Quite the debate been going on about on-line publishing. Cory Doctorow, who is a well known SF author, and relentless, if interesting, self-publicist (Actually, isn't that more or less the definition of a blogger?) blew a ring when the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, who as a group posted a take-down notice on various science fiction writers works on Scribd.
Doctorow's beef was that his works were also targetted in the DMCA notice, and what with their being under the Creative Commons licence, then firstly, they can be distributed without permission or penalty, and secondly, he never asked the SFWA to do any such thing for him. His piece can be found here. He's pretty torqued.
That created a real backlash from one of the SF's other active Internet writers, the venerable Jerry Pournelle, who took the contrarian view that what Scribd was doing was copyright infringement of works of authors both living and dead, and that the SFWA was the one effective shared group that could intervene on the author's behalf.
SWFA has decided by a vote that it will no longer work to issue takedown notices, and so on. Pournelle wrote an open letter to the SFWA, which I will post here in full because I cannot seem to get any kind of reasonable permalinks to Chaos Manor, and given that it is an open letter, then I think that the intention is that is should get a wider audience.
"Dear Michael,
Frankly, sir, while I expected this action, I am greatly
disappointed. It was predictable, but I did have some hopes.
Anyway, it's over. SFWA has caved, authors -- and their estates --
are on their own, and that is an end to it. We lost the battle, and
probably the war. The white flag is up. That does not mean that we can
or should concede the moral high ground. SFWA was on the right side in
this. We were on the side of the authors. That is where an author's
association has to be.
We will test the hypothesis that defending copyright against
electronic piracy is not important, because absent some organization to
do it for us, most authors will be unwilling or unable to go to that
much effort. Despite SCRIBD.com's PR representative saying that the
procedure needed to get them to remove a copyrighted work is not
onerous, most will find it so. I have posted the model of a letter that
worked. Whether someone will do that for the dozens of works I have
identified in about 45 minutes of work examining their site is another
matter. (I have elsewhere listed about fifty copyrighted works available
on scribd including just about everything Jack Chalker wrote. Eva is
Jack's widow.) Eva's web site makes it pretty clear that she's not up to
doing that for Jack's work which I find all over that place. I think
that is true of many estates.
I understand your position here, and absent some groundswell of
membership support which never materialized I don't think you had any
choice in the matter. I'm not disappointed in you. It is never pleasant
to be the general of a defeated army, and you have my sympathy. We lost,
and it wasn't your fault.
I am disappointed in SFWA collectively. We have caved, and quickly,
without much of a fight; but that was done by the membership which
allowed one view to prevail. I wonder if it actually does represent the
views of the entire membership, but given the one-sided way in which the
issues were presented out there on the web, perhaps so. Over time the
real truths of the issues involved will come out: the conflict of the
rights of those who want their works displayed for free download, and
those who are trying to protect electronic copyright. In the one case, a
few were deprived of the right of public display for a limited time. In
the other, entire works, indeed an entire lifetime of work, is offered
to anyone who cares to take it without the author's consent. To put
those two issues as morally equivalent is bizarre.
The effect of SFWA's caving is going to be wholesale abandonment of
any attempts to enforce electronic copyright. A few of us have the
resources to carry on as individuals, but there is no one to do it for
estates and for the many writers who don't have a sophisticated group of
readers and subscribers already organized. The effect is going to be
that there will be a few efforts to defend a few individual copyrights
-- Harlan's team comes to mind -- but for the most part the "practice of
the industry" will be abandonment of any such attempts.
I do not know the long term effects of that. They may be nil.
But I do believe that an important event happened this weekend, and
even though this action by the Board was predictable, I certainly do not
see it as joyful.
As to my own tactics: my apologies if you find them offensive;
believe me, I do not intend you any personal injury. I think you had no
choice. But I do want to make sure everyone understands just who has won
here, and what those who won stand for. I have already seen some signs
that the PR battle did not go quite as expected for scribd and its
champions. I have heard a few apologies from erstwhile supporters of
what they thought scribd and its supporters wanted. I expect more as
readers begin to understand the issues.
I think it's important that people know that whatever its faults,
SFWA was on the right side in this; that we have not one damned thing to
be ashamed of; that we owe no apologies to a web site that allows and
encourages the wholesale infringement of the copyrights of authors dead
and alive, yet claims to be the aggrieved party when an author's
association attempts, first by polite inquiry and notice and finally by
the only means that seems to affect scribd, to act for authors and their
estates. That scribd has the support of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and its legal resources was certainly a factor in your
decision; but while that adds to scribd's power to intimidate, it is not
I think anything for EFF to be proud of, nor does it add to scribd's
moral authority.
I do not concede any part of the moral high ground to SCRIBD and its
sycophants whether those be inside or outside SFWA, and I do not believe
that SFWA ought to make any such concession.
We can regret that a few people were temporarily deprived of the
privilege of having their works available for free download from scribd
but I am damned if I will equate that ethically or morally with what
scribd is doing -- continues to do -- to authors and their widows and
orphans. They damned well do not have any right to the moral high
ground.
SFWA has lost a battle and probably the war. I am sorry we had to run
up the white flag. But I will not apologize for being in the battle, and
I will not concede that scribd and its minions have the moral or ethical
high ground.
SFWA did and does have the moral right of it.
Jerry Pournelle
Chaos Manor"
So, it would be easy to take a view that the old man and the young man cannot agree on how the world should be. But Pournelle has a legal and moral point, that the writer cannot live for free, and so the once reasonable expectation of making a living from your writing, is now gone more or less for good. Doctorow knows it, and has given up trying to make a living exclusively from writing, if he even tried. But the point is that the technology has rendered any other decision practically speaking impossible.
I think that the best description of this dilemma that I ever saw was from Neal Stephenson, who is as amazing a writer as I can think of. He put it thusly in an interview with Slashdot. (I'll quote again at length, as the insightfulness of the response is wonderful.
"Questioner:
Science Fiction is normally relegated to the specialist publications
rather than having reviews in the main stream press. Seen as "fringe"
and a bit sad its seldom reviewed with anything more than condescension
by the "quality" press.
Does it bother you that people like Jeffery Archer or Jackie Collins
seem to get more respect for their writing than you ?
"
"Neal:
OUCH!
(removes mirrorshades, wipes tears, blows nose, composes self)
Let me just come at this one from sort of a big picture point of view.
(the sound of a million Slashdot readers hitting the "back" button...)
First of all, I don't think that the condescending "quality" press look
too kindly on Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer. So I disagree with the
premise of the last sentence of this question and I'm not going to
address it. Instead I'm going to answer what I think MosesJones is
really getting at, which is why SF and other genre and popular writers
don't seem to get a lot of respect from the literary world.
To set it up, a brief anecdote: a while back, I went to a writers'
conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically
acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never
heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me
"And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would
ask another "And which distro do you use?"
I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.
Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"
"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say,
since she already knew that.
"Yes, but what do you do?"
I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered
it!
"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make
money?" she tried.
"From...being a writer," I stammered.
At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She
wasn't snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the
sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely
different creature from the sort she generally associated with.
And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation,
I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify
artists is by to whom they are accountable.
The great artists of the Italian Renaissance were accountable to
wealthy entities who became their patrons or gave them commissions. In
many cases there was no other way to arrange it. There is only one
Sistine Chapel. Not just anyone could walk in and start daubing paint
on the ceiling. Someone had to be the gatekeeper---to hire an artist
and give him a set of more or less restrictive limits within which he
was allowed to be creative. So the artist was, in the end, accountable
to the Church. The Church's goal was to build a magnificent structure
that would stand there forever and provide inspiration to the
Christians who walked into it, and they had to make sure that
Michelangelo would carry out his work accordingly.
Similar arrangements were made by writers. After Dante was banished
from Florence he found a patron in the Prince of Verona, for example.
And if you look at many old books of the Baroque period you find the
opening pages filled with florid expressions of gratitude from the
authors to their patrons. It's the same as in a modern book when it
says "this work was supported by a grant from the XYZ Foundation."
Nowadays we have different ways of supporting artists. Some painters,
for example, make a living selling their work to wealthy collectors. In
other cases, musicians or artists will find appointments at
universities or other cultural institutions. But in both such cases
there is a kind of accountability at work.
A wealthy art collector who pays a lot of money for a painting does not
like to see his money evaporate. He wants to feel some confidence that
if he or an heir decides to sell the painting later, they'll be able to
get an amount of money that is at least in the same ballpark. But that
price is going to be set by the market---it depends on the perceived
value of the painting in the art world. And that in turn is a function
of how the artist is esteemed by critics and by other collectors. So
art criticism does two things at once: it's culture, but it's also
economics.
There is also a kind of accountability in the case of, say, a composer
who has a faculty job at a university. The trustees of the university
have got a fiduciary responsibility not to throw away money. It's not
the same as hiring a laborer in factory, whose output can be easily
reduced to dollars and cents. Rather, the trustees have to justify the
composer's salary by pointing to intangibles. And one of those
intangibles is the degree of respect accorded that composer by critics,
musicians, and other experts in the field: how often his works are
performed by symphony orchestras, for example.
Accountability in the writing profession has been bifurcated for many
centuries. I already mentioned that Dante and other writers were
supported by patrons at least as far back as the Renaissance. But I
doubt that Beowulf was written on commission. Probably there was a
collection of legends and tales that had been passed along in an oral
tradition---which is just a fancy way of saying that lots of people
liked those stories and wanted to hear them told. And at some point
perhaps there was an especially well-liked storyteller who pulled a few
such tales together and fashioned them into the what we now know as
Beowulf. Maybe there was a king or other wealthy patron who then caused
the tale to be written down by a scribe. But I doubt it was created at
the behest of a king. It was created at the behest of lots and lots of
intoxicated Frisians sitting around the fire wanting to hear a yarn.
And there was no grand purpose behind its creation, as there was with
the painting of the Sistine Chapel.
The novel is a very new form of art. It was unthinkable until the
invention of printing and impractical until a significant fraction of
the population became literate. But when the conditions were right, it
suddenly became huge. The great serialized novelists of the 19th
Century were like rock stars or movie stars. The printing press and the
apparatus of publishing had given these creators a means to bypass
traditional arbiters and gatekeepers of culture and connect directly to
a mass audience. And the economics worked out such that they didn't
need to land a commission or find a patron in order to put bread on the
table. The creators of those novels were therefore able to have a
connection with a mass audience and a livelihood fundamentally
different from other types of artists.
Nowadays, rock stars and movie stars are making all the money. But the
publishing industry still works for some lucky novelists who find a way
to establish a connection with a readership sufficiently large to put
bread on their tables. It's conventional to refer to these as
"commercial" novelists, but I hate that term, so I'm going to call them
Beowulf writers.
But this is not true for a great many other writers who are every bit
as talented and worthy of finding readers. And so, in addition, we have
got an alternate system that makes it possible for those writers to
pursue their careers and make their voices heard. Just as Renaissance
princes supported writers like Dante because they felt it was the right
thing to do, there are many affluent persons in modern society who, by
making donations to cultural institutions like universities, support
all sorts of artists, including writers. Usually they are called
"literary" as opposed to "commercial" but I hate that term too, so I'm
going to call them Dante writers. And this is what I mean when I speak
of a bifurcated system.
Like all tricks for dividing people into two groups, this is
simplistic, and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But there is a
cultural difference between these two types of writers, rooted in to
whom they are accountable, and it explains what MosesJones is
complaining about. Beowulf writers and Dante writers appear to have the
same job, but in fact there is a quite radical difference between
them---hence the odd conversation that I had with my fellow author at
the writer's conference. Because she'd never heard of me, she made the
quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer---one so new or
obscure that she'd never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary
criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I
couldn't be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely
teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her
straight, I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me
was because I was famous.
All of this places someone like me in critical limbo. As everyone
knows, there are literary critics, and journals that publish their
work, and I imagine they have the same dual role as art critics. That
is, they are engaging in intellectual discourse for its own sake. But
they are also performing an economic function by making judgments.
These judgments, taken collectively, eventually determine who's deemed
worthy of receiving fellowships, teaching appointments, etc.
The relationship between that critical apparatus and Beowulf writers is
famously awkward and leads to all sorts of peculiar misunderstandings.
Occasionally I'll take a hit from a critic for being somehow arrogant
or egomaniacal, which is difficult to understand from my point of view
sitting here and just trying to write about whatever I find
interesting. To begin with, it's not clear why they think I'm any more
arrogant than anyone else who writes a book and actually expects that
someone's going to read it. Secondly, I don't understand why they think
that this is relevant enough to rate mention in a review. After all, if
I'm going to eat at a restaurant, I don't care about the chef's
personality flaws---I just want to eat good food. I was slagged for
entitling my latest book "The System of the World" by one critic who
found that title arrogant. That criticism is simply wrong; the critic
has completely misunderstood why I chose that title. Why on earth would
anyone think it was arrogant? Well, on the Dante side of the
bifurcation it's implicit that authority comes from the top down, and
you need to get in the habit of deferring to people who are older and
grander than you. In that world, apparently one must never select a
grand-sounding title for one's book until one has reached Nobel Prize
status. But on my side, if I'm trying to write a book about a bunch of
historical figures who were consciously trying to understand and invent
the System of the World, then this is an obvious choice for the title
of the book. The same argument, I believe, explains why the accusation
of having a big ego is considered relevant for inclusion in a book
review. Considering the economic function of these reviews (explained
above) it is worth pointing out which writers are and are not suited
for participating in the somewhat hierarchical and political community
of Dante writers. Egomaniacs would only create trouble.
Mind you, much of the authority and seniority in that world is
benevolent, or at least well-intentioned. If you are trying to become a
writer by taking expensive classes in that subject, you want your
teacher to know more about it than you and to behave like a teacher.
And so you might hear advice along the lines of "I don't think you're
ready to tackle Y yet, you need to spend a few more years honing your
skills with X" and the like. All perfectly reasonable. But people on
the Beowulf side may never have taken a writing class in their life.
They just tend to lunge at whatever looks interesting to them, write
whatever they please, and let the chips fall where they may. So we may
seem not merely arrogant, but completely unhinged. It reminds me
somewhat of the split between Christians and Faeries depicted in
Susannah Clarke's wonderful book "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell."
The faeries do whatever they want and strike the Christians (humans) as
ludicrously irresponsible and "barely sane." They don't seem to deserve
or appreciate their freedom.
Later at the writer's conference, I introduced myself to someone who
was responsible for organizing it, and she looked at me keenly and
said, "Ah, yes, you're the one who's going to bring in our males
18-32." And sure enough, when we got to the venue, there were the males
18-32, looking quite out of place compared to the baseline lit-festival
crowd. They stood at long lines at the microphones and asked me one
question after another while ignoring the Dante writers sitting at the
table with me. Some of the males 18-32 were so out of place that they
seemed to have warped in from the Land of Faerie, and had the
organizers wondering whether they should summon the police. But in the
end they were more or less reasonable people who just wanted to talk
about books and were as mystified by the literary people as the
literary people were by them.
In the same vein, I just got back from the National Book Festival on
the Capitol Mall in D.C., where I crossed paths for a few minutes with
Neil Gaiman. This was another event in which Beowulf writers and Dante
writers were all mixed together. The organizers had queues set up in
front of signing tables. Neil had mentioned on his blog that he was
going to be there, and so hundreds, maybe thousands of his readers had
showed up there as early as 5:30 a.m. to get stuff signed. The
organizers simply had not anticipated this and so---very much to their
credit---they had to make all sorts of last-minute rearrangements to
accomodate the crowd. Neil spent many hours signing. As he says on his
blog
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp
the Washington Post later said he did this because he was a "savvy
businessman." Of course Neil was actually doing it to be polite; but
even simple politeness to one's fans can seem grasping and cynical when
viewed from the other side.
Because of such reactions, I know that certain people are going to read
this screed as further evidence that I have a big head. But let me make
at least a token effort to deflect this by stipulating that the system
I am describing here IS NOT FAIR and that IT MAKES NO SENSE and that I
don't deserve to have the freedom that is accorded a Beowulf writer
when many talented and excellent writers---some of them good friends of
mine---end up selling small numbers of books and having to cultivate
grants, fellowships, faculty appointments, etc.
Anyway, most Beowulf writing is ignored by the critical apparatus or
lightly made fun of when it's noticed at all. Literary critics know
perfectly well that nothing they say is likely to have much effect on
sales. Let's face it, when Neil Gaiman publishes Anansi Boys, all of
his readers are going to know about it through his site and most of
them are going to buy it and none of them is likely to see a review in
the New York Review of Books, or care what that review says.
So what of MosesJones's original question, which was entitled "The lack
of respect?" My answer is that I don't pay that much notice to these
things because I am aware at some level that I am on one side of the
bifurcation and most literary critics are on the other, and we simply
are not that relevant to each other's lives and careers.
What is most interesting to me is when people make efforts to "route
around" the apparatus of literary criticism and publish their thoughts
about books in place where you wouldn't normally look for book reviews.
For example, a year ago there was a piece by Edward Rothstein in the
New York Times about Quicksilver that appears to have been a sort of
wildcat review. He just got interested in the book and decided to write
about it, independent of the New York Times's normal book-reviewing
apparatus. It is not the first time such a thing has happened with one
of my books.
It has happened many times in history that new systems will come along
and, instead of obliterating the old, will surround and encapsulate
them and work in symbiosis with them but otherwise pretty much leave
them alone (think mitochondria) and sometimes I get the feeling that
something similar is happening with these two literary worlds. The fact
that we are having a discussion like this one on a forum such as
Slashdot is Exhibit A."
Which interestingly enough puts Pournelle in the Beowulf camp, and Doctorow in the Literary Criticism side of things, which is not the most obvious of results.
