Thanks for the link to Wellington.

“But outside genre authors…not likely.” Why? (I ask very much out of personal interest.)

Obviously, you can’t credit CD alone with this, but I certainly think the anti-DRM activism in general clearly impacted the decision for music companies to abandon DRM.

“But as I mentioned to Rob above, it remains to be seen whether someone not already net-famous can rise to prosperity (not merely fame) on the back of giveaways. I’m confident it’s possible, but I don’t know of any examples just yet. Does anyone else?”

David Wellington went from being a nobody (at least not a net celeb) to successful horror author by giving it away (like CD, his books are free online and in print, but I don’t think they’re CCed).

I think this formula will absolutely work for genre authors. First time I heard of John Scalzi was the free version of that alien agent book he made available. In fact, most of the books I’ve read lately were written by folks I first heard of through free online offerings.

But outside genre authors…not likely.

Rob, thanks. As for paying for things, I have no doubt CD is making out alright, net-famous as he is. People are doing like he said, and buying his books. Not sure how if the wealth spreads to the more obscure, though.

Brian, good point. Certainly there is a social element to Facebook, as you indicate. But not in quite the way CD seems to think in Content . At least not for those of us in the non-technorati. But you are right, that our view of ’social’ should and probably will evolve. At this point, though, I don’t consider Facebook as social as an actual class reunion.

Marc, CD certainly relishes his role as gadfly to the corporate monolith; but I’m not sure how effective he has been – the content industries, with Microsoft as a prime example, have continued until very recently unabated with more and more DRM despite his bleating in their ears. Seems to me they only begin to listen when a critical mass of their customers begin to shift their behavior. Even then they are slow to respond, and I doubt very much they are thinking of CD at all.

That’s why I respect his attempt to take the anti-DRM fight ‘to the people’, as it were; I just don’t think he’s done a very good job of it. As for alternative revenue streams, I’m all for them, and I hope CD and others dream up a lot of good ones. But as I mentioned to Rob above, it remains to be seen whether someone not already net-famous can rise to prosperity (not merely fame) on the back of giveaways. I’m confident it’s possible, but I don’t know of any examples just yet. Does anyone else?

As for science fiction being the only stealable, CD did indeed say precisely that – it’s the title of one of the essays. As for fiction being like music in terms of up/downloads, I’d say that’s going to require the spread of an iPod-like device (iPhone, anyone?) that is ubiquitous enough and easy enough to use that it won’t require any more technical knowledge than downloading music requires today. I’ve speculated on that possibility and I, for one, would surely welcome it. As I bet CD would.

Thanks, everyone, for your comments.

As for stirring up the masses to rebel against DRM, I hope no-one is trying to spend their life doing that. The fact of the matter is that currently DRM is only an issue in fairly luxury items like music, movies etc. and that most people have much less complicated media consumption lifestyles than alpha geeks do: they aren’t constantly shuffling ‘content’ between multiple ‘devices’ bought in multiple ‘regions’ with multiple ‘OSes’. They use windows, they have an ipod, they steal some music when they want, they buy some when they want and they are more or less all right. (I am more at the alpha-geek end of the spectrum, and the one time I bought music from the iTunes store I have ’suffered’ quite a bit of DRM friction, so I was one of the people who stopped shopping there and went to Amazon instead. So thanks Cory for looking out for me!)

Where you have to applaud Cory is the work he has done to popularize the notion of the commons as a way of enriching culture. And though he is starting to suffer a bit of a backlash at his occasional proposal that writers make their money via their rock star public appearances and not royalties, I think that the emergence of alternative writing distribution models is/will be a beautiful thing.

One more thing: I don’t know if I would agree with Cory Doctorow that ONLY Sci-Fi fiction will get stolen [assuming he said that...], but I agree that it will be the canary in the coal mine. Cult/Genre fiction has the kind of people who will do manual labor to free it and evangelize it. That’s why comic book piracy affects practically 100% of content published today and within the last 60 years in America. After the canary, the first miner to die seems like it would be a Nabokov type of writer who inspires fanatics to read and obsess over their entire oeuvre. But once there are enough ebooks around that they can get cracked without any labor, then it’ll be like music today where you have people uploading music they don’t even like just because why not.

‘According to Doctorow, “adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” In his tech-obsession, he has lost sight of a fundamental fact: Facebook is not a social situation. It’s on a computer.’

Have you noticed at all the person-of-the-week getting fired over a Facebook update because they think it’s ‘not a social situation. It’s on a computer’? I love Facebook, but I think Cory is spot on with his criticism there.

Facebook gives you the illusion of friendly intimacy, but it is a very public space and our ways of thinking about such spaces are lagging severely.

A handy reminder that it’s worthwhile to be a little bit humble–even if you think you know everything.

Maybe the information economy does make it easy for office workers to take off Fridays to go sailing, but I wonder when Cory is going to give us free sailboats to do the sailing on.

Free is great–I love free. But most free models I’ve seen ultimately involve someone paying for something.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com