A Further Thought

When one publishes something, for better or worse, they are putting it out there, placing it on display, making it public; that is, after all, the core of the word. The creator, as much control as he or she had of it up to that point, no longer controls the work to a nontrivial degree.

Certainly, copyright law has all kinds of specific conditions and whatnot as to how much a copyright holder controls the copyright, but really… that’s a commercial thing. I’m not well-versed in its intricacies (though, anyone following the SFWA/Doctorow stuff of late might start to think they qualify as IP experts what with all the know-how being chucked about), so I’m going to take the time-honored tack of ignoring it entirely.

I’m more interested in the cultural applications, anyway.

Or maybe it’s the practical.

At any rate, I feel like… once you put something out there, it’s out there. Your control over it is limited. The best–the very best–you can do, given how national economies are structured, is control the sale of it, when actual money changes hands. Though even that is limited, and often the subject of diplomatic hand-wringing (at least when the big copyright holders start leaning on their elected representatives). But that’s about it.

You don’t have control over which libraries buy a book, for instance, nor over how many people borrow it. You can’t dictate how many friends one lends the book to, or how often it is re-gifted. Hell–you can’t even make an inch of headway on how many times an individual volume is resold. No author can stop anyone from going on television and telling viewers to buy only used books. They can’t even manage to get Amazon to stop advertising used books on the same page as new.

The funny thing is, the culture has always managed to place value on an author’s output in spite of the many cheap-as-free ways of getting their work, prior to the internet age. That value has seemed to decline in recent years, to some degree, and especially in comparison with movies and music and video games, but it’s still been there, and some would insist more people are able to make money writing than ever before.

So I wonder at the wisdom of those who would suggest that allowing works to roam free on the internet is tantamount to cutting one’s own throat. Has the culture lost the ability to place a value on work? In the very worst case, if everyone becomes so enamored with freebies that they buy no creative output whatsoever, then there simply will not be any new output for them to pass around. Perhaps at some point this will not be a problem since there will simply be so much freely available that no one person could get through everything out there, but it doesn’t seem likely.

But clearly that’s not so. The culture still values creative output–and supporting the creator–even if the essence of it is available for free. John Scalzi may well still have Agent to the Stars available as shareware out there, somewhere, but it sold well enough in hardcover that Tor feels like they could make money on it selling it in paperback. Howard Tayler gives away free the bulk of his creative output, and yet still manages to sell massive quantities of printed versions of his work.

If a freebie culture caused the devaluation of the thing that was given away, clearly Scalzi and Tayler should have been among the very first to be affected negatively, rather than affected very, very positively.

And so, I find it frankly astonishing that, as the cornerstone of a group’s copyright policy, they should name two particular websites as targets of interest for aggressive negotiation and conciliation. Seriously? That’s like pursuing an agreement with the occlusal surfaces of teeth #3 and #4 of the hydra’s sixth head such that they will not grind on you if you happen to be eaten by it.

Once a book is published, it’s almost certainly going to be digitized and distributed. The only reason it would not is that no one cares about it, in which case the author has much bigger problems. The technology of distributed file sharing and the reality of sovereign, foreign entities that don’t have to care about domestic law is going to be enough to ensure that that book is going to be out there, meandering around.

There is no deterrence, other than not to publish. There is no strategy that addresses aggressive moves against a couple of distributors that will not need to be applied to every distributor. The RIAA has pursued that strategy to its logical conclusion, and wound up suing seven year olds and computer-free grandmothers. And like in the negotiation with the hydra’s teeth, there is no end to the fight once engaged.

The solution, of course, is making friends with the hydra.