The Cranky Copyright Book

Cory Doctorow’s literary agents.

From the offices of Scovil Galen Ghosh, Russell Galen wrote:

Interesting subject – we represent Cory Doctorow and so are deeply involved in this situation – but you don’t have the platform to get away with writing a book about this issue. You’d need publication credits and degrees.

We’ll just see about that.

General opposition

Let me stave off a bit of the inevitable opposition right up front. I know already that some of you don’t think I deserve to talk about copyright, largely because I am an unauthorized person articulating views that differ from authorized persons’.

Let’s take this from the top. What passes for a public copyright “debate” goes as follows.

• Any rep from a “content industry” (music, movies, books), or from their industry groups, or from a telco or ISP, is automatically suspect. Their angle is assumed by default to be copyright-maximalist. These are the people who can ask for a meeting with government ministers and get it.

• There’s exactly one countervailing position, though it consists of several ideas bundled together and filed under the neologism “copyleft.” You know what these ideas are. You probably also know there are exactly three people authorized to articulate these ideas:

  1. Larry Lessig (U.S.)
  2. Michael Geist (Canada)
  3. Cory Doctorow (transnational Canadian in England)

  Nobody died and made these guys king. It’s just a power-law effect. But the fact remains these are the only public spokesmen for copyright reform. If all those guys are on a jet plane en route to a conference or something and are somehow unreachable by E-mail, you could maybe ask the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Doctorow’s former employer) for a quote.

Aaand that’s it. That’s the copyright debate. You’ve got a bunch of assumed corporate apologists, whose names you barely know (“Um... Jack Valenti?”), on one side. On the other are the three star spokesmen of the movement. (And please, it is a movement.)

Now, who else gets any airtime in the copyright debate? Not you: The only crumb tossed your way is the option, clouded by peer pressure, to license your works under Creative Commons. You get to stick a licence badge on your blog. That’s your contribution.

Wait, you’ve done more than that? You’ve written about copyright on your blog? Well, congrats. So have I, and nobody noticed. (If your copyright post doesn’t appear on Boing Boing, does it make a sound when it falls?)

Time for a new voice

Except I’m not new. I’ve been deeply involved in copyright issues for a decade and a half.

• I was a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers in the 1990s, with nearly 400 published articles. I was making a good living. But I was probably the first person to receive the freelancer contract from the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper, which required writers to sign over all rights.

  That was one of the signals alerting us to the fact that the newspaper’s owner, and other publishers, intended to illegally duplicate and profit from our work. I refused to sign any such contracts and my business died completely within months. I didn’t have a replacement business; I had absolutely nothing for the better part of a year and my life was nearly destroyed.

  And that was 15 years ago. Only this month – June 2009 – will the court case we launched on behalf of freelance writers be settled.

• Later and separately, I found that several of my original photographs had been used on a book cover without permission. I know you probably reject the entire concept of copyright infringement, but my copyrights really were infringed. This tale has a happy ending: The conglomerate publisher admitted guilt immediately and paid me a settlement.

I’ve been through a lot when it comes to copyright. Have you?

Is “the copyright issue” pretty well taken care of?

Do you think the only people “we” need to issue public comments on the subject are Lessig, Geist, and Doctorow? (By definition, corporate flaks can’t be trusted. “We” know that already.)

I’ve spent the last 15 years progressively educating myself on copyright, sort of the way AIDS activists gradually became de facto immunologists. I’ve got my own lived experience and I’ve got book learning under my belt.

I have a new way of looking at copyright. My question is: Do you think I have a right to articulate it? Do I have a right to talk about the subject? And I mean in a big way, in a book issued by a legit publisher.

Some people already think I don’t. Are you one of them? Do you think the bases have already been covered and everything’s all settled already? They haven’t and it isn’t.

Do you really want copyright debate, or do you just think that whatever Larry Lessig has ever talked about should be enshrined into law right away? (In case you haven’t noticed, Lessig has a consistent record of losing in court and has gotten nowhere in changing copyright law. Should you be listening to somebody else?)

If you’re really interested in copyright debate – and in copyright reform that benefits you, the individual creator – then you need to support this project one way or another.