The nice folks at Colbyjack have begun a free, Creative-Commons licensed fan podcast serial of my novel For the Win. The first of 37 installments is here (here’s the MP3), and the RSS feed for the podcast is here. (And don’t forget, you can get a DRM-free MP3 of the official, Random House audiobook, expertly read by the excellent George Newbern, direct from me, or from your favorite audiobook retailer)
I’m headed to Vancouver this weekend to give a keynote at SIGGRAPH; I did a long interview with Blaine Kyllo from the Georgia Straight about the subject of my talk — that is, how you build a digital copyright system that gives creators a fair deal, and why getting it wrong is bad for the whole society, not just artists.
BK: That’s always been the refrain, hasn’t it? That the markets are going to take care of things. But they tend to be governed and controlled by those with money, which are the corporations which have a vested interest in maintaining status quo, right?
CD: And also that they are…markets, especially markets where the market is built around something that is a regulatory fiat.
This isn’t like a market in potatoes where the potato exists whether or not the government creates a potato right. This is a market in goods that have no tangible existence. This isn’t the market for books; this is the market for the words on the books. And that market only exists to the extent that the government comes in and says, “This part of the word is property and this part of the word isn’t owned by anyone.”
So for example, you can register a copyright in the tune of a song, but not in the rhythm of a song. Now if copyrights had been developed in the Afro-Caribbean tradition, where the tunes tend to be improvised and the complex polyrhythms tend to be static and are thought of as the works of authorship, we would have a totally different view of what was a song and what was incidental to the song, what was just the stuff that musicians did while they were performing the song. Right now we think of the words and the music as being the song, we don’t think of the drumming as being the song.
So we’re not just talking about a market. Even if you’re an “A is A”, Ayn Rand fundamentalist, we’re not talking about markets in the way that we think about markets, as a market for cars or real estate or something, we’re talking about a market in a good whose contours are defined by a bunch of regulators who sit down in a board room with some industrialists who say, “We would make more money if you would make this part of this ephemeral, imaginary thing into a property right.” And they listen to all the different people who have opinions on which part of your imagination should be property, and they go, “Well, this part makes sense to be property,” and then they go off and trade it.
Actually, I don’t think that that’s totally bent or crazy, I just think that it’s rife with potential for abuse, and that we should look at the arguments of people who are present-day beneficiaries of that system, who say that what we need is more of it, and what we need is more of it not because we would no longer have any works if we didn’t have more of this kind of right that we benefit from, but they’d be the wrong kind of works.
So for example when you say to a movie executive, “What do you mean that we’ve got to shut down YouTube to keep the Hollywood film industry alive?” Hollywood gives us, like, 40, 100 hours of movies a year? We get 49 hours of video every minute on YouTube. And they go, “Well, that’s not good video. It’s the wrong kind of video.”
I think that when you have an industrialist who says, “This policy that is supposed to create video is creating the wrong kind of video, it should create my video, of which there would be a lot less of it, but I’d make more money from it.” I think that we should at least look that argument up and down pretty thoroughly before we go, “Oh, yeah, makes sense.”
Here’s a reading of my introduction for the 20th anniversary edition of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s Difference Engine, which is just out from Random House, with new material from Bill and Bruce.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Adam created UnMakers using the Creative-Commons-licensed text of my novel Makers. It opens with the final scene, and invites you to navigate the text that led up to it hypertextually, following character-based indexes to the text. He’d like it if you’d annotate and further link the text, which is in a wiki.
If you want to find out more about a character then click on their name, it’ll send you to a list of chapters that the character is in, ordered by their place in the storyline. Click through to one of these to continue reading the characters story. You can also have a look at a list of all categories here: Categories
There’s also more, with the thread taken out of the story we can see the gaps, the implied stories of the characters time away from the readers stage. We have the opportunity to fill in these blanks, to explain the characters choices and add more depth to the overall story. Since this is a Wiki, anyone can post up a story and tag it with characters and locations, meaning that that characters timeline gets filled in and fleshed out. Backstories can be added. Minor characters can have their pasts delved into. The story can grow.
Adam created UnMakers using the Creative-Commons-licensed text of my novel Makers. It opens with the final scene, and invites you to navigate the text that led up to it hypertextually, following character-based indexes to the text. He’d like it if you’d annotate and further link the text, which is in a wiki.
If you want to find out more about a character then click on their name, it’ll send you to a list of chapters that the character is in, ordered by their place in the storyline. Click through to one of these to continue reading the characters story. You can also have a look at a list of all categories here: Categories
There’s also more, with the thread taken out of the story we can see the gaps, the implied stories of the characters time away from the readers stage. We have the opportunity to fill in these blanks, to explain the characters choices and add more depth to the overall story. Since this is a Wiki, anyone can post up a story and tag it with characters and locations, meaning that that characters timeline gets filled in and fleshed out. Backstories can be added. Minor characters can have their pasts delved into. The story can grow.
Hard to believe it’s been 20 years since the original publication of The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s seminal cyberpunk alternate history about a Victorian England dominated by mechanical computers. I was privileged to write the introduction to this 20th Anniversary special edition, which also includes new material from Bill and Bruce about the book’s creation. It came out today, and I can’t wait to get my copy!
Here’s my reading of Clay Shirky’s brilliant essay Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic:
Outside a relative handful of financial publications, there is no such thing as the news business. There is only the advertising business. The remarkable thing about the newspapers’ piece of that business isn’t that they could reliably generate profits without accomplishing much in the way of innovation—that could just as easily describe the local car dealership. The remarkable thing is that over the last couple of generations, those profits supported the fractional bit of those enterprises that covered the news.
This subsidy relied on cultural logic peculiar to newspapers; publishers were constrained not just by their investors but by their editors (who expected the paper to be ethical in the short term) and by their families (who expected the paper to be viable over the long term). In return, a publisher could extract some of the value of the paper in prestige and sinecure instead of cash.
This system was never ideal—out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made—and long before Craig Newmark and Arianna Huffington began their reign of terror, Gannett and Scripps were pioneering debt-laden balance sheets, highly paid executives, and short-term profit-chasing. But even in their worst days, newspapers supported the minority of journalists reporting actual news, for the minority of citizens who cared. In return, the people who followed sports or celebrities, or clipped recipes and coupons, got to live in a town where the City Council was marginally less likely to be corrupt.
Writing about the Dallas Cowboys in order to take money from Ford and give it to the guy on the City Desk never made much sense, but at least it worked. Online, though, the economic and technological rationale for bundling weakens—no monopoly over local advertising, no daily allotment of space to fill, no one-size-fits-all delivery system. Newspapers, as a sheaf of unrelated content glued together with ads, aren’t just being threatened with unprofitability, but incoherence.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
My latest Guardian column is a pretty unenthusiastic review of the new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, hailed by many as the first serious Android-based iPad competitor. The Galaxy has all the right parts, but they’re assembled without much care or forethought. Something I missed mentioning in the review is that the device hides the low-profile power key next to the low-profile volume key, and they’re nearly indistinguishable to the touch, so every time I adjust the volume, I end up turning off the device. Try to imagine how that goes over with the three-year-old when I turn down the sound on a YouTube cartoon she’s enjoying and inadvertently switch the screen off.
But Samsung’s tablets – for no discernible reason – use a custom tip that isn’t any of the standard mini- or micro-USB ends. Instead, it’s a wide, flat connector, like the one Apple uses, but of course, it’s not compatible with Apple’s cables, either. I’ve already lost mine, run down the battery and now I can’t use the tablet again until I find another one. I passed through three airports recently, and none of them had a store that stocked them.I have phone charger cables in my office, my travel bag, my backpack and beside the bed. The very last thing in the entire world that I need right now is to have to add another kind of USB cable to all those places. The decision to use a proprietary connector in a device whose major selling point is that it is non-proprietary is the stupidest thing about the Galaxy Tab 10.1 – even stupider than calling it the “Galaxy Tab 10.1.”
Likewise disappointing was the decision to omit the microSD card slot on the Wi-Fi-only version of the tablet. The 3G-equipped models come with a built-in microSD reader (handy to have, especially if you need to load some data onto the device and you’ve mislaid the stupid proprietary cable). This is integrated into the Sim assembly used by the 3G devices, and rather than leaving the empty Sim assembly in place and leaving the card-reader intact, Samsung removed the whole thing.
BTW, I did find a store that sold the Galaxy Tab proprietary cable, eventually, in the Miami airport. The wire cost $70, while standard USB cables were going for $3. What a rip-off.
The HowTheLightGetsIn festival has posted video from the two items I participated in last spring. The first, Technology and Anarchy, deals with regulation, democracy and technology. The second, The Return of Revolution, is a debate of sorts with Evgeny Morozov (whose book The Net Delusion I reviewed in depth), and Alex Callinicos, in which we discussed whether technology was a force for liberation or oppression.
