Branko's Weblog

It’s a question I have to ask regularly of the direct marketing scum that call me on the phone: “Excuse me, are you calling me to sell me something?” For some reason, the phonetards try to postpone the anti-climax of the conversation as long as possible by trying to obscure the reason for their call. This is because it’s not really a conversation. The longer they can convince me that we are having a conversation, the better it is for them.

But direct marketing is push. It’s in your face, it is unwanted, it is begging for me to take out the baseball bat and come by to clean the pond. You don’t expect pull marketeers to make life more difficult for the prospective customer. Any ad that has to lure me over basically has to make life as smooth as possible for me.

And I guess when Inmatrix put up a webpage to promote their Zoomplayer Pro product, their intention really was to make life easier for me. After all, if I find out after the fact that I cannot use their product, they’re are going to have one cross, baseball bat-owning customer on their hands. Nevertheless, if I read all the things I have to do for the privilige of using their product, I feel the need to grab my credit card dissipate immediately.

The list of requirements is this long because of Microsoft’s perfidious DRM scheme.

But! If you are going to have a page titled: “Why should I buy this product?,” don’t make the list of cons three times as long. Put that list on another page, titled Requirements, and keep the Why page for the good news.

DRM gone mad, I tells you!

Related earlier posts:

• Digital durability (about a government site promoting digital durability which leads by example, er, 404)
• It’s official: civil servants are nuts (about a government site promoting readable URLs at an unreadable URL)

At the Teleread blog (where I also blog), Robert Nagle is talking about works that did not enter the public domain in the USA when they should have, thanks to Walt Disney and other publishers buying legislation to shrink the public domain. His series is called The Copyright Ghosts Of…, discusses actual works (today amongst others: Billy Bud, written in 1891 by Herman Melville), and will run for ten episodes.

Published so far:

• Welcome to 1922! Welcome to 1922!
• The Copyright Ghosts Of 1923
• The Copyright Ghosts Of 1924

Meanwhile, Copyrightwatch discusses Public Domain Day 2007, on which still loads of works returned to the public domain all over the globe, as they should.

Only marginally related: the Roaring Twenties in the Future, as Reinder reruns his White House in Orbit series.

A little under a year ago Joost Smiers and Marijke van Schijndel published an article in the International Herald Tribune called Imagine a World Without Copyright. In it they explore what would happen if works were burdened by only a very short copyright (one year, for instance), or no copyright at all.

The reactions to this article have been interesting. Very few people seem to have actually engaged in the exercise; most either outright welcomed or condemned Smier’s and Van Schijndel’s proposal. Of the ones that did try and imagine a world without copyright, again only very few came with realistic counter-arguments, or refrained from attacking straw men.

While reading up on Richard Stallman, the subject of my previous entry, I came across an article he wrote in 2001 for Nature in which he sums up the reasons why science must “push copyright aside”. I was struck by a pragmatic pre-emptive counter-argument to the argument that scientists need income from licensing to off-set editing costs:

Instead, the cost of editing could be recovered, for example, through page charges to the authors, who can pass these on to the research sponsors. The sponsors should not mind, given that they currently pay for publication in a more cumbersome way through overhead fees for the university library’s subscription to the journal. By changing the economic model to charge editing costs to the research sponsors, we can eliminate the apparent need to restrict access. The occasional author who is not affiliated with an institution or company, and who has no research sponsor, could be exempted from page charges, with costs levied on institution-based authors.

A publisher provides value-add. Nobody likes to provide value-add, because it makes one dispensable. And so adders of value try and become middle-men. Middle-men cannot be dispensed so easily because — as their name applies — they are in the way.

I would like to see copyright reforms, and that is why I am arguing about copyright so often on this blog. And often I take the approach that we should not care if the entire industry loses their jobs. It is not our responsibility as citizens to provide authors and their middle-men with a special kind of welfare. If they want money, they should get real jobs. Copyright only exists to foster creation, not to care for the creators.

But in order to convince the parties involved, being clear may be being fair, it doesn’t necessarily help to win them over. Developing models in which authors can free themselves of the shackles of the publishing industry might help. Outlining how the money-flow can be diverted so that it flows from the author to the publisher instead of the other way around is extremely useful. In that sense it would pay to keep an eye on Lulu, a POD publisher, where self-publishing authors can and are encouraged to interact with value adders such as graphic designers, editors, copy writers and so on.

There are very few people who consistently say smart things about copyright. Actually, I only know one such person, and his name is Richard Stallman.

Stallman’s arguments about copyright center on copyright for software. Basically, he doesn’t want it and would like it to go away. Since that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, he wrote a license for everybody to use that will allow a software commons to bloom in a world of copyright: the GNU General Public License, perhaps better know as the GPL. The GPL covers software such as Linux, the GIMP, and inspired the licenses for Firefox, Apache, and of parts of Mac OS X.

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From an unnamed book currently doing the rounds at Distributed Proofreaders, as quoted by one of the volunteers:

And here let us remark, that this German prince, in order to read that work, was obliged to have the German translated into French by his friend Suhm, the Saxon minister at Petersburg.

Chasot, who had no very definite duties to perform at Rheinsberg, was commissioned to copy Suhm’s manuscript,–nay, he was nearly driven to despair when he had to copy it a second time, because Frederic’s monkey, Mimi, had set fire to the first copy.

At the Teleread blog, where I blog, regular visitor Roland Rohde was talking about the troubles he had with DRM, and in the run-up to his story he casually remarked that: “[the book] had a rather complicated installation routine, I can’t exactly remember what I had to do to get it working“.

A book with an installation procedure!

Now in the the days of yore (that is to say, before the mid-1990s) I would have smiled had I read that, because it would have meant that digital books were finally becoming a reality, and the teething problems we were experiencing were proof of that.

Today however, even though e-books have not caught on yet, there is no shortage of e-book standards and e-book readers, and even if you do not use these specialized items, there are enough wide-spread technologies that can be used to read electronic books, such as HTML and MP3 for file formats, and iPods and mobile phones for devices.

You know the story; this bloke John Gutenberg “invents” movable type. Publishers take authors’ books and make thousands of copies, without reimbursing the authors. Other publishers (”pirates”, as one author once called them) copy these books, not reimbursing the original publishers (or, indeed, the authors), thereby greatly upsetting these original publishers. Publishers get laws passed that evolve into so-called “copy rights”, so that other publishers can no longer “steal” from them.

Then the digital age comes along, and publishing changes from being “fairly easy, if you know what to do and own a printing press” to “so trivial, even a legless goat could do it”.

There is a popular argument that says we need DRM, because otherwise publishers won’t jump on the e-book bandwagon. Somehow the people who claim so fail to mention that readers won’t jump on the e-book bandwagon unless they can do more with e-books than with p-books.

Unless of course publishers are going to play the same sort of shell game they did with the LP/CD, where from one day to the next you could no longer buy vinyl, and had to go for CDs (at extremely inflated prices). In which case we’ll be able to do less with p-books, because there won’t be any.

Photo: Het Parool, 2005.

A while ago the Parool newspaper published a series of books that used to be censored at some point in time. Their list (Dutch): Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”, “Les liaisons dangereuses”, Brecht’s “Dreigroschenroman”, Alberto Moravia’s “Gli Indifferenti”, Marquis de Sade’s “Les Cent-Vingt journées de Sodome”, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five”, Anaïs Nin’s “Henry and June”, Edith Templeton’s “Gordon”, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, and Pauline Réage’s “L’histoire d’O”.

I was going to blog about this earlier, but wanted to find some info about newspapers publishing books, which has become quite fashionable recently. Unfortunately, my Google skills wax and wane with the moon, and I couldn’t find anything. From what I remember, the trend of newspapers publishing books started in Italy (?) and became a quite profitable side-line (?) for newspapers who were otherwise experiencing declining sales (?) in an era in which shopping for printed news has become so much easier (?). If you know more, please help me out here.

The pause gave me some time to think. The ultimate act of censorship, as you know, is called copyright. Copyright allows its owners, typically publishers, but sometimes authors (and in the case of Mein Kampf: governments) to stop distribution of a book. Is that bad for the book? In some cases it is. But more explicit censorship, as in the case of the ten books listed before, also makes publication an attractive proposal; who wouldn’t want to own forbidden fruit?

Where copyright may succeed in burying unpopular ideas is with ideas that would have been unpopular anyway; boring ideas, for example. But I don’t think anyone would want to ban boring ideas, because they tend to ban themselves.

Still, now and again explicit censorship escapes the radar even in somewhat interesting cases. For Project Gutenberg I helped salvage an early edition of “De Zoon van Dik Trom” (Dick Drum’s Son), which was censored by the Nazis during their occupation of the Netherlands, and which according to a website called Verboden Boeken (forbidden books) has not been restored since. I’ll have to check and see one of these days if that is still true.

Dik Trom is (the hero of) a series of children’s books that has remained popular for well over a century. The stories are about the adventures of a village boy with a stubborn slant. Slightly picaresque, but not as much as Tom Sawyer or Pippi Långstrump, it is nowadays considered harmless fun. The second book of the series was censored by the Nazis because Dik’s son Jan and his friends had a snowball fight in which they divided up into two camps: the “Dutch” and the “Germans”. The reasons for that choice were simple: the Germans were considered an acceptable alternative (remember: this was before the two Great Wars in which the Dutch perception of their friendly neighbours changed considerably), and because a German black-white-red flag could easily be mimicked by the turning the Dutch red-white-blue upside down.

And of course, in the heat of the battle kids yell things like: “Away with the Germans! Long live the queen!”

A more infamous example of a censored work that is no longer being reprinted is of course Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which is actively being censored in Europe using copyright law. Apparently our glorious leaders believe that undesirable ideas easily infect the mind of a simple minded person. I guess it takes one to know one.

Copyright is the right of an heir to destroy our culture. Don’t agree with that? Well, how about if I rephrase this to “inheritance gives an heir the control over an author’s estate, and copyright gives the author control over the works he created”?

According to The Injustice Collector, an article in The New-Yorker of June 12, James Joyce’s grandson Stephen has repeatedly suggested that he would destroy some original James Joyce works. Even if it could be argued that unpublished works are not yet property of the public (after all, that’s what unpublished means: not yet made public), there are many reasons to assume why such a feat would be equally disastrous for published manuscripts. I won’t go into these, as I already talked about them here (PDF). This entry is just about collecting evidence.

(Via mr. Flemming.)

Lately I have been getting a lot of spam of the sort that the Blog in Black describes here. Usually it’s terribly easy to spot, because the spamming scum keep their keywords relevant in order to score well with Google, so it no longer freaks me out like it did the first two times. :-)

But today I saw something at the Teleread blog, where I also blog, that could either be serious comments, or spam, and I’ll be damned if I know which is which. Two guys (or rather: two personas) posting adversarial messages, relevant to the blog entry, and the only thing that connects them is an obvious below-average intelligence, and the fact that in their included URLs they both link to similar looking directories — or are they link farms?

The entry was about Australia’s plan to introduce a concept of fair dealing, a concept thus far notably absent from its copyright laws, turning Australians into even bigger criminals than most of the rest of the world.

The first commenter, called “Jack”, wrote:

Bad Idea! Hardly matters even if a law is passed. Piracy is a crime and no rule or law can make it legal. Better not to try it !

Then, after a few messages by others, “Loy” replied:

Everyone has its own rights in so called democratic country, then why not the right to pirate. Piracy is stealing somebody’s work, but that too is an art. Piracy need a tact and so if one is benefitting out of it, why to even think of banning it.

Spammers must die!