My latest Guardian column has just gone up — it talks about the “Potemkin Village” effect with DRM, whereby DRM vendors walk their potential customers through a faked-up demo showing how great DRM is, how much people want it, and how easy it is to use. The latest victim of this scam is the BBC, who’ve just decreed that their TV shows will only be delivered online through the iPlayer, a DRM service that lets you do less than you can with your old TV and VCR. Because that’s what the public is crying out for: an Internet TV that does less than a regular TV.

These demos almost never involve real hardware. It’s so much easier to do interoperability when all it takes to make two devices communicate is to draw a dotted line between them on a slide. And when the demos do involve real hardware, it’s usually all from one vendor, and only within a constrained universe of uses.

In reality, it’s bloody hard to get any two technologies to talk to each other successfully. Remember how hard it was to get your new wireless card, printer or DVD recorder to work? Now, imagine that these technologies had been deliberately designed not to work with each other – except under the exactly correct circumstances.

Microsoft’s PlaysForSure platform is typical of this. All such devices, “certified” to work with each other, barely ran on their own. And God help you if you tried to connect them to a competitor’s device (even Microsoft’s Zune won’t handle PlaysForSure music).

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See also: Cory’s column on “Digital Lysenkoism” for the Guardian

On Saturday, 25 August and Sunday, 26 August, I’ll be a guest at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival in Melbourne, Australia. I met a ton of wonderful people on my last pass through MEL — hoping to see all of you again. Here’s my schedule:

Saturday, 25 August, 9PM: Free and easy, interview by The Chaser’s Charles Firth, Merlyn Theatre

Sunday, 26 August:
11:30AM: Creative commons or common theft?, panel, Merlyn Theatre
3PM: This just in from cyberspace, panel, Beckett Theatre
5:30: Publish or perish: An A-Z of alternative ways to get your name in print, panel, Tower Theatre

I’m also teaching an all-day writing class on Saturday, called “Generation next,” but I believe that most of the slots are now taken.

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DailyLit is a fantastic service — they take public-domain and Creative Commons-licensed books and email them to you, one page per day. They put my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town up last year to great response, and now they’ve added a whole slew of science fiction, including the rest of my novels and my latest short story collection, Overclocked, and many other sf books including Charlie Stross’s Accelerando, Flatland, Frankenstein, From the Earth to the Moon, and The Time Machine.

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(Thanks, Jeff!)

In my latest column for Information Week, I talk about the Hollywood attempt to re-create the Napster Wars, suing all the funded, legit companies that want to do Internet video, like YouTube. When the record companies did this to Napster, all it did was ensure that the P2P market was saturated with companies that had no interest in doing deals with the record companies — instead, we got rogues like Kazaa and AllOfMP3, whose business-model was built around the difficulty of being sued offshore, not paying the record companies for the use of copyrights.

Now the TV and movie people are following suit — and there’s every chance that they’ll succeed at scaring off all the legit Internet distribution companies. Which will just make ThePirateBay into the world’s biggest, most successful video distribution system.

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, Napster 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.

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 presidential 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.

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Voices for the Cure is a Lulu press anthology of science fiction stories published to benefit the American Diabetes Association. Many writers — including me — donated stories to the book (I gave them my story Craphound).

Some of the greatest voices in speculative fiction join forces in this one-of-a-kind anthology to benefit the American Diabetes Association. Join Robert J. Sawyer, Mike Resnick, Cory Doctorow, and others as a cop-for-hire solves a murder aboard a space station…a Chicano science fiction writer takes mind-blowing (literally!) ride through the Singularity…a third-rate superhero with useless powers finds a place to belong…an antique collector learns that one alien’s junk is mankind’s treasure…a geologist discovers that pretending to be a god isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…a journalist learns how to fend off zombies using Linux and a dead badger… All this and more await you in… Voices for the Cure: A Speculative Fiction Anthology to Benefit the American Diabetes Association

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