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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!
Yeah, but after the obscurity, THEN artists get interested in DRM.
crazy dynamite monkey
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.
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.
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.
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 *
Hate to be a spelling nazi but it's "paid" not "payed"
Don't lie, you fucking love it.
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!
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.
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!
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.