This is another cross-post, but I wanted to save it before the UBC writing boards got rebooted for the upcoming year.
Cory Doctorow has gone and made some more sense in The Guardian today with an article where the title really tells us the whole story - When love is harder to show than hate.
[O]ne of the most perverse elements of copyright law [is] the reality that loving something doesn't confer any right to make it a part of your creative life.
And there's the rub. Like those little kids who loved all things Harry Potter, who probably bought every book, paid full admission for every theatre ticket, and even paid for official Harry Potter (TM) merchandise, who were then treated like base thieves for writing about what they loved and trying to be more a part of that universe themselves.
How completely messed up is that?
I myself have paid some $250 on Harry Potter books, and close to that on theatre admission, and then I paid a further $200 for the DVDs. All told, Rowling Enterprises has pulled a good $600 out of my pocket. Not a massive fortune, no, but since there are so many people like me out there doing the same thing, it adds up quickly. To the tune of over a billion for just Rowling herself.
At that level, you'd think a little magnanimity would be in order. Say, something like "I've probably earned enough quid for the next little while. Why don;t you all take this and have fun with it."
But no. It's business, and as for that $600 and what it allows me to do? I can pay that for a Playstation 3 and go online and go hog wild writing about how great the system is, designing my perfect imaginary game, and no one would blink. I could buy $600 worth of Coca-Cola, give it to all and sundry, write Coca-Cola themed stories and blog about Coca-Cola themed recipes, and all that would happen is the company giving me a thumbs up for helping out brand awareness, and maybe they'd throw a few cases in for good measure. Yet were I to wax rhapsodic on Harry and 'is chums, and maybe pen a little piece about how Harry and his pals went on a field trip on day, and 'ol J.K's pitbulls would be feasting on my kneecaps in no time.
That's some seriously messed up stuff.
Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts
Friday, May 22, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Racket Protection
I've been reading a number of really thought provoking posts recently, all about the issue of intellectual property, specifically the nature of information piracy. While I am firmly on the side of those advocating free and open standards, since obscurity, as Cory Doctorow is always quick to point out, is the writer's true enemy. And while this is true, it may not always be true, or at least that is the argument I've recently come across.
Peter Wayner's recent op-ed in the New York Times looks at the issue of piracy and its effect on the world of non-fiction publishing, specifically the world of academic or niche field related publishing. As Wayner says,
The kind of book I write, thick with equations that play to computer lovers, is also the first to be pirated. It’s a canary. O’Reilly Publishers, one of the top technical presses, reported that in 2008, the computer book market was the only segment to lose sales. According to the company, the category sold 8 percent fewer titles in 2008 than 2007.
It is an interesting argument, and pretty convincing in and of itself, but what Wayner does not mention is that until now, authors like him have essentially had a monopoly on a captive market. In fact, you can't even call it a market, because markets are open. In reality it's a racket.
Is there a truly legitimate reason that educational publishers will bring out a new edition of textbook every year or two years? Perhaps. But why is it that university courses usually specify the latest edition of a book where the content has never been significantly altered from edition to edition? University bookstores benefit. Educational publishers benefit. Textbook writers and contributors benefit. But do the students benefit?
Authors like Wayner have made their living depending on the fact that countless students often have no choice or option but to buy the latest shrink wrapped version of their latest epic tome. His readers, more often than not, did not shell out $50 or more per book because they wanted to, or were just dying to read the timeless jargon that only a Peter Wayner could so eloquently produce. No, they shelled out $50 per book because they were required to, and when a quick search for a used copy on Craigslist turned up empty, had to high-tail it on down to the university bookstore and pick up a shiny new copy.
I think the most telling statement Wayner makes, which entirely undercuts his argument, is the blase way he affirms the intrinsic value of his work. As Wayner says,
It’s hard to sue the students who read my books, even though I think the prices are a huge bargain. While $50 seems like a lot to pay for a book, the universities can charge up to $5,000 for a course that often touches upon half of the material in a book.
$50 seems like a lot to pay? While I think he's low-balling the amount most people pay for an average textbook ($150 was the median price in my day), even if every textbook were $50, what Wayner is saying is that his book is actually worth far more. For such a smart fellow, he sure seems oblivious to chasm sized holes in that logic.
Unlike an author, whose only expense is time, and coffee, universities have to pay for tenured faculty, utilities, administration, maintenance, and a whole host of other expenses. Running a university is an expensive proposition. Printing a few more copies of a book is not.
Even that aside, $50 is a sizable chunk of cash for most people. And saying that at $50 we're getting a smokin' deal? In miniature, it's the same attitude I encountered when reading CEO profiles where overpaid execs justified their insane salaries by claiming that they were somehow worth every penny, that they were worth whatever the market could bear, and even then they would be a smokin' deal.
I can only imagine how consumers would react to a fiction author jacking up the price of their books and then claiming that readers were actually getting a deal. Not only would there be a laugh riot, but the author in question would quickly learn an unforgettable lesson on how markets operate.
But for guys like Wayner, whose sinecure, so long unchallenged and secure, now stands under assault from the power of digital technologies, this lesson has not yet sunk in.
Peter Wayner's recent op-ed in the New York Times looks at the issue of piracy and its effect on the world of non-fiction publishing, specifically the world of academic or niche field related publishing. As Wayner says,
The kind of book I write, thick with equations that play to computer lovers, is also the first to be pirated. It’s a canary. O’Reilly Publishers, one of the top technical presses, reported that in 2008, the computer book market was the only segment to lose sales. According to the company, the category sold 8 percent fewer titles in 2008 than 2007.
It is an interesting argument, and pretty convincing in and of itself, but what Wayner does not mention is that until now, authors like him have essentially had a monopoly on a captive market. In fact, you can't even call it a market, because markets are open. In reality it's a racket.
Is there a truly legitimate reason that educational publishers will bring out a new edition of textbook every year or two years? Perhaps. But why is it that university courses usually specify the latest edition of a book where the content has never been significantly altered from edition to edition? University bookstores benefit. Educational publishers benefit. Textbook writers and contributors benefit. But do the students benefit?
Authors like Wayner have made their living depending on the fact that countless students often have no choice or option but to buy the latest shrink wrapped version of their latest epic tome. His readers, more often than not, did not shell out $50 or more per book because they wanted to, or were just dying to read the timeless jargon that only a Peter Wayner could so eloquently produce. No, they shelled out $50 per book because they were required to, and when a quick search for a used copy on Craigslist turned up empty, had to high-tail it on down to the university bookstore and pick up a shiny new copy.
I think the most telling statement Wayner makes, which entirely undercuts his argument, is the blase way he affirms the intrinsic value of his work. As Wayner says,
It’s hard to sue the students who read my books, even though I think the prices are a huge bargain. While $50 seems like a lot to pay for a book, the universities can charge up to $5,000 for a course that often touches upon half of the material in a book.
$50 seems like a lot to pay? While I think he's low-balling the amount most people pay for an average textbook ($150 was the median price in my day), even if every textbook were $50, what Wayner is saying is that his book is actually worth far more. For such a smart fellow, he sure seems oblivious to chasm sized holes in that logic.
Unlike an author, whose only expense is time, and coffee, universities have to pay for tenured faculty, utilities, administration, maintenance, and a whole host of other expenses. Running a university is an expensive proposition. Printing a few more copies of a book is not.
Even that aside, $50 is a sizable chunk of cash for most people. And saying that at $50 we're getting a smokin' deal? In miniature, it's the same attitude I encountered when reading CEO profiles where overpaid execs justified their insane salaries by claiming that they were somehow worth every penny, that they were worth whatever the market could bear, and even then they would be a smokin' deal.
I can only imagine how consumers would react to a fiction author jacking up the price of their books and then claiming that readers were actually getting a deal. Not only would there be a laugh riot, but the author in question would quickly learn an unforgettable lesson on how markets operate.
But for guys like Wayner, whose sinecure, so long unchallenged and secure, now stands under assault from the power of digital technologies, this lesson has not yet sunk in.
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