Author Archive for Dr. Peter Troxler Archive Page 3
Sorry, folks, I have to get that rant off my chest.
First, read this press release from the Conservatives (UK): David Cameron to call for extension in copyright term. Then let me summarize it, as I read it:
“We all agree that you poor music industry loose millions of pounds due to illegal downloading.” — ignoring that the people sharing online obviously see it as the online way of borrowing a CD from a friend.
“We want to give you more and better copyright protection.” — so you can generate more revenue and pay more taxes.
“But in return we want you … to censor antisocial music? — no: to show leadership!” — as long as it shows the same effetcs.
Copyright extension embedded in such words has nothing to do with authors rights. Authors rights are human rights, and the declaration of human rights is based on the belief that humans should be free. Copyright extension sensu David Cameron is brain control using the power and mechanisms of the media industry. And this, eventually, constitutes a breach of human rights.
This is not the kind of copyright we want to be fighting for! And it is not the kind of political support we are keen to get either.
On 19 June in the early morning hours a certain Gabriel aka “go harry” sent an email to seclists.org (a hacker mailing list), allegedly disclosing the ending of the yet to be published next sequel of Harry Potter.1 He claims to have got acces to several computers at publisher Bloomsbury (“It’s amazing to see how much people inside the company have copies and drafts of this book.”) and briefly outlines the plot. “We make this spoiler to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring.” Gabriel calls it the “Harry Potter 0day” (zero-day-exploit).
Fellow hackers don’t seem to be impressed too much. Scott writes: “Who are you people and why should I care? Maybe a new exploit would be more useful.”
But there is a good chance, that this whole story is a hoax …
- http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2007/Jun/0380.html [↩]
The Register carries a story on the success of UK Newspapers and their online editions … readers stay faithful to their paper. And online content attracts up to 20 % extra audience … who are, however, not buying the paper (or any paper, for that matter).
Read the whole story here: Newspapers not killed by net – shock!
This is probably the silliest story that came in today: Book publisher steals Google laptops. The CEO of Macmillan Publishers, Richard Charkin, boasts in his blog1 how he nicked two computers from a Google stall at Book Expo America in New York. He admits of feeling “rather shabby playing this trick on Google”. Poor boy.
Reading through the comments at The Register summarizes all the good and bad old arguments and misconceptions about what Google actually does. We’ve touched on the subject elsewhere2.
On Charkin’s blog comments tend to be a bit more diverse. Somebody remarks the difference between criminal law (which deals with such things as theft, murder, etc.) and civil law (which deals with copyright). An important distinction. As is the distinction between authors’ rights and publishers’ income. Charking was not exactly “standing up for authors’ rights”, as one commentor likes to see it. His point was most probably much more about his own business, guessing from the number websites that in one way or another belong to Macmillan3.
On a different note, however, Charkin leaves me wondering — is there really no difference between texts and computers…?
- The heist [↩]
- Google Book Search ‘auf Deutsch’ [↩]
- http://www.macmillan.com/websites.asp [↩]
As a maverick between arts and culture, business, IT, and many more topics that are of minor or even major interest to me I also read the occasional business analysis piece. This morning an essay by Nicolas G. Carr, contributing editor to strateg+business1. The essay is a review of one famous paper by Eric S. Raymond2 entitled The Cathedral and the Bazar.
To fill you in briefly on Raymond’s paper: it was first presented at a Linux conference in Würzburg, Germany, on 22 May 1997. And it caused a major stir; Raymond for the first time put into writing the ethics of the open source community — the bazaar model — where many people contribute to one product, say Linux for example, with seemingly no central control. Raymond contrasts this to the cathedral model where there is a closed group of developers (or authors).
In his review of the paper, 10 years after its initial publication, Nicolas G. Carr says: ‘ The open source model has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful way to refine programs that already exist (…) but it has proven less successful at creating exciting new programs from scratch.’ This is not a new critique, Lawrence Kesteloot noticed the same in an email to Raymond in March 1998.
Actually, even Raymond himself — if one is inclined to actually read the paper — noticed this quite explicitly indeed: ‘It’s fairly clear, that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode.’3
So, after ten years of bazaar-hype — which has only recently been picked up by corporations and guru writers4 — it is about time that people actually acknowledge that the bazaar is all about debugging and not about creating, and that there is — despite all the advantages the bazaar model has over the cathedral model (imho) — such a thing as individual creativity.
One last thought — individual creativity is sometimes best harnessed in a collective setting. Or isn’t that how authors publish their books — in exchange with agents, lectors, publishers (call it ‘debugging’ if you want) — or how Brecht wrote ‘his’ plays?
- http://www.strategy-business.com/ [↩]
- http://www.catb.org/~esr/ [↩]
- see http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s10.html and also Raymond’s discussion here [↩]
- Don Tapscott’s and Anthony D. Williams’ Wikinomic is just one example [↩]
DailyLit.org is a new service that sends literary texts (and non-fiction works) to subscribers in email-length junks at a time, daily by default. As of now DailyLit only includes royalty-free works (such as “War and Piece”, it comes in 675 parts, “Phaedra”, 18 parts, or Freud’s “Dream Psychology” (57) and the Communist Manifesto (13)). But soon, so the site claims, they will be offering contemporary literature, DailyLit are in discussion with publishers about including copyrighted works.
“If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, or your intellectual property rights have been otherwise violated, please provide DailyLit’s Copyright Agent: copyright [at] dailylit [dot] com” the site tells in its user agreement.
The “Copyright Subgroup” of the “High Level Expert Group” has published its “Report on Digital Preservation, Orphan Works, and Out-of-Print Works. Selected Implementation Issues”.
The main point is, that the group proposes to uphold the principle of “rightholders’ consent”. However, the recommendations “deal with digital copying for the purpose of preservation only”. So they don’t give an answer to the question of giving access to digital assets (i.e. the Google books question).
The group also highlights that “a solution to the issue of orphan works is desirable”, but it does not come up with a straight forward solution. Rather it leaves it to the member states to decide on orphan works.
For out of print works, the group refers to its decision of 16 October 2006 when it proposed a model license for libraries to make out of print works accessible digitally in closed networks. This model license has not been implemented so far.
The press release and full content of the report are available at http://www.europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/07/508&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en.
Today is the 26th of April. The UNESCO celebrations of books and copyrights still resound all over the world. It’s been a happy party of books, writing and reading.
But today, there is another sound in the air. The sound of ‘intellectual property’, of ‘my creativity is my castle’ — it’s the WIPO’s ‘Celebrations’ for the World Intellectual Property Day. Their topic is actually creativity.
Quite rightly they note in their press release that “the word creativity conjures a world of artists and music makers, of poets and problem solvers. Whereas intellectual property all too often summons images of gray-suited lawyers, locked in litigation. But look more closely, and it quickly becomes clear that it is the intellectual property system itself which sustains and nourishes those creators.”
It is the intellectual property system that not only nourishes creators but, oddly enough, every so often also reduces them to mere content suppliers to the all powerful engines of the commercial IP explitation industry. Encouraging creativity to supply the pockets of publishers, distributors, marketeers … ?
Hence, I come back to number 3 of our postulates: Authors need to be free to make a choice on licensing their works for reproduction, communication, distribution, interpretation, and modification in any form and medium of their choice without pressure or interference from others.
Texts Don’t Grow en Trees! — Creation is 10 % inspiration and 90 % transpiration — we need to make sure it does not become 99 % exploitation.
The activities of the World Book and Copyright Day 2007 are well under way … for example in Switzerland, where Roger Lévy blogs live from Zurich main station (in German).
WIPO went to see a group of 16-17 year old students at an international school to find out, how they think about downloading music from the Internet. The first point went to WIPO — the students actually believe that downloading is illegal (which it might or might not be, depending on national legislation). But the downloaders scored all the other points — and I’ll cite only a selection, the whole story is here — “I wouldn’t steal a car. I wouldn’t steal a DVD. But I might borrow a DVD from a friend. And what’s the Internet these days, but a big group of friends sharing stuff?” — “Downloading seems kind of unreal compared to other crimes,” — “They’ve [the music industry] got to find ways to make money other than selling CDs, because stopping people from downloading illegally is, well, extremely hard.” — “they should work harder on making us want to pay for it.”– “We’re always being told: ‘don’t smoke, you’ll get caught; ‘don’t do this, you’ll get caught’… the messages just don’t affect us any more.” — “Just give us simple facts and figures.”
So the message is very clear: downloading is understood as the online equivalent of borrowing, not of buying. It is a reality. And the “kids” are not stupid, they bloody damn well understand the way the business works. Only that some do not seem to be noticing that. I feel that this is the really big chance we get with “Texts Don’t Grow on Trees!”, to campaign intelligently, to listen to our clientele, to understand how they think about the Internet.
Monday is the UNESCO world book and copyright day. And that is our message:
1. Authors must never be pressured into waiving their rights to be named as the authors of their work.
2. Authors must never never be pressured into allowing their works to be treated in a derogatory manner.
3. Authors need to be free to make a choice on licensing their works for reproduction, communication, distribution, interpretation, and modification in any form and medium of their choice without pressure or interference from others.
4. Authors must be rewarded by a conforming and timely execution of the licenses by their licensees.
5. Authorsmust be remunerated in fair relation to the profits arising from the licensed exploitation of their work.
Some might say that this is a complicated message. But I am sure the “kids” will get it.
The “Nederlandse Mededingingsautoriteit” — the Dutch cartel police — is mainly powerless in face of megafusions in the energy, health or banking sector. But now they have found another group of criminals: translators. Illegally they have set a minimum fee, e.g. 5,9 Eurocent per word for translations from English or Hungarian. But this has now led to interventions, first an article in the NRC Handelsblad by Maarten Huygen (31. March). Now Mei Li Vos, Labour MP, asked the staatssecretaris van Economise Zaken 10 questions: if she was aware of this problem, aware of the (economic) pressure freelancers work under in the media, aware of the new regulations in Germany, where exactly such minimum fees are legal, and if she was prepared to introduce similar changes to the regulations in the Netherlands.
see also Mei Li Vos’ website and the report on boekvertalers.nl
“I’ve always wanted publishers and organized crime to swap.” This strapline caught my eyes this morning when I was combing through my already spam-stripped inbox. Some semi-intelligent robot out there on the net must have picked it up in order to fulfill one of my requests for up-to-date knowledge. (Yes, I admit, I am interested in organized crime).
But what it brought up today is a completely different story. It’s the musings of Dusk Peterson, fiction writer, history writer, editor and journalist, on the not-so-delightful world of e-book publishing.
I spent nearly four hours researching whether I should make my online fiction available in e-book form at Lulu.com. While I’m still not sure whether anyone would actually buy my stories – I wouldn’t buy an electronic text if it was available for free – I decided to go ahead and try the experiment. It can’t hurt. At this stage, even a couple of extra dollars would help.
However, set-up fees, buying ISBNs — “which is more money than I’ve earned annually since 1992″ — and the time (and nerves) spent on preparing the cover art make this experiment a rather serious experience. Is this the brave new world of self-determined, self-controled, self-publishing authors?