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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.
"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
For those who don't know, Cory Doctorow also co-edits BoingBoing, a popular tech/culture group blog that's worth checking out.
"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
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
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!
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
"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.
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."
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"
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.