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.

Comments

Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic

[brit74]

"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.

Re:EXCELLENT interview!

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed it is a rehash, it didn't seem all that original when John Boorman & Sean Connery did a version in movie form (the surreally bad Zardoz) in the '70s. Doctorow's take is admittedly much better--Zardoz set a really low bar. I liked the "adhocracy" concept, and the name was inspired. But overall, a short-story of an idea stretched out to book length, without a stunning plot, memorable characters or inventive energy. YMMV.

Cory Doctorow is IMHO at best a mediocre science fiction writer. But he has carved out a niche primarily by pandering to internet posters, who then hold him up as an example of an artist who is successful "because" he eschews copyright and promises them more free stuff. Which is sort of true, but is not a scalable business model: if everyone did what Doctorow did, he wouldn't be noteworthy, and he'd fall deeper into the midlist if not total obscurity. When a "science fiction author" is most famous for blogging and his opinions about copyright, it does say something about his accomplishments in actually writing science fiction.

I'm maybe being a little unfair, but I like reading novels. When Doctorow talks about overcoming "obscurity," based on gimmicks unrelated to quality of his fiction ("A band recorded 'Little Brother' songs"!) I get depressed. Many of my favorite authors are pretty obscure (well, pretty dead, but my next favorites are just obscure), but can get by. The last thing I want is them trying to work in product placements and mini-games to try and go viral one way or another.

Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic

[CharlyFoxtrot]

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.

Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic

[CharlyFoxtrot]

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.