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Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

craphound.com

People who don't "get" the problem would be well advised to read Cory Doctorow's novel "Little Brother" which he has made available for free download http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

He also wrote a much longer story along similar lines.

Cory Doctorow wrote a short story about a sort of related situation. Interesting introduction to the economic forces involved for those who don't play.

File sharing should be legal because the "nobody will pay for what they can get free" is a lie perpetuated by the RIAA. Every study not funded by them has shown that music file sharers spend more on music than non-sharers. The incredibly expensive Photoshop probably owes most of its market share to piracy; dirt-poor college students pirate it, then wind up paying for a legal copy when they become gainfully employed.

I don't know how many sucessful artists have benefitted from "free", but I can point to two of them.

Roger McGuinn, from the old '60s band The Byrds, got "too old" according to the labels, and he couldn't get a new album and wound up playing bars in near poverty. He credited the old outlaw Napser for getting his career back; Napster introduced his music to a new generation of music lovers.

Cory Doctorow credits his status as a NYT best seller to the fact that he posts all his books on craphound.com for free.

Actually, though, "free" is almost the only thing that sells books and music. You're not going to buy a CD from an artist you've never heard. Cover art doesn't sell records, and never has. The music you buy will be music you hear for free -- on the radio, at a friend's house, P2P, etc.

That is the real reason the RIAA wants file sharing to be illegal -- they have radio, the indies have P2P, and radio is better. The indies are their competetion, and that's why they're against file sharing. Were it not for independant artists, they'd be all for file sharing.

After all, if you base your criteria primarily on money

But I don't. If I send you a copy of a Doctorow book by email, it didin't cost Doctorow anything, and most likely will result in a paper copy on your shelf. File sharing should be legal so more people can be acquainted with more art.

Activities that don't harm others should not be illegal, and file sharing harms no one, despite what the industry liars say. They have you and most people fooled. That's why so relatively few release their stuff that way; they've bought into the lie that if I can get it for free I won't buy it.

The reason for the cliche of the struggling artist is because there are so many of them, and 90% of them suck. It's supply and demand; there is a huge supply of music, and almost nobody has unlimited funds.

any full-time artist with less than stellar popularity will have significant troubles

How are you to become popular if nobody's ever heard of you?

Culture is being destroyed by the insanely long copyright terms. Art is like science and technology, in that everything new is built on what came before. Imagine how technology would stagnate if a patent lasted 150 years? That's how culture is stagnating.

Paying for pirate copies is bad because that actually does harm the artist and publisher; you're only going to buy the same work twice if the first copy is destroyed. The money that went to the pirate should have gone to the publisher. Had the pirate not sold an illigitimate copy, the buyer would have bought a legit copy. Not so with a file share. 90% of what you download you're not going to buy because you don't like it!

If a person downloads a copy for free, then he is much less likely to buy a legitimate copy.

You're still not getting it. Unless he's heard it, he isn't going to buy it. The only way you're going to pay for a song is either if you've heard it for free, or you've heard enough of that artist's work that you trust him or her.

Like Doctorow says, no artist ever went broke from piracy, but many have starved from obscurity. A shared file is an advertisement, and should be seen as such. I urge youto read Makers (uh, I think that's the one, it could be Little Brother)

Actually, there is one group of artists that don't benefit from free -- that's artists who suck. If Oprah says "buy this book" you might, and it might turn out to be garbage

File sharing should be legal because the "nobody will pay for what they can get free" is a lie perpetuated by the RIAA. Every study not funded by them has shown that music file sharers spend more on music than non-sharers. The incredibly expensive Photoshop probably owes most of its market share to piracy; dirt-poor college students pirate it, then wind up paying for a legal copy when they become gainfully employed.

I don't know how many sucessful artists have benefitted from "free", but I can point to two of them.

Roger McGuinn, from the old '60s band The Byrds, got "too old" according to the labels, and he couldn't get a new album and wound up playing bars in near poverty. He credited the old outlaw Napser for getting his career back; Napster introduced his music to a new generation of music lovers.

Cory Doctorow credits his status as a NYT best seller to the fact that he posts all his books on craphound.com for free.

Actually, though, "free" is almost the only thing that sells books and music. You're not going to buy a CD from an artist you've never heard. Cover art doesn't sell records, and never has. The music you buy will be music you hear for free -- on the radio, at a friend's house, P2P, etc.

That is the real reason the RIAA wants file sharing to be illegal -- they have radio, the indies have P2P, and radio is better. The indies are their competetion, and that's why they're against file sharing. Were it not for independant artists, they'd be all for file sharing.

After all, if you base your criteria primarily on money

But I don't. If I send you a copy of a Doctorow book by email, it didin't cost Doctorow anything, and most likely will result in a paper copy on your shelf. File sharing should be legal so more people can be acquainted with more art.

Activities that don't harm others should not be illegal, and file sharing harms no one, despite what the industry liars say. They have you and most people fooled. That's why so relatively few release their stuff that way; they've bought into the lie that if I can get it for free I won't buy it.

The reason for the cliche of the struggling artist is because there are so many of them, and 90% of them suck. It's supply and demand; there is a huge supply of music, and almost nobody has unlimited funds.

any full-time artist with less than stellar popularity will have significant troubles

How are you to become popular if nobody's ever heard of you?

Culture is being destroyed by the insanely long copyright terms. Art is like science and technology, in that everything new is built on what came before. Imagine how technology would stagnate if a patent lasted 150 years? That's how culture is stagnating.

Paying for pirate copies is bad because that actually does harm the artist and publisher; you're only going to buy the same work twice if the first copy is destroyed. The money that went to the pirate should have gone to the publisher. Had the pirate not sold an illigitimate copy, the buyer would have bought a legit copy. Not so with a file share. 90% of what you download you're not going to buy because you don't like it!

If a person downloads a copy for free, then he is much less likely to buy a legitimate copy.

You're still not getting it. Unless he's heard it, he isn't going to buy it. The only way you're going to pay for a song is either if you've heard it for free, or you've heard enough of that artist's work that you trust him or her.

Like Doctorow says, no artist ever went broke from piracy, but many have starved from obscurity. A shared file is an advertisement, and should be seen as such. I urge youto read Makers (uh, I think that's the one, it could be Little Brother)

Actually, there is one group of artists that don't benefit from free -- that's artists who suck. If Oprah says "buy this book" you might, and it might turn out to be garbage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
http://www.his.com/~z/vinge.html

or maybe Little Brother
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation. Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new technology. The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits. It's for these reasons that Google has long argued in favor of real patent reform, which we believe will benefit users and the U.S. economy as a whole.

I read this as "Google has long argued in favor of real patent reform, because that would really benefit us." I kid because I love. Or not. Read "Scroogled" by Doctorow free at his Craphound site. "Do no evil" my lily white ass.

Your post advocates a

(x) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

(From http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt.)
----

Furthermore, I don't think you truly understand what Bitcoin is all about.

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting Internet Tracking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

(X) Trackers can easily use it to identify those they want to track the most
(X) User preferences and other legitimate tracking uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop tracking for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of the Web will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from trackers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many Web users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(X) Trackers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for web tracking
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all IP addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in shopping carts
(X) Susceptibility of protocols other than HTTP to attack
(X) Willingness of users to install browser plugins
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of web tracking
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with affiliate programs
(X) Dishonesty on the part of trackers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) IE

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(X) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(X) HTML headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Browsing should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time IP addresses are cumbersome
(X) I don't want the government reading my tracking preferences
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

He did.

Technically speaking, could this happen everywhere? Alternatives?

Two interesting reads on this:

[I]magine a school or a church distributing routers among parents or parishioners as a fund-raiser. Let's see how long SBC or Verizon lasts against the Baptists. Now THAT's disruptive.

Robert X. Cringely, The Little Engine That Could, http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2004/pulpit_20040527_000456.html

And the other one to give to the kids:
Cory Doctorow, http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/, 2008

Stories like "The Right to Read" and "Printcrime" seem more prophetic all the time. Good on Graf_chokolo for sticking it to the bastards.

I don't think I'm crying "The Sky Is Falling"

How is an author going to be paid for their time writing the books if we allow one person to purchase the book, and then lend it to an infinite number of people at once?

Well, I was thinking that they might get paid the same way that scriveners, lamplighters, and blacksmiths are paid.

Do we tell those writers, "tough shit, start waiting tables and give up the writing thing if you're not popular?"

Well, that is pretty much what we told scriveners, lamplighters, blacksmiths, and dozens of other professionals whose professions were rendered obsolete by technology. If authors do not want to write because they enjoy the art, well, that is unfortunate, but there are a whole lot of people out there who do just enjoy the art and write even when it is not profitable.

if you actually would suggest that, you've just neatly gutted the bulk of the sci-fi and fantasy genres, which I believe tend to be pretty popular around this part of the intartubes.

Oh yeah? Do you have some sort of proof that, without viciously strong copyrights, scifi and fantasy authors would not bother? If they do not enjoy the art, and are only in it to make money, then I guess they should find an industry that doesn't need special laws that restrict everyone's natural rights just to remain profitable. Of course, I can think of a few writers who might continue writing even if we took the copyright system away, like Cory Doctorow:

http://craphound.com/

Why do I get the feeling that Prof. Moglen has read Doctorow's "Little Brother" ?

I'm pretty sure Doctorow has read Eben Moglen. The man is a founder of the EFF.

Why do I get the feeling that Prof. Moglen has read Doctorow's "Little Brother" ?

Modified from this:

Your post advocates a

( X ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to computer security. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( X ) Remote access and other legitimate computer uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( X ) It will stop insecure PCs for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( X ) Users of computers will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( X ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( X ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( X ) Many computer users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( X ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for security
( ) VPNs in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny numeric address space of all computers
( X ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( X ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in security
( X ) Susceptibility of protocols other than HTTP to attack
( X ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( X ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( X ) Technically illiterate politicians
( X ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( X ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Microsoft

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( X ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) HTTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( X ) Blacklists suck
( X ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( X ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending traffic should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( X ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( X ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time passwords are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( X ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

I'm bookmarking your source, maybe it's a meme but I've never seen it before.

Anti-copying mechanisms only work in soft science fiction like Star Trek (Transporters have strong anti-copy technology, as do the holodecks).

If the legions on Slashdot can support or disprove that claim, you would be doing me a favour.

Hint: We already know it doesn't work in the "real world" : http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

The high school kids who broke it were Brazilian Linux hackers who lived in a favela - a kind of squatter's slum.
Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.

...also apply to what the authors discard as "less capable states and sub-state actors".

Wireless.
Paranoid Linux.
Little Brother.
Cory Doctorow.
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

In other words, like the machines in "Makers" by Cory Doctorow? http://craphound.com/makers/download

I've got mod points tonight but I'm going to post instead. Take a look at this link http://craphound.com/makers/ for an interesting scifi spin on what the OP is thinking about. Free download available - its a good read.

Isn't this the plot of Human Readable by Cory Doctorow? Human Readable

that is the plot for the story Makers by Cory Doctorow.

Damn, I don't have mod points when I need them. But yeah, I was going to say that.

Link here: http://craphound.com/makers/download/

Tell that to Cory Doctorow. I've slightly edited the quote for brevity, and the emphasis is mine. If you want to read the whole text, it's in the forward to Little Brother. The link is to the entire text of the book.

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. One thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the Internet without permission is that they're readers, they're people who love books.

People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band.

Same with books. I've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. I've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. I'm a stone used bookstore junkie, and I go to book fairs for fun. And you know what? It's the same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has to do with books. I buy weird, fugly pirate editions of my favorite books in China because they're weird and fugly and look great next to the eight or nine other editions that I paid full-freight for of the same books. I check books out of the library, google them when I need a quote, carry dozens around on my phone and hundreds on my laptop, and have (at this writing) more than 10,000 of them in storage lockers in London, Los Angeles and Toronto.

If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I would. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business-models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

In case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place:

Giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. The commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money?

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of

I'm sorry, the crime you have described has already been labeled as printcrime.

Your efforts are appreciated, however. Please feel free to submit further ideas in the future.

Sincerely,

Olivia Newthreads
director, Novel Crimes exploitation division
Futurecrime, inc. (Bringing you tomorrow's crimes today!)

I've certainly seen single case examples (Cory Doctorow and his one book

Correction: All of Cory Doctorow's books are available free online. You can also buy them print.

Fiction is becoming reality.

Yeah.

Now, I don't remember if bringing up Cory Doctorow is a good or bad idea, but he's written the short "Printcrime" that would be relevant to this topic:

http://craphound.com/?p=573

Oblig: Printcrime by Cory Coctorow - http://craphound.com/?p=573 It's just a short story, but makes the point quite well.

You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen

You could follow Cory Doctorow's method.

Project Gutenberg, alas, only has public domain works afaik. However, there are other sources of free, legal, copyrighted books online. Cory Doctorow explains in Content why he posts all his books online:

• Many writers have tried free e-book releases to tie in with the print release of their works. To the best of my knowledge, every writer who's tried this has repeated the experiment with future works, suggesting a high degree of satisfaction with the outcomes
• A writer friend of mine had his first novel come out at the same time as mine. We write similar material and are often compared to one another by critics and reviewers. My first novel had a free download, his didn't. We compared sales figures and I was doing substantially better than him -- he subsequently convinced his publisher to let him follow suit
• Baen Books has a pretty good handle on expected sales for new volumes in long-running series; having sold many such series, they have lots of data to use in sales estimates. If Volume N sells X copies, we expect Volume N+1 to sell Y copies. They report that they have seen a measurable uptick in sales following from free e-book releases of previous and current volumes
• David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD candidate in economics, published a paper in 2004 in which he calculated that, for music, "piracy" results in a net increase in sales for all titles in the 75th percentile and lower; negligible change in sales for the "middle class" of titles between the 75th percentile and the 97th percentile; and a small drag on the "super-rich" in the 97th percentile and higher. Publisher Tim O'Reilly describes this as "piracy's progressive taxation," apportioning a small wealth-redistribution to the vast majority of works, no net change to the middle, and a small cost on the richest few
• Speaking of Tim O'Reilly, he has just published a detailed, quantitative study of the effect of free downloads on a single title. O'Reilly Media published Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, in November 2005, simultaneously releasing the book as a free download. By March 2007, they had a pretty detailed picture of the sales-cycle of this book -- and, thanks to industry standard metrics like those provided by Bookscan, they could compare it, apples-to-apples style, against the performance of competing books treating with the same subject. O'Reilly's conclusion: downloads didn't cause a decline in sales, and appears to have resulted in a lift in sales. This is particularly noteworthy because the book in question is a technical reference work, exclusively consumed by computer programmers who are by definition disposed to read off screens. Also, this is a reference work and therefore is more likely to be useful in electronic form, where it can be easily searched
  In my case, my publishers have gone back to press repeatedly for my books. The print runs for each edition are modest -- I'm a midlist writer in a world with a shrinking midlist -- but publishers print what they think they can sell, and they're outselling their expectations
• The new opportunities arising from my free downloads are so numerous as to be uncountable -- foreign rights deals, comic book licenses, speaking engagements, article commissions -- I've made more money in these secondary markets than I have in royalties
• More anecdotes: I've had literally thousands of people approach me by e-mail and at signings and cons to say, "I found your work online for free, got hooked, and started buying it." By contrast, I've had all of five e-mails from people saying, "Hey, idiot, thanks for the free book, now I don't have to buy the print edition, ha ha!"

A textbook I was assigned in an undergrad history course in the late '70s at SIU is now online, and it's not just informative, it's a good read, as well. That's not the only book virginia.edu has online, and I would imagine they're not the only college that posts books.

the logic behind DRM is, frankly, sound.

No, it's not. I'll quote Doctorow:

Cryptography -- secret writing -- is the practice of keeping secrets. It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker (actually, there can be more attackers, senders and recipients, but let's keep this simple). We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol.

Let's say we're in the days of the Caesar, the Gallic War. You need to send messages back and forth to your generals, and you'd prefer that the enemy doesn't get hold of them. You can rely on the idea that anyone who intercepts your message is probably illiterate, but that's a tough bet to stake your empire on. You can put your messages into the hands of reliable messengers who'll chew them up and swallow them if captured -- but that doesn't help you if Brad Pitt and his men in skirts skewer him with an arrow before he knows what's hit him.

So you encipher your message with something like ROT-13, where every character is rotated halfway through the alphabet. They used to do this with non-worksafe material on Usenet, back when anyone on Usenet cared about work-safe-ness -- A would become N, B is O, C is P, and so forth. To decipher, you just add 13 more, so N goes to A, O to B yadda yadda.

Well, this is pretty lame: as soon as anyone figures out your algorithm, your secret is g0nez0red.

So if you're Caesar, you spend a lot of time worrying about keeping the existence of your messengers and their payloads secret. Get that? You're Augustus and you need to send a message to Brad without Caceous (a word I'm reliably informed means "cheese-like, or pertaining to cheese") getting his hands on it. You give the message to Diatomaceous, the fleetest runner in the empire, and you encipher it with ROT-13 and send him out of the garrison in the pitchest hour of the night, making sure no one knows that you've sent it out. Caceous has spies everywhere, in the garrison and staked out on the road, and if one of them puts an arrow through Diatomaceous, they'll have their hands on the message, and then if they figure out the cipher, you're b0rked. So the existence of the message is a secret. The cipher is a secret. The ciphertext is a secret. That's a lot of secrets, and the more secrets you've got, the less secure you are, especially if any of those secrets are shared. Shared secrets aren't really all that secret any longer.

Time passes, stuff happens, and then Tesla invents the radio and Marconi takes credit for it. This is both good news and bad news for crypto: on the one hand, your messages can get to anywhere with a receiver and an antenna, which is great for the brave fifth columnists working behind the enemy lines. On the other hand, anyone with an antenna can listen in on the message, which means that it's no longer practical to keep the existence of the message a secret. Any time Adolf sends a message to Berlin, he can assume Churchill overhears it.

Which is OK, because now we have computers -- big, bulky primitive mechanical computers, but computers still. Computers are machines for rearranging numbers, and so scientists on both sides engage in a fiendish competition to invent the most cleverest method they can for rearranging numerically represented text so that the other side can't unscramble it. The existence of the message isn't a secret anymore, but the cipher is.

But this is still too many secrets. If Bobby intercepts one of Adolf's Enigma machines, he can give Churchill all kinds of intelligence. I mean, this was good news for Churchill and us, but bad news for Adolf. And at the end of the day, it's bad news for anyone who wants to keep a secret.

Enter keys: a cipher that uses a key is still more secure. Even if the cipher is disclosed, even if the ciphertext is intercepted, without the key (or a break), the message is secret. Post-war, this is doubly important as we begin to realize what I think of as Schneier's La

Too long to cut an paste, but Doctorow's talk to Microsoft Research about DRM really does it. Main points:

1. DRM systems don't work
2. DRM systems are bad for society
3. DRM systems are bad for biz
4. DRM systems are bad for artists
5. DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

Those are just subject headings, and are eloquently explained in the link.

It's certainly improved mine. I wouldn't want to do without my computer, let alone my microwave (or fire -- a stove is technology).

But the thing about technology is you CHOOSE to use it. You can buy ebooks or you can buy books. Both have advantages and disadvantages; you have to choose which features you need and which you don't. Me, I don't need to carry my whole library with me, but I do want to be able to give books away, so the old tech (Gutenberg) suits my needs better.

That said, I've been reading Doctorow's Content on my netbook, but I want to quote a passage from the forward to Makers:

There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more, they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.

I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.

These people don't believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than publishing books has. Copyright law has always recognized your right to own your books. When copyright laws are made -- by elected officials, acting for the public good -- they always safeguard this right.

But ebook publishers don't respect copyright law, and they don't believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you "buy" an ebook, you're really only licensing that book, and that copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal. (Of course, the button on their website says, "Buy this book" and they talk about "Ebook sales" at conferences -- no one says, "License this book for your Kindle" or "Total licenses of ebooks are up from 0.00001% of all publishing to 0.0001% of all publishing, a 100-fold increase!")

I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright law's guarantee of ownership in your books.

There's good tech and bad tech. Eight track tapes and volume buttons in car radios were bad tech, but not nearly as bad as DRM.

If I buy a book, it should be MY book. If I want to rent a book I'll go to the library and "rent" it for free.

It's certainly improved mine. I wouldn't want to do without my computer, let alone my microwave (or fire -- a stove is technology).

But the thing about technology is you CHOOSE to use it. You can buy ebooks or you can buy books. Both have advantages and disadvantages; you have to choose which features you need and which you don't. Me, I don't need to carry my whole library with me, but I do want to be able to give books away, so the old tech (Gutenberg) suits my needs better.

That said, I've been reading Doctorow's Content on my netbook, but I want to quote a passage from the forward to Makers:

There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more, they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.

I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.

These people don't believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than publishing books has. Copyright law has always recognized your right to own your books. When copyright laws are made -- by elected officials, acting for the public good -- they always safeguard this right.

But ebook publishers don't respect copyright law, and they don't believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you "buy" an ebook, you're really only licensing that book, and that copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal. (Of course, the button on their website says, "Buy this book" and they talk about "Ebook sales" at conferences -- no one says, "License this book for your Kindle" or "Total licenses of ebooks are up from 0.00001% of all publishing to 0.0001% of all publishing, a 100-fold increase!")

I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright law's guarantee of ownership in your books.

There's good tech and bad tech. Eight track tapes and volume buttons in car radios were bad tech, but not nearly as bad as DRM.

If I buy a book, it should be MY book. If I want to rent a book I'll go to the library and "rent" it for free.

Or the forward to any of Cory Doctorow's books. From Makers:

There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more, they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.

I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.

These people don't believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than publishing books has. Copyright law has always recognized your right to own your books. When copyright laws are made -- by elected officials, acting for the public good -- they always safeguard this right.

But ebook publishers don't respect copyright law, and they don't believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you "buy" an ebook, you're really only licensing that book, and that copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal. (Of course, the button on their website says, "Buy this book" and they talk about "Ebook sales" at conferences -- no one says, "License this book for your Kindle" or "Total licenses of ebooks are up from 0.00001% of all publishing to 0.0001% of all publishing, a 100-fold increase!")

I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright law's guarantee of ownership in your books.

So you own this ebook. The license agreement (see below), is from Creative Commons and it gives you even more rights than you get to a regular book. Every word of it is a gift, not a confiscation. Enjoy.

What do I want from you in return? Read the book. Tell your friends. Review it on Amazon or at your local bookseller. Bring it to your bookclub. Assign it to your students (older students, please -- that sex scene is a scorcher) (now I've got your attention, don't I?). As Woody Guthrie wrote:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

Oh yeah. Also: if you like it, buy it or donate a copy to a worthy, cash-strapped institution.

Why am I doing this? Because my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks, @timoreilly for this awesome aphorism). Because free ebooks sell print books. Because I copied my ass off when I was 17 and grew up to spend practically every discretionary cent I have on books when I became an adult. Because I can't stop you from sharing it (zeroes and ones aren't ever going to get harder to copy); and because readers have shared the books they loved forever; so I might as well enlist you to the cause.

Emphasis mine. Oh, and BTW, the book is available for free at the linked page, in many ereader formats. It's a pretty good read, except he uses too many hyphens (parking-lot, shopping-center, etc)

... until 3D printers are affordable and everywhere, like Cory Doctorow describes in Makers . Now that I've got a kid, I keep wanting to print small, one-off plastic bits to repair and enhance toys.

Kinda reminds me of the higher educational system described (briefly) in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom , which is an excellent free read from the days before he started to believe his own hype.

if nobody pays for something then the people who make that something are pretty quickly going to have to find something else to do for a living

The biggest word in the English language only has two letters. If pigs had big enough wings they'd fly. But the fact that has been demonstrated by study after study is that music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates. Another fact is that nobody ever went broke and had to get a different job because of people pirating their work, while many, many artists have gone broke and had to find other work because of obscurity. I'm not likely to buy your book if I've never heard of you. I'd never have bought an Isaac Asimov book had I not read some for free from the public library, yet I have an entire shelf with nothing but Asimov.

If "nobody would buy art if they could get it free" than how did Cory Doctorow manage to get on the New York Times best seller list? Note you can download his latest book from that link, and all his books are available for free download as well.

In short, your "if anybody could get it for free nobody would buy it" is tripe. Utter bullshit. DAMNED LIES.

If the carrier or manufacturer of a device that I own wipes it and reinstalled the factory OS, they're the one rooting/hacking MY property. I have a right to do anything I damned well please with something I own. I have no rights whatever to what I manufacture after I sell it.

You must be an ebook publisher.

If everyone had as a personal policy "only read OpenPGP-signed mail, and distrust mail signed with a key I haven't personally downloaded from a key server"

Then it would it would still fall under the "Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once" line of the well-known copypasta, and possibly "Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected" and "Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers" depending on how it is implemented.

Flamebait? I see I may have to metamod tonight. I found your comment to be insightful, especially the part where you said "What I find distasteful is that you believe you have any fucking right to tell me how I can and cannot use the goddamn property I own". The petulance in your tone is called for, in my view.

The GP sounds like the ebook publishers Cory Doctorow rails against in the forward to Makers:

There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more, they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.

I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.

These people don't believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than publishing books has. Copyright law has always recognized your right to own your books. When copyright laws are made -- by elected officials, acting for the public good -- they always safeguard this right.

But ebook publishers don't respect copyright law, and they don't believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you "buy" an ebook, you're really only licensing that book, and that copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal. (Of course, the button on their website says, "Buy this book" and they talk about "Ebook sales" at conferences -- no one says, "License this book for your Kindle" or "Total licenses of ebooks are up from 0.00001% of all publishing to 0.0001% of all publishing, a 100-fold increase!")

I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright law's guarantee of ownership in your books.

Is it moral to steal from a thief who's trying to rob you? If you want my wallet and I get your gun away from you, you're not only going home broke, but naked.

And torrenting != "pirating". My Paxil Diaries is on BT (I seeded it myself), as are all of Cory Doctorow's books. He offers his ebooks in all kinds of formats, directly downloadable from his website. From the forward to Makers:

There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more, they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.

I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.

These people don't believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than publishing books has. Copyright law has always recognized your right to own your books. When copyright laws are made -- by elected officials, acting for the public good -- they always safeguard this right.

But ebook publishers don't respect copyright law, and they don't believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you "buy" an ebook, you're really only licensing that book, and that copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal. (Of course, the button on their website says, "Buy this book" and they talk about "Ebook sales" at conferences -- no one says, "License this book for your Kindle" or "Total licenses of ebooks are up from 0.00001% of all publishing to 0.0001% of all publishing, a 100-fold increase!")

I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright law's guarantee of ownership in your books.

And they have the gall to call US "pirates". Send 'em home broke and naked, I say.

Cory Doctorow credits giving his books away on his website as the reason he's on the NYT best seller list. As to your video, you need to offer more than just a video. After all, nobody's going to actually work on their car while the movie's going, dirtying up their notebook to go back and see where that extra bolt is supposed to go.

Offer both the video and a nice, fat paper reference book. You're not going to sell your video to professionals, but shade tree mechanics.

Plus, you're going to have to have a separate book and video for every make and model you cover.

Sorry, I don't think your idea is practical at all. However, if it were, giving it away is a way to get the word out that it exists. I'm not going to buy your video if I've never heard of it. From one of Doctorow's books:

So you own this ebook. The license agreement (see below), is from Creative Commons and it gives you even more rights than you get to a regular book. Every word of it is a gift, not a confiscation. Enjoy.

What do I want from you in return? Read the book. Tell your friends. Review it on Amazon or at your local bookseller. Bring it to your bookclub. Assign it to your students (older students, please -- that sex scene is a scorcher) (now I've got your attention, don't I?). As Woody Guthrie wrote:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

Oh yeah. Also: if you like it, buy it or donate a copy to a worthy, cash-strapped institution.

Why am I doing this? Because my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks, @timoreilly for this awesome aphorism). Because free ebooks sell print books. Because I copied my ass off when I was 17 and grew up to spend practically every discretionary cent I have on books when I became an adult. Because I can't stop you from sharing it (zeroes and ones aren't ever going to get harder to copy); and because readers have shared the books they loved forever; so I might as well enlist you to the cause.

This is not the RIAA here, authors need book sales to get paid. Rant all you want about free information, but unless you have a real solution for the business model, the only authors you'll see dedicating themselves to the art are cranks writing manifestos and dilettantes who are already well-off enough to do it as a hobby.

Cory Doctorow disagrees with you. As far as I know, he was not rich when he started making all his books free for the downloading.

Don't worry, the Russians will solve that problem.