Monday, July 20, 2009
Blog of Ages Redux
I worked for a number of years in old media: books, magazines, and film. They all depended, and to some extent still do depend, on the concept of intellectual property. Simply put, it means that the person who creates a piece of writing or music or a work of art owns it just as much as the person who grows a tomato owns it. If the tomato grower works for a farmer, of course, the tomato might belong to the farmer, just as the articles written by a staff writer for a magazine might well belong to the magazine.
But what happens when the tomato is put on the Internet? First, it becomes an infinity of tomatoes. The power of intellectual property lies in two aspects of the work—the tomato. The second aspect is in what we call, appropriately enough, secondary or subsidiary rights. Your Star Wars toys and Living Words lunch boxes fall into this area. They exploit the idea of the tomato, and I've heard no one dispute that the creator of the tomato should control that idea.
The first right of the intellectual creator, though, is copyright, which is exactly what it appears to be—the right to make (or allow others to make) copies. This is a relatively recent idea. Only a little more than two hundred years ago, an author or composer would sell a work to a publisher for a flat fee. If it was hugely successful, the composer might have some additional leverage in negotiating the next sale, but would never see another pfennig on that work. Other publishers would be likely to put out their own editions, for which the creator would get nothing.
Copyright allowed creators to lease, rather than sell, the rights to their work. An author's contract now is for an advance against royalties, and if the book continues to sell, an author can keep getting checks for a lifetime (and beyond; current copyright law in the U.S. protects the rights for 75 years after the author's death). The publisher is compensated, of course, for the costs of editing and designing and manufacturing and distributing the book; all that comes out of the price you and I pay for a physical book.
But what happens when there is no physical book? If I buy an e-book or an audio book download, no physical object is transferred to me. The farmer sells me the tomato, but he can still sell you the very same tomato.
There are some people who believe that the low manufacturing cost (for a book, basically editing and design, both of which can really be omitted if you aren't obsessed with quality) should be reflected in the price. That is, they think that we should give away the right to copy intellectual property and control only who can sell it and the secondary rights. Some authors (the most famous is probably Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer) now release their works for free on the Internet, assuming that readers will then be inspired to purchase physical copies--and Doctorow's books do have respectable sales ranks at Amazon, so people are buying them.
The other side of that is that many people believe that everything should be free if it is freely available on the Web, or if it can be made freely available. Writers' organizations spend a fair amount of time tracking down pirate sites that post scanned copies of books whose authors have not agreed to release their texts (Doctorow and others release some rights under Creative Commons licenses, which you can look up at creativecommons.org). The pirates, both those who scan and post and those who unknowingly download those texts, often claim that they have done nothing wrong, since “information wants to be free.” Well, it may want to be free; I want to be rich, but my writing is not making that happen—in part because I face competition from those who are willing to give their work away for free. If my work is better than theirs, they still have the advantage of price.
I have not really decided on the rights and wrongs of all this, but I keep thinking about Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. With complete freedom of information, will bad information drive out good? It's one more problem to worry about.
But what happens when the tomato is put on the Internet? First, it becomes an infinity of tomatoes. The power of intellectual property lies in two aspects of the work—the tomato. The second aspect is in what we call, appropriately enough, secondary or subsidiary rights. Your Star Wars toys and Living Words lunch boxes fall into this area. They exploit the idea of the tomato, and I've heard no one dispute that the creator of the tomato should control that idea.
The first right of the intellectual creator, though, is copyright, which is exactly what it appears to be—the right to make (or allow others to make) copies. This is a relatively recent idea. Only a little more than two hundred years ago, an author or composer would sell a work to a publisher for a flat fee. If it was hugely successful, the composer might have some additional leverage in negotiating the next sale, but would never see another pfennig on that work. Other publishers would be likely to put out their own editions, for which the creator would get nothing.
Copyright allowed creators to lease, rather than sell, the rights to their work. An author's contract now is for an advance against royalties, and if the book continues to sell, an author can keep getting checks for a lifetime (and beyond; current copyright law in the U.S. protects the rights for 75 years after the author's death). The publisher is compensated, of course, for the costs of editing and designing and manufacturing and distributing the book; all that comes out of the price you and I pay for a physical book.
But what happens when there is no physical book? If I buy an e-book or an audio book download, no physical object is transferred to me. The farmer sells me the tomato, but he can still sell you the very same tomato.
There are some people who believe that the low manufacturing cost (for a book, basically editing and design, both of which can really be omitted if you aren't obsessed with quality) should be reflected in the price. That is, they think that we should give away the right to copy intellectual property and control only who can sell it and the secondary rights. Some authors (the most famous is probably Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer) now release their works for free on the Internet, assuming that readers will then be inspired to purchase physical copies--and Doctorow's books do have respectable sales ranks at Amazon, so people are buying them.
The other side of that is that many people believe that everything should be free if it is freely available on the Web, or if it can be made freely available. Writers' organizations spend a fair amount of time tracking down pirate sites that post scanned copies of books whose authors have not agreed to release their texts (Doctorow and others release some rights under Creative Commons licenses, which you can look up at creativecommons.org). The pirates, both those who scan and post and those who unknowingly download those texts, often claim that they have done nothing wrong, since “information wants to be free.” Well, it may want to be free; I want to be rich, but my writing is not making that happen—in part because I face competition from those who are willing to give their work away for free. If my work is better than theirs, they still have the advantage of price.
I have not really decided on the rights and wrongs of all this, but I keep thinking about Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. With complete freedom of information, will bad information drive out good? It's one more problem to worry about.
Blog of Ages
I don't suppose that “blog” counts as a new word any more, even if it doesn't appear in Dr. Johnson's dictionary or the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. I am told that the first web log appeared in 1994, long enough ago that many of my students have never been conscious of a world without blogs.
The advantage of the blog over the old-fashioned diary, of course, is that you don't have to wait until you're famous and dead (or at least dead; the diary might make you famous) before your thoughts are available to millions of people. And most blogs are, like most diaries, the boring everyday thoughts of people who are fundamentally uninteresting.
A few blogs, perhaps several hundred out of the millions on the Internet, cover particular topics interestingly, and even fewer are the models of interesting minds at work.
This mode of journaling is not entirely new. The medium is new, but not the idea of recording for the public what you happen to think about various issues. A newspaper column is a form of blog, even when it is not (as this is) posted on the Web. Some newspaper bloggers have become famous and influential for their writings, from Walter Winchell to Grantland Rice to Walter Kerr, influencing how Americans thought about politics or sports, or what theater they saw.
Ultimately, all of us bloggers, in print or newer media, are the children of Samuel Johnson and The Rambler. It's true that Johnson himself considered himself the successor to Addison and Steele's Spectator, and he was correct in that The Rambler came out regularly (twice a week; The Spectator was a daily) and consisted of a single essay in each issue. But The Spectator was not the work of a single hand, was intended to provide material for polite conversation, and took on something of the form of a collection of short stories.
The Rambler, on the other hand, ran to more serious meditations on those issues that seized Johnson's imagination from day to day. The first few in the selection I'm currently reading include the realistic novel, marriage, stoicism, pastoral poetry, sorrow, and biography--not a bad summary of Johnson's interests and life in a few words, and he revisited some of those issues many times. (I know, it omits the dictionary, but I said “not bad,” not “perfect.”)
There are 208 essays in The Rambler, and another 104 in The Idler, written on deadline 1750-52 and 1758-60 (the Idler essays were weekly) in his spare time; he was working on the dictionary and his annotated edition of Shakespeare in those same years. Boswell describes (with some amazement) Johnson dashing off one of those essays in half an hour the day before it was to appear. This is how many blog posts are written today.
Of course, not many of us can dash off a blog post as elegant and well reasoned as most of Johnson's, and mine, at least, take considerably more than half an hour. But even though his have been collected and republished often in the last two and a half centuries, they had the same ephemeral intention as our blog posts and columns.
The difference now, really, is that anyone with an e-mail account can have a blog. Anyone with a web site can “publish” a book. The type of material isn't new (not even hypertext is new), only the medium, and the ability to spew our work out into the unfiltered universe. We've entered a new era in how we think about writing. Are all blogs created equal? How do we deal with the availability of so much information, other than by choosing to ignore whole continents of it?
But I'm out of space. I'll have to revisit this issue later.
The advantage of the blog over the old-fashioned diary, of course, is that you don't have to wait until you're famous and dead (or at least dead; the diary might make you famous) before your thoughts are available to millions of people. And most blogs are, like most diaries, the boring everyday thoughts of people who are fundamentally uninteresting.
A few blogs, perhaps several hundred out of the millions on the Internet, cover particular topics interestingly, and even fewer are the models of interesting minds at work.
This mode of journaling is not entirely new. The medium is new, but not the idea of recording for the public what you happen to think about various issues. A newspaper column is a form of blog, even when it is not (as this is) posted on the Web. Some newspaper bloggers have become famous and influential for their writings, from Walter Winchell to Grantland Rice to Walter Kerr, influencing how Americans thought about politics or sports, or what theater they saw.
Ultimately, all of us bloggers, in print or newer media, are the children of Samuel Johnson and The Rambler. It's true that Johnson himself considered himself the successor to Addison and Steele's Spectator, and he was correct in that The Rambler came out regularly (twice a week; The Spectator was a daily) and consisted of a single essay in each issue. But The Spectator was not the work of a single hand, was intended to provide material for polite conversation, and took on something of the form of a collection of short stories.
The Rambler, on the other hand, ran to more serious meditations on those issues that seized Johnson's imagination from day to day. The first few in the selection I'm currently reading include the realistic novel, marriage, stoicism, pastoral poetry, sorrow, and biography--not a bad summary of Johnson's interests and life in a few words, and he revisited some of those issues many times. (I know, it omits the dictionary, but I said “not bad,” not “perfect.”)
There are 208 essays in The Rambler, and another 104 in The Idler, written on deadline 1750-52 and 1758-60 (the Idler essays were weekly) in his spare time; he was working on the dictionary and his annotated edition of Shakespeare in those same years. Boswell describes (with some amazement) Johnson dashing off one of those essays in half an hour the day before it was to appear. This is how many blog posts are written today.
Of course, not many of us can dash off a blog post as elegant and well reasoned as most of Johnson's, and mine, at least, take considerably more than half an hour. But even though his have been collected and republished often in the last two and a half centuries, they had the same ephemeral intention as our blog posts and columns.
The difference now, really, is that anyone with an e-mail account can have a blog. Anyone with a web site can “publish” a book. The type of material isn't new (not even hypertext is new), only the medium, and the ability to spew our work out into the unfiltered universe. We've entered a new era in how we think about writing. Are all blogs created equal? How do we deal with the availability of so much information, other than by choosing to ignore whole continents of it?
But I'm out of space. I'll have to revisit this issue later.
