Thanks mostly to David Berry and Karl Fogel, there is a debate unfolding in the comment section of my post on whether it makes sense to open source books and in what ways the model of free software is transferable (or not) to book publishing.
It is worth reading if you are interested in this debate as the back and forth volley is pretty illuminating.
Somewhat independent of the content, Karl Fogel wrote something that I love, mostly because I often try to remind people of this, although I have not said is as eloquently and tersely as Karl:
I do not understand how you can have ‘libre’ freedom without ‘free as in beer’ freedom. While the latter does not necessarily imply the former, the former always implies the latter. If everyone can share X freely with others, than the cost will always be driven down to zero (hence X will have both freedoms); if people cannot so share, then X is, by definition, not “libre” free.
Much more there, so check it out.
One assumption I wish we’d examine more often:
It is often claimed that books are different from software; that something about the production of software is fundamentally different from the production of books and other creative works, such that the freedoms on which the free software movement depends are more important, for software, than the corresponding freedoms would be for books if applied to books.
I question that. Why would the freedom to fork be important for software, yet not for other works? What, in the end, is really so special about software that makes it not like other stuff?
Or conversely, if software is radically different from books, then shouldn’t sheet music be different from books too, and recorded music different from all of the preceding, and movies different from all of them, etc, etc? But somehow there are not as many people calling for different copyright practices for those different sorts of things (some people are, but only a few). Software gets the Most Special category, for reasons that are (at least to me) never quite made clear.
The converse argument above is mostly a straw man, of course: I don’t really think there’s a big difference between prose texts and software texts, and I want maximum freedom for both.
But I do think that if one were going to go looking for differences between various categories of creative work, movies (or perhaps movies and recorded music) ought to stand out as Most Special, not software. The dynamics of reusability for movies and recordings are radically different from the dynamics for books, software, sheet music, and even still photographs.
If more people who wrote prose also wrote software, things might be different. But since more people lack direct experience of software (except through user interfaces) than lack direct experience of books, movies, songs, etc, it becomes okay to assume software must have special properties. IOW, this categorization is too often based more on subjective personal experience than on anything inherent to software itself.
Comment by Karl Fogel — August 29, 2007 @ 12:15 am
Hi Biella,
I am just not sure that you can dislocate form and content in that way (see McLuhan, Kittler, Heidegger etc). Nor does freeing the content through a copyright license or giving to the public domain does not change the fundamental economics of distribution of the text. Something, somewhere will need to be the carrier – and whilst currently we all pretend that the Internet is free for distribution – I am not sure how long that will go on as moves in the ITU, Telcos and so on start to lock it down (i.e. ipV6 etc). Anyway, the cost of a laptop/computer remains, as does printing, electricity, difficulty of reading on screen etc etc etc. So giving the text away, as it were, cannot be the sole answer, and certainly cannot be the answer to improving education, academic debate or the production of literature.
So what is the best way to facilitate the production of texts to contribute to the Parliament of Texts that we use in academia (which was my point of reference). It seems to me that Free licenses are *not* going to produce better books, nor is it going to produce better arguments. This is critical, and ignored by FLOSS-like arguments.
Part of the problem with your position is that you have a misconception that the £90.00 edition is in some way, meant to be bought by the public. Not at all, the first hardbacks are usually library editions – made in an expensive way to ensure they can take the thumbing and rough treatment meted out to them by students. This edition is then sold and later a paperback copy is often released precisely for students etc which is usually much cheaper. I think it is a public good for the publishers to produce these versions, good for the libraries to stock them and for the students to be able to access them. They charge a high price to recoup their losses and continue releasing books – that lets face it will only ever sell a limited number (usually only to libraries). The publishers also often supply an value-add service by proof-reading, editing and neatly typesetting the text, adding indices and so forth. These are the economics of publishing.
The question is when it comes to academic publishing does a 95 year term really cause problems? I don’t think so. Many authors of academic books automatically regain the copyright when the book goes out-of-print and at that point they can decide to distribute over the Internet, sell on POD services via Amazon or even license as copyleft or whatever.
We as academics can throughout this entire process use, critique and quote from books. Yes there are some real problems with IPR – for example trademarks can be enforced against publishers ( Sounding out the City by Michael Bull was forced by Sony to purge Walkman (TM) from the book). These can and should be addressed, however they did not stop the publication of the research results.
I just think that the arguments taken from FLOSS and then applied to books are not really thought through very well and often blindly applied.
Your dilemma over assigning expensive books is not new, well before free licenses and the Internet academics had to balance accessibility with cost, and libraries are part of that balance. However, good books are good books, and I would always assign them to a course because we should be studying the important texts. In the worst case scenario for out-of-print books or rare texts I have even contacted authors to get them to send me copies of chapters to use (and never been refused). I also photocopy chapters for the library (and they then pay the copyright fee to the publisher) if necessary.
You ask what I think is wrong with copyright. Well, I am concerned about many other mediums and their relationship with copyright, but academic books are not on the whole a major problem when being quoted, critiqued or commented upon however once we try to use them digitally, yes there are problems there (e.g. in the UK digital copies have different and harsher rules governing use than photocopies). Additionally I am rather concerned about the movement towards Journal publication, particularly the move to very expensive digital libraries – and the short-sighted librarians who are throwing out there paper copies (again see Double Fold by Nicolson Baker for a great discussion). The economics and practices of Journal publication have been rather anti-scholar in some instances, and the assignment of copyright in these instances does seem problematic (but can be addressed through Open Access publication and through web publication of drafts).
So the long answer is that I believe that it is more than just assigning books free licenses and that the complexities of academic publication warrant more careful analysis than the simple equation of FREE=GOOD, COPYRIGHT=BAD. We must concentrate on the quality of the books not (just) the copyright regime.
Best
David
Comment by David Berry — August 29, 2007 @ 5:40 am
Hi Biella,
I am just not sure that you can dislocate form and content in that way (see McLuhan, Kittler, Heidegger etc). Nor does freeing the content through a copyright license or giving to the public domain does not change the fundamental economics of distribution of the text. Something, somewhere will need to be the carrier – and whilst currently we all pretend that the Internet is free for distribution – I am not sure how long that will go on as moves in the ITU, Telcos and so on start to lock it down (i.e. ipV6 etc). Anyway, the cost of a laptop/computer remains, as does printing, electricity, difficulty of reading on screen etc etc etc. So giving the text away, as it were, cannot be the sole answer, and certainly cannot be the answer to improving education, academic debate or the production of literature.
So what is the best way to facilitate the production of texts to contribute to the Parliament of Texts that we use in academia (which was my point of reference). It seems to me that Free licenses are *not* going to produce better books, nor is it going to produce better arguments. This is critical, and ignored by FLOSS-like arguments.
Part of the problem with your position is that you have a misconception that the £90.00 edition is in some way, meant to be bought by the public. Not at all, the first hardbacks are usually library editions – made in an expensive way to ensure they can take the thumbing and rough treatment meted out to them by students. This edition is then sold and later a paperback copy is often released precisely for students etc which is usually much cheaper. I think it is a public good for the publishers to produce these versions, good for the libraries to stock them and for the students to be able to access them. They charge a high price to recoup their losses and continue releasing books – that lets face it will only ever sell a limited number (usually only to libraries). The publishers also often supply an value-add service by proof-reading, editing and neatly typesetting the text, adding indices and so forth. These are the economics of publishing.
The question is when it comes to academic publishing does a 95 year term really cause problems? I don’t think so. Many authors of academic books automatically regain the copyright when the book goes out-of-print and at that point they can decide to distribute over the Internet, sell on POD services via Amazon or even license as copyleft or whatever.
We as academics can throughout this entire process use, critique and quote from books. Yes there are some real problems with IPR – for example trademarks can be enforced against publishers ( Sounding out the City by Michael Bull was forced by Sony to purge Walkman (TM) from the book). These can and should be addressed, however they did not stop the publication of the research results.
I just think that the arguments taken from FLOSS and then applied to books are not really thought through very well and often blindly applied.
Your dilemma over assigning expensive books is not new, well before free licenses and the Internet academics had to balance accessibility with cost, and libraries are part of that balance. However, good books are good books, and I would always assign them to a course because we should be studying the important texts. In the worst case scenario for out-of-print books or rare texts I have even contacted authors to get them to send me copies of chapters to use (and never been refused). I also photocopy chapters for the library (and they then pay the copyright fee to the publisher) if necessary.
You ask what I think is wrong with copyright. Well, I am concerned about many other mediums and their relationship with copyright, but academic books are not on the whole a major problem when being quoted, critiqued or commented upon however once we try to use them digitally, yes there are problems there (e.g. in the UK digital copies have different and harsher rules governing use than photocopies). Additionally I am rather concerned about the movement towards Journal publication, particularly the move to very expensive digital libraries – and the short-sighted librarians who are throwing out there paper copies (again see Double Fold by Nicolson Baker for a great discussion). The economics and practices of Journal publication have been rather anti-scholar in some instances, and the assignment of copyright in these instances does seem problematic (but can be addressed through Open Access publication and through web publication of drafts).
Best
David
Comment by David Berry — August 29, 2007 @ 5:41 am
Your dilemma over assigning expensive books is not new, well before free licenses and the Internet academics had to balance accessibility with cost, and libraries are part of that balance. However, good books are good books, and I would always assign them to a course because we should be studying the important texts. In the worst case scenario for out-of-print books or rare texts I have even contacted authors to get them to send me copies of chapters to use (and never been refused). I also photocopy chapters for the library (and they then pay the copyright fee to the publisher) if necessary.
You ask what I think is wrong with copyright. Well, I am concerned about many other mediums and their relationship with copyright, but academic books are not on the whole a major problem when being quoted, critiqued or commented upon however once we try to use them digitally, yes there are problems there (e.g. in the UK digital copies have different and harsher rules governing use than photocopies). Additionally I am rather concerned about the movement towards Journal publication, particularly the move to very expensive digital libraries – and the short-sighted librarians who are throwing out there paper copies (again see Double Fold by Nicolson Baker for a great discussion). The economics and practices of Journal publication have been rather anti-scholar in some instances, and the assignment of copyright in these instances does seem problematic (but can be addressed through Open Access publication and through web publication of drafts).
So the long answer is that I believe that it is more than just assigning books free licenses and that the complexities of academic publication warrant more careful analysis than the simple equation of FREE=GOOD, COPYRIGHT=BAD. We must concentrate on the quality of the books not (just) the copyright regime.
Comment by David Berry — August 29, 2007 @ 5:44 am
Heres how you can have libre freedom without having “free as in free beer” freedom. Consider some object that has non-zero costs of reproduction (or sharing – consider this some kind of transaction cost). Make this available for unlimited copying and for making derivative works but attach a non-zero cost to the act of making each copy (or to the act of sharing). Wouldn’t this object enjoy libre freedom without being free in terms of price? The implication Karl mentions is not one of necessity but is simply one of great likelihood. You are thinking only of digital products when you make the relationship of the implication one of necessity (because these digital products enjoy zero costs of reproduction).
Comment by Samir Chopra Chopra — August 29, 2007 @ 2:46 pm
“Heres how you can have libre freedom without having “free as in free beer” freedom. Consider some object that has non-zero costs of reproduction (or sharing – consider this some kind of transaction cost). Make this available for unlimited copying and for making derivative works but attach a non-zero cost to the act of making each copy (or to the act of sharing). Wouldn’t this object enjoy libre freedom without being free in terms of price?”
Spoken like a true philosopher Samir: but show me the so-called object now and then we can start talking
To be sure I can imagine such an object but in a world that is vastly different in terms of political economy. There is nothing delivered in terms of content that does not have some cost to it right now, so I am happy and willing to have this conversation when it happens.
Again, it is not that I am not interested in the hypothetical because hypothetically I would not only want many things to be different but I would consider things in a different light given distinct conditions.
But when it comes to this argument, given the “great likelihood” (which I would phrase as great, great likelihood,”) my argument currently stands. It may not stand for all time, but I am comfortable with asserting it for now and changing things when that so called object comes to be.
Comment by Biella — August 29, 2007 @ 5:28 pm
David
Well I guess we agree here. I have always asserted that some sort of limited form of copyright makes some sense for books (though I would have to do a lot more delving and research to come up with an appropriate number for term limits). I just think the current length is truly preposterous and thus change is not minimal but requires some radical rethinking or back tracking..
Samir and Scott: So I want to hear your thoughts on copyrights and books. It seems like you had (have?) a desire to make the book available under a much freer licenses but (very legitimate) conditions beyond your control did not make this possible. That is, if you commanded the leverage of Benkler or Lessig, it seems like you 2 would have chosen the path that David Berry is attacking.
So my question would be:
Can you comment on current model of academic publishing and copyright in light of David Berry’s insistence that the current model does not warrant much change?
Comment by Biella — August 29, 2007 @ 5:34 pm
First, I want to clarify what I take “academic publishing” to mean in this discussion: we’re talking about books that are published by authors of non-fiction who (as Karl pointed out) don’t expect to be awash in royalties, and who do expect their book to be used primarily in academic research and teaching. That excludes, for example, the nasty, cut-throat, profit-thirsty computer science textbook industry and probably most of O’Reilly’s titles.
RMS sometimes motivates free software by observing that it’s “human knowledge”. I’d expect most academic authors to understand their work the same way, and therefore I’d expect them to accept the four freedoms, more or less, without batting an eye. Of course, the four freedoms don’t work quite the same way with actual paper books, so what I’m really saying is that most academic authors, given the chance, would willingly accept hobbled analogs of the four freedoms. Freedoms 0 and 1 (the freedom to make private annotations, translations, cut-ups, whatever) are, I think, beyond contention; freedom 2 has particular benefit for classroom teaching; freedom 3 eases the way for translation, anthologization, and commentary (certainly a very important form of derivative work in the scholarly tradition). (By the way, wouldn’t a physical book published with terms like this be an example of the sort of libre-but-not-free object Samir and Biella are discussing above?)
So I think the main reason academic authors seek traditional publication (instead of, say, self-publishing, whether online or Instabook style) is simply that it’s the only meritocratic system that the academy understands (I was complaining to a colleague about the price, and his response was, “You should be happy it is in hardback for prestige purposes.”). While open copyright with digital publication creates the conditions for a more democratic-participatory peer review system, it’s hard to imagine this sort of publishing catching on in the academy until a particular system or collection of systems whose properties can be well understood emerges. (As the FOSS world demonstrates well, there are myriad ways to implement meritocracies on top of the four freedoms — one could argue that Linux kernel development has quite a bit in common with traditional publishing.)
As for why our book in particular costs $95, I think it’s a fairly simple supply-demand calculation by the publisher that goes something like this: Books in this series treat topics of narrow, primarily academic, interest and therefore would only be purchased by a small number of individuals for research purposes; we don’t expect much in the way of course adoption, and there isn’t any mass-market appeal. Therefore the most appropriate form of dissemination is the academic library, so we’ll produce a relatively small number of sturdy books and charge appropriately. Of course, we’d like to believe that many of the premises of that calculation are wrong….
Comment by Scott Dexter — August 30, 2007 @ 6:09 am
Actually, Biella, its not that hard to come up with such an object: digital media. I was thinking about this, and it occurred to me that we (including me) too uncritically accept the idea that its zero-cost to make copies and distribute copies of software or other digital artifacts. Unfortunately, this is not zero-cost. You need computers and networks and skills and access to them. This is why we have huge debates over the digital divide whenever anyone starts talking about how making objects available online in digital format will solve all problems of access. Let me tell you a story: my wife worked as a community organizer up in East Harlem (for welfare recipients), and frequently planned meetings with their members. Guess what? The Internet was useless to her as an organizing tool – she had to go door-to-door, and make phone calls as a luxury. If I had told her members that making copies of digital objects (like the files for the PDF flyers that I made for them) was zero cost, they would have laughed at me. Please, lets not take the cost of making a copy of a digital object to be the cost of those CPU cycles expended in making a copy. Whose computer is making the copy? And whose network is being used to distribute that copy?
Comment by Samir Chopra — August 30, 2007 @ 7:24 am
Samir,
Many this deluge of posts is affecting our ability to read each other’s posts. To quote myself Samir:
“There is nothing delivered in terms of content that does not have some cost to it right now, so I am happy and willing to have this conversation when it happens.”
I am precisely saying what are you saying: there is no such thing right now as something that is completely zero cost, because of the need to deliver goods: hence with software, you don’t really charge for the content but then you charge for the peripherals: the medium to delivery it, the support to service it etc, and yes it assumes that people have access to the net, which again is supported and must be supported by a vast system of tax and private dollars.
But the point being you don’t lock up the data with legal codes and then depending on structural conditions, the digital content may or may not be accessible. The point being is you took one barrier away; it was never implied that that was the aboselute, entire, solution (did I really say that??).
And indeed, not everyone has access to the Internet world over, but in many parts of Latin America, especially in the big cities, for example, it is easier for folks to access works on the Internet than in their library. In other places, like parts of Nigeria, it is impossible to get either and hence the debate in some ways is moot. For many types of organizing, the Internet is, as you point out, useless.
I am just saying that if you want to GPL something, you can charge for it, but you have to make it available for free, which includes putting it on the internet as well as making it available on a CD to send to folks. Of course they will still need material goods to use it; I am not that naive
but it still gets rid of a barrier and does not lock up the material/content so that given the right infrastructural conditions, it can be delivered.
Comment by Biella — August 30, 2007 @ 8:19 am
Biella,
I am confused; I gave you an example of an object that does not conform to the implication that you found so correct – because I wanted to show you that its possible to have objects that have libre freedom but not ‘free as in free beer’ freedom (remember, Karl was saying “If Libre then Free as in Free Beer”). After I provided my example, you described it as hypothetical, and said “To be sure I can imagine such an object but in a world that is vastly different in terms of political economy.” I wanted to point out that those objects are available in this world, with its political economy. Right? But then you said “There is nothing delivered in terms of content that does not have some cost to it right now, so I am happy and willing to have this conversation when it happens.” (perhaps those two sentences of yours above are in conflict? my apologies if I’m still misinterpreting something – you might be right in that engaging in long online debates can cloud the mind!)
To get to your earlier question, in an ideal world, what I’d like is for the publisher (whoever it might be) to do the following:
1. Make some copies for the library market (hard-bound) to deal with issues like longevity (the kind of things that David was referring to) and access to broader demographics (folks who don’t have access to the net, or the money to buy the paperback version).
2. Some copies in paperback for people who would prefer that medium for reading, borrowing, lending etc. The good old paperback is really quite an amazing piece of technology.
3. The whole book available online for downloading, copying, transferring all over the place etc.
I’m not quite sure how this would all be paid for, but I’m speaking right now of proximate possible worlds.
Comment by Samir Choprara Chopra — August 30, 2007 @ 11:10 am
hmm well, i am taking a break from this until maybe sat or sunday. we have non stop guests and i am stillll trying to finalize my syllabi. so, until then, /me ducks out.
b
Comment by Biella — August 30, 2007 @ 11:58 am