Or so says Cory Doctorow in his latest Publisher's Weekly column.

As I noted in the earlier blog post about Scalzi's DRM-free Redshirts, one of the important things that needs to happen is simple communication between the creative side and the consumer side. Doctorow's post argues that trade publishers should be diving into that conversation with the news that 'Hey, we're good guys here!'

The problem is that the face of corporate IP is the Cartel - the RIAA and the big music business, and Hollywood studios that do everything in their power to obscure how much money they make and who gets any of it. And of course there's the ongoing jihad against customers, with everyone and their lawyers suing left right and center to block, take down, and absurdly penalize everyone they can target.

What Doctorow points out are important differences in how trade publishers, particularly fiction, treat their authors versus how recording companies or movie studios treat their creative types. That difference matters, if we're going to have this conversation I keep banging on about. Not all corporations are alike, and not all copyright holders act like the Cartel does.