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By Steven Levy
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As a spectator, I found it easy to be sanguine about the raging Internet intellectual-property debates. I'd tempered my ecstasy during the heady exultations of the "information wants to be free"-bies, and kept my emotional powder dry as apocalyptic content owners warned that wanton file-sharing would mean the death of creativity. Basically, my take was that the Net had simply opened up a powerful mode of distribution, most fully realized in the Napsterlike peer-to-peer (P2P) model, where everybody could help spread the word (and the music). Artists and merchants alike would eventually figure out how to reap bucks from that bounty, and until then I'd sit back and enjoy the fun as Metallica and Courtney Love duked it out.
That was before I got P2P'd. And like facing a hangman's noose, being pirated on the Net has a way of focusing one's attention.
I first got wind of my own Napsterish problem a few months back when I stumbled on a message posted in an Internet discussion group that mentioned my 1984 book "Hackers." Some helpful soul informed the group that one could get the whole tome free, simply by going to a certain Web site. Huh?
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Indeed, the entire text of "Hackers" was posted for all the world to download. And the Web address revealed a most unexpected host for the giveaway: Stanford University. How did my copyrighted work find its way there? A few minutes of clicking revealed that this particular server had some connection to the chair of the university's program in history and philosophy of science, Tim Lenoir. So I called him to ask if he'd any idea who'd done this.
"I scanned your book," he said. Then came the apologies. The professor professed to be a big fan of my work, and (erroneously) assuming that it was out of print, spent a few hours to suck the words from each page of my book, submit it to a program that converted it to text and posted it for the benefit of his students only. The fact that anyone in the world could get to it, he said, was a mistake: he had not intended Stanford University to become an unofficial global distributor of "Hackers," charging nothing and, of course, paying no royalties. Lenoir promised to remove the book from the site, and we had a pretty good conversation about what might be fair use of electronic texts in an educational setting. By the time I hung up the phone, I felt somewhat less violated. Still, I wondered whether his "mistake" had cost me book sales.
My benign outlook dissolved about a week later when I received an e-mail from an English reader informing me that "in some kind of ironic but illegal turn, your book 'Crypto' has been... posted onto the newsgroup alt.binaries.e-book." This was the work I had published just weeks before, still selling briskly at $25.95 a pop! I knew all too well where the aforementioned irony came from. One topic I'd discussed in "Crypto" was the use of cyberanonymity, a means of cloaking the origin of an electronic missive. The purloiner of my own book called himself Stormysky, and carefully hid his tracks. Using those techniques, a number of Internet repositories had emerged as thriving underground book dumps where free-riders could download the texts of hundreds of recent tomes. Author Harlan Ellison calls the alt-scanners "rodents without ethic or understanding." A talk with my publisher's lawyer was even more dispiriting. "We're seeing this problem all the time," he moaned; he'd had little success in stemming the tide of purloined works by the likes of Tom Clancy. (So what were my chances?)
Though the technologies of anonymity wouldn't let me trace this particular rodent, it was possible to send him e-mail. Stormysky replied promptly, assuring me that he'd posted my book not to hurt me but to express his notion that the Internet was about sharing--and also as a protest against the intention of publishers to lock up intellectual property on the Net. If publishers have their way, Stormysky warned, they would limit the uses of books so that traditional consumer rights--lending a book to a friend, or even getting access to the book after a specified period--might be lost.
I actually agree with those sentiments, but also think I'm entitled to some payment for my work--and wonder what will happen when electronic reading devices become more convivial, and downloaders of these files won't pay a penalty in eyestrain. Unfortunately, my new friend's protest contradicted his belief that "authors should receive monetary compensation for their creations." Grappling with this concept, he graciously agreed not to post any more of my work to newsgroups.
Forgive me, Stormy, if I'm feeling less than grateful. But I do appreciate the wake-up call. For authors like me--as musicians have already learned--the intellectual-property wars cannot be a spectator sport. I need to speak up more forcefully on the issues, and petition vociferously for creative business models--even if they require drastically altering the ones that have evolved over decades. Publishers mainly want control, and the consumers mainly want convenience and value, if not freebies. But it's the artists who are on the firing line, eager to win audiences but concerned about maintaining our credit ratings. We have to muscle our way into the center of the quest for a solution that somehow exploits the distribution power of the Net while assuring that our audiences pay us something for the experience. Otherwise, we'll just be P'd on.
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