
642
The future is gnarlier than futurism. NCC-1701 probably wouldn't send
out transporter-equipped drones -- instead, it would likely find itself
on missions whose ethos, mores, and rationale are largely
incomprehensible to us, and so obvious to its crew that they couldn't
hope to explain them.
643
Science fiction is the literature of the present, and the present is
the only era that we can hope to understand, because it's the only era
that lets us check our observations and predictions against reality.
644
20. When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview
with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil
645
It's not clear to me whether the Singularity is a technical belief
system or a spiritual one.
646
The Singularity -- a notion that's crept into a lot of skiffy, and
whose most articulate in-genre spokesmodel is Vernor Vinge -- describes
the black hole in history that will be created at the moment when human
intelligence can be digitized. When the speed and scope of our
cognition is hitched to the price-performance curve of microprocessors,
our "progress" will double every eighteen months, and then every twelve
months, and then every ten, and eventually, every five seconds.
647
Singularities are, literally, holes in space from whence no information
can emerge, and so SF writers occasionally mutter about how hard it is
to tell a story set after the information Singularity. Everything will
be different. What it means to be human will be so different that what
it means to be in danger, or happy, or sad, or any of the other
elements that make up the squeeze-and-release tension in a good yarn
will be unrecognizable to us pre-Singletons.
648
It's a neat conceit to write around. I've committed Singularity a
couple of times, usually in collaboration with gonzo Singleton Charlie
Stross, the mad antipope of the Singularity. But those stories have the
same relation to futurism as romance novels do to love: a shared
jumping-off point, but radically different morphologies.
649
Of course, the Singularity isn't just a conceit for noodling with in
the pages of the pulps: it's the subject of serious-minded punditry,
futurism, and even science.
650
Ray Kurzweil is one such pundit-futurist-scientist. He's a serial
entrepreneur who founded successful businesses that advanced the fields
of optical character recognition (machine-reading) software,
text-to-speech synthesis, synthetic musical instrument simulation,
computer-based speech recognition, and stock-market analysis. He cured
his own Type-II diabetes through a careful review of the literature and
the judicious application of first principles and reason. To a casual
observer, Kurzweil appears to be the star of some kind of Heinlein
novel, stealing fire from the gods and embarking on a quest to bring
his maverick ideas to the public despite the dismissals of the
establishment, getting rich in the process.
651
Kurzweil believes in the Singularity. In his 1990 manifesto, "The Age
of Intelligent Machines," Kurzweil persuasively argued that we were on
the brink of meaningful machine intelligence. A decade later, he
continued the argument in a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines,
whose most audacious claim is that the world's computational capacity
has been slowly doubling since the crust first cooled (and before!),
and that the doubling interval has been growing shorter and shorter
with each passing year, so that now we see it reflected in the computer
industry's Moore's Law, which predicts that microprocessors will get
twice as powerful for half the cost about every eighteen months. The
breathtaking sweep of this trend has an obvious conclusion: computers
more powerful than people; more powerful than we can comprehend.
652
Now Kurzweil has published two more books, The Singularity Is Near,
When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, Spring 2005) and Fantastic
Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (with Terry Grossman, Rodale,
November 2004). The former is a technological roadmap for creating the
conditions necessary for ascent into Singularity; the latter is a book
about life-prolonging technologies that will assist baby-boomers in
living long enough to see the day when technological immortality is
achieved.
653
See what I meant about his being a Heinlein hero?
654
I still don't know if the Singularity is a spiritual or a technological
belief system. It has all the trappings of spirituality, to be sure. If
you are pure and kosher, if you live right and if your society is just,
then you will live to see a moment of Rapture when your flesh will
slough away leaving nothing behind but your ka, your soul, your
consciousness, to ascend to an immortal and pure state.
655
I wrote a novel called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom where
characters could make backups of themselves and recover from them if
something bad happened, like catching a cold or being assassinated. It
raises a lot of existential questions: most prominently: are you still
you when you've been restored from backup?
656
The traditional AI answer is the Turing Test, invented by Alan Turing,
the gay pioneer of cryptography and artificial intelligence who was
forced by the British government to take hormone treatments to "cure"
him of his homosexuality, culminating in his suicide in 1954. Turing
cut through the existentialism about measuring whether a machine is
intelligent by proposing a parlor game: a computer sits behind a locked
door with a chat program, and a person sits behind another locked door
with his own chat program, and they both try to convince a judge that
they are real people. If the computer fools a human judge into thinking
that it's a person, then to all intents and purposes, it's a person.
657
So how do you know if the backed-up you that you've restored into a new
body -- or a jar with a speaker attached to it -- is really you? Well,
you can ask it some questions, and if it answers the same way that you
do, you're talking to a faithful copy of yourself.
658
Sounds good. But the me who sent his first story into Asimov's
seventeen years ago couldn't answer the question, "Write a story for
Asimov's" the same way the me of today could. Does that mean I'm not me
anymore?
659
Kurzweil has the answer.
660
"If you follow that logic, then if you were to take me ten years ago, I
could not pass for myself in a Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. But once the
requisite uploading technology becomes available a few decades hence,
you could make a perfect-enough copy of me, and it would pass the Ray
Kurzweil Turing Test. The copy doesn't have to match the quantum state
of my every neuron, either: if you meet me the next day, I'd pass the
Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. Nevertheless, none of the quantum states in
my brain would be the same. There are quite a few changes that each of
us undergo from day to day, we don't examine the assumption that we are
the same person closely.
661
"We gradually change our pattern of atoms and neurons but we very
rapidly change the particles the pattern is made up of. We used to
think that in the brain -- the physical part of us most closely
associated with our identity -- cells change very slowly, but it turns
out that the components of the neurons, the tubules and so forth, turn
over in only days. I'm a completely different set of particles from
what I was a week ago.
662
"Consciousness is a difficult subject, and I'm always surprised by how
many people talk about consciousness routinely as if it could be easily
and readily tested scientifically. But we can't postulate a
consciousness detector that does not have some assumptions about
consciousness built into it.
663
"Science is about objective third party observations and logical
deductions from them. Consciousness is about first-person, subjective
experience, and there's a fundamental gap there. We live in a world of
assumptions about consciousness. We share the assumption that other
human beings are conscious, for example. But that breaks down when we
go outside of humans, when we consider, for example, animals. Some say
only humans are conscious and animals are instinctive and machinelike.
Others see humanlike behavior in an animal and consider the animal
conscious, but even these observers don't generally attribute
consciousness to animals that aren't humanlike.
664
"When machines are complex enough to have responses recognizable as
emotions, those machines will be more humanlike than animals."
665
The Kurzweil Singularity goes like this: computers get better and
smaller. Our ability to measure the world gains precision and grows
ever cheaper. Eventually, we can measure the world inside the brain and
make a copy of it in a computer that's as fast and complex as a brain,
and voila, intelligence.
666
Here in the twenty-first century we like to view ourselves as
ambulatory brains, plugged into meat-puppets that lug our precious grey
matter from place to place. We tend to think of that grey matter as
transcendently complex, and we think of it as being the bit that makes
us us.
667
But brains aren't that complex, Kurzweil says. Already, we're starting
to unravel their mysteries.
668
"We seem to have found one area of the brain closely associated with
higher-level emotions, the spindle cells, deeply embedded in the brain.
There are tens of thousands of them, spanning the whole brain (maybe
eighty thousand in total), which is an incredibly small number. Babies
don't have any, most animals don't have any, and they likely only
evolved over the last million years or so. Some of the high-level
emotions that are deeply human come from these.
669
"Turing had the right insight: base the test for intelligence on
written language. Turing Tests really work. A novel is based on
language: with language you can conjure up any reality, much more so
than with images. Turing almost lived to see computers doing a good job
of performing in fields like math, medical diagnosis and so on, but
those tasks were easier for a machine than demonstrating even a child's
mastery of language. Language is the true embodiment of human
intelligence."
670
If we're not so complex, then it's only a matter of time until
computers are more complex than us. When that comes, our brains will be
model-able in a computer and that's when the fun begins. That's the
thesis of Spiritual Machines, which even includes a (Heinlein-style)
timeline leading up to this day.
671
Now, it may be that a human brain contains n logic-gates and runs at x
cycles per second and stores z petabytes, and that n and x and z are
all within reach. It may be that we can take a brain apart and record
the position and relationships of all the neurons and sub-neuronal
elements that constitute a brain.
672
But there are also a nearly infinite number of ways of modeling a brain
in a computer, and only a finite (or possibly nonexistent) fraction of
that space will yield a conscious copy of the original meat-brain.
Science fiction writers usually hand-wave this step: in Heinlein's "Man
Who Sold the Moon," the gimmick is that once the computer becomes
complex enough, with enough "random numbers," it just wakes up.
673
Computer programmers are a little more skeptical. Computers have never
been known for their skill at programming themselves -- they tend to be
no smarter than the people who write their software.
674
But there are techniques for getting computers to program themselves,
based on evolution and natural selection. A programmer creates a system
that spits out lots -- thousands or even millions -- of randomly
generated programs. Each one is given the opportunity to perform a
computational task (say, sorting a list of numbers from greatest to
least) and the ones that solve the problem best are kept aside while
the others are erased. Now the survivors are used as the basis for a
new generation of randomly mutated descendants, each based on elements
of the code that preceded them. By running many instances of a randomly
varied program at once, and by culling the least successful and
regenerating the population from the winners very quickly, it is
possible to evolve effective software that performs as well or better
than the code written by human authors.
675
Indeed, evolutionary computing is a promising and exciting field that's
realizing real returns through cool offshoots like "ant colony
optimization" and similar approaches that are showing good results in
fields as diverse as piloting military UAVs and efficiently
provisioning car-painting robots at automotive plants.
676
So if you buy Kurzweil's premise that computation is getting cheaper
and more plentiful than ever, then why not just use evolutionary
algorithms to evolve the best way to model a scanned-in human brain
such that it "wakes up" like Heinlein's Mike computer?
677
Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's argument in Spiritual Machines:
if we have computation to spare and a detailed model of a human brain,
we need only combine them and out will pop the mechanism whereby we may
upload our consciousness to digital storage media and transcend our
weak and bothersome meat forever.Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil's
argument in Spiritual Machines: if we have computation to spare and a
detailed model of a human brain, we need only combine them and out will
pop the mechanism whereby we may upload our consciousness to digital
storage media and transcend our weak and bothersome meat forever.
678
But it's a cheat. Evolutionary algorithms depend on the same mechanisms
as real-world evolution: heritable variation of candidates and a system
that culls the least-suitable candidates. This latter -- the
fitness-factor that determines which individuals in a cohort breed and
which vanish -- is the key to a successful evolutionary system. Without
it, there's no pressure for the system to achieve the desired goal:
merely mutation and more mutation.
679
But how can a machine evaluate which of a trillion models of a human
brain is "most like" a conscious mind? Or better still: which one is
most like the individual whose brain is being modeled?
680
"It is a sleight of hand in Spiritual Machines," Kurzweil admits. "But
in The Singularity Is Near, I have an in-depth discussion about what we
know about the brain and how to model it. Our tools for understanding
the brain are subject to the Law of Accelerating Returns, and we've
made more progress in reverse-engineering the human brain than most
people realize." This is a tasty Kurzweilism that observes that
improvements in technology yield tools for improving technology, round
and round, so that the thing that progress begets more than anything is
more and yet faster progress.
681
"Scanning resolution of human tissue -- both spatial and temporal -- is
doubling every year, and so is our knowledge of the workings of the
brain. The brain is not one big neural net, the brain is several
hundred different regions, and we can understand each region, we can
model the regions with mathematics, most of which have some nexus with
chaos and self-organizing systems. This has already been done for a
couple dozen regions out of the several hundred.
682
"We have a good model of a dozen or so regions of the auditory and
visual cortex, how we strip images down to very low-resolution movies
based on pattern recognition. Interestingly, we don't actually see
things, we essentially hallucinate them in detail from what we see from
these low resolution cues. Past the early phases of the visual cortex,
detail doesn't reach the brain.
683
"We are getting exponentially more knowledge. We can get detailed scans
of neurons working in vivo, and are beginning to understand the chaotic
algorithms underlying human intelligence. In some cases, we are getting
comparable performance of brain regions in simulation. These tools will
continue to grow in detail and sophistication.
684
"We can have confidence of reverse-engineering the brain in twenty
years or so. The reason that brain reverse engineering has not
contributed much to artificial intelligence is that up until recently
we didn't have the right tools. If I gave you a computer and a few
magnetic sensors and asked you to reverse-engineer it, you might figure
out that there's a magnetic device spinning when a file is saved, but
you'd never get at the instruction set. Once you reverse-engineer the
computer fully, however, you can express its principles of operation in
just a few dozen pages.
685
"Now there are new tools that let us see the interneuronal connections
and their signaling, in vivo, and in real-time. We're just now getting
these tools and there's very rapid application of the tools to obtain
the data.
686
"Twenty years from now we will have realistic simulations and models of
all the regions of the brain and [we will] understand how they work. We
won't blindly or mindlessly copy those methods, we will understand them
and use them to improve our AI toolkit. So we'll learn how the brain
works and then apply the sophisticated tools that we will obtain, as we
discover how the brain works.
687
"Once we understand a subtle science principle, we can isolate,
amplify, and expand it. Air goes faster over a curved surface: from
that insight we isolated, amplified, and expanded the idea and invented
air travel. We'll do the same with intelligence.
688
"Progress is exponential -- not just a measure of power of computation,
number of Internet nodes, and magnetic spots on a hard disk -- the rate
of paradigm shift is itself accelerating, doubling every decade.
Scientists look at a problem and they intuitively conclude that since
we've solved 1 percent over the last year, it'll therefore be one
hundred years until the problem is exhausted: but the rate of progress
doubles every decade, and the power of the information tools (in
price-performance, resolution, bandwidth, and so on) doubles every
year. People, even scientists, don't grasp exponential growth. During
the first decade of the human genome project, we only solved 2 percent
of the problem, but we solved the remaining 98 percent in five years."
689
But Kurzweil doesn't think that the future will arrive in a rush. As
William Gibson observed, "The future is here, it's just not evenly
distributed."
690
"Sure, it'd be interesting to take a human brain, scan it,
reinstantiate the brain, and run it on another substrate. That will
ultimately happen."
691
"But the most salient scenario is that we'll gradually merge with our
technology. We'll use nanobots to kill pathogens, then to kill cancer
cells, and then they'll go into our brain and do benign things there
like augment our memory, and very gradually they'll get more and more
sophisticated. There's no single great leap, but there is ultimately a
great leap comprised of many small steps.
692
"In The Singularity Is Near, I describe the radically different world
of 2040, and how we'll get there one benign change at a time. The
Singularity will be gradual, smooth.
693
"Really, this is about augmenting our biological thinking with
nonbiological thinking. We have a capacity of 1026 to 1029 calculations
per second (cps) in the approximately 1010 biological human brains on
Earth and that number won't change much in fifty years, but
nonbiological thinking will just crash through that. By 2049,
nonbiological thinking capacity will be on the order of a billion times
that. We'll get to the point where bio thinking is relatively
insignificant.
694
"People didn't throw their typewriters away when word-processing
started. There's always an overlap -- it'll take time before we realize
how much more powerful nonbiological thinking will ultimately be."
695
It's well and good to talk about all the stuff we can do with
technology, but it's a lot more important to talk about the stuff we'll
be allowed to do with technology. Think of the global freak-out caused
by the relatively trivial advent of peer-to-peer file-sharing tools:
Universities are wiretapping their campuses and disciplining computer
science students for writing legitimate, general purpose software;
grandmothers and twelve-year-olds are losing their life savings;
privacy and due process have sailed out the window without so much as a
by-your-leave.
696
Even P2P's worst enemies admit that this is a general-purpose
technology with good and bad uses, but when new tech comes along it
often engenders a response that countenances punishing an infinite
number of innocent people to get at the guilty.
697
What's going to happen when the new technology paradigm isn't
song-swapping, but transcendent super-intelligence? Will the
reactionary forces be justified in razing the whole ecosystem to
eliminate a few parasites who are doing negative things with the new
tools?
698
"Complex ecosystems will always have parasites. Malware [malicious
software] is the most important battlefield today.
699
"Everything will become software -- objects will be malleable, we'll
spend lots of time in VR, and computhought will be orders of magnitude
more important than biothought.
700
"Software is already complex enough that we have an ecological terrain
that has emerged just as it did in the bioworld.
701
"That's partly because technology is unregulated and people have access
to the tools to create malware and the medicine to treat it. Today's
software viruses are clever and stealthy and not simpleminded. Very
clever.
702
"But here's the thing: you don't see people advocating shutting down
the Internet because malware is so destructive. I mean, malware is
potentially more than a nuisance -- emergency systems, air traffic
control, and nuclear reactors all run on vulnerable software. It's an
important issue, but the potential damage is still a tiny fraction of
the benefit we get from the Internet.
703
"I hope it'll remain that way -- that the Internet won't become a
regulated space like medicine. Malware's not the most important issue
facing human society today. Designer bioviruses are. People are
concerted about WMDs, but the most daunting WMD would be a designed
biological virus. The means exist in college labs to create destructive
viruses that erupt and spread silently with long incubation periods.
704
"Importantly, a would-be bio-terrorist doesn't have to put malware
through the FDA's regulatory approval process, but scientists working
to fix bio-malware do.
705
"In Huxley's Brave New World, the rationale for the totalitarian system
was that technology was too dangerous and needed to be controlled. But
that just pushes technology underground where it becomes less stable.
Regulation gives the edge of power to the irresponsible who won't
listen to the regulators anyway.
706
"The way to put more stones on the defense side of the scale is to put
more resources into defensive technologies, not create a totalitarian
regime of Draconian control.
707
"I advocate a one hundred billion dollar program to accelerate the
development of anti-biological virus technology. The way to combat this
is to develop broad tools to destroy viruses. We have tools like RNA
interference, just discovered in the past two years to block gene
expression. We could develop means to sequence the genes of a new virus
(SARS only took thirty-one days) and respond to it in a matter of days.
708
"Think about it. There's no FDA for software, no certification for
programmers. The government is thinking about it, though! The reason
the FCC is contemplating Trusted Computing mandates," -- a system to
restrict what a computer can do by means of hardware locks embedded on
the motherboard -- "is that computing technology is broadening to cover
everything. So now you have communications bureaucrats, biology
bureaucrats, all wanting to regulate computers.
709
"Biology would be a lot more stable if we moved away from regulation --
which is extremely irrational and onerous and doesn't appropriately
balance risks. Many medications are not available today even though
they should be. The FDA always wants to know what happens if we approve
this and will it turn into a thalidomide situation that embarrasses us
on CNN?
710
"Nobody asks about the harm that will certainly accrue from delaying a
treatment for one or more years. There's no political weight at all,
people have been dying from diseases like heart disease and cancer for
as long as we've been alive. Attributable risks get 100-1000 times more
weight than unattributable risks."
711
Is this spirituality or science? Perhaps it is the melding of both --
more shades of Heinlein, this time the weird religions founded by
people who took Stranger in a Strange Land way too seriously.
712
After all, this is a system of belief that dictates a means by which we
can care for our bodies virtuously and live long enough to transcend
them. It is a system of belief that concerns itself with the meddling
of non-believers, who work to undermine its goals through irrational
systems predicated on their disbelief. It is a system of belief that
asks and answers the question of what it means to be human.
713
It's no wonder that the Singularity has come to occupy so much of the
science fiction narrative in these years. Science or spirituality, you
could hardly ask for a subject better tailored to technological
speculation and drama.
714
21. Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the
editors
715
"Mostly Harmless" -- a phrase so funny that Adams actually titled a
book after it. Not that there's a lot of comedy inherent in those two
words: rather, they're the punchline to a joke that anyone who's ever
written for publication can really get behind.
716
Ford Prefect, a researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
has been stationed on Earth for years, painstakingly compiling an
authoritative, insightful entry on Terran geography, science and
culture, excerpts from which appear throughout the H2G2 books. His
entry improved upon the old one, which noted that Earth was, simply,
"Harmless."
717
However, the Guide has limited space, and when Ford submits his entry
to his editors, it is trimmed to fit:
718
"What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One
719
[fn: My lifestyle is as gypsy and fancy-free as the characters in H2G2,
and as a result my copies of the Adams books are thousands of miles
away in storages in other countries, and this essay was penned on
public transit and cheap hotel rooms in Chile, Boston, London, Geneva,
Brussels, Bergen, Geneva (again), Toronto, Edinburgh, and Helsinki.
Luckily, I was able to download a dodgy, re-keyed version of the Adams
books from a peer-to-peer network, which network I accessed via an open
wireless network on a random street-corner in an anonymous city, a fact
that I note here as testimony to the power of the Internet to do what
the Guide does for Ford and Arthur: put all the information I need at
my fingertips, wherever I am. However, these texts are a little
on the dodgy side, as noted, so you might want to confirm these quotes
before, say, uttering them before an Adams truefan.]
720
And there's the humor: every writer knows the pain of laboring over a
piece for days, infusing it with diverse interesting factoids and
insights, only to have it cut to ribbons by some distant editor (I once
wrote thirty drafts of a 5,000-word article for an editor who ended up
running it in three paragraphs as accompaniment for what he decided
should be a photo essay with minimal verbiage.)
721
Since the dawn of the Internet, H2G2 geeks have taken it upon
themselves to attempt to make a Guide on the Internet. Volunteers wrote
and submitted essays on various subjects as would be likely to appear
in a good encyclopedia, infusing them with equal measures of humor and
thoughtfulness, and they were edited together by the collective effort
of the contributors. These projects -- Everything2, H2G2 (which was
overseen by Adams himself), and others -- are like a barn-raising in
which a team of dedicated volunteers organize the labors of casual
contributors, piecing together a free and open user-generated
encyclopedia.
722
These encyclopedias have one up on Adams's Guide: they have no shortage
of space on their "microprocessors" (the first volume of the Guide was
clearly written before Adams became conversant with PCs!). The ability
of humans to generate verbiage is far outstripped by the ability of
technologists to generate low-cost, reliable storage to contain it. For
example, Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive project (archive.org) has
been making a copy of the Web -- the whole Web, give or take --
every couple of days since 1996. Using the Archive's Wayback Machine,
you can now go and see what any page looked like on a given day.
723
The Archive doesn't even bother throwing away copies of pages that
haven't changed since the last time they were scraped: with storage as
cheap as it is -- and it is very cheap for the Archive, which
runs the largest database in the history of the universe off of a
collection of white-box commodity PCs stacked up on packing skids in
the basement of a disused armory in San Francisco's Presidio -- there's
no reason not to just keep them around. In fact, the Archive has just
spawned two "mirror" Archives, one located under the rebuilt Library of
Alexandria and the other in Amsterdam. [fn: Brewster Kahle says that he
was nervous about keeping his only copy of the "repository of all human
knowledge" on the San Andreas fault, but keeping your backups in a
censorship-happy Amnesty International watchlist state and/or in a
floodplain below sea level is probably not such a good idea either!]
724
So these systems did not see articles trimmed for lack of space; for on
the Internet, the idea of "running out of space" is meaningless. But
they were trimmed, by editorial cliques, and rewritten for
clarity and style. Some entries were rejected as being too thin, while
others were sent back to the author for extensive rewrites.
725
This traditional separation of editor and writer mirrors the creative
process itself, in which authors are exhorted to concentrate on
either composing or revising, but not both at the same
time, for the application of the critical mind to the creative process
strangles it. So you write, and then you edit. Even when you write for
your own consumption, it seems you have to answer to an editor.
726
The early experimental days of the Internet saw much experimentation
with alternatives to traditional editor/author divisions. Slashdot, a
nerdy news-site of surpassing popularity [fn: Having a link to one's
website posted to Slashdot will almost inevitably overwhelm your server
with traffic, knocking all but the best-provisioned hosts offline
within minutes; this is commonly referred to as "the Slashdot
Effect."], has a baroque system for "community moderation" of the
responses to the articles that are posted to its front pages. Readers,
chosen at random, are given five "moderator points" that they can use
to raise or lower the score of posts on the Slashdot message boards.
Subsequent readers can filter their views of these boards to show only
highly ranked posts. Other readers are randomly presented with posts
and their rankings and are asked to rate the fairness of each
moderator's moderation. Moderators who moderate fairly are given more
opportunities to moderate; likewise message-board posters whose
messages are consistently highly rated.
727
It is thought that this system rewards good "citizenship" on the
Slashdot boards through checks and balances that reward good messages
and fair editorial practices. And in the main, the Slashdot moderation
system works [fn: as do variants on it, like the system in place at
Kur5hin.org (pronounced "corrosion")]. If you dial your filter up to
show you highly scored messages, you will generally get well-reasoned,
or funny, or genuinely useful posts in your browser.
728
This community moderation scheme and ones like it have been heralded as
a good alternative to traditional editorship. The importance of the
Internet to "edit itself" is best understood in relation to the old
shibboleth, "On the Internet, everyone is a slushreader." [fn: "Slush"
is the term for generally execrable unsolicited manuscripts that fetch
up in publishers' offices -- these are typically so bad that the most
junior people on staff are drafted into reading (and, usually,
rejecting) them]. When the Internet's radical transformative properties
were first bandied about in publishing circles, many reassured
themselves that even if printing's importance was de-emphasized, that
good editors would always been needed, and doubly so online, where any
mouth-breather with a modem could publish his words. Someone would need
to separate the wheat from the chaff and help keep us from drowning in
information.
729
One of the best-capitalized businesses in the history of the world,
Yahoo!, went public on the strength of this notion, proposing to use an
army of researchers to catalog every single page on the Web even as it
was created, serving as a comprehensive guide to all human knowledge.
Less than a decade later, Yahoo! is all but out of that business: the
ability of the human race to generate new pages far outstrips Yahoo!'s
ability to read, review, rank and categorize them.
730
Hence Slashdot, a system of distributed slushreading. Rather than
professionalizing the editorship role, Slashdot invites contributors to
identify good stuff when they see it, turning editorship into a reward
for good behavior.
731
But as well as Slashdot works, it has this signal failing: nearly every
conversation that takes place on Slashdot is shot through with
discussion, griping and gaming on the moderation system itself .
The core task of Slashdot has become editorship, not the
putative subjects of Slashdot posts. The fact that the central task of
Slashdot is to rate other Slashdotters creates a tenor of meanness in
the discussion. Imagine if the subtext of every discussion you had in
the real world was a kind of running, pedantic nitpickery in which
every point was explicitly weighed and judged and commented upon. You'd
be an unpleasant, unlikable jerk, the kind of person that is sometimes
referred to as a "slashdork."
732
As radical as Yahoo!'s conceit was, Slashdot's was more radical. But as
radical as Slashdot's is, it is still inherently conservative in that
it presumes that editorship is necessary, and that it further requires
human judgment and intervention.
733
Google's a lot more radical. Instead of editors, it has an algorithm.
Not the kind of algorithm that dominated the early search engines like
Altavista, in which laughably bad artificial intelligence engines
attempted to automatically understand the content, context and value of
every page on the Web so that a search for "Dog" would turn up the page
more relevant to the query.
734
Google's algorithm is predicated on the idea that people are good at
understanding things and computers are good at counting things. Google
counts up all the links on the Web and affords more authority to those
pages that have been linked to by the most other pages. The rationale
is that if a page has been linked to by many web-authors, then they
must have seen some merit in that page. This system works remarkably
well -- so well that it's nearly inconceivable that any search-engine
would order its rankings by any other means. What's more, it doesn't
pervert the tenor of the discussions and pages that it catalogs by
turning each one into a performance for a group of ranking peers. [fn:
Or at least, it didn't . Today, dedicated web-writers, such as
bloggers, are keenly aware of the way that Google will interpret their
choices about linking and page-structure. One popular sport is
"googlebombing," in which web-writers collude to link to a given page
using a humorous keyword so that the page becomes the top result for
that word -- which is why, for a time, the top result for "more evil
than Satan" was Microsoft.com. Likewise, the practice of
"blogspamming," in which unscrupulous spammers post links to their
webpages in the message boards on various blogs, so that Google will be
tricked into thinking that a wide variety of sites have conferred some
authority onto their penis-enlargement page.]
735
But even Google is conservative in assuming that there is a need for
editorship as distinct from composition. Is there a way we can dispense
with editorship altogether and just use composition to refine our
ideas? Can we merge composition and editorship into a single role,
fusing our creative and critical selves?
736
You betcha.
737
"Wikis" [fn: Hawai'ian for "fast"] are websites that can be edited by
anyone. They were invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995, and they have
become one of the dominant tools for Internet collaboration in the
present day. Indeed, there is a sort of Internet geek who throws up a
Wiki in the same way that ants make anthills: reflexively,
unconsciously.
738
Here's how a Wiki works. You put up a page:
739
Welcome to my Wiki. It is rad.
740
Click "publish" and bam, the page is live. The word "OtherWikis" will
be underlined, having automatically been turned into a link to a blank
page titled "OtherWikis" (Wiki software recognizes words with capital
letters in the middle of them as links to other pages. Wiki people call
this "camel-case," because the capital letters in the middle of words
make them look like humped camels.) At the bottom of it appears this
legend: "Edit this page."
741
Click on "Edit this page" and the text appears in an editable field.
Revise the text to your heart's content and click "Publish" and your
revisions are live. Anyone who visits a Wiki can edit any of its pages,
adding to it, improving on it, adding camel-cased links to new
subjects, or even defacing or deleting it.
742
It is authorship without editorship. Or authorship fused with
editorship. Whichever, it works, though it requires effort. The
Internet, like all human places and things, is fraught with spoilers
and vandals who deface whatever they can. Wiki pages are routinely
replaced with obscenities, with links to spammers' websites, with junk
and crap and flames.
743
But Wikis have self-defense mechanisms, too. Anyone can "subscribe" to
a Wiki page, and be notified when it is updated. Those who create Wiki
pages generally opt to act as "gardeners" for them, ensuring that they
are on hand to undo the work of the spoilers.
744
In this labor, they are aided by another useful Wiki feature: the
"history" link. Every change to every Wiki page is logged and recorded.
Anyone can page back through every revision, and anyone can revert the
current version to a previous one. That means that vandalism only lasts
as long as it takes for a gardener to come by and, with one or two
clicks, set things to right.
745
This is a powerful and wildly successful model for collaboration, and
there is no better example of this than the Wikipedia, a free,
Wiki-based encyclopedia with more than one million entries, which has
been translated into 198 languages [fn: That is, one or more Wikipedia
entries have been translated into 198 languages; more than 15 languages
have 10,000 or more entries translated]
746
Wikipedia is built entirely out of Wiki pages created by self-appointed
experts. Contributors research and write up subjects, or produce
articles on subjects that they are familiar with.
747
This is authorship, but what of editorship? For if there is one thing a
Guide or an encyclopedia must have, it is authority. It must be vetted
by trustworthy, neutral parties, who present something that is either
The Truth or simply A Truth, but truth nevertheless.
748
The Wikipedia has its skeptics. Al Fasoldt, a writer for the Syracuse
Post-Standard, apologized to his readers for having recommended that
they consult Wikipedia. A reader of his, a librarian, wrote in and told
him that his recommendation had been irresponsible, for Wikipedia
articles are often defaced or worse still, rewritten with incorrect
information. When another journalist from the Techdirt website wrote to
Fasoldt to correct this impression, Fasoldt responded with an
increasingly patronizing and hysterical series of messages in which he
described Wikipedia as "outrageous," "repugnant" and "dangerous,"
insulting the Techdirt writer and storming off in a huff. [fn: see
<
749
Spurred on by this exchange, many of Wikipedia's supporters decided to
empirically investigate the accuracy and resilience of the system. Alex
Halavais made changes to 13 different pages, ranging from obvious to
subtle. Every single change was found and corrected within hours. [fn:
see <
750
There has been one very damning and even frightening indictment of
Wikipedia, which came from Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of the
GeekCorps group, which sends volunteers to poor countries to help
establish Internet Service Providers and do other good works through
technology.
751
Zuckerman, a Harvard Berkman Center Fellow, is concerned with the
"systemic bias" in a collaborative encyclopedia whose contributors must
be conversant with technology and in possession of same in order to
improve on the work there. Zuckerman reasonably observes that Internet
users skew towards wealth, residence in the world's richest countries,
and a technological bent. This means that the Wikipedia, too, is skewed
to subjects of interest to that group -- subjects where that group
already has expertise and interest.
752
The result is tragicomical. The entry on the Congo Civil War, the
largest military conflict the world has seen since WWII, which has
claimed over three million lives, has only a fraction of the verbiage
devoted to the War of the Ents, a fictional war fought between sentient
trees in JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings .
753
Zuckerman issued a public call to arms to rectify this, challenging
Wikipedia contributors to seek out information on subjects like
Africa's military conflicts, nursing and agriculture and write these
subjects up in the same loving detail given over to science fiction
novels and contemporary youth culture. His call has been answered well.
What remains is to infiltrate the Wikipedia into the academe so that
term papers, Masters and Doctoral theses on these subjects find
themselves in whole or in part on the Wikipedia. [fn See <
754
But if Wikipedia is authoritative, how does it get there? What alchemy
turns the maunderings of "mouth-breathers with modems" into valid,
useful encyclopedia entries?
755
It all comes down to the way that disputes are deliberated over and
resolved. Take the entry on Israel. At one point, it characterized
Israel as a beleaguered state set upon by terrorists who would drive
its citizens into the sea. Not long after, the entry was deleted
holus-bolus and replaced with one that described Israel as an illegal
state practicing Apartheid on an oppressed ethnic minority.
756
Back and forth the editors went, each overwriting the other's with his
or her own doctrine. But eventually, one of them blinked. An editor
moderated the doctrine just a little, conceding a single point to the
other. And the other responded in kind. In this way, turn by turn, all
those with a strong opinion on the matter negotiated a kind of Truth, a
collection of statements that everyone could agree represented as
neutral a depiction of Israel as was likely to emerge. Whereupon, the
joint authors of this marvelous document joined forces and fought back
to back to resist the revisions of other doctrinaires who came later,
preserving their hard-won peace. [fn: This process was just repeated in
microcosm in the Wikipedia entry on the author of this paper, which was
replaced by a rather disparaging and untrue entry that characterized
his books as critical and commercial failures -- there ensued several
editorial volleys, culminating in an uneasy peace that couches the
anonymous detractor's skepticism in context and qualifiers that make it
clear what the facts are and what is speculation]
757
What's most fascinating about these entries isn't their "final" text as
currently present on Wikipedia. It is the history page for each,
blow-by-blow revision lists that make it utterly transparent where the
bodies were buried on the way to arriving at whatever Truth has
emerged. This is a neat solution to the problem of authority -- if you
want to know what the fully rounded view of opinions on any
controversial subject look like, you need only consult its entry's
history page for a blistering eyeful of thorough debate on the subject.
758
And here, finally, is the answer to the "Mostly harmless" problem.
Ford's editor can trim his verbiage to two words, but they need not
stay there -- Arthur, or any other user of the Guide as we know it
today [fn: that is, in the era where we understand enough about
technology to know the difference between a microprocessor and a
hard-drive] can revert to Ford's glorious and exhaustive version.
759
Think of it: a Guide without space restrictions and without editors,
where any Vogon can publish to his heart's content.
760
Lovely.
761
22. Warhol is Turning in His Grave
762
The excellent little programmer book for the National Portrait
Gallery's current show POPARTPORTRAITS has a lot to say about the
pictures hung on the walls, about the diverse source material the
artists drew from in producing their provocative works. They cut up
magazines, copied comic books, drew in trademarked cartoon characters
like Minnie Mouse, reproduced covers from Time magazine, made
ironic use of the cartoon figure of Charles Atlas, painted over an
iconic photo of James Dean or Elvis Presley -- and that's just in the
first room of seven.
763
The programmer book describes the aesthetic experience of seeing these
repositioned icons of culture high and low, the art created by the
celebrated artists Poons, Rauschenberg, Warhol, et al by nicking the
work of others, without permission, and remaking it to make statements
and evoke emotions never countenanced by the original creators.
764
However, the book does not say a word about copyright. Can you blame
it? A treatise on the way that copyright and trademark were -- had
to be -- trammeled to make these works could fill volumes. Reading
the programmer book, you have to assume that the curators' only message
about copyright is that where free expression is concerned, the rights
of the creators of the original source material appropriated by the pop
school take a back seat.
765
There is, however, another message about copyright in the National
Portrait Gallery: it's implicit in the "No Photography" signs
prominently placed throughout the halls, including one right by the
entrance of the POPARTPORTRAITS exhibition. This isn't intended to
protect the works from the depredations of camera-flashes (it would
read NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY if this were so). No, the ban on pictures is
in place to safeguard the copyright in the works hung on the walls -- a
fact that every gallery staffer I spoke to instantly affirmed when I
asked about the policy.
766
Indeed, it seems that every square centimeter of the Portrait Gallery
is under some form of copyright. I wasn't even allowed to photograph
the NO PHOTOGRAPHS sign. A museum staffer explained that she'd been
told that the typography and layout of the NO PHOTOGRAPHS legend was,
itself, copyrighted. If this is true, then presumably, the same rules
would prevent anyone from taking any pictures in any public place --
unless you could somehow contrive to get a shot of Leicester Square
without any writing, logos, architectural facades, or images in it. I
doubt Warhol could have done it.
767
What's the message of the show, then? Is it a celebration of remix
culture, reveling in the endless possibilities opened up by
appropriating and re-using without permission?
768
Or is it the epitaph on the tombstone of the sweet days before the UN's
chartering of the World Intellectual Property Organization and the
ensuing mania for turning everything that can be sensed and recorded
into someone's property?
769
Does this show -- paid for with public money, with some works that are
themselves owned by public institutions -- seek to inspire us to become
21st century pops, armed with cameraphones, websites and mixers, or is
it supposed to inform us that our chance has passed, and we'd best
settle for a life as information serfs, who can't even make free use of
what our eyes see, our ears hear, of the streets we walk upon?
770
Perhaps, just perhaps, it's actually a Dadaist show masquerading
as a pop art show! Perhaps the point is to titillate us with the
delicious irony of celebrating copyright infringement while
simultaneously taking the view that even the NO PHOTOGRAPHY sign is a
form of property, not to be reproduced without the permission that can
never be had.
771
23. The Future of Ignoring Things
772
For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's
time for them to help us to ignore.
773
Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but
virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam
messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from our ratings what is and
is not spam, but it expends practically no effort on figuring out which
of the non-spam emails are important and which ones can be safely
ignored, dropped into archival folders, or deleted unread.
774
For example, I'm forever getting cc'd on busy threads by well-meaning
colleagues who want to loop me in on some discussion in which I have
little interest. Maybe the initial group invitation to a dinner (that
I'll be out of town for) was something I needed to see, but now that
I've declined, I really don't need to read the 300+ messages that
follow debating the best place to eat.
775
I could write a mail-rule to ignore the thread, of course. But
mail-rule editors are clunky, and once your rule-list grows very long,
it becomes increasingly unmanageable. Mail-rules are where bookmarks
were before the bookmark site del.icio.us showed up -- built for people
who might want to ensure that messages from the boss show up in red,
but not intended to be used as a gigantic storehouse of a million
filters, a crude means for telling the computers what we don't want to
see.
776
Rael Dornfest, the former chairman of the O'Reilly Emerging Tech
conference and founder of the startup IWantSandy, once proposed an
"ignore thread" feature for mailers: Flag a thread as uninteresting,
and your mailer will start to hide messages with that subject-line or
thread-ID for a week, unless those messages contain your name. The
problem is that threads mutate. Last week's dinner plans become this
week's discussion of next year's group holiday. If the thread is still
going after a week, the messages flow back into your inbox -- and a
single click takes you back through all the messages you missed.
777
We need a million measures like this, adaptive systems that create a
gray zone between "delete on sight" and "show this to me right away."
778
RSS readers are a great way to keep up with the torrent of new items
posted on high-turnover sites like Digg, but they're even better at
keeping up with sites that are sporadic, like your friend's brilliant
journal that she only updates twice a year. But RSS readers don't
distinguish between the rare and miraculous appearance of a new item in
an occasional journal and the latest click-fodder from Slashdot. They
don't even sort your RSS feeds according to the sites that you
click-through the most.
779
There was a time when I could read the whole of Usenet -- not just
because I was a student looking for an excuse to avoid my assignments,
but because Usenet was once tractable, readable by a single determined
person. Today, I can't even keep up with a single high-traffic
message-board. I can't read all my email. I can't read every item
posted to every site I like. I certainly can't plough through the
entire edit-history of every Wikipedia entry I read. I've come to grips
with this -- with acquiring information on a probabilistic basis,
instead of the old, deterministic, cover-to-cover approach I learned in
the offline world.
780
It's as though there's a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the
network only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much
about the bits that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort
sweeps of the Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they
find, rather than lamenting the stuff they don't have time to see.
781
The network won't ever become more tractable. There will never be fewer
things vying for our online attention. The only answer is better ways
and new technology to ignore stuff -- a field that's just being born,
with plenty of room to grow.
782
24. Facebook's Faceplant
783
Facebook's "platform" strategy has sparked much online debate and
controversy. No one wants to see a return to the miserable days of
walled gardens, when you couldn't send a message to an AOL subscriber
unless you, too, were a subscriber, and when the only services that
made it were the ones that AOL management approved. Those of us on the
"real" Internet regarded AOL with a species of superstitious dread, a
hive of clueless noobs waiting to swamp our beloved Usenet with dumb
flamewars (we fiercely guarded our erudite flamewars as being of a
palpably superior grade), the wellspring of an
784
Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of
pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in
need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get
from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it?
Facebook isn't telling -- you have to visit Facebook to find out,
generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using
the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed
email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving
and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're
eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to
discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other
"social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces
of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold
of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I
know something, won't tell you what it is!"
785
If there was any doubt about Facebook's lack of qualification to
displace the Internet with a benevolent dictatorship/walled garden, it
was removed when Facebook unveiled its new advertising campaign. Now,
Facebook will allow its advertisers use the profile pictures of
Facebook users to advertise their products, without permission or
compensation. Even if you're the kind of person who likes the sound of
a "benevolent dictatorship," this clearly isn't one.
786
Many of my colleagues wonder if Facebook can be redeemed by opening up
the platform, letting anyone write any app for the service, easily
exporting and importing their data, and so on (this is the kind of
thing Google is doing with its OpenSocial Alliance). Perhaps if
Facebook takes on some of the characteristics that made the Web work --
openness, decentralization, standardization -- it will become like the
Web itself, but with the added pixie dust of "social," the indefinable
characteristic that makes Facebook into pure crack for a significant
proportion of Internet users.
787
The debate about redeeming Facebook starts from the assumption that
Facebook is snowballing toward critical mass, the point at which it
begins to define "the Internet" for a large slice of the world's
netizens, growing steadily every day. But I think that this is far from
a sure thing. Sure, networks generally follow Metcalfe's Law: "the
value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of
the number of users of the system." This law is best understood through
the analogy of the fax machine: a world with one fax machine has no use
for faxes, but every time you add a fax, you square the number of
possible send/receive combinations (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or Don;
Bob can fax Alice, Carol and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob and Don,
etc).
788
But Metcalfe's law presumes that creating more communications pathways
increases the value of the system, and that's not always true (see
Brook's Law: "Adding manpower to a late softer project makes it
later").
789
Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the
many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading
to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I'm inclined to think that these systems
are subject to a Brook's-law parallel: "Adding more users to a social
network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward
social circumstance." Perhaps we can call this "boyd's Law" [NOTE TO
EDITOR: "boyd" is always lower-case] for danah [TO EDITOR: "danah"
too!] boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks
from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described
the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in
a series of sharp papers.
790
Here's one of boyd's examples, a true story: a young woman, an
elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning
Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up
and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt,
drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital
photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa. The teacher
inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, and all is well again
until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the service and
demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn't like
her boss doesn't really matter: in the social world of Friendster and
its progeny, it's perfectly valid to demand to be "friended" in an
explicit fashion that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now
that her boss is on her friends list, our teacher-friend's buddies
naturally assume that she is one of the tribe and begin to send her
lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty
funtimes.
791
In the real world, we don't articulate our social networks. Imagine how
creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover
the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by
"friend" and "foe," with the top eight friends elevated to a small
shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there's an
undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly
acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it's
evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution
into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of
survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys
so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not, e.g.,
napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging
only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged.
792
Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work
that runs a heavy cognitive load. It's natural to seek out some neural
prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a
"social scheduling" application that would watch your phone and email
and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if
too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep
the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you've reached your
forties, chances are you're out-of-touch with more friends than you're
in-touch with, old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and
their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans...
Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and
then some.
793
You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all
this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on
Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the
whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person
who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy
ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to
know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.
794
It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking
service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been
frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile:
why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving
arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add
someone to your friends list -- but removing someone from your
friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way
to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to
reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites
(of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to
someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that
we're pals).
795
That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more
users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your
exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go --
and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the
scrapheap of net.history.
796
25. The Future of Internet Immune Systems
797
Bunhill Cemetery is just down the road from my flat in London. It's a
handsome old boneyard, a former plague pit (“Bone hill” --
as in, there are so many bones under there that the ground is actually
kind of humped up into a hill). There are plenty of luminaries buried
there -- John “ Pilgrim's Progress” Bunyan, William Blake,
Daniel Defoe, and assorted Cromwells. But my favorite tomb is that of
Thomas Bayes, the 18th-century statistician for whom Bayesian filtering
is named.
798
Bayesian filtering is plenty useful. Here's a simple example of how you
might use a Bayesian filter. First, get a giant load of non-spam emails
and feed them into a Bayesian program that counts how many times each
word in their vocabulary appears, producing a statistical breakdown of
the word-frequency in good emails.
799
Then, point the filter at a giant load of spam (if you're having a hard
time getting a hold of one, I have plenty to spare), and count the
words in it. Now, for each new message that arrives in your inbox, have
the filter count the relative word-frequencies and make a statistical
prediction about whether the new message is spam or not (there are
plenty of wrinkles in this formula, but this is the general idea).
800
The beauty of this approach is that you needn't dream up “ The
Big Exhaustive List of Words and Phrases That Indicate a Message Is/Is
Not Spam.” The filter naively calculates a statistical
fingerprint for spam and not-spam, and checks the new messages against
them.
801
This approach -- and similar ones -- are evolving into an immune system
for the Internet, and like all immune systems, a little bit goes a long
way, and too much makes you break out in hives.
802
ISPs are loading up their network centers with intrusion detection
systems and tripwires that are supposed to stop attacks before they
happen. For example, there's the filter at the hotel I once stayed at
in Jacksonville, Fla. Five minutes after I logged in, the network
locked me out again. After an hour on the phone with tech support, it
transpired that the network had noticed that the videogame I was
playing systematically polled the other hosts on the network to check
if they were running servers that I could join and play on. The network
decided that this was a malicious port-scan and that it had better kick
me off before I did anything naughty.
803
It only took five minutes for the software to lock me out, but it took
well over an hour to find someone in tech support who understood what
had happened and could reset the router so that I could get back
online.
804
And right there is an example of the autoimmune disorder. Our network
defenses are automated, instantaneous, and sweeping. But our fallback
and oversight systems are slow, understaffed, and unresponsive. It
takes a millionth of a second for the Transportation Security
Administration's body-cavity-search roulette wheel to decide that
you're a potential terrorist and stick you on a no-fly list, but
getting un-Tuttle-Buttled is a nightmarish, months-long procedure that
makes Orwell look like an optimist.
805
The tripwire that locks you out was fired-and-forgotten two years ago
by an anonymous sysadmin with root access on the whole network. The
outsourced help-desk schlub who unlocks your account can't even spell
"tripwire." The same goes for the algorithm that cut off your credit
card because you got on an airplane to a different part of the world
and then had the audacity to spend your money. (I've resigned myself to
spending $50 on long-distance calls with Citibank every time I cross a
border if I want to use my debit card while abroad.)
806
This problem exists in macro- and microcosm across the whole of our
technologically mediated society. The “ spamigation bots”
run by the Business Software Alliance and the Music and Film Industry
Association of America (MAFIAA) entertainment groups send out tens of
thousands of automated copyright takedown notices to ISPs at a cost of
pennies, with little or no human oversight. The people who get
erroneously fingered as pirates (as a Recording Industry Association of
America (RIAA) spokesperson charmingly puts it, “ When you go
fishing with a dragnet, sometimes you catch a dolphin.”) spend
days or weeks convincing their ISPs that they had the right to post
their videos, music, and text-files.
807
We need an immune system. There are plenty of bad guys out there, and
technology gives them force-multipliers (like the hackers who run
250,000-PC botnets). Still, there's a terrible asymmetry in a world
where defensive takedowns are automatic, but correcting mistaken
takedowns is done by hand.
808
26. All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites
809
AOL hates spam. AOL could eliminate nearly 100 percent of its
subscribers' spam with one easy change: it could simply shut off its
internet gateway. Then, as of yore, the only email an AOL subscriber
could receive would come from another AOL subscriber. If an AOL
subscriber sent a spam to another AOL subscriber and AOL found out
about it, they could terminate the spammer's account. Spam costs AOL
millions, and represents a substantial disincentive for AOL customers
to remain with the service, and yet AOL chooses to permit virtually
anyone who can connect to the Internet, anywhere in the world, to send
email to its customers, with any software at all.
810
Email is a sloppy, complicated ecosystem. It has organisms of
sufficient diversity and sheer number as to beggar the imagination:
thousands of SMTP agents, millions of mail-servers, hundreds of
millions of users. That richness and diversity lets all kinds of
innovative stuff happen: if you go to nytimes.com and "send a story to
a friend," the NYT can convincingly spoof your return address on the
email it sends to your friend, so that it appears that the email
originated on your computer. Also: a spammer can harvest your email and
use it as a fake return address on the spam he sends to your friend.
Sysadmins have server processes that send them mail to secret
pager-addresses when something goes wrong, and GPLed mailing-list
software gets used by spammers and people running high-volume mailing
lists alike.
811
You could stop spam by simplifying email: centralize functions like
identity verification, limit the number of authorized mail agents and
refuse service to unauthorized agents, even set up tollbooths where
small sums of money are collected for every email, ensuring that
sending ten million messages was too expensive to contemplate without a
damned high expectation of return on investment. If you did all these
things, you'd solve spam.
812
By breaking email.
813
Small server processes that mail a logfile to five sysadmins every hour
just in case would be prohibitively expensive. Convincing the soviet
that your bulk-mailer was only useful to legit mailing lists and not
spammers could take months, and there's no guarantee that it would get
their stamp of approval at all. With verified identity, the NYTimes
couldn't impersonate you when it forwarded stories on your behalf --
and Chinese dissidents couldn't send out their samizdata via disposable
gmail accounts.
814
An email system that can be controlled is an email system without
complexity. Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled.
815
The Hollywood studios are conniving to create a global network of
regulatory mandates over entertainment devices. Here they call it the
Broadcast Flag; in Europe, Asia, Australia and Latinamerica it's called
DVB Copy Protection Content Management. These systems purport to solve
the problem of indiscriminate redistribution of broadcast programming
via the Internet, but their answer to the problem, such as it is, is to
require that everyone who wants to build a device that touches video
has to first get permission.
816
If you want to make a TV, a screen, a video-card, a high-speed bus, an
analog-to-digital converter, a tuner card, a DVD burner -- any tool
that you hope to be lawful for use in connection with digital TV
signals -- you'll have to go on bended knee to get permission to deploy
it. You'll have to convince FCC bureaucrats or a panel of Hollywood
companies and their sellout IT and consumer electronics toadies that
the thing you're going to bring to market will not disrupt their
business models.
817
That's how DVD works today: if you want to make a DVD player, you need
to ask permission from a shadowy organization called the DVD-CCA. They
don't give permission if you plan on adding new features -- that's why
they're suing Kaleidascape for building a DVD jukebox that can play
back your movies from a hard-drive archive instead of the original
discs.
818
CD has a rich ecosystem, filled with parasites -- entrepreneurial
organisms that move to fill every available niche. If you spent a
thousand bucks on CDs ten years ago, the ecosystem for CDs would reward
you handsomely. In the intervening decade, parasites who have found an
opportunity to suck value out of the products on offer from the labels
and the dupe houses by offering you the tools to convert your CDs to
ring-tones, karaoke, MP3s, MP3s on iPods and other players, MP3s on CDs
that hold a thousand percent more music -- and on and on.
819
DVDs live in a simpler, slower ecosystem, like a terrarium in a bottle
where a million species have been pared away to a manageable handful.
DVDs pay no such dividend. A thousand dollars' worth of ten-year old
DVDs are good for just what they were good for ten years ago: watching.
You can't put your kid into her favorite cartoon, you can't downsample
the video to something that plays on your phone, and you certainly
can't lawfully make a hard-drive-based jukebox from your discs.
820
The yearning for simple ecosystems is endemic among people who want to
"fix" some problem of bad actors on the networks.
821
Take interoperability: you might sell me a database in the expectation
that I'll only communicate with it using your authorized database
agents. That way you can charge vendors a license fee in exchange for
permission to make a client, and you can ensure that the clients are
well-behaved and don't trigger any of your nasty bugs.
822
But you can't meaningfully enforce that. EDS and other titanic software
companies earn their bread and butter by producing fake database
clients that impersonate the real thing as they iterate through every
record and write it to a text file -- or simply provide a compatibility
layer through systems provided by two different vendors. These
companies produce software that lies -- parasite software that fills
niches left behind by other organisms, sometimes to those organisms'
detriment.
823
So we have "Trusted Computing," a system that's supposed to let
software detect other programs' lies and refuse to play with them if
they get caught out fibbing. It's a system that's based on torching the
rainforest with all its glorious anarchy of tools and systems and
replacing it with neat rows of tame and planted trees, each one
approved by The Man as safe for use with his products.
824
For Trusted Computing to accomplish this, everyone who makes a
video-card, keyboard, or logic-board must receive a key from some
certifying body that will see to it that the key is stored in a way
that prevents end-users from extracting it and using it to fake
signatures.
825
But if one keyboard vendor doesn't store his keys securely, the system
will be useless for fighting keyloggers. If one video-card vendor lets
a key leak, the system will be no good for stopping screenlogging. If
one logic-board vendor lets a key slip, the whole thing goes out the
window. That's how DVD DRM got hacked: one vendor, Xing, left its keys
in a place where users could get at them, and then anyone could break
the DRM on any DVD.
826
Not only is the Trusted Computing advocates' goal -- producing a
simpler software ecosystem -- wrongheaded, but the methodology is
doomed. Fly-by-night keyboard vendors in distant free trade zones just
won't be 100 percent compliant, and Trusted Computing requires no less
than perfect compliance.
827
The whole of DRM is a macrocosm for Trusted Computing. The DVB Copy
Protection system relies on a set of rules for translating every one of
its restriction states -- such as "copy once" and "copy never" -- to
states in other DRM systems that are licensed to receive its output.
That means that they're signing up to review, approve and write special
rules for every single entertainment technology now invented and every
technology that will be invented in the future.
828
Madness: shrinking the ecosystem of everything you can plug into your
TV down to the subset that these self-appointed arbiters of technology
approve is a recipe for turning the electronics, IT and telecoms
industries into something as small and unimportant as Hollywood.
Hollywood -- which is a tenth the size of IT, itself a tenth the size
of telecoms.
829
In Hollywood, your ability to make a movie depends on the approval of a
few power-brokers who have signing authority over the
two-hundred-million-dollar budgets for making films. As far as
Hollywood is concerned, this is a feature, not a bug. Two weeks ago, I
heard the VP of Technology for Warners give a presentation in Dublin on
the need to adopt DRM for digital TV, and his money-shot, his big
convincer of a slide went like this:
830
"With advances in processing power, storage capacity and broadband
access... EVERYBODY BECOMES A BROADCASTER!"
831
Heaven forfend.
832
Simple ecosystems are the goal of proceedings like CARP, the panel that
set out the ruinously high royalties for webcasters. The recording
industry set the rates as high as they did so that the teeming millions
of webcasters would be rendered economically extinct, leaving behind a
tiny handful of giant companies that could be negotiated with around a
board room table, rather than dealt with by blanket legislation.
833
The razing of the rainforest has a cost. It's harder to send a
legitimate email today than it ever was -- thanks to a world of closed
SMTP relays. The cries for a mail-server monoculture grow more shrill
with every passing moment. Just last week, it was a call for every
mail-administrator to ban the "vacation" program that sends out
automatic responses informing senders that the recipient is away from
email for a few days, because mailboxes that run vacation can cause
"spam blowback" where accounts send their vacation notices to the
hapless individuals whose email addresses the spammers have substituted
on the email's Reply-To line.
834
And yet there is more spam than there ever was. All the costs we've
paid for fighting spam have added up to no benefit: the network is
still overrun and sometimes even overwhelmed by spam. We've let the
network's neutrality and diversity be compromised, without receiving
the promised benefit of spam-free inboxes.
835
Likewise, DRM has exacted a punishing toll wherever it has come into
play, costing us innovation, free speech, research and the public's
rights in copyright. And likewise, DRM has not stopped infringement:
today, infringement is more widespread than ever. All those costs borne
by society in the name of protecting artists and stopping infringement,
and not a penny put into an artist's pocket, not a single
DRM-restricted file that can't be downloaded for free and without
encumbrance from a P2P network.
836
Everywhere we look, we find people who should know better calling for a
parasite-free Internet. Science fiction writers are supposed to be
forward looking, but they're wasting their time demanding that Amazon
and Google make it harder to piece together whole books from the
page-previews one can get via the look-inside-the-book programs.
They're even cooking up programs to spoof deliberately corrupted ebooks
into the P2P networks, presumably to assure the few readers the field
has left that reading science fiction is a mug's game.
837
The amazing thing about the failure of parasite-elimination programs is
that their proponents have concluded that the problem is that they
haven't tried hard enough -- with just a few more species eliminated, a
few more policies imposed, paradise will spring into being. Their
answer to an unsuccessful strategy for fixing the Internet is to try
the same strategy, only moreso -- only fill those niches in the ecology
that you can sanction. Hunt and kill more parasites, no matter what the
cost.
838
We are proud parasites, we Emerging Techers. We're engaged in perl
whirling, pythoneering, lightweight javarey -- we hack our cars and we
hack our PCs. We're the rich humus carpeting the jungle floor and the
tiny frogs living in the bromeliads.
839
The long tail -- Chris Anderson's name for the 95% of media that isn't
top sellers, but which, in aggregate, accounts for more than half the
money on the table for media vendors -- is the tail of bottom-feeders
and improbable denizens of the ocean's thermal vents. We're unexpected
guests at the dinner table and we have the nerve to demand a full
helping.
840
Your ideas are cool and you should go and make them real, even if they
demand that the kind of ecological diversity that seems to be
disappearing around us.
841
You may succeed -- provided that your plans don't call for a simple
ecosystem where only you get to provide value and no one else gets to
play.
842
27. READ CAREFULLY
843
READ CAREFULLY. By reading this article, 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.
844
READ CAREFULLY -- all in caps, and what it means is, "IGNORE THIS."
That's because the small print in the clickwrap, shrinkwrap, browsewrap
and other non-negotiated agreements is both immutable and outrageous.
845
Why read the "agreement" if you know that:
846
1) No sane person would agree to its text, and
847
2) Even if you disagree, no one will negotiate a better agreement with
you?
848
We seem to have sunk to a kind of playground system of forming
contracts. There are those who will tell you that you can form a
binding agreement just by following a link, stepping into a store,
buying a product, or receiving an email. By standing there, shaking
your head, shouting "NO NO NO I DO NOT AGREE," you agree to let me come
over to your house, clean out your fridge, wear your underwear and make
some long-distance calls.
849
If you buy a downloadable movie from Amazon Unbox, you agree to let
them install spyware on your computer, delete any file they don't like
on your hard-drive, and cancel your viewing privileges for any reason.
Of course, it goes without saying that Amazon reserves the right to
modify the agreement at any time.
850
The worst offenders are people who sell you movies and music. They're a
close second to people who sell you software, or provide services over
the Internet. There's a rubric to this -- you're getting a discount in
exchange for signing onto an abusive agreement, but just try and find
the software that doesn't come with one of these "agreements" --
at any price.
851
For example, Vista, Microsoft's new operating system, comes in a
rainbow of flavors varying in price from $99 to $399, but all of them
come with the same crummy terms of service, which state that "you may
not work around any technical limitations in the software," and that
Windows Defender, the bundled anti-malware program, can delete any
program from your hard drive that Microsoft doesn't like, even if it
breaks your computer.
852
It's bad enough when this stuff comes to us through deliberate malice,
but it seems that bogus agreements can spread almost without human
intervention. Google any obnoxious term or phrase from a EULA, and
you'll find that the same phrase appears in a dozens -- perhaps
thousands -- of EULAs around the Internet. Like snippets of DNA being
passed from one virus to another as they infect the world's
corporations in a pandemic of idiocy, terms of service are
semi-autonomous entities.
853
Indeed, when rocker Billy Bragg read the fine print on the MySpace user
agreement, he discovered that it appeared that site owner Rupert
Murdoch was laying claim to copyrights in every song uploaded to the
site, in a silent, sinister land-grab that turned the media baron into
the world's most prolific and indiscriminate hoarder of garage-band
tunes.
854
However, the EULA that got Bragg upset wasn't a Murdoch innovation --
it dates back to the earliest days of the service. It seems to have
been posted at a time when the garage entrepreneurs who built MySpace
were in no position to hire pricey counsel -- something borne out by
the fact that the old MySpace EULA appears nearly verbatim on many
other services around the Internet. It's not going out very far on a
limb to speculate that MySpace's founders merely copied a EULA they
found somewhere else, without even reading it, and that when Murdoch's
due diligence attorneys were preparing to give these lucky fellows
$600,000,000, that they couldn't be bothered to read the terms of
service anyway.
855
In their defense, EULAese is so mind-numbingly boring that it's a kind
of torture to read these things. You can hardly blame them.
856
But it does raise the question -- why are we playing host to these
infectious agents? If they're not read by customers or
companies, why bother with them?
857
If you wanted to really be careful about this stuff, you'd prohibit
every employee at your office from clicking on any link, installing any
program, creating accounts, signing for parcels -- even doing a run to
Best Buy for some CD blanks, have you seen the fine-print on
their credit-card slips? After all, these people are entering into
"agreements" on behalf of their employer -- agreements to allow spyware
onto your network, to not "work around any technical limitations in
their software," to let malicious software delete arbitrary files from
their systems.
858
So far, very few of us have been really bitten in the ass by EULAs, but
that's because EULAs are generally associated with companies who have
products or services they're hoping you'll use, and enforcing their
EULAs could cost them business.
859
But that was the theory with patents, too. So long as everyone with a
huge portfolio of unexamined, overlapping, generous patents was
competing with similarly situated manufacturers, there was a mutually
assured destruction -- a kind of detente represented by cross-licensing
deals for patent portfolios.
860
But the rise of the patent troll changed all that. Patent trolls don't
make products. They make lawsuits. They buy up the ridiculous patents
of failed companies and sue the everloving hell out of everyone they
can find, building up a war-chest from easy victories against little
guys that can be used to fund more serious campaigns against larger
organizations. Since there are no products to disrupt with a
countersuit, there's no mutually assured destruction.
861
If a shakedown artist can buy up some bogus patents and use them to put
the screws to you, then it's only a matter of time until the same
grifters latch onto the innumerable "agreements" that your company has
formed with a desperate dot-bomb looking for an exit strategy.
862
More importantly, these "agreements" make a mockery of the law and of
the very idea of forming agreements. Civilization starts with
the idea of a real agreement -- for example, "We crap here and
we sleep there , OK?" -- and if we reduce the noble agreement to
a schoolyard game of no-takebacks, we erode the bedrock of civilization
itself.
863
28. World of Democracycraft
864
Can you be a citizen of a virtual world? That's the question that I
keep asking myself, whenever anyone tells me about the wonder of
multiplayer online games, especially Second Life, the virtual world
that is more creative playground than game.
865
These worlds invite us to take up residence in them, to invest time
(and sometimes money) in them. Second Life encourages you to make stuff
using their scripting engine and sell it in the game. You Own Your Own
Mods -- it's the rallying cry of the new generation of virtual worlds,
an updated version of the old BBS adage from the WELL: You Own Your Own
Words.
866
I spend a lot of time in Disney parks. I even own a share of Disney
stock. But I don't flatter myself that I'm a citizen of Disney World. I
know that when I go to Orlando, the Mouse is going to fingerprint me
and search my bags, because the Fourth Amendment isn't a "Disney
value."
867
Disney even has its own virtual currency, symbolic tokens called Disney
Dollars that you can spend or exchange at any Disney park. I'm
reasonably confident that if Disney refused to turn my Mickeybucks back
into US Treasury Department-issue greenbacks that I could make life
unpleasant for them in a court of law.
868
But is the same true of a game? The money in your real-world
bank-account and in your in-game bank-account is really just a pointer
in a database. But if the bank moves the pointer around arbitrarily
(depositing a billion dollars in your account, or wiping you out), they
face a regulator. If a game wants to wipe you out, well, you probably
agreed to let them do that when you signed up.
869
Can you amass wealth in such a world? Well, sure. There are rich people
in dictatorships all over the world. Stalin's favorites had great big
dachas and drove fancy cars. You don't need democratic rights to get
rich.
870
But you do need democratic freedoms to stay rich.
In-world wealth is like a Stalin-era dacha, or the diamond fortunes of
Apartheid South Africa: valuable, even portable (to a limited extent),
but not really yours , not in any stable, long-term sense.
871
Here are some examples of the difference between being a citizen and a
customer:
872
In January, 2006 a World of Warcraft moderator shut down an
advertisement for a "GBLT-friendly" guild. This was a virtual club that
players could join, whose mission was to be "friendly" to
"Gay/Bi/Lesbian/Transgendered" players. The WoW moderator -- and
Blizzard management -- cited a bizarre reason for the shut-down:
873
"While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we do feel that
the advertisement of a 'GLBT friendly' guild is very likely to result
in harassment for players that may not have existed otherwise. If you
will look at our policy, you will notice the suggested penalty for
violating the Sexual Orientation Harassment Policy is to 'be
temporarily suspended from the game.' However, as there was clearly no
malicious intent on your part, this penalty was reduced to a warning."
874
Sara Andrews, the guild's creator, made a stink and embarrassed
Blizzard (the game's parent company) into reversing the decision.
875
In 2004, a player in the MMO EVE Online declared that the game's
creators had stacked the deck against him, called EVE, "a poorly
designed game which rewards the greedy and violent, and punishes the
hardworking and honest." He was upset over a change in the game
dynamics which made it easier to play a pirate and harder to play a
merchant.
876
The player, "Dentara Rask," wrote those words in the preamble to a
tell-all memoir detailing an elaborate Ponzi scheme that he and an
accomplice had perpetrated in EVE. The two of them had bilked EVE's
merchants out of a substantial fraction of the game's total GDP and
then resigned their accounts. The objective was to punish the game's
owners for their gameplay decisions by crashing the game's economy.
877
In both of these instances, players -- residents of virtual worlds --
resolved their conflicts with game management through customer
activism. That works in the real world, too, but when it fails, we have
the rule of law. We can sue. We can elect new leaders. When all else
fails, we can withdraw all our money from the bank, sell our houses,
and move to a different country.
878
But in virtual worlds, these recourses are off-limits. Virtual worlds
can and do freeze players' wealth for "cheating" (amassing gold by
exploiting loopholes in the system), for participating in real-world
gold-for-cash exchanges (eBay recently put an end to this practice on
its service), or for violating some other rule. The rules of virtual
worlds are embodied in EULAs, not Constitutions, and are always
"subject to change without notice."
879
So what does it mean to be "rich" in Second Life? Sure, you can have a
thriving virtual penis business in game, one that returns a healthy sum
of cash every month. You can even protect your profits by regularly
converting them to real money. But if you lose an argument with Second
Life's parent company, your business vanishes. In other worlds, the
only stable in-game wealth is the wealth you take out of the game. Your
virtual capital investments are totally contingent. Piss off the wrong
exec at Linden Labs, Blizzard, Sony Online Entertainment, or Sularke
and your little in-world business could disappear for good.
880
Well, what of it? Why not just create a "democratic" game that has a
constitution, full citizenship for players, and all the prerequisites
for stable wealth? Such a game would be open source (so that other,
interoperable "nations" could be established for you to emigrate to if
you don't like the will of the majority in one game-world), and run by
elected representatives who would instruct the administrators and
programmers as to how to run the virtual world. In the real world, the
TSA sets the rules for aviation -- in a virtual world, the equivalent
agency would determine the physics of flight.
881
The question is, would this game be any fun ? Well, democracy
itself is pretty fun -- where "fun" means "engrossing and engaging."
Lots of people like to play the democracy game, whether by voting every
four years or by moving to K Street and setting up a lobbying
operation.
882
But video games aren't quite the same thing. Gameplay conventions like
"grinding" (repeating a task), "leveling up" (attaining a higher level
of accomplishment), "questing" and so on are functions of artificial
scarcity. The difference between a character with 10,000,000 gold
pieces and a giant, rare, terrifying crossbow and a newbie player is
which pointers are associated with each character's database entry. If
the elected representatives direct that every player should have the
shiniest armor, best space-ships, and largest bank-balances possible
(this sounds like a pretty good election platform to me!), then what's
left to do?
883
Oh sure, in Second Life they have an interesting crafting economy based
on creating and exchanging virtual objects. But these objects are
also artificially scarce -- that is, the ability of these
objects to propagate freely throughout the world is limited only by the
software that supports them. It's basically the same economics of the
music industry, but applied to every field of human endeavor in the
entire (virtual) world.
884
Fun matters. Real world currencies rise and fall based, in part, by the
economic might of the nations that issue them. Virtual world currencies
are more strongly tied to whether there's any reason to spend the
virtual currency on the objects that are denominated in it. 10,000
EverQuest golds might trade for $100 on a day when that same sum will
buy you a magic EQ sword that enables you to play alongside the most
interesting people online, running the most fun missions online. But if
all those players out-migrate to World of Warcraft, and word gets
around that Warlord's Command is way more fun than anything in poor old
creaky EverQuest, your EverQuest gold turns into Weimar Deutschemarks,
a devalued currency that you can't even give away.
885
This is where the plausibility of my democratic, co-operative, open
source virtual world starts to break down. Elected governments can
field armies, run schools, provide health care (I'm a Canadian), and
bring acid lakes back to health. But I've never done anything run by a
government agency that was a lot of fun . It's my sneaking
suspicion that the only people who'd enjoy playing World of
Democracycraft would be the people running for office there. The
players would soon find themselves playing IRSQuest, Second Notice of
Proposed Rulemaking Life, and Caves of 27 Stroke B.
886
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe customership is enough of a rock to build a
platform of sustainable industry upon. It's not like entrepreneurs in
Dubai have a lot of recourse if they get on the wrong side of the Emir;
or like Singaporeans get to appeal the decisions of President Nathan,
and there's plenty of industry there.
887
And hell, maybe bureaucracies have hidden reserves of fun that have
been lurking there, waiting for the chance to bust out and surprise us
all.
888
I sure hope so. These online worlds are endlessly diverting places.
It'd be a shame if it turned out that cyberspace was a dictatorship --
benevolent or otherwise.
889
29. Snitchtown
890
The 12-story Hotel Torni was the tallest building in central Helsinki
during the Soviet occupation of Finland, making it a natural choice to
serve as KGB headquarters. Today, it bears a plaque testifying to its
checkered past, and also noting the curious fact that the Finns pulled
40 kilometers of wiretap cable out of the walls after the KGB left. The
wire was solid evidence of each operative's mistrustful surveillance of
his fellow agents.
891
The East German Stasi also engaged in rampant surveillance, using a
network of snitches to assemble secret files on every resident of East
Berlin. They knew who was telling subversive jokes--but missed the fact
that the Wall was about to come down.
892
When you watch everyone, you watch no one.
893
This seems to have escaped the operators of the digital surveillance
technologies that are taking over our cities. In the brave new world of
doorbell cams, wi-fi sniffers, RFID passes, bag searches at the subway
and photo lookups at office security desks, universal surveillance is
seen as the universal solution to all urban ills. But the truth is that
ubiquitous cameras only serve to violate the social contract that makes
cities work.
894
The key to living in a city and peacefully co-existing as a social
animal in tight quarters is to set a delicate balance of seeing and not
seeing. You take care not to step on the heels of the woman in front of
you on the way out of the subway, and you might take passing note of
her most excellent handbag. But you don't make eye contact and exchange
a nod. Or even if you do, you make sure that it's as fleeting as it can
be.
895
Checking your mirrors is good practice even in stopped traffic, but
staring and pointing at the schmuck next to you who's got his finger so
far up his nostril he's in danger of lobotomizing himself is bad
form--worse form than picking your nose, even.
896
I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the
Tokyo subway wore surgical masks. Are they extreme germophobes?
Conscientious folks getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of
course, but that's only the rubric. The real reason to wear the mask is
to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression, to
make your face into a disengaged, unreadable blank--to spare others the
discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in order to model your
mood based on your outward expression. To make it possible to see
without seeing.
897
There is one city dweller that doesn't respect this delicate social
contract: the closed-circuit television camera. Ubiquitous and
demanding, CCTVs don't have any visible owners. They ... occur. They
exist in the passive voice, the "mistakes were made" voice: "The camera
recorded you."
898
They are like an emergent property of the system, of being afraid and
looking for cheap answers. And they are everywhere: In London,
residents are photographed more than 300 times a day.
899
The irony of security cameras is that they watch, but nobody cares that
they're looking. Junkies don't worry about CCTVs. Crazed rapists and
other purveyors of sudden, senseless violence aren't deterred. I was
mugged twice on my old block in San Francisco by the crack dealers on
my corner, within sight of two CCTVs and a police station. My rental
car was robbed by a junkie in a Gastown garage in Vancouver in sight of
a CCTV.
900
Three mad kids followed my friend out of the Tube in London last year
and murdered him on his doorstep.
901
Crazy, desperate, violent people don't make rational calculus in
regards to their lives. Anyone who becomes a junkie, crack dealer, or
cellphone-stealing stickup artist is obviously bad at making life
decisions. They're not deterred by surveillance.
902
Yet the cameras proliferate, and replace human eyes. The cops on my
block in San Francisco stayed in their cars and let the cameras do the
watching. The Tube station didn't have any human guards after dark,
just a CCTV to record the fare evaders.
903
Now London city councils are installing new CCTVs with loudspeakers,
operated by remote coppers who can lean in and make a speaker bark at
you, "Citizen, pick up your litter." "Stop leering at that woman."
"Move along."
904
Yeah, that'll work.
905
Every day the glass-domed cameras proliferate, and the gate-guarded
mentality of the deep suburbs threatens to invade our cities. More
doorbell webcams, more mailbox cams, more cams in our cars.
906
The city of the future is shaping up to be a neighborly Panopticon,
leeched of the cosmopolitan ability to see, and not be seen, where
every nose pick is noted and logged and uploaded to the Internet. You
don't have anything to hide, sure, but there's a reason we close the
door to the bathroom before we drop our drawers. Everyone poops, but it
takes a special kind of person to want to do it in public.
907
The trick now is to contain the creeping cameras of the law. When the
city surveils its citizens, it legitimizes our mutual
surveillance--what's the difference between the cops watching your
every move, or the mall owners watching you, or you doing it to the guy
next door?
908
I'm an optimist. I think our social contracts are stronger than our
technology. They're the strongest bonds we have. We don't aim
telescopes through each others' windows, because only creeps do that.
909
But we need to reclaim the right to record our own lives as they
proceed. We need to reverse decisions like the one that allowed the New
York Metropolitan Transit Authority to line subway platforms with
terrorism cameras, but said riders may not take snapshots in the
station. We need to win back the right to photograph our human heritage
in museums and galleries, and we need to beat back the snitch-cams
rent-a-cops use to make our cameras stay in our pockets.
910
They're our cities and our institutions. And we choose the future we
want to live in.
911
30. Hope you enjoyed it! The actual, physical object that corresponds
to this book is superbly designed, portable, and makes a great gift:
912
<
913
If you would rather make a donation, you can buy a copy of the book for
a worthy school, library or other institution of your choosing:
914
<
915
31. About the Author
916
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is an award-winning novelist, activist,
blogger and journalist. He is the co-editor of Boing Boing
(boingboing.net), one of the most popular blogs in the world, and has
contributed to The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Economist,
Forbes, Popular Science, Wired, Make, InformationWeek, Locus, Salon,
Radar, and many other magazines, newspapers and websites.
917
His novels and short story collections include Someone Comes to
Town, Someone Leaves Town , Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom , Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present and his
most recent novel, a political thriller for young adults called
Little Brother , published by Tor Books in May, 2008. All of his
novels and short story collections are available as free downloads
under the terms of various Creative Commons licenses.
918
Doctorow is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (eff.org) and has participated in many treaty-making,
standards-setting and regulatory and legal battles in countries all
over the world. In 2006/2007, he was the inaugural Canada/US Fulbright
Chair in Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg Center at the University of
Southern California. In 2007, he was also named one of the World
Economic Forum's "Young Global Leaders" and one of Forbes Magazine's
top 25 "Web Celebrities."
919
Born in Toronto, Canada in 1971, he is a four-time university dropout.
He now resides in London, England with his wife and baby daughter,
where he does his best to avoid the ubiquitous surveillance cameras
while roaming the world, speaking on copyright, freedom and the future.