The people have spoken. I offered to have my head 3D-scanned while making a ridiculous face originated by John “Rubberface” Scalzi if enough was donated to Jay Lake’s cancer treatment fundraiser. After an exhaustive poll, the Internet chose this face. I’ve started practicing already.

Dear Cory Doctorow: The Masses Have Decided That This is the Face You Shall Have Made Into a 3D Scan

As previously mentioned, I have committed to recreating a funny face made by John Scalzi, then getting my head 3D scanned while pulling said face, and releasing the scan as a CC-BY download on Thingiverse. It’s all part of this most worthy fundraiser to help with the treatment and expenses from Jay Lake’s cancer.

Scalzi has produced an array of astounding googie faces, and now there is a poll to pick the one I am to recreate in 3D-scanned glory. Vote away!

Another Act of Whimsy: Choose Cory Doctorow’s Face!

I’ve written an essay on how copyright enforcement laws let entertainment companies get away with paying less to artists for the O’Reilly Tools of Change blog. The ToC folks asked to to contribute something related to the keynote I’ll be doing at their annual conference in NYC next month, as part of my tour for Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother.

In other words, by asking governments to ascribe liability to these “intermediaries” (services that sit between creators and audiences), the entertainment industry is demanding that the Internet be scaled back to something that’ll fit in cable TV’s bathtub. Something where only people with a lot of capital and clout can speak and be heard. Something where big entertainment companies can use their money and power as a wall to stop anyone from challenging their pride of place.

When a big star goes into a record-company negotiations, she isn’t limited to saying, “Sorry, that deal’s not good enough, I’ll see what I can get across the street at your competitor.” Now she can say, “That’s not good enough, I can do better on my own, like Trent Reznor did.” Or, “That’s not good enough, I can hook up with a new kind of music business,” like Madonna did. But only if the intermediary liability is small enough to allow all these different kinds of companies to clamor for artists’ attention and products.

When a successful beginner like Amanda Hocking or EL James comes before a big publisher who wants to take her from indie to pro, the worst deal they can offer her has to be better than the best deal she could get for herself, or from one of the new startups.

Put it another way: There’s never been a time when tight controls over distribution were good for artists: fewer labels always means worse deals for musicians; fewer studios always means worse deals for filmmakers, actors, and other film professionals; fewer publishers always means worse deals for authors.

Liability vs. leverage

My next novel, Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother) is out in a few weeks, and I recently sat down with Nicole Powers from Suicide Girls for an interview about the book and the issues it raises, especially the student-debt bubble:

When it was just rich people going, it wasn’t about just getting a better job, because you were already rich, you already had the entré into the better job. You could already do unfunded apprenticeships and your parents’ friends were the people offering you the unfunded apprenticeships. You had a good five ways within the system. But now it’s a market transaction, and once it’s a market transaction we start applying cost benefit analysis to it. We start saying, well if the university degree earns you so many pounds, then it makes sense to start talking about you paying so many pounds. And if the objective here is to take people whose lifetime income expectancy was so many pounds, and make it a little bit higher –– which is what we call social mobility –– then why shouldn’t that be a virtuous cycle and they pay back into it. That way the university can expand the number of students they take on and all the rest of it, right?

The problem with that is that it’s become a Ponzi scheme, especially in America. We haven’t quite gotten there here. But in America, you have this crazy thing where it is somewhat true and it’s also universally received as true, that you can’t get a good job without a university degree. It’s also the case that universities, including many state colleges –– that are actually owned by the public –– can act as loan originators, which is to say they lend you the money but where those loans are then backed by the federal government. They can lend you any amount of money because there’s no risk to them because the government will take the loan off their hands. Those loans are then further secured by the federal government when they float them as bonds. So you have this weird perverse incentive where the universities, the more they charge the more they get –– which is a bit weird right? Because in real market economies, the more you charge the more you get up to a point, and then people start going, wait a second, that’s not worth it anymore, and they stop paying in. But if I tell you that you can’t get a job unless you get a degree, and then I tell you that no matter how much the degree costs I can get you a loan for that much, all of a sudden you start getting takers for those crazy propositions and that starts to look like a bubble, like a pyramid scheme.

Cory Doctorow: Homeland

Nominations are open again for science fiction’s Hugo Awards — if you attended last year’s WorldCon or have supported/bought a membership for this year’s con, you get a vote. There’s a lively LJ group discussing potential nominees (I often wait for the annual Locus Magazine best-of list to use as a crib for my nominations). My own eligible works are two novels: Pirate Cinema and Rapture of the Nerds (with Charles Stross), both from Tor Books. Here’s Charlie Stross’s list of eligible works, and here’s a wider list instigated by John Scalzi. Feel free to leave your favorites (or own eligible works) in the comments here.