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Just how do you like your art?

People will keep making and playing music. How do you want to get it? Sheet music for your piano? YouTube videos with mostly decent production values? Going to concerts? If you want well-produced audio files or something like that, there's a lot of work involved that needs to be paid for.

Similarly, if you like writing fiction, it's fun. Rewriting is much less fun. If you want a polished novel, there needs to be an editor to work with the author on revisions, probably until the author is temporarily sick of the story. I'm a regular participant in National Novel Writing Month. If you want stuff that people just wrote without trying to make it as readable as possible, I can send you some of my stuff. (It could be worse, honest. My wife said that she didn't notice amateurish writing in the second half of "Heinrich von Sturm and the Russian Underground of Science", and that the novel was actually readable.)

Basically, good music and good books and good movies (your definition of "good" may be different from mine) are going to require a fair chunk of money to produce. Even in the least technical of these, fiction, there's a lot of non-creative work that goes into it.

Car: something I own. (A red 2017 Subaru Forester, if you're interested.) File containing novel that's probably not good enough to be published: something I own.

Suppose I email you a copy of "The Empty God" (2013 Nanowrimo success). I still have everything I had. I still own the computer, the file, However, you can make a copy of the file. It won't affect me. I won't be aware of it. Now, I've opened up that possibility by letting you have a copy. You will find it easy to make indefinitely many copies and distribute them.

Now, suppose I let you borrow my car. I don't have my car. You do. You return it, and then you don't have it, but I do. You can't copy it while it's in your possession (at least not without paying far more than it would cost for you to go to a Subaru dealer and buy your own).

Now, suppose you bought your own Forester and have a copy of my novel. You can legally do as you like with the car, subject to the usual restrictions (vehicular homicide is still a no-no). You can't legally do as you like with your copy. In particular, you can't copy it and distribute it legally, although there's no technological reason for the restriction. Your right of free speech is limited when it comes to the novel. You don't have freedom of the press to print it. I'm using the legal system to restrict what you can do with your property.

Every year, National Novel Writing Month provides structure for hundreds of thousands of 50K-word novels. Read the forums sometimes. Writers ask the strangest questions, not always about legal things.

Copyright law is well established, and quite a few people depend on it for their livings. I'd suggest that the person trying to change a system answer questions about the proposed changes. It's clear that you are ideologically opposed to copyright, but that doesn't mean other people have to justify it to you. You are welcome to propose alternatives, and we can discuss them, but removing a working system without replacement isn't going to happen. Not all parts of the legal system are prompted by ideology; many serve more pragmatic purposes.

Your idea of property still looks nonstandard. If I lend someone my car, everybody will say that it still belongs to me, but I can't use it. If someone steals it, and I talk about recovering my property, nobody will blink an eye at the phrasing. It also obscures the difference between physical property and "intellectual property", in that in both cases I'm calling on the legal system to enforce my rights.

There are ways to pay some people for their worthy creations that don't involve copyright, and they tend to suck. Composers used to make their living providing music lessons, which meant that, if you were not a good teacher, you didn't make a living on music. Writing music was, economically, advertising. There used to be a lot of patronage, which meant that if you wanted to do something unpopular you'd be in trouble. The modern equivalent would be crowdsourcing, but that depends on whether you can convince people to give you money in the faith that you'll deliver something they want.

As far as paying for what people do, I'm planning to write a novel during National Novel-Writing Month. I figure it might be interesting to about a dozen people, but it's conceivable that it will become popular, and entertain thousands. How much should I be paid for doing this? To get it in good shape so it entertains thousands, I really should have someone edit it. Writing is fun. Editing is not really fun, and so editors want to be paid. Who pays the editor, and why?

Consider movies. The Avengers movie provided a great deal of entertainment to a great many people, who demonstrated that by paying to see it. As far as entertainment value goes, it was definitely worth the money spent on making it, which was many millions of dollars. Some other movies are flops, and it's not possible to tell which is which ahead of time. How do we handle that sort of thing?

Back in November, 2007, I wrote a fantasy novel (unpublished) for NaNoWriMo that contained a fair sized boat that was powered this way. And, at the time, I had a few links that showed the idea in action, but not only have I lost them, I'd bet that they'd be 404 compliant anyway.

forum_access offers a decent performance improvement for mid-large sized forums, it uses the ACL module which helps to reduce number of joins with the node_access table, which is where a lot of performance issues come from. Nanawrimo is a good example of a decently optimized Drupal forum site, they get about 100k nodes/year, not to mention groups.drupal.org or drupal.org, which average about the same.

The truth is that any site with > 10k authenticated users a month and 100k+ user generated posts is going to need performance tuning.

Nice rebuttal. Also, yay, NaNoWriMo! Hope yours is going well.

Let's just say eek!

I agree about the copy editing. This is a discipline all of its own. My wife has just completed a 2 year course (in 12 months) to qualify as an editor. There is a 'language' to the editing marks that leaves me somewhat stumped, but is obvious to those in the know.

I also heard her say, on a regular basis through the course, that they are taught to "edit without changing the writer's voice".

So, if you are editing your own work, be careful that you edit in your own voice. (I recently wrote (most of) a 50,000 word novel for the National Novel Writing Month and found myself editing on the fly and in some cases editing out good dialogue and making it 'wooden'. Then, I recalled my wife's words, and the words flowed much better in my own 'voice'.)

OpenOffice.org is what I used.

Nation Novel Writing Month has been around for almost 10 years and the authors that participate have been releasing lots of novels under CC for almost all that time. And several of them have been allowing edits along with way as well. How you would find them or search examples I don't know; I suppose you could just ask in the NaNoWriMo forums to see.

Autoconfig, extended range wireless adaptors, bittorrent 24x7 from every network you can get connected to; you know, for the children.

on a more serious note, I used to work at a place where we were required to take "retired" laptops to the dumpster, somehow they ended up in the trunk of my car more often than not...
NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month) runs a laptop loaner program, where people without regular access to a computer can borrow one for a month for free in order to write a novel. It isn't exactly charity, but self-motivated intellectual persuits need all the support they can muster in our society. Most of the laptop loaners work fine but the batteries are shot (aka most used laptops).

I have "fixed up" (clean install with no bricking garbage on it) several and given them to family members at various times.

I have installed one with win2k+remote desktop client and NOTHING else so I could VPN + Remote in to our wintel machines at work without having to worry about work's big brother software locking me out because I have skype installed...

Finally, you could work on some decorative case mods, such as a Steampunk Laptop

As far as your not needing a publisher to decide what's good and what's not, last year's National November Novel Writing Contest had 15,335 winners. I doubt that as many as 1% were readable, let alone worth publishing. Would you like to wade through that huge pile of dross looking for the few nuggets of gold? I certainly wouldn't, and I was one of them. No, I'll let literary agents and editors do that for me, TYVM!

I think you may be missing the value of the idea. Think of National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/)

It's a timed writing exercise. Don't pour all your free time, money, and most inspired creative energy into it. Try seeing what you can accomplish in a month with the idea that you'll be fine giving it away after that time. You may find some creative inspiration in exploring areas that you otherwise wouldn't.

Don't go for creating your best-album-evar. Just create what you can in a month's time. And even then, if it turns out to be too good for you to bear the thought of setting it free, you don't have to. Too wrapped up in paying studio work to give it a shot? Then consider yourself lucky, and get back to work! ;)

Hell I'm going to start looking through them to look to see if any of them are being sold. If they are decent, I'll buy them...

Now if only I had something more interesting to say. Well, It's a great thing and I think we should all support anything that is independent of the big labels...

Kindof like National Novel Writing Month (november). http://www.nanowrimo.org/ And Channel 101 (5 minute videos monthly) http://www.channel-101.com/ The internet's becoming a seasonal support group for artists lacking impetus. Now if only there was a way for these independent producers to make money off their labor...

At my previous job I tried it, the problem is all 15 desktops were OS X, and all users had MS Office v.X or 2004 already installed. The users were too lazy to even consider switching to OOo, plus there was no cost advantage, those licenses would last at least the life of each individual workstation (not a hell of a lot of pressure to upgrade from v.X to 2004 or higher when available).

The sad thing is that the year I tried to do this I participated in National Novel Writing Month for the second time, this time I did all my work from OOo in OS X. Except some minor learning issues with the way styles are defined and applied, my experience was overwhelmingly positive. Still, it was not enough to impress my users into even trying OOo.

If you want to see a book written and typeset in OOo, you can download mine here. It is licensed under Creative Commons, feel free to pass it around.

Now with NeoOffice we don't even have to keep X11 running, and eventually the main OOo branch will be offering a X11-free version for OS X.

One thing I know for sure: it's going to be one cold day in hell before I purchase another MSO:mac license for any of my personal macs. There is no reason for a home user to be shelling out for MSO:mac just to write letters and make spreadsheets when both OOo and NeoOffice are completely capable, easy to use and completely free.

That sounds kinda familiar....

It should. Larry Niven did it to Mars back in 1973 (the January '74 edition of "Analog") with "The Hole Man", and won the Hugo for it.

Thanks for the link, BTW. I hadn't heard of Escape Pod. Yet another market, if a small one. (The sketch on the page is an interesting coincidence -- I just started my NaNoWriMo novel, "The Martian War" (aka "The War of the Worlds: The True Story"). Earth wasn't quite so defenseless as Wells lets on, and Nikola Tesla is implicated in both attracting the Martians, and helping defeat them by duplicating their heat ray. More to it than just that, of course.)

And on the other end of the spectrum, November is National Novel Writing Month. Write a 50K word novel in just one month.

And are you to get arrested for murder when you kill their in game character? (Arrested out here in the real world that is...)

all the best,

drew
Come on slashdotters, you know you want to...
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.p hp?topic_id=4146&forum=171&post_id=61131#forumpost 61131

I like ourmedia and have my stuff there, but they have been having reliability issues / growing pains of late. Talk to some of the people there if you have concerns. I plan on keeping my stuff with them while it works itself out and am not trying to scare anyone off, just do some checking if your situation warrants it.

all the best,

drew
Come on over to NaNoWriMo and write your novel in 30 days.
Then join me in putting yours under a Creative Commons BY-SA license.
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.p hp?topic_id=4146&forum=171&post_id=61131#forumpost 61131

"It would be different if MS was truly 'screwing' users with the prices, but they are not. Even non-server Linux distributions sell for about the same as a Home copy of MS Windows."

Go ahead and make your points, but trying to pass this off as legit will not fly. You can't properly compare the cost of a "distro" to the cost of an OS. Plus, for the distros I play with, I can legally install to a hundred machines for that price if I so choose.

all the best,

drew
Come on over to NaNoWriMo and write a novel in November. Then join me in putting it under a CC BY-SA license. (think copyleft)
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.p hp?topic_id=4146&forum=171&post_id=61131#forumpost 61131

There is also vnc over and ssh tunnel.

all the best,

drew
Come on over to NaNoWriMo and write a novel in November. Then join me in putting it under a CC BY-SA license. (think copyleft)
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.p hp?topic_id=4146&forum=171&post_id=61131#forumpost 61131

"Zork nostalgia, anyone?"

That's just gruesome!

all the best,

drew
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.p hp?topic_id=4146&forum=171&post_id=61131#forumpost 61131
Come on over to NaNoWriMo and write and copyleft a novel in 30 days.

"You are assuming that the AAA would find it in its best interest to have a low cost AutoCAD clone runnign around. First of all, lowering the cost of tools lowers the barriers to entry for new firms. Existing firms might not like that. Next, you're assuming that the tool is a significant cost for their members, worth the time and hassle of negotiating with, funding, and supporting a group of OSS programmers. Finally, you're assuming that all of this amounts to more than AutoCAD currently provides to the AAA in terms of conference sponsorships, ads in their journals, and corporate membership fees."

Funny thing is that you are assuming that I am assuming all of those things you say when in fact, I am assuming none of them.

Care to try again?

all the best,

drew
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.p hp?topic_id=33654&forum=157

I too have often wondered when the big boys and the industry associations would clue in to their power in this way.

Doesn't anyone think that the American Architects Association might have some pull with respect to the license terms for something like autocad? Or for funding a competitor with better terms?

all the best,

drew
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.p hp?topic_id=33654&forum=157

"No, the contributors still maintain copyright, they just have to grant an unlimited, unrevokable, license to the project (or company) that is compatible with the planned distribution model."

Cool, so do you know of any dual license projects or companies that do it this way? Can you provide links to the agreements required of contributors?

all the best,

drew
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.p hp?topic_id=33654&forum=157

"Actually, Asterisk isn't _really_ FOSS, as you have to sign a disclaimer (before you submit code to them) giving them the right to repackage it in non a FOSS way."

Not that I particularly like this practice. But wouldn't pretty much any project with a dual license strategy where one is non-free need to do this?

Anyone know what mysql and trolltech do?

all the best,

drew
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.p hp?topic_id=33654&forum=157
Coming to IRC this November - live novel writing...

"Oh, that's clever. I guess we just need a load of CC-licensed artists to form some kind of Association and pool their resources. I look forward to the first case being filed!"

Just what I was thinking...

1. Release loads of stuff CC BY-SA.

2. Wait for copies to be made via zune.

3. ??? - wait, I got it. Sue!

4. Profit!

Is this the first ever slashdot business model where # 3 has been reasonably filled in?

all the best,

drew
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.p hp?topic_id=33654&forum=157&post_id=528358#forumpo st528358
Novel Writing as performance art?

ps. if anyone has an account and can see all of my old posts, can you send me my other lauded business model?

Tabletop RPG designers do this too, in the 24 hour RPG challenge. It's always running, though they do "Grand Acts" too. One person, one day, make a fully playable tabletop RPG from 'idea' to 'PDF' in 24 hours. It's not a competition but an exercise, more like the Novel in a Month challenge.

Then there's Game Chef, who just wrapped up their 2006 contest. This has the luxury of a full week to make a tabletop RPG from a given list of ingredients and mystery requirement. This is competitive, the best eight get published.

Damn, I should write a sci-fi novel!

Yes, why not? It's just the month for it anyways.

an ambitious high school student who applies for entrance to MIT and prays to remain sleeping until the acceptance letter comes, which doesn't happen for another 30 years.

There goes my exact story I was writing for NaNoWriMo this month. Now I'll have to go change all my references from MIT to Georgia Tech. And make it a girl. Who prays to remain stoned until she is accepted. And it will take 27 years.

Yup, that'll fix it. No infringement here.

the AC
No smileys, there really isn't any humour to be mined in such an appalling mis-use of the patent system as this

...it is also crushing creativity....

As a NaNoWriMo participant, I had wondered where my creativity had gone last night. Damn you, Google! Now I'll never make it beyond 50,000 words.

Every Halloween at the stroke of midnight an imaginary gun goes off, and thousands of people start working on 50,000-word novels, which they try to finish by the end of November -- National Novel-Writing Month. Writers report their progress on the website. Some people post their work online, but it's all on the honor system and is just for fun. Don't have any ideas? No problem! Visit the site and get advice from character development to plotting to excuses for not finishing. You can also find other participants by location. In many cities people meet and party at the end of the month. Good way to jumpstart yourself.

Infonaut writes: Perhaps yet another part of the bill America must pay for our hamfisted approach is that as we become more militarized, the creative and free-thinking aspects of our society become isolated and minimized.

Some of my favorite genre fiction when I was growing up was written by famous guys like Joseph Heller and not so famous guys like Brian Daley. Guys who were painfully aware of how much of a price this is to pay.

Labor Day weekend is the 3-Day Novel Contest, and November is National Novel Writing Month. Do not expect these REMF's to pick up a writing implement and do what must be done. It's simply not in their nature. Most of them were all jingo for kicking the Iraqi collective ass, but they weren't willing to sign up (and go there and do that).

If they didn't have the stones to make good on their lip-flapping about Iraq, they certainly won't have enough backbone to write a novel. Once again, it falls to you to do what they can only pretend.

That explains the excerpts I've seen elsewhere in the discussion. While an occasional gem gets rejected over and over only to come into its own via self-publishing, for the vast majority of it, there's a reason that the manuscript didn't get snatched up. Writing is one of those things where doing it is easy, but doing it well is not and doing it exceptionally is nigh unto impossible.

The excerpts (and that's all I'm ever going to read of this) are filled with labored descriptions, repetetive text, forced turns of phrase and an obsession with pounding one over the head with the technology he's invented for his future: all hallmarks of beginning sci-fi writing.

I'm personally going to participate in NaNoWriMo this year, but if I end up doing the self-publishing, it will be mostly to get printed copies for myself and a few interested friends and not any sort of self delusion that it's going to be the next great American novel, and I certainly won't be trying to push it on a site like Slashdot. Rather, I'm viewing it like an amateur runner views a marathon: a challenge to participate and a reward to finish and nothing more. It's something to have accomplished and finished, regardless of my final standing with regard to other participants. Should I deliver something of worth, that's a bonus.

"Oh, and let me add.. fair trade, does not involve profit."

Again, I think you are defining profit in your own way for your own convience.

In my example, we could both get more done in less time and have some free time left over which we would not have had if we had each done all of our own work. Since, you would expect a little free time to rest might be considered valuable, we could consider it our profit. Alternately, we could do something else productive with our free time and what we produce with that time could be considered our profit.

I don't think you can necessarily use a definition from physics for this sort of thinking. By the definition of work, there are a good amount of high paying jobs where very little work is done.

all the best,

drew

http://www.nanowrimo.org/userinfo.php?uid=47354

"Firstly, at this point in time, everything you make that is copyrightable is copyrighted automatically by the law. You are not in fact choosing to do it for a particular reason."

Yes, but I am not talking of my works which I place no notice on, but rather those works I place a notice on. These days, ti is GPL and CC BY-SA for me. Check:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A %22drew%20Roberts%22
http://zotz.openphoto.net/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/zbcw/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nanoppix/
http://security.royans.net/projects/dydns/

"Secondly, I think you're confusing something. If you are creating works without any expectation of getting anything at all in return, then you appear to not be encouraged to create those works by the availability of copyright, and therefore shouldn't get a copyright since it is superfluous."

You are missing what motivates me with respect to copyright and also trying to reduce all motivations to economic ones. I think you are mistaken as to what motivates me. Perhaps it is that way with you, I cannot read your mind, but I have some inkling of my own.

"To be honest, I'm dubious. Your posts in this thread are copyrighted. Would you not post on /. if you had to register them in order to protect them? I don't think so. I think that you post here because you enjoy the debate, and the copyright status of the posts is irrelevant."

With the example you chose, which is my posting on slashdot, you are more than likely right. But you chose a wrong example. Check this link:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/userinfo.php?uid=47354

I wrote a novel in November 2004 as part of a contest. If I sort out some issues with my lawyer with respect to short quotes from songs of the era sprinkled here and there in the novel, I intend to publish it under some Creative Commons or similar license.

After all that work, I would not put it in the public domain, but would be happy to release as CC BY-SA. I will be quite happy, even if I do not receive a dime as a result of sales. This brings up a key issue with reguards to motivation. That is that we have a continumm from demotivation to total absence of motivation to motivation. You are speaking like there is only motivation and the absence of motivation.

While I am quite happy to share my work for no monetary reward, I find it demotivating to think others will make a derivative of my work and copyright it all rights reserved and not pay me. I am cool with them copylefting a derivative and not paying me. Perhaps this will remove the need to be dubious.

"Given that the system I describe is more or less how we did things from 1710-1977 and that we had a pretty thriving public domain, and that the number of copyrightable works didn't seem to shoot up upon the effective date of the 1976 Act, or the 1989 amendments, I think that those expansions of the law were not really justified."

I can easily agree that the expansions of the law were not justified. However, if one of the acts/amendments you cite was the one that made all works automatically copyrighted once comitted to a fixed medium, you are seriously mistaken in your claim that the number of copyrighted works did not shoot up (I realise you said copyrightable works, if there is a fine point to the difference, please enlighten.) I take it you meant works where the copyright was registered did not shoot up in number.

"One year statutory bar to filing, probably from publication, where that's significantly expanded from what it means now (e.g. inclusive of public performance). Five year terms from pu

What's your nick on Nanowrimo? And...do you want Chris Baty as bad as everyone else does?

I'm geekster on Nanowrimo. And considering Chris is a guy and I'm a straight happily married man, I think I'll let the ladies and fellas who are into that take a crack. :-)

What's your nick on nano?

What's your nick on Nanowrimo? And...do you want Chris Baty as bad as everyone else does?

I'm geekster on Nanowrimo. And considering Chris is a guy and I'm a straight happily married man, I think I'll let the ladies and fellas who are into that take a crack. :-)

What's your nick on nano?

Join an online writer's community. They're great for giving you the motivation to sit down and write, which is essentially the hardest part of becoming a writer.

One I'm a member of is forward motion. They're good people.

Or, if you think you have enough time for it, give NaNoWriMo a try this November.