I’m honored and delighted to learn that Quill and Quire, the Canadian publishing industry journal of record, has named For the Win one of its five notable YA novels for 2010. Thanks, Q&Q!

In my latest Guardian column, “News Corp Kremlinology: what do the Times paywall numbers mean?” I have a good rummage around the mysterious figures released by The Times earlier this month on the performance of its vaunted pay-for-news scheme. The Times released the numbers with a lot of triumphant accompaniment, but I’m not clear on whether their figures can be taken of indication of anything, except, perhaps, a reluctance to report in full on their experiment’s performance.

Here’s what the Times will say: about 50,000 of the current paid users are on a monthly subscription of some sort: £8.66, £1, or free with a TalkTalk subscription. They will not disclose how many £1 trial users turn into £8.66 users, or how many sustain their £8.66 subscription into the second or third month. However, the anonymous official spokesperson did say that whichever users are remaining after three months are more than 90% likely to stump up for a fourth month. From this, I think we can safely assume that lots less than 90% of paid users stick around for a second month, and of those, less than 90% sustain themselves for a fourth month.

But the Times isn’t saying.

The remaining 50,000, of course, are people who paid £1 for a single day’s access. Some number of these converted to monthly subscribers.

Some number bought a second article. How many? The Times isn’t saying.

So, best case: there are 50,000 paid subscribers, all of whom got there by paying £1 for an article, converted immediately to £1 monthly subscriptions and now pay £8.66 every month (or £9.99 in the case of iPad users who want to pay extra for the privilege of not being allowed to access the website).

Worst case: 50,000 people tried a day pass and left. 20,000 TalkTalk subscribers got a free subscription with their phone which they may or may not know or care about. 5,000 people use it with an iPad.

75,000 people tried a £1 month trial. 40,000 of them signed up for a second month, 30,000 of them for a third, and 25,000 stayed on for a fourth month.

News Corp Kremlinology: what do the Times paywall numbers mean?

In my latest Guardian column, “What do we want copyright to do?” I try to get out of the “you’re a thief/you’re a greedhead” copyright debate by asking what a good copyright system would look like, and suggesting how we might design one:

Let’s start by saying that there is only one regulation that would provide everyone who wants to be an artist with a middle-class income. It’s a very simple rule: “If you call yourself an artist, the government will pay you £40,000 a year until you stop calling yourself an artist.”

Short of this wildly unlikely regulation, full employment in the arts is a beautiful and improbable dream. Certainly, no copyright system can attain this. If copyright is to have winners and losers, then let’s start talking about who we want to see winning, and what victory should be.

In my world, copyright’s purpose is to encourage the widest participation in culture that we can manage – that is, it should be a system that encourages the most diverse set of creators, creating the most diverse set of works, to reach the most diverse audiences as is practical.

What do we want copyright to do?

James Riley took the trouble of going through previous posts here and assembled a list of foreign translations of my works, including ones where the links to fan-trans and commercial editions have gone dead. Thanks, James!

Here’s video of this week’s EFF Pioneer Awards ceremony in San Francisco, which I was privileged to emcee.