I first read the speech by Cory Doctorow ‘How to Destroy the Book‘ before Christmas, but didn’t immediately mention it because although there was much in it that appealed to me I wanted to think about it a bit more.
Doctorow made the speech to a Canadian ‘National Reading Summit‘ in Toronto in the middle of November and the speech was printed by ‘The Varsity‘, a Toronto-based on-line student newspaper, a month later. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you should.
To put things simply, Doctorow stresses the centrality to our culture of being able to own and copy books and points out the threat posed both by mechanisms such as DRM licensing and the current attempts by the copyright industries (and in particular those from the US) through the the World Intellectual Property Organization and proposals to ‘update’ copyright laws in countries around the world. (Our very own Peter Mandelson gets a special mention for his weekend in Corfu with David Geffen which persuaded him to to come back and rewrite our own copyright laws.)
Doctorow as a creator has certainly put his works where his mouth is, insisting on his work being published DRM free and making his books available as free downloads (and they really look good on screen.) For him, scattering his work, to use his image, as freely as the dandelion scatters its seeds, gives “a fecundity to your work that allows it to find its way into places that you never thought it would be found before.”
As he says, most people first come across the work of authors without buying it. They borrow books from libraries, from friends – or download material from the Internet. Far from threatening the sales of books, these same people go on to buy those that they really like – because they want to own them.
It works because the product for sale, the printed work, has a physical form that people want to own. An electronic book just isn’t the same (and I think most of us are by now simply annoyed by those clever book-look interfaces on web pages with pages that ‘turn’ rather than simply doing what a screen display can do better.)
But does it work for other media? Perhaps less so for some, although I’d still prefer to have those few movies I own on DVD in nice packages with a title on the spine and some interesting material in the box – something the industry has rather too often failed to provide. Music too has failed to come up with anything to rival the LP cover in the post-vinyl age, though I still like to be able to run my eye along a row of CDs and choose the one I want, but perhaps I’m a dinosaur in this MP3 age.
And photography? I’ve certainly made much of my own work available in low resolution on the web – well over 50,000 images now on My London Diary and other web sites. Although almost all of it carries a copyright message, I’ve never intended that this should prevent people copying it for their own personal use and for research/study. Occasionally people do ask for permission to print pictures or use them in their academic work or even to print them on a t-shirt, and I would never normally refuse such individual requests.
I also make it clear that my pictures are available for use without payment by “suitable non-profit organisations” but that payment is expected for any commercial use. It isn’t a hard and fast division, though usually a reasonable test for me is whether the person asking to use pictures is actually getting paid for what they are doing. If the organisation can afford to pay them, it can afford to pay me for my work too.
By keeping my work copyright I can also try to prevent images being used by people in ways that I don’t want, for example by right-wing hate sites. Letters from a solicitor to the ISP concerned about copyright abuse have led to their removal, but unfortunately it is all too easy for these sites to move around to different hosts. Unfortunately Creative Commons licences – of any type – just don’t seem work in this way at all.
But as a photographer I also have something else to sell. Original prints and high res files for reproduction. And the Internet is a shop window for me, although the takings from it are not particularly high. I’m not sure I’m ever going to put high-res files onto the web without protection of some sort, though should I ever get round to publishing (almost certainly self-publishing) one of the books I’ve often started to produce I think it quite likely that I would make that available as a free PDF.
What I think is vital – and what Doctorow says – is that copyright, and in particular the international agreements on it, needs to take into account the interests of creators and users and not to be simply based on securing the profits of large corporate interests who are currently running the show in secret sessions of the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement or at villas in Corfu. People like Geffen would really like to keep copyright as their private beach!