/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2012-05-10T11:39:31-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/05/10/the_mongoliad_as_business_model.php I recently got to hear Neal Stephenson talk at MIT. As usual, he was a pleasure*, and the talk ranged over a wide variety of topics, from why America is in a massive idea deficit to why we should all stand up more and sit down less. What he didn't really discuss, to my disappointment, was the Mongoliad. Fortunately, Mark Teppo's "Big Idea" post in Scalzi's Whatever gives a little hint of what's going on here. The Mongoliad on offer here is a book - a collaborative work. But what's of interest to Copyfight is the structure and entity that... 75632@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2012-05-10T11:39:31-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/05/07/what_to_read_when_not_here.php Copyfight is getting comment-bombed again. I'm cleaning up as fast as I can, but things are sluggish. Apologies in advance. Meanwhile, let me give you a couple of pointers to things I think are worth reading relative to the past week's stories. Amanda Palmer wrote a guest post on techdirt about her successful Kickstarter, which is well on its way to being the biggest ever. As I mentioned last week, one of the few elements I see in common among all the new success models is relentless fan service and Amanda addresses that issue head-on. She talks about "all of... 75619@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2012-05-07T12:23:37-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/05/01/two_followups_on_bnmsft_and_palmer.php Both of the stories behind yesterday's pair of posts are getting more commentary. Here are a couple quickies and thoughts to go with them: Michael Marotta writes for the Phoenix on Palmer's choice to skip the major-label route. The Phoenix, being Boston's alternative paper, was one of the first media outlets to notice and publicize Palmer and the Dresden Dolls. Thus, she writes them from time to time. In her letter this time she points out that even though the Kickstarter has blown the roof off its fundraising goal that still only represents a few thousand fans. Any major-label release... 75606@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2012-05-01T14:51:54-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/04/25/why_breakabandon_drm.php Yesterday, when I linked to Charles Stross's later entry I should also have linked back to his earlier piece "What Amazon's ebook strategy means". This piece, published earlier this month, forthrightly declared that "DRM on ebooks is dead." Stross has been careful to state that he had no insider view that Tom Doherty Associates - the publishers who put out the Tor, Forge, and other lines of books - were going to make a big move to drop DRM. But even without that knowledge, Stross put together what he saw as the business case for getting rid of DRM. Long-time... 75593@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2012-04-25T13:53:43-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/04/13/thinking_about_the_ebook_lawsuit_and_what_is_to_come.php Today I want to spend a few minutes on a couple reflections posted in response to the DOJ's suit against publishers and Apple. First, the practical response. Dearauthor.com has a very nice (if lengthy) guide to "What happens next?" It's complicated, in part because some of the publishers accepted a settlement and some rejected it. So what happens with your e-books (both as an author and as a reader) depends on who the publisher is. Also bear in mind that the settlement doesn't yet have the official court stamp of approval, which could take as much as 60 days to... 75572@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2012-04-13T13:53:54-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/02/23/is_wanting_to_pay_for_content_entitlement.php Fantasy author Jim Hines takes issue with the Oatmeal comic I discussed yesterday. In a brief blog entry titled "Oatmeal, McGuire, and Entitlement", Hines relates the story of fellow author Seanan McGuire who was apparently subjected to a great deal of abuse because readers were disgruntled that the e-book version of her latest book didn't appear until two weeks after the print version. Hines avers that he is no fan of DRM, and agrees that HBO is making a mistake with their marketing. However, he takes umbrage at what he sees as entitlement on the part of fans: that sense... 75476@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2012-02-23T16:13:36-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/02/21/we_are_the_net_the_media_the_people_winning.php The theme for February seems to be retrospective analyses. I hope this isn't boring everyone; I'm finding it fascinating to see the Copyright Wars at last moving into a new phase. I am devouring analyses from everyone I can find, trying to figure things out for myself. Feel free to contribute your links and ideas, too! Today I'd like to point at two more thought pieces, both of which take on the theme of "who". First, there was a piece on BBC Tech last week from Rory Cellan-Jones, asking "The internet is angry - is it winning?" Cellan-Jones notes that... 75467@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2012-02-21T10:44:56-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/02/10/how_should_we_enforce_patents.php Rizza Barnes of UC Irvine sent me a pointer to a new paper by Tomlinson and Torrance addressing this question. Bill Tomlinson is an Associate Professor of Informatics at UCI (and former colleague of mine from MIT days) and Andrew W. Torrance is a professor of law at the University of Kansas School of Law. The paper appears to be a follow-up to their 2009 work, which also used simulation models to compare how different intellectual property regimes would affect the production of new innovation. You can download the full PDF of the article from the SSRN URL above. The... 75447@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2012-02-10T06:47:12-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/02/07/tassi_isnt_done_yet.php In today's follow-up post on Forbes, Paul Tassi exposes more of how he sees the Copyright Wars. In particular, he's keen to address the notion that he "gets it" and somehow the Cartel doesn't. Contrary to what I may have implied yesterday, Tassi says that he doesn't believe the Cartel executives per se are dumb, just that they're behaving in un-clever ways. If so, the question is why. Tassi makes the familiar argument that the Cartel is deliberately overstating - if not outright lying and distorting - its losses due to illegal copying. At least, these numbers and reasoning are... 75438@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2012-02-07T15:41:17-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/02/04/a_copyright_wars_primer_for_libertarians.php Copyfighter Jayel Aheram sent me a pointer to his recently published "libertarian primer on the copyright social conflict." The essay starts with the recent defeat of SOPA/PIPA and works backward to a nice set of links to past important battles in the Copyright Wars. Aheram is clearly reacting to currents within his own libertarian intellectual-thinking tradition, where some have taken sides with the pro-SOPA forces or been "dismissive" of SOPA. As I am not libertarian, I was interested to read their point of view. In particular, Aheram asserts that copyright itself, by virtue of its government-granted monopolistic status, is an... 75428@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2012-02-04T12:33:26-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/25/y_kill_hollywood.php Y Combinator is Paul Graham (and partners') early-stage seed-funding organization. Part angel investor, part venture capital introduction, and part hip techster scene, it often has an impact well beyond the small amounts of capital it invests in early stage companies. Graham is also a respected essayist on the Web in his own right. So when Y Combinator puts up something called "RFS 9: Kill Hollywood" that gets some raised eyebrows. The page appears to be a response to the recent fracas over SOPA/PIPA and Hollywood's insistence that its 1960's-era business models are deserving of special legal protection regardless of the... 75402@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2012-01-25T07:55:06-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/28/the_business_of_science_fiction_writers_is_not_prediction_but_sometimes_they_do_it_anyway.php Nearly every science fiction writer I've hung out with or listened to has asserted that his or her business was not predicting the future. They might write about it, but the purpose of writing about the future is not, usually, to say "this is going to happen" (as if they were fortune tellers gazing into crystal balls) but rather to say "here's an interesting projection of what might happen." That's true, but it's incomplete. Sometimes writing about the future is a way of warning people "If This Goes On..." or saying "Your way of looking at the world is not... 75350@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2011-12-28T13:03:44-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/02/will_the_drugs_ip_world_ever_change.php I promise I'll talk about drugs in a minute, but first I want to meta-introspect... There are a lot of tabs I open in my Copyfight window. Most of them don't make it to posts because they're not well-enough developed for me to say something about, or because someone else is saying all I want to say about something. For example FOSSPatents has been dogging the Apple-Motorola patent suits story extensively. I confess I don't understand what Apple is up to here and nobody else seems to have anything clear to say about it. As I mentioned the other day... 75308@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2011-12-02T16:30:43-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/11/21/openness_as_the_default.php Kevin Smith of Duke University has a pointed and poignant essay up on his blog about "The Unexpected Reader". The essay talks about how models of openness have become the norm in at least academic and scientific information access. Smith notes that open access has more than proved its worth, both anecdotally and in repeated tests. The value of publication is not just in reaching those for whom the publication was intended; the value is in being read by a wider and wider audience, many of whom are unexpected readers who can make unexpected connections and derive surprising results and... 75285@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2011-11-21T11:46:03-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/09/19/no_books_means_poor_people_need_not_apply.php SF author Elizabeth Bear pointed to this entry in a LiveJournal blog. It's a little bit long on passion and short on facts, but the central idea is neatly summarized:When you have little money, you buy second-hand books. Seen a second-hand ebook lately? Of course, you haven't. There are a few minuscule programs to allow some libraries to lend a few ebooks, but the secondary market for ebooks doesn't exist and likely never will. It's an interesting, and somewhat frightening, question: if we really do away with physical books, what will poor people read? Should lack of money mean you... 75183@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Big Thoughts 2011-09-19T12:29:12-05:00