Makers

For those that don’t know, I love the fiction that Cory Doctorow writes and he has a brand new book out today! Woo!

I wasn’t able to make the signing, but I did the next best thing; downloaded a copy of the book.

Before you gasp in shock, be assured that I have done this legally with the author’s consent. You see Mr. Doctorow is an awesome guy and a copyfighter, he releases books under a Creative Commons US Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license so I can read this book, remix it and do awesome things like tell you to go read it here now!

Now this might not make a lot of sense, but hear me out. I’m about a third of the way though this book, but I’ve only downloaded a txt file of it. Instead of buying a physical copy for myself, I’ve donated a copy to the Institute of Technology Carlow. Now you see, Mr. Doctorow’s book will be read by at least two people. If you read it now like you should then that’s three. If the hard copy gets passed around the Institute of Technology, that’s a shed load more. If just a few of those people buy a book for themselves or a friend then the system has worked. That’s marketing and sales all in one.

I’ll leave you with my favourite passage from the book so far:

“They need the tools to make any other tools,” is what Perry said when he returned from the hospital, the side of his head still swaddled in bandages that draped over his injured eye. They’d shaved his head at his insistence, saying that he wasn’t going to try to keep his hair clean with all the bandages. It made him look younger, and his fine skull-bones stood out through his thin scalp when he finally came home. Before he’d looked like a outdoorsman engineer: now he looked like a radical, a pirate.

“They need the tools that will let them build anything else, for free, and use it or sell it.” He gestured at the rapid prototyping machines they had, the three-dee printer and scanner setups. “I mean something like that, but I want it to be capable of printing out the parts necessary to assemble another one. Machines that can reproduce themselves.”

Francis shifted in his seat. “What are they supposed to do with those?”

“Everything,” Perry said, his eye glinting. “Make your kitchen fixtures. Make your shoes and hat. Make your kids’ toys — if it’s in the stores, it should be a downloadable too. Make toolchests and tools. Make it and build it and sell it. Make other printers and sell them. Make machines that make the goop we feed into the printers. Teach a man to fish, Francis, teach a man to fucking *fish*. No top-down ’solutions’ driven by ‘market research’” — his finger-quotes oozed sarcasm — “the thing that we need to do is make these people the authors of their own destiny.”

Photo by eschipul

Tags: books, copyright, Cory Doctorow

Jail Time

It’s good to see hardened criminals put in their place. Shooters of Jean Charles de Menezes? Still free. Street Photographers? Images deleted without court order; HA! Officers brutalising protesters? Still walkin’ around. Admins of The Pirate Bay? Locked up like they deserve!

Hokay, I’m trivialising. I’m not anti-police (my sister’s fiancée is a copper) and I know folks that work in the force and they’re all sound folks. Saying that though, the G20 riots were a bloody mess of mismanagement and bizarre savagery and require us all to think about the fundamental changes to police procedure that are creeping into effect. Why did officers cover their faces and conceal their ID numbers?

That’s a question for another time though, I want to talk about The Pirate Bay staffers being sentenced to jail for a year, and the fantastic statements given by Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi:

We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.

That man needs a medal and a suspended sentence. Copyright is fucked, let’s face it. We all breach copyright regularly, especially residents of the UK. I’m fairly sure that my Sky+ box is actually illegal. I know the copies of CDs I make to put on my iPod are illegal, and I think the backups of my music are probably fair game for a civil case too. But that’s the problem, every person thinks as media as ‘theirs’, whilst companies view it as their own and only grant you a license to view/hear/use it. Why shouldn’t we copy media, change it, improve it, destroy it and do as we damn well please?

It all be down to cash, grasshopper. If remittance was offered every time we download a song nobody would have a problem with TPB, but when their revenue stream is disrupted our corporate friends get upset. When they get upset they get litigious, and when they get litigious huge sums of remuneration get bandied about. Is the amount of stuff downloaded via TPB really worth £2.4m? I think it’s probably not. Without dispersal like this a lot of people wouldn’t have bothered. How many people have watched your copy of Firefly for example? Should each of them have to pay the price of the boxed set to watch it?

I know free access to media is unsustainable, but surely we can come up with a better way than criminalising free access to media whilst keeping distribution locked to physical products or digitally restricted ones. Copyright is broken and needs a fix that the people and the corporations can agree on, after all we pay their wages.

In the mean time of course, TPB is still up:

But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That’s the only thing hollywood ever taught us.
-The Pirate Bay

Tags: copyright, copywrong, digital rights, freedom, police, torrents