booktwo.org

I haven’t talked about Creative Commons in a while. Last night I went to the London CC Salon, which turned out to be a sort of pep rally for free culture - not a bad thing.

One of the films shown is embedded below (or watch it on YouTube) and makes for a pretty funky introduction to the concepts behind CC. The video is one of the many pieces of CC-licensed work included on Free Me, a DVD created to show off and promulgate the CC ethos. Eventually, it is intended to be sent to journalists and MPs to try to get them to think differently about copyright law.

There hasn’t been much CC-licensed activity in publishing yet, with the notable exceptions of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and novels from experimentalists like Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow. The latter two tell some interesting stories about the possibilities of CC.

Stross’ novel Accelerando was released simultaneously in bookstores and as a free, CC-licensed download from the web. According to him and his publisher, this didn’t harm sales one iota - in fact, they’re pretty sure it increased them, not only because of the attendant publicity but because people who downloaded the book and liked it went out and bought the book from shops. Score one to CC.

Doctorow’s Overclocked, downloadable from his site, goes even further. Whereas Accelerando’s Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license allows sharing in the original form but nothing more, Overclocked’s Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license means fans can do what the hell they like with the text - including turning it into a song, creating new methods of distribution, or translating it into their local language.

I think the last one is particularly significant, for authors and publishers. Translation of all but the most mainstream books into all but the most widely-spoken languages is often prohibitively expensive - and in many parts of the world, the author never sees any money for it anyway. CC even provides a developing nations license (now merged with the general licenses) to give different rights according to geographical location. As Tim O’Reilly put it: “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”

One really interesting use of these licenses - and I don’t know how this would be done, but I’m sure it’s possible - would be for authors to assign CC licenses to their work when they die, so that the rights to the work would pass directly into the public domain, instead of to the current, bad and corrupt system of author estates** which are allowed to leech off this work for 75 years. Such a move would instantly free up huge chunks of our literary heritage for redistribution and rediscovery.

In fact, there might be a case here for campaigning for existing estates to use CC licenses now. The Society of Authors - who use the income from a number of literary estates, including those of Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, to finance their work - might be a good place to start…

There’s something here too about historical parallels with (or reversals of) physical enclosure and the tragedy of the commons. However, that will have to wait: today is the first day of London Lit Plus, and I expect to see you all there.

** No, they’re not all like that. But plenty are…

Steve over at the Gilbane Publishing Practice Blog has a long post on the experiences of the the We Are Smarter Than Me project. We>Me, which I wrote about last year, is (was?) a project by MIT, Pearson and others to build a community to write a book about how building communities could help businesses. The results, as Gilbane tells it, are interesting.

Firstly, it became clear to the steering committee that they had to relinquish all control of the project to the community in order for the community to flourish. There can be no half-measures in crowd-sourcing: you either let people do exactly what they want, or they won’t do it. This was demanded by the users, and the original editorial board had no choice to go along with it. In the end, they realised that this did energise the project.

However, freeing up the community also meant that the final book was not acceptable on delivery: “To yield an acceptable business book, it would be necessary to hire an accomplished professional author who would also handle the fact checking process.” This is not that unexpected, but it is a problem - particularly if that editor has to negotiate edits with X hundred authors…

There are some other insights as well - not least that the originally intended participants, tenured professors at Wharton and MIT, refused to participate, and that this didn’t make any difference in the long run - that make the Gilbane report worth reading in full. But it’s interesting to compare too with the Million Penguins project, as the final reports on that make pretty much the same observation: the journey was more interesting than the destination. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a business book or a novel; for the participants, the act of creation is more important than the end result.

Is this, then, the central quality of the wikibook? Crowdwriting - or many-to-many publishing, as Gilbane puts it - is inherently selfish. It’s not in the individual author’s best interest to make their shard integrate well with others - in fact, the opposite may be true. Altruism exists, but it’s balanced with self-promotion, of one kind or another. But perhaps we should pick apart that phrase, ‘many-to-many publishing’ - something there resists the urge to put an end to the endeavour. Like Wikipedia, is a wikibook - by its very nature - permanently unfinished? One of the core perceived attributes of book 1.0 is that it represents the “one true version” - yet many of our most culturally important books - think of the Bible, or the works of Shakespeare - exist in multiple versions.

Perhaps, if we are to understand the wikibook, we need to place it in the context of mythical texts, like the Bible and other religious and historical works. They share the same core attributes: multiple authors, disputed authorship, multiple versions, endless potential versions, authors and versions distributed across time and space and filterable by the reader/editor’s prejudices. The only thing we can do is add metadata to aid historians, tracking changes and creating concordances.

With the need for a “one true version” removed, we promote the reader to editor, and the relationship graph becomes truly many-to-many, instead of passing through the editorial bottleneck. Combine this with innovative licensing which allows for-profit publication of remixed text (CC3.0 now available), and you have the seeds of a new literary culture…

This week saw the first meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Publishing at the UK Houses of Parliament. The APPG was set up last month, largely on the instigation of Sonny Leong, who is chairman of the IPG, a body which does an excellent job of representing independent publishers in the UK (full disclosure: my employer is a member, but that’s a personal opinion). It’s great that indie publishers will have such a voice in the house, although the APPG was set up to communicate with the industry as a whole.

The chairman of the APPG is Gordon Banks MP, a staunch Labourite whose record speaks for itself, although his background in the building trade doesn’t imply he has much experience in the area. He does however “like reading a wide range of books.” The Secretary is Gisela Stuart MP, another Labour MP with a similarly loyal record. She was a former Bookseller apprentice and Deputy Director of the London Book Fair, so should have a good understanding of the trade.

This is all important because the great changes coming to publishing are undoubtedly going to be accompanied by a fair amount of legislation - there’s already plenty of lobbying going on with things like copyright term extension, which was rejected by the Gowers Review back in December, but is bound to raise its ugly head again soon.

It’s depressing then, that one of the main items on the agenda - as reported by Publishing News, the only source I have for this - was territorial copyright (there were also some worrying turns of phrase about India’s ’sclerotic’ courts and the need for ’show trials’ - but even I am not going to come out on the side of the pirates). Territorial copyright refers to the practice of selling book rights in different territories, so that, for example, an author is published by Penguin in the UK, Simon & Schuster in the US, Gallimard in France and so on…

This practice means that publishers are protected in their own market, and can make pots of additional revenue selling rights to titles they own outright to other territories. This is a major moneyspinner, and it’s increasingly threatened by globalisation. A case in point is Amazon UK, which is regularly a focus of publisher’s ire for selling US editions, either directly or via third parties, to the UK market. The is, essentially, illegal - and it makes a mockery of publishers’ attempts to lock down their home markets.

Something clearly needs to be done - but parliamentary involvement just makes me nervous. There will still be separate foreign language editions of books for obvious reasons, and they’ll probably be done by diferent publishers, with contracts all round - but who thinks they can enforce territorial rights for ebooks? The internet has already made common-language borders irrelevant in most spheres; it’s going to happen here. Ill-conceived legislation could be a disaster. The bald statement that “without copyright, publishers would have nothing to sell at London or Frankfurt” is deeply misleading, but sounds like just the thing to get MPs geed up and making speeches.

Still, there was some mention of digitisation, and proof that the UK book industry is in rude health, having grown from £4,984m to £9,057m in its contribution to the UK economy in the last fifteen years according to a written answer from the Chancellor, so I’ll stop complaining now. But I will keep an eye out for the next meeting in June. Anyone know how to find written records of parliamentary group meetings?

One of the many things we missed while we were away was the appearance of Forbes Magazine’s special Books edition. It’s right on the ball, with a number of fascinating articles from the people who really know what they’re talking about, so you’ve got the Institute for the Future of the Book’s Ben Vershbow on The Networked Book, Boingboing’s Cory Doctorow on giving books away for free, and UC’s Jonathan Enfield on new challenges to copyright. It’s a really good selection, and all the commentators seem to be saying the same thing: technology is coming, but books aren’t going away.

Cory Doctorow’s piece is possibly the most interesting - not just from how assured he is of his model, which he has every right to be, having released three novels for free online, but because of his analysis of the link between social networking and the social book:

The thing about an e-book is that it’s a social object. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation–when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were “My friend suggested I pick up….” The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth.

If ebooks do take over (and, Doctorow believes, this is by no means certain), we’ve got to think of new ways to monetise them, because you just can’t charge for easy-copy bits like you can for physical paper. But creatives have wethered these kinds of changes before:

This isn’t the first time creative entrepreneurs have gone through one of these transitions. Vaudeville performers had to transition to radio, an abrupt shift from having perfect control over who could hear a performance (if they don’t buy a ticket, you throw them out) to no control whatsoever (any family whose 12-year-old could build a crystal set, the day’s equivalent of installing file-sharing software, could tune in). There were business models for radio, but predicting them a priori wasn’t easy. Who could have foreseen that radio’s great fortunes would be had through creating a blanket license, securing a Congressional consent decree, chartering a collecting society and inventing a new form of statistical mathematics to fund it?

This description of the e-shift is much like my humble own previously, comparing it to the move from chamber to recorded music. But the essential point here is that more readers must be, by definition, a good thing. It’s an honour to be pirated: it’s a sign of recognition. And,

There has never been a time when more people were reading more words by more authors. The Internet is a literary world of written words. What a fine thing that is for writers.

The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property is published today as part of the UK’s pre-Budget report, and is now available as a downloadable pdf from the Treasury website (which, it must be said, is a joy to use, right down to the lovely red box favicon).

The Gowers review is a year-long independent review of intellectual property rights in the United Kingdom commissioned by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and lead by former FT-editor Andrew Gowers. It’s the first action in some time on Britain’s somewhat untypical copyright laws, and is particularly interesting when various parties are seeking to increase the UK term of copyright, introduce stronger DRM measures in their products, and potentially to enforce rules that mean all music on iPods is currently illegal.

Many of the recommendations seem promising:

• “introducing a limited private copying exception, which will allow consumers to format shift legitimately purchased content, for example music from a CD to an MP3 player” - or indeed, ebooks from PC to reader.
• “proposing an ‘orphan works’ provision to the European Commission. This will make it easier for creative artists to re-use ‘orphan’ copyright protected material (for which no author can be found), thus unlocking previously unusable material” - including books which have remained out of print due to contested copyright [example].
• “The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights at 50 years.” - particularly interesting, and a conclusion reached after comparison with US law which, while it gives sound rights up to 75 years, has not made any noticeable difference to the creative industries.

For more discussion of the issues involved, see Tom Coates’ thoughts at plasticbag.org.

Currently all over the blogs: think tank calls for ‘private right to copy’. If you didn’t know already, every time you rip a CD to your computer, and then copy that MP3 to your portable player, you’re breaking several copyright laws. Clearly these laws are out of date and ineffectual, but that doesn’t stop the various industry bodies involved from pushing to tighten them up rather than rewrite them.

The news now, of course, is all about music, but the same arguments apply to books. Soon, ebooks will allow you to ‘rip’ your books to other portable devices, or back them up on a secure hard drive. Current copyright law forbids this, but it can’t possibly stay that way. At the moment, only one industry, music, is really fighting this, but film and TV are quickly catching up, and books will follow. Will the smart publishers find new and innovative ways to sell their books, or will they fight the same, desperate, hopeless rearguard action as the other entertainment industries? My money is on the latter, but it leaves room for some interesting projects in the intervening space.

With all my recent ranting about Digital Rights Management (DRM), I thought I should post some of the reasons for the unrest. Then I came across BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow advertising the course he’ll be teaching at UCLA this semester. It’s called “Pwned: Is everyone on this campus a copyright criminal?” and the course description sums up the potential dangers of DRM better than I would:

Every garden has a snake: computers aren’t just tools for empowering their owners. They’re also tools for stripping users of agency, for controlling us individually and en masse.

It starts with “Digital Rights Management” — the anti-copying measures that computers employ to frustrate their owners desires. These technologies literally attack their owners, treating them as menaces to be thwarted through force majeure, deceit, and cunning. Incredibly, DRM gets special protection under the law, a blanket prohibition on breaking DRM or helping others to do so, even if you have the right to access the work the DRM is walling off.

But DRM’s just the tip of the iceberg. Every digital act includes an act of copying, and that means that copyright governs every relationship in the digital realm. Take a conversation to email and it’s not just culture, it’s copyright — every volley is bound by the rules set out to govern the interactions between large publishing entities.

Playing a song for a buddy with your stereo is lawful. Stream that song to your buddy’s PC and you could be facing expulsion and criminal prosecution.

Every interaction on the Web is now larded over with “agreements” — terms of service, acceptable use policies, licenses — that no one reads or negotiates. These non-negotiable terms strip you of your rights the minute you click your mouse. Transactions that would be a traditional purchase in meatspace are complex “license agreements” in cyberspace. As mere licensors, we are as feudal serfs to a lord — ownership is conferred only on those who are lucky enough to be setting the terms. Our real property interests are secondary to their “intellectual property” claims.

When the computer, the network, publishing platforms, and property can all be magicked away with the Intellectual Property wand, we’re all of us pwned, 0wnz0red, punkd. Our tools are turned against us, the law is tipped away from our favor.

Imagine, twenty years from now, you have a digital library of all your favourite books. Hundreds of titles, the fruits of two decades of collecting - entirely legally - the greatest works by the greatest writers. Then you switch brands and buy a different computer, or ereader, or whatever, and suddenly the code which these books are stored in decides that you no longer have the right to read the books - books you own, have paid for, wish to re-read. This is the situation that will present itself if DRM issues are not resolved, if we don’t consider all the possibilities right now.