Speaker: ACTA: Don't sell us down the river
526 Responses
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I remember going to meetings in the 1990s with Jane Kelsey telling us how we were about to, and then had, given up our sovereignty on this issue. Reading through it, I can see just how much we have.
I had Jane as a lecturer a couple of years ago, for a paper on law and globalisation. TRIPS got a good roasting. International IP treaties in general appear to be uniformly bad for the public, and ACTA is not doing anything to dispel that notion.
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Matthew Poole - no, I havent seen any increase in sales for those works still in print (3 out of 7 titles.) Sales diminish over time,naturally*, and the internet has not been of use - to me. You're right - people cant pay to download my work, but my position isnt discordant. There is no good way to set up a site and have something like PayPal to receive the income *and make it profitable.* I know several writers who have tried this, and know of others who have had an equally dismal experience. Yes, I know about Neil Gaiman (power to his quill or whatever) and Cory Doctorow - they are exceptional.
Nor do I think a mention of "Bait" -I assume- (hmmm, must check Wikipedia) is 'marketing.' A mention doesnt market something that exists as 859 pages of ms but not as a book. Yet. It may keep the possibility in front of those few people who are interested - if they check Wikipedia specifically for it.
And yes, I've read about the scifi writers' experience too BUT there are extremely active sci-fi fan groups who do everything from appreciate the ability to download their favourite authors *and* buy the hard copy to writing fanfic & fanzines. No such groups exist for work of the kind I do. Publishers? Publishers are now interested in obtaining e-rights to certain kinds of books, but are not good at actual e-marketing yet. Taking orders over the net for hard copy is another matter, but it's not what we are discussing is it?
*Except when a successful film is made of a novel.
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Like hell they are. Death-plus-50 is no improvement on death-plus-70 in any material sense.
For some reason this morning I thought it was 50 from publication.
Death plus 50 makes me quite angry. If I publish something now and live into my 80s or 90s, it's going to be 2110-2120 before it falls out of copyright. That is just ridiculous.
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I'm also angry about TRIPS, which for me redoubles the need to prevent ACTA from being signed.
It might be worth getting a group of copyright-holders together to meet with the Minister and opposition to express opposition to ACTA, and support for better copyright laws...
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There is no good way to set up a site and have something like PayPal to receive the income *and make it profitable.* I know several writers who have tried this, and know of others who have had an equally dismal experience. Yes, I know about Neil Gaiman (power to his quill or whatever) and Cory Doctorow - they are exceptional.
And David Haywood. I'm quite inspired by what he's done with PA Books. All yo need is a Booker-winner's endorsement for the back cover ;-)
And yes, I've read about the scifi writers' experience too BUT there are extremely active sci-fi fan groups who do everything from appreciate the ability to download their favourite authors *and* buy the hard copy to writing fanfic & fanzines. No such groups exist for work of the kind I do.
No, they don't. But I wonder if things are already evolving that way. OTOH, I think there's a built-in structural issue with the tension between literary writing and the always-on nature of being an internet persona. Even novelists who don't live in the Big O tend to metaphorically "go bush" when they're trying to bring that book to fruition.
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There is no good way to set up a site and have something like PayPal to receive the income *and make it profitable.* I know several writers who have tried this, and know of others who have had an equally dismal experience.
Going it alone is pretty much a sure-fire recipe for failure in something like this, though. It needs to happen at the level of the publisher, or even better a joint venture by several publishers. Back, again, to my comments about convenience. People want a single source, not a different source for every other author. If publishers can get it right - and not do what the big music labels did and all try and build their own stores, selling their own products, with their own variations on DRM - I wouldn't call the experience of sole authors a prediction of what will happen in future. Amazon is already on its way to being the ITMS of digital books, and publishers would do well to try and get in behind that right now, before the book industry ends up chasing after a departing train full of consumers who are setting up their own expectations.
Also, as both I and other have said in here, books are consumed for the medium as much as they are for the content (ignoring text books). That ain't going to change, even if the representation of books does. You cannot replace curling up on the sofa with a book with curling up on the sofa with a laptop. It's just not the same, and never will be. I can replicate to a large extent the experience of going to the movies with a big screen and a good sound system, but what will replicate the experience of a book except for something that's very much like a book? Your fear of digital is, I feel, somewhat unfounded. Even if Kindle takes the world by storm, it's still a very expensive purchase and then has ongoing costs to buy new books. You cannot lend Kindle books as you can real books, all you can lend is the entire Kindle. There is no market for second-hand Kindle books, because Amazon has chosen to break the first-sale doctrine. Books have real up-sides that just don't exist with digital. There's a romance to the printed word that I think you are underestimating. Remember that I'm saying this as a person who has been subjected to torrents of disagreement from many comers about copyright and artists rights, and as someone who is very, very in touch and comfortable with the digital word.
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And yes, I've read about the scifi writers' experience too BUT there are extremely active sci-fi fan groups who do everything from appreciate the ability to download their favourite authors *and* buy the hard copy to writing fanfic & fanzines.
Up to a point -- but it also helps if, like Cory Doctorow, your day job is all about writing, thinking and activism on the bloody crossroads where art, commerce and technology meet. Oddly enough, you'd be surprised how many science fiction writers aren't tech geeks, and even somewhat naive about how the media-industrial complex works. :)
OTOH, I think there's a built-in structural issue with the tension between literary writing and the always-on nature of being an internet persona.
Sure - even Neil Gaiman has been known to vanish from teh interwebz when he's got a deadline coming over the horizon at warp speed. :)
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Death plus 50 makes me quite angry. If I publish something now and live into my 80s or 90s, it's going to be 2110-2120 before it falls out of copyright. That is just ridiculous.
But if you were in your eighties and the bestsellers you wrote 40 years ago went out of copyright, so that copies were being sold everywhere and films being made, of which you got not a cent, you might think otherwise.
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For some reason this morning I thought it was 50 from publication.
Death plus 50 makes me quite angry. If I publish something now and live into my 80s or 90s, it's going to be 2110-2120 before it falls out of copyright. That is just ridiculous.
It's 50 from first publication for works with corporate or unidentified authors, as I read the Copyright Act, and from first performance/release for musical and film. So your 50 wasn't actually totally wrong at all.
Ridiculous doesn't quite cover it. Assuming that the sons are born when their fathers are 30 (my current age), and live for the current expected lifespan of a European male in NZ of 78 years, if I published a novel and fathered a son tomorrow, my novel would not enter the public domain until my son was dead, my grandson was past today's retirement age, my great grandson was nearly 40, and my great great grandson was well into primary school. That is not just ridiculous, it's thoroughly obscene.
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Amazon is already on its way to being the ITMS of digital books, and publishers would do well to try and get in behind that right now, before the book industry ends up chasing after a departing train full of consumers who are setting up their own expectations.
Fanboi that I am, I'm actually expecting Apple's iTablet to be a gamebreaker -- not just for prose writers, but for newspapers and magazines. Devices that come with content seem like a way forward. The portability of the material will be diminished, but hopefully not in a way that breaks the internet.
Meanwhile, Modern Warfare 2 takes a staggering $550 million in its first five days on sale -- and that's while the torrent and warez sites seem to be groaning with cracks and copies of it. People still do seem to buy stuff.
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and that's while the torrent and warez sites seem to be groaning with cracks and copies of it. People still do seem to buy stuff.
Lies. Lies, scandal and statistics! Nobody buys stuff if they can get it on the internet for nothing!
OK, I'll stop now. But it really was too good an opportunity to pass up.
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But if you were in your eighties and the bestsellers you wrote 40 years ago went out of copyright, so that copies were being sold everywhere and films being made, of which you got not a cent, you might think otherwise.
Good law strikes a balance between competing interests.
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Oh, and as for the iTablet, maybe. If Apple can manage to not piss off consumers with excessive DRM, as opposed to what has been foisted on the Kindle (though I have recollections that stuff like not reading aloud was the publishers' call?), they could be for e-books as they were for portable MP3 players.
Of course, I would be thoroughly saddened if Apple became the only choice for e-book readers because I refuse to give any of my money to the iJobs. -
Gio, Paul, Peter, Kyle, Keir -- where do you all stand on this? What balance best serves the public good? How should we best move forward? Again: put away the moral thunderbolts -- what might actually work?
I have no earthly clue. I agree completely with what you write here
I'm in favour of limiting the ability to make infringing copies of commercial works such as films and books. But I also see the need to limit the scope of that limitation. I regard the protection of fair-dealing rights as fundamental to the public good
But the problem is that you can deal very easily with our last point - all you need to do is relax a statute - while it’s almost impossible to deal with the former without going nuclear, ACTA-style (and even then, I doubt you’d actually serve any end except to bolster the big players in the publishing industry). So, let me ask you: how do you propose to “limit the ability to make infringing copies of commercial works such as films and books”? And if you think that we can’t, then what system do you propose to put in place to support the people who currently work in those industries?
Somebody might correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that every time we’ve gone down that path the conversation has always devolved into a variation of “but the artists are not in fact suffering, I mean look at the numbers”. Which may or may not be true (and it applies only to music anyhow), but it certainly fails to answer the original question, and is in fact a way of making by stealth that argument that various people are claiming is not being made, namely, that illimited downloading is okay. So long as it doesn’t hurt anybody, right?
My personal feeling is that we’re not going to be so lucky, things aren't in fact just going to work out okay in the currently unregulated (or hopelessly misregulated) framework. And if I get archly moralistic at times, it’s because the argument always gets polarised in the exact same way: either with ACTA and the like, or completely against it, whereas I think we ought to occupy a middle ground of sanity, think creatively of ways that artists could be compensated, and the function of publishers recognised and translated into the new environment. Naively, this is what I would expect from a book entitled, I don’t know, The Future of Ideas - The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. But that’s most emphatically not the case.
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Lies. Lies, scandal and statistics! Nobody buys stuff if they can get it on the internet for nothing!
Thank you for reiterating my point there.
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Lies. Lies, scandal and statistics! Nobody buys stuff if they can get it on the internet for nothing!
Heh. But seriously, I do. All the time.
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Heh. But seriously, I do. All the time.
People have a tendency to generalise from their own experience. We all do, it's a fairly human thing to do.
The problem is that anecdata isn't all that useful for generalising from if it's coming from a non-typical sample.
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I suspect younger people download and much of the purchasing comes from older customers.
Those track sales in the US for the likes of Lady Gaga and Black Eyed Peas would tend to argue otherwise. These acts are selling, as legal digital downloads, ten million plus tracks a year.
You need to think of these as singles because that's the way kids are buying them.
That's immense and beyond anything we've ever seen before. Even at their height the Fab 4, the biggest act in history by quite some margin, were only selling 6-7 million singles a year in the US.
And piracy is killing the music industry how?
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The problem is that anecdata isn't all that useful for generalising from if it's coming from a non-typical sample.
It doesn't mean something's not true either. That was prompted by Matthew's light-hearted response to my observation that consumers last week spent $550m on a single work that they could have illicitly copied. That's data.
I don't want to depict myself as an angel -- I use Hype Machine to sample music on MP3 blogs, not all of which I subsequently buy (or even can buy). I download some television (but not films, unless it's a documentary I need and can't otherwise obtain). I use YouTube like everyone else.
As I keep saying, no one is a copyright maximalist in real life. I remember when RIANZ was campaigning against a Copyright Act exemption for format-shifting, and pretty much everyone on the RIANZ board had an iPod full of songs they'd ripped from their CDs. Michael Glading, bless his heart, did once try and convince me that iTunes playlists weren't necessary when you could get perfectly good carousel CD players -- but that was a while ago.
Hype Machine is an interesting example of the way things can evolve when fans are the users -- while new releases might pop up in its chart, what you'll more often see is derivative works -- remixes by other acts, or working DJs -- that function as a bonus for people who've bought the original work. It's still, of course, an infringement of copyright, but it's different -- and most of the artists seem happy to live with it.
That's why I don't like blanket statements about music downloading, or the dismissal of it all as "theft". It's way more nuanced than that. A lovingly-kept MP3 blog is not the same thing as some idiot seeding artists' entire catalogues.
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That's immense and beyond anything we've ever seen before. Even at their height the Fab 4, the biggest act in history by quite some margin, were only selling 6-7 million singles a year in the US
The contrast is even greater when you look at the numbers of singles sold in the US before download sales really got rolling: I think there were number one singles that sold in the low thousands some weeks. Most shops weren't stocking more than a handful of them.
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That's why I don't like blanket statements about music downloading, or the dismissal of it all as "theft".
For the sake of clarity, I totally agree. I'm equally unimpressed with the position that it's nothing at all like theft, is all.
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I am all for lovingly-kept MP3 blogs ( such as The Perfumed Garden )and I would like to see some means of making them legit. But it is the seeding idiots that is the problem. I have met people who do not own (in the sense of having bought) any music: they have iPods full of stuff downloaded illegally and stuff they have copied from their friends' iPods. They have extensive collections of movies they have obtained at no cost. They don't read books.
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And piracy is killing the music industry how?
Didn't you say (and this is a genuine question) that album sales and dollar value were way down? Unit sales hardly tell the whole story, surely.
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Meanwhile, Modern Warfare 2 takes a staggering $550 million in its first five days on sale -- and that's while the torrent and warez sites seem to be groaning with cracks and copies of it. People still do seem to buy stuff.
And yet another place where discretionary spending it done. That $20 a week I mentioned before will need to be saved for 5 or 6 weeks to buy that game, rather than a movie or CD.
A few games recently have earnt more than many movies. That's another impact on media's bottom line. And it's probably the same target market as well.
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Didn't you say (and this is a genuine question) that album sales and dollar value were way down? Unit sales hardly tell the whole story, surely.
Simon's argument is that album sales are down because the labels can't now force people to buy albums just to get the one two or three tracks they really want. They can just buy the songs they want on iTunes or Amazon. The figures tend to back him up. So it's a consequence of the internet, but not of piracy.
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