Thanks to one of the many Meet the Media Guru events organized in Milan, Cory Doctorow was in Milan talking about digital rights management (DRM), open source and the role of copyright in society. SARA: So I'm here with Cory Doctorow, and he's a science fiction author as well as the co-editor of Boing Boing.net and a big proponent of copyfight which is what we're going to talk about in a moment. One of the things he's probably most known for is releasing his books under public domain- CORY: Creative Commons SARA: -under Creative Commons Attribution and- CORY: Creative Commons, non-Commercial, Share-Alike SARA: ...sorry CORY: It's ok. There's a big difference. SARA: Yes, I know...(me blushing furiously and thinking of my recently published A Guide to Creative Commons and Copyright) He makes his books available for download online and people can rework them, adapt them as long as they don't re-sell them or make them available to others for pay. (Editor’s note: And, due to the share-alike license, all derivative works must be released under the same license.) So can you tell us, what does copyfight mean? CORY: It really means re-balancing copyright. It used to be that copyright was something that the average person never used to think about..because copyright TKKKKK only kicked in when you made a copy, and making a copy involves having a big industrial piece of machinery...you know, a printing press could make a copy. If you were going to spend a million dollars on a print shop, you could spend a thousand dollars for a lawyer to tell you how to do it right. But now we can make copies a million times a day without even thinking. We copy like we breathe on the internet and every one of those copies is governed by copyright law and the digital response to the copyright law, TKKKKKKKKKKKK hasn't been to make it simpler for us to understand, it's been to make it harder and to make the penalties for getting it wrong even worse. This has produced a really bad outcome, where 98% of the works in copyright don’t have any visible owner, no one knows who the license TKKKKKKKKKKK, but the majority of internet users are essentially criminals because of how they use the internet. Musicians and other kinds of artists are not getting paid and their fans are starting to feel like they’re greedy, terrible people TKkkkkkkk they’re getting sued by people who love their work and don’t deserve to get paid, I mean it’s a mess for everybody! So I really think we need a set common-sense copyright rules that say if you’re going to do something industrial, with copying as a business that you have a set of rules that are respectful of the need to innovate but still fairly compensate people whose work that you take and if you’re not doing something commercial but if you’re doing something that’s merely cultural, the kind of thing that’s really the way we converse with copyrighted works now that that shouldn’t be subject to that kind of industrial regulation at all. It should just be outside of the realm of industrial regulation. SARA: And what about an artist who’s interested in releasing their works under Creative Commons? I know that when you did that, you already had a bit of a following, a bit of community. I think in some ways a community serves not only as someone who propagates your work but also defends it by TKKK a sort of a watchdog. What about someone who’s just starting out? Would you recommend they release their work under Creative Commons? CORY: Well, to be honest I’ve never needed a watchdog. It just hasn’t come up. Yeah, I mean there’s like a million people who violate the licenses in tiny ways, but you know, as an artist or a commercial person you need to decide : Are you interested in making sure everyone who uses your work pays you for it or everyone who would pay you for your work gets a chance to use it? You can’t do both. If you spend all your time chasing 13-year olds and turning them upside down so the quarters fall out of their pockets, you’ll never get any painting or music or books done. So, I’ve never had to worry about the enforcement side. Now as to whether or not it’s worth doing if you don’t have a community or what it can do for you I think you put your finger on something important: Creative Commons doesn’t make people love your work in one spread Tkkkk it gives the tools to people who love your work in one spread TKKK to do something. So, it doesn’t solve the first problem. And that’s a problem that every artist solves in their own way. Some of them solve it by connecting with a commercial entity that helps promote their work, some of us have the innate ability to do it, some of us just chance into it and just find that TKKK right evangelist TKKKKKKKK Every artist finds their way there. But the important takeaway from that is it never occurs, I think, to allow people explicitly to non-commercially share your work, because first of all most people assume that TKKK do it, or TKKK and they do it anyway. So you’re not enabling people to do something anyway that they would do if they loved your work. What you’re doing is assuring them that what they’re doing is lawful. And more importantly than enlisting people to act as your enforcer, what you’re doing is creating a social contract with those people by saying to them, “this isn’t a lawless zone with no rules under which you can take my work and share it with your friends. This is a zone where we have a social contract of reasonable, easy-to-understand terms; I would ask you to police yourselves.” Not that you’re asking them to police on your behalf, but to themselves, temper their own behavior on that basis. The important thing about all law, all agreements is that they have to be in large part self-enforced. If a law requires a policeman to sit in your living room all day long to make sure you don’t violate it, then the law is dead. So the law has to first be seen as reasonable by people who are bound by it. And Creative Commons represents a very reasonable, very easy to understand set of bi-lateral, easy-to-understand premises. SARA: Can we talk about your decision to release your book under Creative Commons? Can you tell me about that day you decided to do that? CORY: Sure, you know I decided to release it for free online before Creative Commons existed, but by the time I was ready to, Creative Commons had come into existence. My first book was a guide to publishing science fiction. I wrote it with a novelist. I was a short story writer and he was a novelist and we were both widely published….we wrote this book and the month it came out, I won the award for best new writer in the field, so this was presumably good news for the publisher and you’d think they run out and try and sell some more copies off that, but they did nothing. And they did nothing because they expected to sell 10,000 copies of this book and if they sold another 1,000 copies they would make $800. And it would cost them $3,000 to do anything with this news that was meaningful to sell those 1,000 copies. So it made no sense for them to go out and sell those 1,000 copies. SARA: Or maybe there were 800 already in Nebraska and your audience was somewhere else… CORY: Right. I understood why they didn’t want to do it, but it disappointed me. I thought, god this is no way to run a career as a writer, but at the same time there had been this enormous fufarah about ebook piracy, where people who loved books were taking the copy off the shelf, slicing the binding off of it, running each page on the scanner and then running it through optical character recognition (OCR) software and then going through it by hand and correcting all the typos that had been introduced by this process. There’s only one reason that someone does this: it’s because they love the book and they want to share it with their friends. And there have been all these writers were going crazy about this – once you go electronic you’ll never get it back, you’re doomed, you’ve destroyed us, we hate you, you’re a pirate! And I looked at this and I thought first of all: calling these people who love your books a pirate even if you’re disappointed with what they’ve done is probably not a productive strategy. The best you can hope for is that they’ll hate you and stop promoting your book. That’s the best of all the possible outcomes. The worst is they’ll hate you and decide to promote your books just to spite you! It’s just awful news, right? So I thought ok, we can do better than this. So looking at these two facts: the fact that my publisher didn’t want to and couldn’t afford to promote me and the fact that there were fans out there who were trying to promote books that they love, and writers were running away from this as fast as they could, I thought there’s a better way to do this. And that is, rather than expect them to spend 80 hours scanning in the book and 10 hours to promote the copy, why don’t I just give them a copy of the book and maybe they’ll spend all 80 or 90 hours out there promoting it? And it worked really well. SARA: I know that you said that ‘ebooks are poor substitutes for print, which makes them great enticement for print (copies) – if you like the e version, go buy the book’ but what about someone like me, for example, I don’t go buy print books anymore, I only buy ebooks. What can someone like me do? Do you see a world where print no longer exists, where’s the new revenue model? CORY: Well, I don’t really see a world where print can no longer exist. I mean, there is a minority of people who do this (buy all electronic) but I don’t see it growing very quickly. The Kindle sold no one knows how many units, but at $350 a pop, and I don’t see them getting cheaper either because there’s just not a lot of mass appeal. Book reading is not a mass activity. No one’s going to expect them to sell as many Kindles as they sold Nintendo DS, for example. I’m not that really worried about it. But if it emerges, we’ll have to think of something different. There’s this risk of waiting for the future, waiting for this crisis to occur before you act, doing nothing because you think this crisis might occur later, and then everything passes you by. If print dies, we’re going to need a business model no matter what. And it’s not going to be based on preventing people from copying your work if they want to, because it’s not technically possible to really be able to do that. So I’m not exactly worried about it. It’s like ‘What are we going to do when the meteor hits?’ There’s a non-zero chance that the meteor’s going to hit and it would be pretty disastrous if it did. SARA: I don’t really think it’s a crisis actually, I think it’s an opportunity because, for example, me living in another country I have access to so many more types of genres that I wouldn’t have access to if they weren’t electronic. So I think your point is make it electronic, make it available to someone who’s in Australia, or someone in Iceland… CORY: But expatriates are different, and a very small market. The total expatriate book market commercially is very small, but getting you free electronic copies of my books probably sells more copies TKK even if you read it electronically because you go out and tell 15 friends about it who aren’t necessarily expatriates because we have these digital networks now. So they can walk down to their local bookshop in New York or Stanford or wherever and pick up a copy. I mean again I think it’s a net positive for now. You know the world in which like print completely bleeds over to the Kindle, I don’t know…we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. SARA: Well you saw that this week has had some big improvements / changes on the ebook industry: The Kindle 2 was released and also they then released an app for the iPhone, and then yesterday Fictionwise was bought by Barnes & Noble. But we’re still in this format war. The difference in the mp3 war is that there was an mp3, a universal format. What can individuals do or what can you do as an author to push toward some sort of universal format that can make it more appealing? CORY: Actually I think that the important thing isn’t a universal format, but the important thing is open formats, because books are open, right? I mean, you walk into a big, well-supplied bookstore and pick out from the smallest, most cheaply made book to the largest, most expensively made you will find an enormous diversity of printed material. Digitally representing that material faithfully is going to require more than one format. So, you open a web page in your browser, you probably open 25 different file formats and you don’t care if they are bitmaps, or pngs, bmps, jpgs, gifs or j32s or whatever because they are all open, right? And provided they are open, it’s not challenging for people to make devices or display technology to implement. These things if they are standardized, there’s been a records code that the standards body produced and you literally just paste it into your code base and away you go, you’ve got support. And if you go to China, you actually see what this is going to look like because in China nobody cares if the formats are proprietary and if it’s technically against the law for them to include it. So people have video playback devices in China and it plays everything, if you buy an ebook reader in China, it plays everything, if you buy an mp3 player in China, it plays everything. And in fact most video players play all the ebooks and all the audio because, why not? It’s an extra 16 lines of code in a device that has gigabytes of memory. So, how do we get to open standards is probably a better question and I think we need to focus on bringing these companies to account. So, I don’t think it’s good news that Kindle books are available on the iPhone, I think that’s pathological. Why should we need a business arrangement so that you can play books that you bought and paid for on another device? SARA: And it’s extremely US-centric. CORY: Right, I mean saying we can now read Kindle books on the iPhone should be as weird as saying that we can read Bantam books in easy chairs. Bantam shouldn’t have any say on what kind of chair you’re sitting on when you’re reading the book. Amazon shouldn’t have any say over which device you’re using when you’re reading the book. You’re buying the book, it should be yours. SARA: Yes, it’s hard for those of us that want to, I mean until today I have never downloaded a cracked version of a book but there’s a lot of temptation because I have three different formats that I want to read and at any time and I think that it’s a big problem with the formatting. CORY: Right, and you point out something important which is that people who don’t want to pay, people who are pirates, don’t get TKKKK by the DRM, they go out and download the cracked books for free. It’s only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms. SARA: Right and if you’re an avid reader it’s hard to resist that. Can we go back to copyright a little bit…you talk about “the elimination of copyright is something that diversifies cultural participation” and “decentralizes who gets to make art.” I wanted to talk to you about what you think the future of an artist is, because maybe a couple of years ago, you were a programmer OR a writer OR a photographer and I think that if we’re not going to be able to “get rich” because that’s something that the copyright should be protecting who can buy, and how many copies they can buy, a further evolution of this might be: you might make less from that book, you might write more books because the technology is helping you do things faster, but you might need to diversify your own talent. How do you see the future of an artist being impacted by the information age? CORY: Well, I think that, and I want to start at the beginning of the question: I think that copyright diversifies decision-making TKKK. Before copyright, we had patronage, so a pope or a duke said that you could paint a ceiling, you could paint a ceiling. We got some great ceilings that way, but it was not a great way for apportioning capital to make art. The creation of an exclusive industrial right TK that you could then waive investment on to restrict copying allowed people to make any art that they wanted to, provided it was profitable. So that was the second stage, and that vastly diversified who got to decide who made art, and that was good. We are entering the realm now where relaxing that right, not eliminating it but relaxing it, dramatically reduces the capital you need to produce, because for example you can remix and do lots of other things. And when you dramatically reduce the amount of capital you need, you further diversify, because now it’s not just which art is profitable, but it’s that art which is profitable at smaller investment levels, or that art which doesn’t require profit in order to exist, right? It can be made for free. So this is really a good policy, I can’t wait to have more diversity from a more relaxed or more liberal copyright regime. But I don’t think that copyright ever made a majority of artists rich. So, the majority of artists were not earning anything like a living before copyright, before the Internet rather. They won’t be earning a living during the Internet, they won’t be earning a living after the Internet because creating art is a non-economic, fundamentally non-economic principle. People make art even when no one wants to buy it because they want to express themselves. Now the Internet has made it possible for a generation of artists to earn a living, there are a lot of artists who TKKK on the Internet TKKK visual artists who can connect more readily with potential buyers for their work. My friend RICK Tkkk in Michigan, he lives outside of Detroit and he’s a well-known painter of science fiction covers and commissioned painter work. It’s your basic day-job for painters. But he loves photography and he sits in his backyard and he takes the most exquisite macro photography of bugs and high-speed photography of birds. And the Internet has made it possible for him to connect with an audience, a gigantic audience of people who want to buy art prints of these photos. So here you have someone who was making a modest living painting book covers for New York publishing, is now making a real living as an artist taking photos that really tickle his artistic fancy from his backyard in Michigan. So this is the kind of thing the Internet enables. But even when it does enable an artist to make a living, the two reasons we make art is to get paid, but also to be heard. The Internet has made it possible for more people to be heard by more people than ever before. So, every artist is going to find their own way to earn a living or not, and the majority of artists won’t find a way to earn a living, that’s just the way it works, whether or not there’s an Internet. But if there’s an Internet, more artists will be able to find an audience and that’s a piece of the puzzle. It’s not the only piece but it’s a very important piece of the puzzle. SARA: Can you give us a little preview of what you’re going to be speaking about tonight? (Meet the Media Guru, Milan) CORY: I think you just heard it. SARA: Yes, because I saw that you’re talking about writing in the “Age of Distraction”… CORY: I won’t be talking about that so much but that’s certainly something that cuts right into my daily experience, because I work on a novel all the time, I’m writing a thousand words every day on it, I wrote a thousand words this morning and getting those thousand words done when you travel a lot and have a little baby and all the rest of it, is tricky. SARA: I’m not sure if you’re aware that in Italy they are proposing that there be a registry of bloggers, because in Italy we still have a registry of journalists – to be a part of this you have to be certified and carry a license. What do you think the implications of having a registry of bloggers would be, that we’re held accountable legally just like a journalist would be in Italy? CORY: I don’t think it would work very well, because defining what a blogger is would be very hard. It would silence or make ridiculous the phenomenon, for example of a 12 year old who wants to open a blog to talk about Pokemon cards with their friends. Do those people need licenses? And how do you establish where the cutoff is? This sounds to me like it’s something that a Parliament could spend 10 years debating, and by the time they come up with a working definition, it would have been completely invalid and technology would have moved on. If there’s a legitimate problem that the Parliament’s trying to solve, this won’t solve it. I guess that’s the shortest answer I can give you: this won’t solve it. SARA: That’s all the questions I have today, thank you for your time. CORY: It was lovely to meet you.