Wil Wheaton reads this independently produced audio edition of Homeland, which also includes Jacob Appelbaum’s reading of his own afterword, and Noah Swartz reading his brother Aaron Swartz’s afterword.
Jamie from Vodo writes, “We’ve launched Otherworlds, our first indie sci-fi bundle! This pay-what-you-want, crossmedia collection includes the graphic novel collecting Cory’s own ‘Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now’, Jim Munroe’s micro-budget sci-fi satire ‘Ghosts With Shit Jobs’, Robert Venditti’s New York Times Bestselling graphic novel ‘The Surrogates’, and Amber Benson/Adam Busch’s alien office farce, ‘Drones’. Check out the whole bundle and choose your own price 5% of earnings go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation!”
I love Vodo — they produce gorgeous, high-quality science fiction shows that are CC licensed; each episode is released once donors have pitched in to pay for it. It’s a business-model that lets them make good art based on generosity, trust and working with the Internet, instead of stamping their feet and insisting that it change to suit their needs.
For those of you who missed the audiobook in which Wil Wheaton reads my novel Homeland in the Humble Ebook Bundle, despair no longer! You can buy it DRM-free on the excellent Downpour.com, a site with many DRM-free audio titles.
My new Guardian column is “Why it is not possible to regulate robots,” which discusses where and how robots can be regulated, and whether there is any sensible ground for “robot law” as distinct from “computer law.”
One thing that is glaringly absent from both the Heinleinian and Asimovian brain is the idea of software as an immaterial, infinitely reproducible nugget at the core of the system. Here, in the second decade of the 21st century, it seems to me that the most important fact about a robot – whether it is self-aware or merely autonomous – is the operating system, configuration, and code running on it.If you accept that robots are just machines – no different in principle from sewing machines, cars, or shotguns – and that the thing that makes them “robot” is the software that runs on a general-purpose computer that controls them, then all the legislative and regulatory and normative problems of robots start to become a subset of the problems of networks and computers.
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I believe two things about computers: first, that they are the most significant functional element of most modern artifacts, from cars to houses to hearing aids; and second, that we have dramatically failed to come to grips with this fact. We keep talking about whether 3D printers should be “allowed” to print guns, or whether computers should be “allowed” to make infringing copies, or whether your iPhone should be “allowed” to run software that Apple hasn’t approved and put in its App Store.
Practically speaking, though, these all amount to the same question: how do we keep computers from executing certain instructions, even if the people who own those computers want to execute them? And the practical answer is, we can’t.
Here’s a reading (MP3) of a my November, 2013 Locus column, Collective Action, in which I propose an Internet-enabled “Magnificent Seven” business model for foiling corruption, especially copyright- and patent-trolling. In this model, victims of extortionists find each other on the Internet and pledge to divert a year’s worth of “license fees” to a collective defense fund that will be used to invalidate a patent or prove that a controversial copyright has lapsed. The name comes from the classic film The Magnificent Seven (based, in turn, on Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai) in which villagers decide one year to take the money they’d normally give to the bandits, and turn it over to mercenaries who kill the bandits.
Why has Warner gotten away with its theft of ‘‘Happy Birthday’’ for so long? Because the interests of all the people who pay the license fee are diffused, and Warner’s interests are concentrated. For any one licensor, the rational course of action is paying Warner, rather than fighting in court. For Warner, the rational course is fighting in court, every time.
In this regard, Warner is in the same position as copyright and patent trolls: the interests of the troll are concentrated. Their optimal strategy is to fight back when pushed. But it’s the reverse for their victims: the best thing for them to do is to settle.
Collectively, though, the victims are always out more than the cost of a defense. That is, all the money made by a troll from a single stupid patent is much more than the cost of fighting to get the patent invalidated. All the money made by Warner on ‘‘Happy Birthday’’ dwarfs the expense of proving, in court, that they weren’t entitled to any of it.
The reason the victims don’t get together to fight back is that they don’t know each other and have no way to coordinate among each other. In economists’ jargon, they have a ‘‘collective action problem.’’
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes “Beer Jewelry” and “Odd Musical Furniture.” He often “meditates while reading cookbooks.”
Chapter nine of Homeland opens with about 400 digits of Pi. When Wil Wheaton read the chapter, he soldiered through it, reading out Pi for a whopping four minutes! Here’s the raw studio audio (MP3) of Wil and director Gabrielle De Cuir playing numbers station.
There’s less than a week left during which you can get the independently produced Homeland audiobook through the Humble Ebook Bundle!
Hey, Danes! There’s a limited-edition Danish-language translation of Little Brother that’s just come out from Science Fiction Cirklen! Tell your friends!
Before he died, Aaron Swartz wrote a tremendous afterword for my novel Homeland — Aaron also really helped with the core plot, devising an ingenious system for helping independent candidates get the vote out that he went on to work on. When I commissioned the indie audiobook of Homeland (now available in the Humble Ebook Bundle, I knew I wanted to have Aaron’s brother, Noah, read Aaron’s afterword, and Noah was kind enough to do so, going into a studio in Seattle to record a tremendous reading.
Here is Noah’s reading (MP3), released as a CC0 file that you can share without any restrictions. I hope you’ll give it a listen.
And a reminder that the complete Humble Ebook Bundle lineup is now available, including work from John Scalzi, Mercedes Lackey, and Ryan North, as well as the core bundle, which features Wil Wheaton, Holly Black, Steven Gould, and Scott Westerfeld!
I’m immensely proud and honored to once again be shortlisted for the Prometheus Award, for my novel Homeland. The Prometheus is given by the Libertarian Futurist Society, and I’ve won it for my books Little Brother and Pirate Cinema. As always, the Prometheus shortlist is full of great work, including both of Ramez Naam’s novels Crux and Nexus, both of which I enjoyed enormously. My thanks to the Libertarian Futurist Society and my congratulations to my fellow nominees! See you at the World Science Fiction convention in London this summer!
Two of my friends contributed afterwords to my novel Homeland: Aaron Swartz and Jacob Appelbaum. In this outtake from the independently produced Homeland audiobook (which you can get for the next week exclusively through the Humble Ebook Bundle), Jake reads his afterword at The Hellish Vortex Studio in Berlin, where he is in exile after several harrowing adventures at the US border. Hellish Vortex is run by Alec Empire, founding member of Atari Teenage Riot. Alec recorded this clip (MP3), and also mixed an alternate version.
Originally Jake had intended for his afterword to be anonymous (I didn’t understand this at the time, and there was no harm done!). In keeping with this, Alec mixed this vocoder edition (MP3), that is pretty awesome.
