The following note began as a reponse to a thread about the Googlebooks scan-and-claim fisaco, writers' rights, the process and business behind writing and publishing, and the challenges of old laws in the new marketplace.
------------------------
I agree with you the the current models for publication and protection are broken. The innovations of the Internets and peer-to-peer sharing technology, sampling software, computer replication and modification, and other things besides, have changed the game to unforeseen degrees. The old system is economic dead weight. Trouble is, many of the parties who are trying to fix the problem either have little knowledge about the subject, have vested interests in screwing people, or both.
As someone who has worked in the publishing industry for over 20 years (*1), I want to share my personal knowledge about the subject at hand.
(Photo of the Author, by Sandra Buskirk, copyright(c) 2009. All rights reserved.)
Inspiration, not "Information"
A common cry from folks who don't understand all this is "Information deserves to be free!" This sentiment comes from folks who want free stuff, not from folks who create stuff that others want to get for free. (*2)
To begin with, writing is not information. It is inspiration, often shaped by large amounts of time, learned skills, and physical, mental and often emotional labor. A written work is not composed of atoms or bytes of information, but of human thoughts given shape by human skill and effort. Machines can duplicate written content, but although they can produce text, they cannot produce meaningful writing. This is as true of non-fiction writing as it is for fiction. A tech manual still demands hundreds or thousands of hours of labor on the part of the human beings involved in its production. Beyond the necessary research, fact-checking, proofreading and layout, there remains the necessity of a human being converting thoughts or, yes, data into communications that other people can process and understand.
This sounds much easier than it is.
As I tell my students, art involves a spectrum between expression and communication. The Artist expresses, and the Audience understands. An Artist who doesn't mind having a small Audience can express whatever she wants in whatever form she desires; an Artist who wishes to be understood (maybe even paid!) strives to communicate effectively to a larger Audience. This feat involves an array of skills, intuitions and experiences that go far beyond merely putting fingers to keys or brush to paper. It also involves time, labor, energy and risk. The larger the project, the greater its intended Audience, the more resources, time, skills and risk that work demands.
And writing - fiction or non-fiction, is artistry.
On many levels, writing demands even more artistry than music or visual expression. A visual artist can get by on pretty colors or compelling subjects; a musician can get by with volume and intensity. A writer, though, has nothing but words with which to work. Writing in a creative and coherent manner involves a constant mastery of technology and artistry, plus the time and effort to commit it into words other folks will understand.
Intellectual Property
Beyond that, there's the realm of intellectual property (IP): the creation of something from nothing which goes on to assume a broader reality.
This is where pop-cultural memes originate. Every show you've watched, series you've followed, cartoon character you've sketched, in-joke you've cracked, every spiritual insight you've drawn from a movie, game, TV show, book, whatever - it all began with someone sitting at a desk using the written language to create something out of nothing. Somewhere along that process, a writer took his or her imagination and drafted an idea into words that other folks could understand. Again, this is not data processing. It is art.
Much of that art - and the effort behind it - remains invisible. When you read a comic book, for example, you don't see the copious notes shared between the writer, artists, editor and publisher; you don't see the bible that guides the setting and character, or the outline of plot the book will follow. You don't see the concept sketches, brainstorming, rejected ideas and revised pages and art. Maybe if you're interested in the process, you might see the scripts, storyboards, a few design sketches and maybe an interview or two with the folks behind the project. What you won't see unless you're one of us is the time and effort this process demands. No matter how much you like Neil Gaiman's stories, you do not wake up with him thinking about the project at hand, sit down with him all those hours he puts in every day at the computer, participate with him as he debates them with his collaborators, toss and turn in the middle of the night with him as he hashes out some problematic issue in the story. You just see the finished result - something you can often polish off in a few hours. As one who does this for a living myself, however, I tell you that the work involved in the creation of even the simplest webcomic demands hours of effort before anything appears before the audience.
Something else you won't see is the mental and emotional process behind each creation. Every book, every character, every sentence a writer writes is drawn - sometimes kicking and screaming - from decades of experience and observation. For the writer, this can be a nerve-wracking process as well as a cathartic one. Behind every idea in the pop-cultural Wonderland sits a writer who dug through his or her life to express it... and who, in the course of expressing it, employed years of refined skill, observation, criticism (*3) and raw talent to turn that idea into a broader reality.
And the fact that the idea can then be turned into movies, jokes, tattoos, songs, comic books, action figures, whatever does not negate the writer's role in that process... nor should it negate her rights to earn a living from it, especially not if someone else is, too.
The core of the dispute with Google rests in the idea that imagination is information, and that information should be free and belong to everyone.
Lo, I say unto thee: bullshit.
As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, writing involves time and labor. Writing well also involves a level of skill refined through training, learning and experience. Again, this effort remains invisible until you try to do it. But, as many NANOWRIMO authors (or readers) can attest, there's a galaxy of difference between typing 50,000 words and writing a good (or even adequate) novel.
Writing is an art and a technology. Just as the ability to snap a model kit together does not make someone an engineer, so too the ability to generate text does not make someone an author.
Writing is skilled labor, too. It can be shared, but it should not be taken from granted. As I asked elsewhere, would you expect a farmer to purchase land, tend it, acquire tools, and then spend resources, work and time to grow and harvest a crop, only to have other people walk off with it and hand it off to still more people (often at a profit), and then expect that farmer to get little or nothing for his work? I don't think so.
So what makes a writer different?
I'm all in favor of small-scale sharing. As anyone who reads my blog knows, I recently invited people to write NANO projects based around my own intellectual property, Deliria. That, however, was an invitation I extended to a small number of people whom I trust, within certain legal and creative parameters. If, say, Warner Brothers were to suddenly base a movie off of Deliria and assume that I'd given up my rights to profit off my creation just because the book is out of print, I would not, shall we say, be flattered. Nor would I accept Google scanning that same book (which they did) and then selling it (which they tried to do) without approval from, or payment to, me.
I tended that land. I raised that crop. What's done with it is my business, not Googlebooks' profit.
The Publishing Business
Finally, I'd like to clarify the way the publication media business currently works.
* Composition: We've covered this step. An author (perhaps with collaborators) creates something from nothing.
* Editing & Layout: Someone else (often a publisher) has people refine the original work. This can range from fact-checking to legal footwork, stylistic polishing and so forth. Eventually, the text (and perhaps illustrations) are handed off to a graphic designer, who then formats the work into a digestible and enjoyable medium. From experience, I can tell you that one person cannot and should not attempt to do all these steps alone - the results, even for the best authors, are disastrous. Now, someone has to compensate these editors, illustrators and graphic designers for their own time, skill and effort. That "someone" is usually the publisher.
* Publication & Distribution: Here's where I've seen the biggest misconceptions appear on this thread.
To start with, digital/ virtual media is still a new and exclusive technology. Many people do not have computers at all; still others lack the hardware, software, Internet connection or desire to process virtual media. Hell, I have all those things, and although I buy most of my music in MP3 format these days (note, please, that I said BUY), I hate reading stuff off a screen. I don't plan to ever get a Kindle, I like books, and when I need to read a PDF, I print the damn thing out. So although many of us are looking toward the virtual future, most human beings (and hence, most audience members) are still using hardcopy media.
And hardcopy media costs money to produce. Money to store. Money to ship. Money to stock and return. Every step of the way, people must process, track, promote and sell that media; those people cost money. The media occupy space; that space costs money. State and federal governments tax that inventory, whether or not it sells, once or twice a year. Add more money. Finally, units of media get stolen, damaged, lost or given away as promotional items... and every unit lost takes money away from the bottom line. Add to this the risk that customers will not pay for media they've acquired, due to bankruptcy, refused charges, bounced checks and so forth.
Why would anyone do all this work and spend all this money if there was no compensation to be had?
(As I noted in another thread above, digital media are not exempt from this process. Virtual media distribution still involves server space, hardware and software, maintenance, updating, troubleshooting, virus protection, site hacking, bank transactions, marketing, customer service, accounting and more. All of these steps cost time and money. It is not a free process; as I know from experience, it can be expensive in all kinds of ways. *4)
So yeah - someone's gotta do all this. Why should they do it for free, and how many do you think would do so if they had to?
Publishers, distributors and retails get a lot of heat - some of it justified. Thing is, without these parties, the risks they take and the work and resources they invest, there'd be a huge gulf between Artist and Audience. Even with virtual media, that gulf's still there. It's smaller, but when you get to the practical process of creating something and gaining compensation for it, the gulf between Artist and Audience remains.
Concept Ownership
Finally (whew!), there are ancillary rights - a creator's ability to profit from things tht are based on the original work. In the Media Age, this is the wild frontier because - again, as I mentioned in an earlier thread - mass-culture technology didn't even exist when many of the current laws were drafted.
In our era, ideas are commodities. Mickey Mouse is a multi-billion dollar commodity, if only because so many people find him appealing (*5). Beyond the arguments over content ownership, there's a potent war being waged over concept ownership. Where do the lines get drawn between the parties responsible for creating a popular concept and the audience members who are inspired - perhaps in their own creations - to create new things based on the old ones?
I wish there was a simple or reasonable answer to this question. At the moment, there isn't one. I could spend all week writing my thoughts on the subject, but right now, I have a living to make.
As someone who works in the publishing business, though, I know that the solution starts with education. The Googlebooks decision was handed down by a judge who clearly did not understand how writing, publishing and ancilliary rights work. I suspect, however, that someone in Google knew exactly what the company was doing. As a multi-billion dollar corporation, Google had a board of directors and a legal department that signed off on a blatant, massive copyright violation, then spent millions of dollars defending it in court.
Sorry, but hell fucking no.
We need people who do understand what's involved. People who know all the steps of the process, and who understand where and how the decisions impact real human beings, not abstract philosophies and pithy slogans.
That's why I spent so much time on this post today.
I want people to know what's involved. Because it impacts not only on the value of my own work, but on the market value given to work by people we cherish.
Thanks again for raising the topic!
- Satyr
----------------
NOTES
----------------
*1 - I've been a professional writer, editor, publisher, manager, bookseller and educator since the late 1980s. The business has been my primary source of income since 1993.
*2 - Yes, I know folks create free hacks and shareware code; even then, though, there's some hope of compensation, if only in bragging rights and philosophical validation... and writing a progam code is still not the same thing as writing a book!
*3 - There's also the whole "nail that stands out is the nail that gets hammered" effect, but that's a subject for a whole other post or three.
*4 - At least $1.30 of each copy of Ravens in the Library sold on our site went to Paypal, just for processing the bank transactions. That expense sucked, but we could not have processed over 1400 orders without them! As for Amazon and their Kindle, the cut that this virtual media distributor takes runs as high as 80% of the retail price... which, again, leaves the author and/ or publisher with next to nothing while the "gatekeeper" gains most of the compensation.
*5 - Ironically, Mickey was created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks because they'd just been screwed out of the rights to everything else they had produced, including Disney's original studio itself, by a distributor who felt that he owned the concept rights because he owned the means of distribution. Even more ironically, he later lost those rights to another animator, who'd won them in a poker game with the distributor's biggest client.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
contemplative
nauseated
enraged
quixotic
bouncy
creative
amused
determined
