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scieNce fictioN is the oNly literature
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collar workers. We commune with our muses behind closed doors
and deliver up our work product when it’s done, through plastic,
laser-etched discs. You have no right to demand that we convert
to a live-performance economy.”
Technology giveth and technology taketh away. As bands on
MySpace — who can fill houses and sell hundreds of thousands of
discs without a record deal, by connecting individually with fans
— have shown, there’s a new market aborning on the Internet for
music, one with fewer gatekeepers to creativity than ever before.
That’s the purpose of copyright, after all: to decentralize who
gets to make art. Before copyright, we had patronage: you could
make art if the Pope or the king liked the sound of it. That pro-
duced some damned pretty ceilings and frescos, but it wasn’t
until control of art was given over to the market — by giving pub-
lishers a monopoly over the works they printed, starting with the
Statute of Anne in 1709 — that we saw the explosion of creativ-
ity that investment-based art could create. Industrialists weren’t
great arbiters of who could and couldn’t make art, but they were
better than the Pope.
The Internet is enabling a further decentralization in who gets
to make art, and like each of the technological shifts in cultural
production, it’s good for some artists and bad for others. The im-
portant question is: Will it let more people participate in cultural
production? Will it further decentralize decision-making for art-
ists?
And for sf writers and fans, the further question is: “Will it be
any good to our chosen medium?” Like I said, science fiction is
the only literature people care enough about to steal on the Inter-
net. It’s the only literature that regularly shows up, scanned and
run through optical character recognition software and lovingly
hand-edited on darknet newsgroups, Russian websites, IRC chan-
nels, and elsewhere (yes, there’s also a brisk trade in comics and
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