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The Google book search settlement is raising yet another fuss over digital distribution, so I've been thinking about it recently. Base assumption: our goal as a society is to encourage quality creative production, but the exact method is irrelevant. I think everyone is focusing on the wrong things. What follows applies to just about everything, but books serve as a convenient example. Let's break it down vaguely in order of controversy...
Production/Distribution: It is, of course, blatantly obvious at this point that distributing data in a non-corporeal digital form beats the pants off everything that came before. It's many orders of magnitude faster and just about infinitely cheaper. Anyone can do it. Everyone can now publish whatever they want to a global audience. No one can claim with a straight face that we need large corporate structures in order to achieve this goal.
Content screening: One of the unsung advantages to the old system was that it provided implicit quality control. Because publishing a physical book was so expensive, publishers wanted to get their investment back. If something was published, it had a fair chance of being decent. Maybe not your cup of tea, but not absolute crap, either. You were protected from the horrors of the slushpile. One concern with the new model is that, omg, how will we ever sort through the tsunami of material available? (Students of Chinese history will recognize this concern -- and the dangers that come from centralized "solutions" to it.) Well, it turns out this isn't really a problem either. We've developed lots of methods for ranking and recommending material. And more importantly, it matters less when these systems fail. If you're not paying for something, you're only out whatever time it took you to realize it was crap before putting it down. How often do you watch the first 10 seconds of a youtube video before going eh and closing the tab? The problem is solved by the same thing that caused it -- massive reduction in costs and even more massive amateur parallelization.
Content creation: This is where discussions start to get all emotional and pear-shaped. The simple truth is, I see no evidence that monetary rewards drive creation. (Except when the production tools are expensive, which was never the case for writing and is true less and less for just about everything else.) How many authors ever make a living at it? And even those that did, how did they manage to write before they were famous enough to make a living at it? The whole argument is ridiculous. It's even more crazy when you look at the unpaid material being posted constantly online. People like to create! (And that's a really good thing. I'd much rather live in a world where we didn't need to bribe people to be cool.) They also like to be famous, which I will argue was always the real external motivator. So, even though I'm going to be accused of wanting authors to starve to death alone in the snow, there just isn't a problem at this step. Things will still get written.
Editing: Finally, at this obscure step in the process, we run into problem. Going from a manuscript to a final book takes editing. (Also typesetting and cover design and other such things, depending on the final target medium. The same arguments apply.) Real effort, doing something boring and tedious and decidedly unsexy. Writing is sexy -- everyone wants to be an author. There are people who want to be copy-editors, but not usually in the do-it-for-free-cause-it's-fun kind of way. No one ever gets famous for being a copy-editor. Despite all the popular hysteria around the previous steps, this is where the new system grinds to a halt.
In the end, the question I'm very interested in right now is how to incentivize this kind of labor. If you're concerned with quality books coming out after the publishing houses finally go bankrupt, this is what needs to be fixed. There is no guarantee that there is a solution, of course. The old model is permanently broken, though. In the long run, selling data is for chumps. It's time to get over that and start making sure the new world order will be as awesome as possible.
(What, you were expecting answers? Solutions? No, just trying to clarify the issues. Sorry.)
Production/Distribution: It is, of course, blatantly obvious at this point that distributing data in a non-corporeal digital form beats the pants off everything that came before. It's many orders of magnitude faster and just about infinitely cheaper. Anyone can do it. Everyone can now publish whatever they want to a global audience. No one can claim with a straight face that we need large corporate structures in order to achieve this goal.
Content screening: One of the unsung advantages to the old system was that it provided implicit quality control. Because publishing a physical book was so expensive, publishers wanted to get their investment back. If something was published, it had a fair chance of being decent. Maybe not your cup of tea, but not absolute crap, either. You were protected from the horrors of the slushpile. One concern with the new model is that, omg, how will we ever sort through the tsunami of material available? (Students of Chinese history will recognize this concern -- and the dangers that come from centralized "solutions" to it.) Well, it turns out this isn't really a problem either. We've developed lots of methods for ranking and recommending material. And more importantly, it matters less when these systems fail. If you're not paying for something, you're only out whatever time it took you to realize it was crap before putting it down. How often do you watch the first 10 seconds of a youtube video before going eh and closing the tab? The problem is solved by the same thing that caused it -- massive reduction in costs and even more massive amateur parallelization.
Content creation: This is where discussions start to get all emotional and pear-shaped. The simple truth is, I see no evidence that monetary rewards drive creation. (Except when the production tools are expensive, which was never the case for writing and is true less and less for just about everything else.) How many authors ever make a living at it? And even those that did, how did they manage to write before they were famous enough to make a living at it? The whole argument is ridiculous. It's even more crazy when you look at the unpaid material being posted constantly online. People like to create! (And that's a really good thing. I'd much rather live in a world where we didn't need to bribe people to be cool.) They also like to be famous, which I will argue was always the real external motivator. So, even though I'm going to be accused of wanting authors to starve to death alone in the snow, there just isn't a problem at this step. Things will still get written.
Editing: Finally, at this obscure step in the process, we run into problem. Going from a manuscript to a final book takes editing. (Also typesetting and cover design and other such things, depending on the final target medium. The same arguments apply.) Real effort, doing something boring and tedious and decidedly unsexy. Writing is sexy -- everyone wants to be an author. There are people who want to be copy-editors, but not usually in the do-it-for-free-cause-it's-fun kind of way. No one ever gets famous for being a copy-editor. Despite all the popular hysteria around the previous steps, this is where the new system grinds to a halt.
In the end, the question I'm very interested in right now is how to incentivize this kind of labor. If you're concerned with quality books coming out after the publishing houses finally go bankrupt, this is what needs to be fixed. There is no guarantee that there is a solution, of course. The old model is permanently broken, though. In the long run, selling data is for chumps. It's time to get over that and start making sure the new world order will be as awesome as possible.
(What, you were expecting answers? Solutions? No, just trying to clarify the issues. Sorry.)
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As he puts it, "do the work, get paid". SO many people want him, and other writers, to Write Stuff For Free. Writing is work. Writing well is hard work which requires hard-won skills which most people, quite frankly, just don't have. Something that is well-written can cause a product to make huge amounts of money for the person selling it ... and that person is usually not the person who did the writing work. So why shouldn't the writer be paid, and paid well for their hours and hours of skilled labor?
A large part of the Google Book Settlement fuss was around the fact that Google was attempting to pirate massive amounts of other people's work and then sell it for a profit, with the very thin excuse that Information Wants To Be Free and They're Doing The World A Service, Really.
Yeah, right. Sorry guys, that just does NOT qualify as not being evil.
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And for the record, even if they had contacted us, we didn't own the rights they wanted to infringe. We only licensed the right to publish those stories in paper form, which is what most publishers do. It would have been illegal for US to publish the book electronically, too.
As for your interpretation of copyright ... um, no. Copyright and patent laws were not created to give society ownership over all creative work, they were created to ensure that the people who did the work were the ones who would profit from their own labor. Intellectual property is *property*, the result of *work* and is often at least partially the creator's livelihood. Copyright lasts for the lifetime of the author plus 50 years, not just for a short time. And Google was attempting to violate the copyright of many many many *living* authors, most of whom are still making a livelihood from their copyrighted works.
Think about it this way--if you were a plumber, would society own your ability to do plumbing work? Would you therefore do plumbing for free? And ... how would you eat and pay rent?
Writing isn't any less work, any less a skill, than plumbing is.
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Copyright, literally the right to copy, demonstrating in its very name that it is about copying not about property, started out at two years. It was then extended to about 15 years in the 1700's, before it lost its privileged status and became part of the public domain. That privileged time has been extended repeatedly. I think this is a lousy thing, for what it's worth, but that's not really relevant. People who argue patent law claim that current patent law stifles innovation (http://www.patentlawinsights.com/2009/05/articles/patentability-1/do-patents-promote-progress-or-stifle-innovation/). It's possible that copyright does the same thing, insofar as it has a similar structure to patent law, although I'm unaware of any studies showing this.
Google clearly should have made reasonably diligent attempts to contact people. But with that said, if they can't contact people, it is obviously in their financial interest, but also in the public interest, to then decide the material in question is orphaned. But I'm a socialist at heart, so I am big on the gains made by society at large, even at the cost of some individuals.
If I were a plumber I'd charge per job. I wouldn't charge people for use of my plumbing work for the rest of my life + 50 years.
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(I also add that "managing" my work away from Google's "we downloaded it so we own and can sell it" venture took me the better part of a day's worth of deeply frustrating work. Their interface was extremely awkward, time-consuming and labor-intensive. And that was just to "manage" - read: re-acquire rights I had already owned - 10 or 12 books. A more famous or prolific author - like Elizabeth Moon, who alerted us to the Googlebooks fiasco - could easily spend several days doing so.)
As for the history of copyright, it's worth noting that mass recording and distribution technology did not exist prior to the Industrial Revolution; most of it did not exist prior to the 20th century. The printing press alone did not suddenly transform the distribution of creative work. Until the mid-1700s, the majority of printed works were bibles, political broadsides (themselves a creative work, but one meant for public distribution) and a handful of scientific works. As the Industrial Revolution made printing and distribution cheaper, the battle between authors and publishers intensified. Many authors saw their labor - and, as I point out below, writing is labor - exploited by anyone with a printing press. The "starving artist" archetype dates to the time when people like Edgar Allen Poe and Vincent van Gough were swindled out of the money their work should have earned because some dude with a printing press thought it'd be nifty to reprint their works without offering compensation or sharing the generated profits. It took authors and artists who had either the resources of nobility (Lord Leighton), the means and willingness to fight for their rights in court (Charles Dickens), or both to make copyright law as we now understand it exist. The "lousy" expansion of "privilege" regarding copyright has involved a hard-fought battle between producers of content (aka writers, artists and musicians) and people who have little or no connection to the labor involved but who merely own the means of replication and distribution. With the current technology, that battle is larger and more important than ever.
By the way, the "privilege" you refer to is no more or less than the right of a person to be compensated for his or her labor.
You say an artist should "charge per job." Random, until the last two centuries, that's exactly what creative professionals did. A tale-teller told her story to the audience, and that audience rewarded her with sustenance. There was no way a mass audience could receive that person's labor without being in her presence. Sure, we have the occasional transcriptions of Classical Greek or Elizabethan plays, but those works were - until the 20th century - the property of a tiny audience that paid dearly for the privilege of acquiring them. Until the combination of printing and recording equipment, mass production, widespread distribution, and cheap materials and manufacture, creative property involved the immediate labor of the artist and the immediate presence of the audience. Even the painters and sculptors whose work adorned palaces and cathedrals were rewarded with patronage; their works could not be reproduced without additional labor (often by apprentices or students, who were likewise rewarded), and even that process was limited to small-scale reproduction. Art was paid for "by the job," and creative professionals were regarded far more highly that we are today because remote access to our work simply didn't exist.
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By that same principle - again, no more and no less - a farmer should tend land, invest in materials, acquire tools, pay taxes and grow and harvest crops so that people can just walk by and take as much of his crop as they want to walk off with, in whatever quantity they please, and do whatever they want to do with it... including sell it to other folks at a profit they choose not to share with the farmer. Surely, your "socialist" beliefs do not extend to telling farmers that their work should be exploited. Why do you assert the same to me?
(It was, by the way, exactly such exploitation that led to the establishment and popularity of socialist and communist philosophies.)
Yes, Random and Fish, this subject is personal for me. I feel deeply angered by sentiments such as yours. It's already hard enough to get paid for my work without people who clearly do not know what that work entails deciding that my labor should be worth even less. Your ideas and ideals, mistaken as they are, do directly impact on my ability to make a living. With assertions like the ones you make above, you literally de-value my work and its compensation.
Besides, "society at large" does not gain when individuals are exploited by managers of mass production. As "a socialist at heart," you should be aware that uncompensated labor yields diminishing results. And when people with something worthwhile to offer cannot or will not offer it, everybody loses out.
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Also, in your example a finite number of people walk up and take what they can easily carry away.
With Internet and file-duplication technology, an infinite number of people can replicate an infinite amount of data, without effort.
Your example gets at the heart of the Metallica vs Napster issue. Some people at the time felt that Lars Ulrich and James Hetfeld were hypocrites - that because they, as teenagers, had traded home-recorded tapes of albums they liked, they had no right to prevent people from downloading their albums on Napster.
This argument missed four important factors:
1. To tape an album, you first have to obtain a copy of it. In Ulrich's case, he bought them, often at very high import prices, then...
2. ...shared a copy or two with a small number of friends. He did not burn a copy, put it up on the Internet, and allow thousands of people to get the album for free.
3. Taping an album (and duplicating that tape) takes time, and results in degraded levels of quality. Downloaded files take virtually no time, and result in very little degradation. Therefore, there's little incentive for a "customer" to actually go out and buy the album if she's already downloaded it from, say, Napster.
4. Metallica works hard to make an album. They put in months of hard work, spend years refining the crafts that allow them to make the album, and expend huge amounts of physical and emotional energy in the process of composing and recording the album. Likewise, the band and its label spend thousands, often millions, of dollars obtaining the equipment needed to produce the music, record it, and refine it for release. Expecting them to do all this for nothing is beyond unreasonable.
To expect someone to expend time, energy and money so that you can walk off with the results without effort or cost on your part is THEFT.
In every society in human history, strangers who take the results of someone's work and walk off without paying for it in some way are called "thieves."
In the case of social welfare (like support programs, taxation or the feeding of a community), there's still an expected renumeration. You support the community, the community supports you.
In the case of mass digital piracy, however, there is no support involved. You could download a copy of Master of Puppets in 1998 and never spend a single dime to support Metallica and their efforts. Tens of thousands of people could do the same thing. Tens of thousands of people were doing the same thing (my ex-wife among them), and Metallica, not unreasonably, saw that as theft.
On a small scale, taping an album or sharing a PDF does not affect the artist's ability to make a living. Multiply that by tens of thousands of people, though, and it does.
Your theoretical farmer is now working hard, but thousands of people are walking by and taking her crops while she gets nothing for her work.
Does this make sense now?
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I'm sorry Google handled things poorly, but that isn't really what I was talking about either. That's just details of the messy transition away from the old system. I'm concerned with making the inevitable new system as good as possible.
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The same can be said of 'rights', however. Undermining copyright in this way undermines your right to free expression, free worship, free assembly, ownership of any property, and even of yourself.
Are you sure you want to maintain this contention?
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I reject your slippery slope fallacy (that acknowledging IP as a potentially outdated legal fiction will lead to human rights being dismissed as a legal fiction.)
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I think this principle *might* hold up if the person/entity going ahead and distributing it were doing so for free. That's the only way it would be consistent with your view of what copyright is for. Distributing for profit seems to me to violate what you're saying.
I think the closest we've gotten to getting this right, as a society, is the Creative Commons thing. It seems to satisfy all the perceived purposes of copyright; a) creations are out there for the world to share if they want, b) nobody should claim the work is theirs when it isn't, and c) nobody should make money off something they didn't create (unless the creator says they can). I wish copyright law would be rewritten to be modeled after that.
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what I'd like to see -- and I swiped this from Boyce@DownMOO -- is distribution right. As long as you're actively distributing a work, you maintain the sole right to continue distributing it. As soon as you stop, it goes into public domain and anyone can have at it.
I like GNU's copyleft, insofar as it not only maintains copyright, but also gives people the ability to make money off their additions to the material as long as they also give away the basic code for free. That gives a lot of incentive to people to build upon what has gone before... but I have no idea how you'd do something like this in works of fiction or music, which isn't particularly intended to be extended.
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Distribution involves labor, materials, taxation and risk. Why shouldn't distrubtors also be compensated?
In the book trade, a distributor buys a certain amount of product, warehouses it (which involves personnel overhead and risk, as well as storage rent); the distributor ships it (more labor and expense) to clients (maintained through yet labor), and then attempts to collect and distribute the money involved in that transaction (still more labor and risk). Anything not sold by tax time is then taxed by the state and federal governments. I have no problem with distributors being compensated for all of this - it's the way the system is handled that needs fixing.
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-B.
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And - I say as someone who has worked in three publishing companies and two bookstore chains - you are mistaken about taxation. On-shelf inventory is taxed once or twice a year, depending on where your business is based. These taxes are based on estimated retail value of inventory; sales tax is another thing entirely.
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* - Software, hardware, troubleshooting, viruses, site hacking, customer support, server issues, collection of funds, business filing, accounting, the time to maintain all the above... and lots more, besides.
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So, the point is that the old distribution system will largely fall, due to those hurdles you point to, and all the business models based on it will go with it.
So, if someone wants to make money writing, they need to learn how to work within the new upcoming model that will mostly not include those elements. (Although there will always be boutique book stores, selling physical objects, but they will become the exception.)
-B.
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Not just in this post, but in others, there's been a strong undercurrent that you aren't really all that much for it. I think you're tripping over one of the unstated American cultural assumptions, that creative work (art, music, and so on) isn't really work, and therefore by implication isn't really work compensation. Accordingly, I think you should stress this more often when commenting on this topic, as it does seem to come up a lot.
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Things I reserve the right to be snarky about:
The kinds of arguments that I originally referenced, causing this whole mess. We're surrounded by gigabytes of evidence that people love to create and will quite happily do so for free.
The idea that amateur content is inherently inferior to professional content.
The idea that creative expression should have special protections which other forms of labor don't. This only ever applies to forms of creation which have been profitable in recent history. No one is rushing to make sure my preferred artistic outlets are protected that way.
Elitism when it comes to creative production. Creative production absolutely is labor, fully deserving its reward assuming a market exists for it. But it is not inherently better than any other kind of labor. You can't have it both ways.
The idea that this time we can fight the trends of technological progress and protect a broken business model. General Ludd became a term of derision for a reason. This has never, ever worked. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, and get laughed at in the process.