Because Cory Doctorow's new novel, “Little Brother” is the first e-book I'm reading on my iPhone (very readable, thank-you very much), I got to see his copyright notice which I'm reproducing here in its entirety because it's such a great summary of how copyright should work in a sane and rational world:
THE
COPYRIGHT THING
The
Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you
off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about
copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a
long way, and more than that is too much.
I
like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and
film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff
without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a
piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to
negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a
decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a
stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's
copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these
negotiations — even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions
of Little Brother (which would put it in top millionth of a
percentile for fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations,
which I could just about manage.
I
hate
the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are
expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and
lawyers. It's just stupid
to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a
lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on
one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to
“loan” their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to
get a license
to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on
Earth, and it's a fine thing.
I
recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how
he felt about piracy of his books. He said, “Hands up in the
audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free — because
someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now,
hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store
and plunking down cash.” Overwhelmingly, the audience said that
they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a
gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries:
I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two
or three, to give away to friends who must
read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their
book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.
Neil
went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny
minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books
because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who
downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that
they're readers,
they're people who love books.
People
who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something
curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you
pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people
left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the
day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably
check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot
music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything
that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for
black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your
favorite death-metal band.
Same
with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and
libraries. I've hung out in pirate ebook (“bookwarez”)
places online. I'm a stone used bookstore junkie, and I go to book
fairs for fun. And you know what? It's the same people at all those
places: book fans who do lots of everything that has to do with
books. I buy weird, fugly pirate editions of my favorite books in
China because they're weird and fugly and look great next to the
eight or nine other editions that I paid full-freight for of the same
books. I check books out of the library, google them when I need a
quote, carry dozens around on my phone and hundreds on my laptop, and
have (at this writing) more than 10,000 of them in storage lockers in
London, Los Angeles and Toronto.
If
I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of
them, I would.
The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a
feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these
writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just
got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing
access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners
crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's
feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to
reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but
let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!
Universal
access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the
history of the world. This is not a bad thing.
In
case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away
ebooks makes sense at this time and place:
Giving
away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The
commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you
give away free ebooks and still make money?
For
me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn't piracy,
it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of
all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so
because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free
copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in science fiction sell half a million
copies — in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con
alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who “like
science fiction” (and related geeky stuff like comics, games,
Linux, and so on) just don't really buy books. I'm more interested in
getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure
that everyone who's in the tent bought a ticket to be there.
Ebooks
are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it's in their nature. And many
of those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for, a
hand-wrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a
personal recommendation between two people who trust each other
enough to share bits. That's the kind of thing that authors (should)
dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. By making my books
available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love
them to help other people love them.
What's
more, I don't see ebooks as substitute for paper books for most
people. It's not that the screens aren't good enough, either: if
you're anything like me, you already spend every hour you can get in
front of the screen, reading text. But the more computer-literate you
are, the less likely you are to be reading long-form works on those
screens — that's because computer-literate people do more things
with their computers. We run IM and email and we use the browser in a
million diverse ways. We have games running in the background, and
endless opportunities to tinker with our music libraries. The more
you do with your computer, the more likely it is that you'll be
interrupted after five to seven minutes to do something else. That
makes the computer extremely poorly suited to reading long-form works
off of, unless you have the iron self-discipline of a monk.
The
good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers
are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which
is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute
for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen
to realize you want to be reading it on paper.
So
ebooks sell print books. Every writer I've heard of who's tried
giving away ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it
again. That's the commercial case for doing free ebooks.
Now,
onto the artistic case. It's the twenty-first century. Copying stuff
is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today (or if it
does, it'll be because civilization has collapsed, at which point
we'll have other problems). Hard drives aren't going to get bulkier,
more expensive, or less capacious. Networks won't get slower or
harder to access. If you're not making art with the intention of
having it copied, you're not really making art for the twenty-first
century. There's something charming about making work you don't want
to be copied, in the same way that it's nice to go to a Pioneer
Village and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his
traditional forge. But it's hardly, you know, contemporary.
I'm a science fiction writer. It's my job to write about the future
(on a good day) or at least the present. Art that's not supposed to
be copied is from the past.
Finally,
let's look at the moral case. Copying stuff is natural. It's how we
learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story,
written when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars, which
I'd just seen in the theater. Now that the Internet — the world's
most efficient copying machine — is pretty much everywhere, our
copying instinct is just going to play out more and more. There's no
way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, I'd be a hypocrite: when I
was 17, I was making mix-tapes, photocopying stories, and generally
copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around
then, I'd have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could.
There's
no way to stop it, and the people who try end up doing more harm than
piracy ever did. The record industry's ridiculous holy war against
file-sharers (more than 20,000 music fans sued and counting!)
exemplifies the absurdity of trying to get the food-coloring out of
the swimming pool. If the choice is between allowing copying or being
a frothing bully lashing out at anything he can reach, I choose the
former.
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