A spat recently erupted between two SF writers, purportedly about copyright. Cory Doctorow posted a paragraph of Ursula K. Le Guin, and she took offense because the single paragraph was a complete story; puffed-up chests and finger-pointing ensued, ending with an apology.
The reason this is trollery is that this story is given away through multiple sources, and Cory Doctorow, by promoting it, was doing her a service. She doesn't see it that way, though, because she is stuck irretrievably in 1950. So she made a stink about it. And Jerry Pournelle and his cronies in the soul-deadening SFWA waded in, carrying pitchforks and baying for Doctorow's blood.
So why does the SFWA hate Doctorow? He writes new stuff that people want to read, he gives it away for free, and has been tremendously successful at it. He also contributes to the influential blog BoingBoing. He does not bow and scrape to the bunch of borderline-fascist ex-authors who run the SFWA, and he has the temerity to espouse socially liberal political philosophies. They hate that stuff. And since UKLG and Connie Willis are the token women in the group, these real men can defend their honour.
A tempest in a teapot, illustrating the fact that a bunch of has-beens feel that the Internet will take away a comfortable retirement based on royalties from outdated, poorly written crypto-nazi bullshit they produced a generation ago. Now UKLG's boring story will safely stay on her site where nobody will actually read it. Great call, Ursula!
5 comments:
So, if I understand Cory Doctorow's career, he gives away his literature under GNU-CC licenses. So how does he eat? I'm guessing he makes a pile at boingboing from the enormous ad revenue that they must generate. Plus, I'm guessing he does paid speaking tours, but can there be very much money there?
It's kind of my problem. I don't want to work. But I have to eat. So I work and I accumulate my wealth so that, one day, I can do what I really want to do--teach elementary school kids--and earn no money.
He sells books. It turns out that giving away those same books online is great advertisement, and many people who read the electronic copy buy the paper copy. I've done it myself – free downloadable PDFs don't make a very good birthday gift.
Bits are never going to get more difficult to copy. The information economy is not based on scarcity of information any more than the industrial revolution was based on the scarcity of machines. The machines made goods cheap and accessible, and information makes knowledge cheap and accessible. The information which was once scarce and dear is now free and easy to find.
So what do we do? We provide services that take advantage of that data. If you write software, you might think you're selling software. Guess what, that software is already commoditized and becoming increasingly worthless: it is the intelligent updating of that software that becomes valuable, and your expertise and knowledge of it is valuable.
You can't hoard information anymore and expect it to be worth anything. Hard-won experience is becoming devalued by inflationary time.
Well said. You really cleared it up for me.
Here's an interesting article as well. I know you blogged about Facebook a while back. I think this just supports further what you were saying:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/15/technology/google_facebook.fortune/?postversion=2007101606
By the way... can't wait to see you guys for T-Giving. Wish you could stay longer, but understand time is limited.
That's a good article. Poor Google, from cutting-edge to passé in one swell poop.
We're looking forward to Thanksgiving too. We would stay longer, but we'd rather leave you wanting more.
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