Content by Cory Doctorow (first e reader txt) 📕

of us won’t spend most of our time reading anything recognizable as a book on them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sorry, got to go — eight more e-mails.

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How Do You Protect Artists?

(Originally published in The Guardian as “Online censorship hurts us all,” Tuesday, Oct 2, 2007)

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.

But no matter how bad these problems get, they’re a distant second to the gravest, most terrifying problem an artist can face: censorship.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?).

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.

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.

It would be a death knell for the kind of focused, noncommercial 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.

And the worst of it is, we’re marching toward this “solution” in the name of protecting artists. Gee, thanks.

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It’s the Information Economy, Stupid

(Originally published in The Guardian as “Free data sharing is here to stay,” September 18, 2007)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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