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Cory Doctorow On For the Win, Gold Farming, and DRM
adaviel passes along a New Scientist interview with Cory Doctorow, who has been touring for his new book For the Win. The SF author and technology activist talks about DRM, gold farming, and much else besides.
FTW.
"For Teh Win."
There, fixed that for you.
Come to Australia so we can strip search you and rob you of your internets, pr0n, rights and freedoms.
Hint: it's not the artist.
that's teh shizzle bizzle
HEY how are ya
AND is mike still in favor of TPM ? as in technological protection measures.
GOTO the cbc website and see how that debunked , goto groklaw.net and try and say it isn't DRM
and why JUST DRM in the current law is not the only problem.
SEEMS lawyer types are focusing on that, when they should include it all in a whack the mole.
For those who don't know, Cory Doctorow also co-edits BoingBoing, a popular tech/culture group blog that's worth checking out.
As a geek a decade older than this particular fruit-bat, I can assure you he's right on the monkey.
Fuck off back to Digg where you belong.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
"When did gold farming start? First reports were in Central America and Mexico in about 2003." I remember gold farming in Asheron's Call in early 2000. Here's a link to a blurb about Sony's problems with EverQuest in April 2000. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017_3-239052.html
Is monkey COBOL for money?
Or a Freudian slip?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
No, no. The monkey is his girlfriend. Sure, she's a bit hairy but at least he's getting some.
Boing Boing became a Web site in 1995 and later relaunched as a weblog on January 21, 2000, described as a "directory of wonderful things." Over time, Frauenfelder was joined by three co-editors: Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Xeni Jardin. All four Boing Boing contributors are, or have been, contributing writers for Wired magazine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boing_Boing
Self-promotion, on the internet? say it ain't so!
Cory, Xeni, Dave and Marc ARE boingboing. Cory's also a writer who stands behind his opinions on copyright, licensing the electronic versions of his books via Creative Commons, with free downloads in non DRM formats.
disclaimer: I also happen to like his writing. I Loved "Little Brother", and liked Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom, Content, Makers, and am halfway through FTW
I remember a guy who worked the desk at the computer lab who'd gold farm Everquest while on the clock.
Doctorow is great at self-promotion. It's too bad he's shit at everything else.
Cory Doctorow is the biggest, most shameless self-promoter on the internet. He's also kind of a tool. He's already hijacked one website to promote his writing. Its called 'boingboing', perhaps you've heard of it?
Wait! I thought Nicholas Negroponte was the most shameless self-promoter on the internet! I demand a face-off!
Who, exactly, is Doctorow a tool of? Independent free thinkers?
In addition, given that he gives away his work in addition to publishing it, how exactly do you consider him a "shameless self-promoter"?
Sounds like some jealousy is at work here, mister AC Troll.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Yeah, but after the obscurity, THEN artists get interested in DRM.
crazy dynamite monkey
I've recently become a big Cory Doctorow fan, reading several of his sci-fi books in electronic format. (I'm reading through "Down and out in the Magic Kingdom" right now on my iPad.)
This interview just further impressed me with him... Great, insightful comments on both DRM and on "piracy" vs. "publicity"!
I'll admit that as much as I like science-fiction, I'm not exactly an "avid reader" - so maybe some of Doctorow's work is just a "re-hash" of ideas already used before. But I found lots of very interesting and unique (at least to me) concepts in his writing. I particularly like his premise in "Down and Out..." that the world has solved its energy problems, which led to sort of a new "enlightenment" era of rapid advances in technology - with one of them being the ability to "reboot" a dead person from recent backups of the knowledge in their head that were taken at regular intervals. People measure their age in how many lifetimes + years old they are. Of course, this leads to massive overpopulation, but the masses accept it because they're confident that problem can also be resolved somehow. And in the meantime, many people opt to "deadhead" for X number of hundred years - voluntarily putting themselves in a suspended state, when they feel they've done everything they really want to do and see everything they want to see. This just seems a few steps beyond the material you typically find in science fiction in the movies or on TV, not to mention in other books I've read so far!
Sorry. Hollywood wants you to pay for it.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
He is a tool because he parrots EXACTLY what the community wants to hear, and if they start complaining about something loud enough, he will have a sudden "epiphany" and do whatever his community asks him to do because he wants to continue selling his shitty ass "writing".
He is also one of the worst writers I have EVER read. I tried reading one of his books once and was turned off by the second paragraph. All he does is browbeat you continuously with his ideology without really defending it and making up the flimsiest of premises to browbeat you with it even more. If I want that much ideology shoved down my throat I'll go to the Sarah Palin website, at least it's less pretentious.
How unselfish of them, thinking of all those obscure authors they've left behind!
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
The view changes dramatically when you are "on top". Protecting your IP once it has value becomes important for a lot of people.
crazy dynamite monkey
Pabst Blue Ribbon?
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
"Obscurity, not piracy, is the biggest problem writers face. In the 21st century, if you are not making art with the intention of it being copied, you are not making contemporary art."
Interesting fact: Cory Doctorow rips his ideas from other people. The original quote was from Tim O'Reilly. If you watch the internet closely, you'll see him copy other people's quotes and ideas all the time without giving them credit. A few months ago, I saw him regurgitate one author's comment that piracy is like masterbation. Of course, Cory never gives them credit - he's too busy wanting people to believe "his great ideas" aren't directly cribbed from other people. No wonder Cory is such a big fan of piracy - that's how he gets famous - by taking other people's ideas and regurgitating them as if they were his own.
Gaining insight to the minds of idiots is often illuminating. Thank you for contributing to my insight.
You don't cite any of his work, any of the reasons why you think he does what you say he does, you just go on and on with baseless insults, and then a totally irrelevant comparison. Your comment is worth exactly as much as my reply to it is.
I could almost feel sorry for you, but I have many more important things to feel bad about.
Go live in your little world, child. It'll bite you someday.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Problem is art has never payed well except in the last half century or so and then only for a few superstars. Now shysters are trying to sell absolute control over works on the promise artist will somehow get payed more, they won't.
Here's a nice quote from a recent Mick Jagger interview :
"People only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!
Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.
So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t."
Same goes for authors. There's a reason "starving author" is such a well known concept.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
that's how he gets famous - by taking other people's ideas and regurgitating them as if they were his own.
Like everybody else. Writers are not philosophers or physicists. They are not supposed to come up with new ideas, but to express the old ideas in interesting ways.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Lots of people who share their ideas publicly actually want them adopted.
So to them it's perfectly fine for someone else to help spread them around. Now if someone dishonestly/negligently claims he/she is the original source when that's not true then it's plagiarism.
Most pirates don't plagiarize when they copy stuff- they don't claim they are the original authors of the work.
Could you explain how giving his work away in any way lessens or negates the possibility of him being a shameless self-promoter? From what I've seen, in fact, his giving his work away is actually his biggest self-promotional gimmick -- as an author, he's essentially a marketing personality built on the kind of fad promotion that was seen when NIN or Radiohead or a handful or other artists got huge amounts of press due to the unsustainable novelty of them putting their work on the web. Without him being such a proponent of that kind of distribution, and making such a huge stink about how he's a proponent of it, he'd just be another mediocre writer living in obscurity.
A few points of import. The goldfarmers in the novel never steal accounts. They just play the game, and build up large banks of gold to sell. While all WoW players know that a significant part of the banks that the goldsellers sell were acquired through account-theft, these are not the people that FTW is about.
I don't think you can call playing the game 18 hours a day a crime. The fact that they subsequently sell the gold - well that's only a crime in the concept of breaking a EULA... which is not something I have EVER heard a /. poster speaking AGAINST.
Furthermore, the world in the book is a bit different, it's set a few years in the future - and the games are no longer MEANT to be a closed economy there. There are official channels of gold trade, where real stockbrokers invest in game gold much as they would invest in any other currency. The goldfarmers in the book use black-markets though because they are excluded from these official channels of trade (which is in fact the game-companies' largest source of income).
I won't spoil the ending, but suffice to say - this is not a a novel about thieves who live of other people's hard work. It's a novel about hard workers being exploited and demanding a better life. It uses the MMORPG world as a millieu but it's really a book about economics and a scathing attack on the world of sweatshop workers - in all it's forms.
It includes solid chapters on economic fundamentals, inflation (and how the kind of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe came to be) how it works, and how often it doesn't.
In short, it's a very, very good book. As SIFI I wouldn't call it groundbreaking, it writes about technology that's every day life NOW. There are some minor practical changes to the games concept in the time of the book but nothing that all gamers aren't expecting now. It's not science fiction, it's a much more a kind of social activism fiction, which happens to use a technological mileu.
Mind you, I didn't consider Little-Brother to be science fiction either, 99% of the technologies in THAT novel are things that you can download right this second. What it was, was an excellent novel that happens to also teach the fundamentals of crypto, privacy and security systems.
So in short, I really LIKE Doctorow's niche, he uses his fields of expertise, to set novels with a much wider social message - that's to me what good writing is all about.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The view changes dramatically when you are "on top". Protecting your IP once it has value becomes important for a lot of people.
But only after they've already profited handsomely from it.
Hate to be a spelling nazi but it's "paid" not "payed"
Who?
And how often do you casually repeat insightful/witty statements made by other people in conversation without bothering to give a citation? Everyone does it, sometimes without even realizing it.
Don't lie, you fucking love it.
Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief. All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief
U2, The Fly
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Spelling nazis should be punished by grammatical hangman.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I was going to halp propagate your anti-Cory meme, but I've already forgotten who you are, and therefore I find myself ethicially unable to propagate your ideas.
Sorry about that.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Regarding my downmod "-1, Troll" -- I'm not trolling, BoingBoing has a really terrible, sensationalist slant on all of their DRM stories. What used to be an interesting blog "a collection of wonderful things" has turned into Doctorow's personal platform for pushing his own personal DRM agenda in an attempt to gain notoriety to sell more books. Many of their articles are reactionary, sensationalist garbage you would expect to see in a supermarket tabloid, tailored to suit their slightly above average readership. There's no reason to plug him or his site. Him and his site should be buried under a heap of bad reviews, not promoted. What's worse is that they're occasionally featured on google news' "fast flip" feature, giving their sensationalist headlines and "analysis" added weight, when they lack any sort of editorial review beyond Doctorow's lazy "delete" button. Internet journalism has been going downhill and someone has to stand up and point out the merely mediocre from the bad and biased. If you don't agree with my opinion, fine, move on and keep reading but don't label me a troll.
moox. for a new generation.
To be fair, Doctorow wouldn't seem like like such an epic tool if he's just get rid of those "do I look like a smart outcast yet" glasses.
I think it's natural for someone who hates DRM as much as Cory Doctorow not to give credit for quotes. After all, credit for quotes are is another form of Intellectual Property.
This is commonly called "culture" (evolution of culture). It's why you and me post on Slashdot and expect other people to be willing to understand our verbal diarrhoea. Or am I misunderstanding what you mean?
There's no money to be had climbing to the top. It's once you're there you can "take advantage" of your situation.
Many of their articles are reactionary, sensationalist garbage you would expect to see in a supermarket tabloid, tailored to suit their slightly above average readership.
If that's your opinion of the BoingBoing blog, I wonder what you'd say of the Reg (or non-tech pseudo-highbrow publications like the WSJ)... Unless you give specific examples in your empty rants, I will continue to believe that you're a troll, or on a personal vendetta.
Writers are not philosophers or physicists
As a physicist and philospher who is currently developing his writing career, I don't agree with this. It's true that some writers are just what you describe. They aren't artists, they aren't original thinkers. They are what used to be known as "hacks".
Writers, however, are expected to come up with their own ideas, and in the case in point, with their own words--at least some of the time. While it's true that "mediocrity borrows, genius steals", it takes more than theft to make a genius: it takes intelligent transmutation of the stolen material into an original and interesting form. Insofar as a writer does that, they are not a hack, but that is a requirement, not just "expressing old ideas in interesting ways."
And the best writers, of course, express new ideas in interesting ways. Melville wasn't just regurgitating facts about whales (although he was doing that too...)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I think it's natural for someone who hates DRM as much as Cory Doctorow not to give credit for quotes.
I think it's weird that you can't distinguish between broken tech like DRM and a perfectly legitimate desire for an artist to be recognized and compenstated for their work. The latter is expressed by a variety of intellectual property law, which Doctorow is not absolutely against.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Lots of anonymous cowards white knighting BoingBoing this morning I see! No personal vendetta, no trolling. Look around at the (registered!) netizens here and you'll see my opinion is shared by many. I'd be happy to list examples if someone with a name wishes to ask for them. You don't have to dig very hard to find them.
moox. for a new generation.
That's almost word for word from Little Brother IIRC. Which, BTW, I thought was an excellent book.
Free Martian Whores!
It hasn't affected Doctorow; he's a best selling author.
Free Martian Whores!
I'm sure you've heard the quote often attributed to the artist Pablo Picaaso, that "good artists borrow, great artists steal."?
The fact is that any artist is a giant milling machine - in goes ideas and concepts and styles and techniques and disparate things (like banana cereal and dogs peeing against trees) and they all churn and ferment and process and grind and beak down and clump together and then ... ping ... up pops an idea, which because the milling machine is an artist of some description, needs to get expressed in some manner (the non-artist merely stalls at the last step - the process is not unique to artists).
The expression in turn becomes more grist for the mills of others.
Rip people off? No. Tuck into the feast of ideas and creativity? Yes!
The only bad thing is when people simply plagarise - but just because somone's expressing an idea that someone else has, does not mean that they're trying to pass those ideas off as their own for the sake of appearances; you can't assume that they haven't had those ideas slosh about inside them and find affinity with them and become caught in the current of that need for expression. I mean - we all know this - people say things that express how we feel about something and we take the bits we like, pass it through the filter of ourselves and express the same basic idea in a different manner.
No one OWNS ideas. It's all a big ocean full of plankton and we're like basking sharks swimming through it's currents and eddys, breathing it in, filtering it, pissing and shitting it out and releasing our spawn into it. (And that's why copyright - walls in a constantly churning ocean - is a fundementally awkward thing doomed to imperfect implementation and why the IP Monopolists are fated to much unhappiness (by equating it to real tangible property)).
Even if you sit in a cave and never encounter other people's ideas, the chances of you coming up with an idea that's not already been manifested by people swimming throght the ocean of ideas and expression, is slim to none.
And why the hell would you want to do that? It doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
To provide another perspective:
What you describe as "ripping off" could be better viewed as exposing oneself to ideas that are actually relevant to people by, you know, interacting with them. Discard the bad or irrelevant ideas, keep the good ones and share them with others to make sure they continue to propagate. Combine some in the form of 'mash ups' to create something kind of new. And in addition, possibly process the ideas gathered from such activity such that something completely new and unique comes out.
Maybe you shouldn't focus so much on the ideas that clearly circulate as part of a wider conversation and try instead to filter those out so you can more easily identify the new ones. Then at least you could make a meaningful evaluation about how good Cory is as a source of new ideas compared to others.
Cory is a writer. He publishes under a CC type license. He manages to make money.
He also admits that, like all of use, he pretty much has to copy stuff to work. If it is as small as copy and pasting URL's or bigger still like printing articles and pictures off the web. Research requires copying.
It's the last few questions so 99% of you won't have read it.
And by posting that piece of work anonymously, you just missed out on hundreds of geeks that would have otherwise "friended" you and become your legion of slashdot fans.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
He credits Tim just fine on his website:
http://craphound.com/overclocked/2007/01/08/about-this-sitefaq/
So this time he didn't spell it out, but it's not like he is claiming this idea is "his"
I think he just agrees and feels it is basically a fact in the culture today.
Tim first wrote that idea, that I am aware of, back in 2002 so after 8 years or so, I think it might be fair to say that it has become fact or reality to many of us.
Wax on, wax off baby!
Some people have souls.
"Bad writers borrow. Good writers steal." T.S. Eliot.
Everybody borrows that quote.
Fuck off back to Digg where you belong. ... says the guy with a six digit uid. You weren't even around when /. was worth reading.
You're mising the point -- AC Troll is the tool, not Doctorow. AC is probably a record company executive or one of their lawyers.
Free Martian Whores!
He may not credit Tim (or the masturbation guy) every single time he utters those words but he has indeed credited him:
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).
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of slagging Cory. Do you realize how long it would take for Cory, or anyone, to talk if they had to cite the origin of every single thought they're expressing?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Sometimes a "a really terrible, sensationalist slant" is nothing but the truth. The New York Times has a really terrible, sensationalist slant on all of their BP Gulf oil disaster stories.
You were downmodded because your post is inflammatory and untrue. Doctorow didn't get on the New York Times best selling list because he gained notoriety writing about how stupid and bad for consumers DRM is, he got there because he's a damned good writer. Good writing does NOT read like a PhD thesis; the worst thing a writer can do is bore his audience, even a nonfiction writer. Almost all good writing is written at about a tenth grade level. It's not that Dr. Isaac Asimov (PhD in biochemistry) couldn't write a scientific paper, it's that he realised that boring your audience is just plain stupid. Your stories have to be easily readable to be good.
If you're of the opinion that the BP oil disaster is a good thing, or that the GNAA is funny, or Goatse is high art, express that opinion and you're going to be modded troll for that, too, and rightly so.
Free Martian Whores!
Some people still have souls.
Everyone started with one. Sad but true.
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of slagging Cory. Do you realize how long it would take for Cory, or anyone, to talk if they had to cite the origin of every single thought they're expressing?
Off-topic, but using his name twice in a row like that, along the same thought line, shows you either know him personally or are a fanboy of some sort. There's an emotional attachment to a construction like that, and out here on the internet it seems inappropriate.
Not that we disagree. Slagging, would take a long time, all check. Just maybe without the name-dropping.
Exactly.
Maybe the GP thinks everyone should start wearing t-shirts that say "Citation Required".
Absolutely, if writers did just take other people's ideas and redo them we wouldn't have any Shakespearean plays. Oh wait, that man rarely had an original idea for a play. He usually took someone else's idea and did it better.
I could go with the "not my native language" defense but even I should have seen that one :-) Apparently it got past my spell czech (bad Tibor!) because there's an archaic nautical use of the verb spelled that way.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
You don't really know what writers do. There is nothing more to be said, you are speaking out of total ignorance.
Yeah, all those composers getting works commissioned by kings and dukes were totally flat broke.
Dear lord.. just about the ONLY thing that Melville did was regurgitate facts about whales in that horrid book. The "original and interesting" parts could have been a nice short story or novella-length work. Maybe 100 pages of truly interesting stuff there. The rest... insufferable.
The game creators are missing out on the market to get even more real money from their customers. In that Runes of Magic sells in-game goods for real money, if you want to pay real money for in-game gold in WoW or Guild Wars, you should be able to do so - either from the developer or from a third party. Legitimizing third party sales would even keep prices in check. Bottom line - the market exists for in-game gold. If a developer chooses not to enter that market to satisfy the demands of their customers, it will come from an outside source.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
hey weirdbeird, who the f$ck is JohnKatz ? !!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Did you even read the quote? It is exactly what your "interesting fact" describes.
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
Somewhere I have heard this before
In a dream my memory has stored
As a defence I'm neutered and spayed
What the hell am I trying to say?
--Kurt Cobain, On a Plain
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I also heard him give credit during some radio interview. I'd imagine after giving numerous interviews to promote a book, one would slip up on some details here and there while covering the same ground so many times.
Or maybe I just wrote in kind of a hurry, moved things back and forth, and didn't get around to changing one instance of his name to a pronoun since this is just a forum and not a dissertation. Mainly, I was just replying because the comment was +5 and Slashdot doesn't have a "-1, factually incorrect" mod. In other words, duty called. :-)
For the record: I loved Little Brother, couldn't even finish Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, thought Makers was pretty good, and thought Overclocked had some good bits but mostly wasn't that great. As for his general Internet writings: some good, some bad, some I totally agree with, some where I think he's way off. In other words, about like everyone else.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
His book better mention the fact that gold farmers ruin the gaming experience for gamers, and that most gold farming is done by macro programs called "bots", or he is the fake your claim him to be.
FUCK Cory Doctorow. Where is the latest story on the new iPhone?
Actually, there's one on Boing Boing.
Cory Doctorow is a fucking hack. His writing is hackneyed and just pushes his own agenda through fiction. I'm all for using trends of issues in fiction, but good fiction should come first...
So film stars never made any money in the '20s, '40s, and '50s? The Beatles never made any money in the '60s? It wasn't lucrative to be Picasso before 1970? Any sources other than Mick Jagger, who isn't exactly a historian?
Thats my only gripe. Once you get past all the books about latest trends and issues, he's a very mediocre writer...
Ogre Wedding Planners llc.
Here's the version cached by Google: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pTLaIWOh_tsJ:www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627635.700-cory-doctorow-my-computer-says-no.html%3Ffull%3Dtrue+new+scientist+cory+doctorow+drm&cd=1&hl=sv&ct=clnk&gl=se&client=opera
You read Mainspring?
Actually Cory attributes that quote to Tim O'Reilly all the time. If it didn't come out in that interview, that must have been a mistake, because it doesn't seem consistent with his behavior as I've observed it to "rip off" ideas. (Not to mention, it's entirely consistent with his message to attribute the ideas and still get credit for putting them together, so he doesn't need to hold back to preserve his own vanity.)
I saw him speak on a panel two weeks ago in New York City, and he mentioned the piracy/obscurity division, which got a laugh out of the other panelists and the audience. Before proceeding, he made sure to tell the crowd that he didn't deserve all the credit for the laugh, as it's actually something Tim O'Reilly put together. Similarly, in the podcasts of the class he taught at USC ("Pwned") he discussed the Tim O'Reilly essay from which that formulation comes explicitly.
That's... hell, I can't even figure out what you are trying to say. My signature was out of place? Where else is it supposed to go?
You might want to work on your reading comprehension - in no part of my post did I actually call the AC an idiot ;-) A child, yes... as literary critiques go, that one was devoid of any real content.
Come on now. Cory Doctorow "parroting what the community wants to hear"?
What community? The SF "community" (like SF writers and readers are part of some vast hive mind). Sheesus. The AC's post was beyond stupid.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I admit it's only a few years off from the range you quote Jagger as saying, but I watched "When You're Strange" a few days ago (it was on "American Masters" recently). It said that the Doors' first royalty check was $50,000 each (some of their albums had all songs attributed to "The Doors"). $50K in 1967 was a heck of a lot of money..for their very first check.
Yet DRM itself is trying to force "a perfectly legitimate desire for an artist [and publisher] to be recognized and compenstated [sic] for their work".
Do I like DRM? No, I think I agree with you that it's "broken tech". But I also think that the reason behind it is the same "perfectly legitimate desire". As has been stated many times before (ironically I can't cite one), if there weren't thieves, we wouldn't need locks on our doors.
Whereas Mr Anonymous Coward has been here from the beginning.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Meanwhile people like Iggy Pop got screwed over in roughly the same period :
"And, by the way, when people say that the group sells or an artists sells an album, this is a misnomer. A company sells them. A company generally owns the master, the company owns the right to manipulate the accounts and will cheat and steal from the artists. The artist gets zilch. The artist also has to fend off divorce settlements, girlfriends, drug dealers, managers, lawyers, agents - a whole panoply of crooks."
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
The day copyright and attribution is mandated to the level at which you have to attribute small quotes, then that day we can as well stop talking.
Quoting somebody else is not piracy, you dumbo, it is simply how culture develops.
That there are stupid people out there (and here I think I use the descritpive with precision) belieiving one should attirbute everybody one quotes is a testament to how the twisted worldview of the IP Insustry brigade has been infused in the general conscioussness.
That's just not true. He also regurgitated facts about Whaling, a completely different thing. (100 pages is pretty generous)
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
Hmmm... I'm not sure that works the way you seem to think it does. I have a perfectly legitimate desire for a snack. Does that mean that I have a right to force you to buy a bar of chocolate for me? Or does the act that force is a theoretical possibility make my urge for food somehow unethical?
I think it must be possible to have legitimate desires, without that legitimacy extending to forcing others to co-operate.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Cory Doctorow is the biggest, most shameless self-promoter on the internet. He's also kind of a tool. He's already hijacked one website to promote his writing. Its called 'boingboing', perhaps you've heard of it?
Wait! I thought Nicholas Negroponte was the most shameless self-promoter on the internet! I demand a face-off!
Or is it Ray Kurzweil? There are so many it's hard to keep track.