Kottke’s guest blogger has posted a fantastic interview with Cory Doctorow on copyright, 21st century literature, and appropriately compensating artists for the indexing and public availability of their work :
“You know, the fact that Amazon or Google want to show quotes from your book alongside search results for people who are trying to find out which books contain which string, I think it’s just crazy to say that you deserve to be compensated for that even if they could figure out a way to make money off of it. Indexing books is just not in the realm of things that we deserve to get compensated for, any more than library lending is.
And I know that in Europe they do have a library right, and you actually do get compensated for library use. I actually think that’s kind of gross. I don’t think that’s good public policy. If we want to subsidize writers with public money, don’t take it out of the budget of the library. What a disaster for public policy, for good stewardship, to take money out the hands of the public libraries. What a disaster that writers have actually endorsed this plan.”
If that doesn’t provide a clear enough picture of his position on digital re-distribution of copyright works, here’s what he says in the bio on his personal website:
“I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes.”
At the risk of violating my personal prohibition against bandwagon-jumping and/or endorsing unabashed declarations of historical inevitability… can I get an amen, brothers and sisters?
In any case, I think the “library right” to which he refers in the first quote above may be the “rental and lending right” established in Directive 1992/100/EEC (since replaced by Directive 2006/115/EC), although my familiarity with law there is not sufficient for me to say so with any great degree of certainty.
In Canada we have the Public Lending Right Commission. According to it’s FAQ, the Commission disbributes payment to authors of registered “works of fiction, poetry, drama, children’s books, scholarly books, and general non-fiction” that meet certain criteria, with compensation being based on their presence in the catalogues of a representative sample of Canadian public libraries rather than tied to circulation statistics or any other measure of use.
In February of this year, $9 million in public funds were distributed among some 15,000 authors (an average payment of $588 per author). Given that compensation was capped at a maximum of $281.05 per title, I guess that means the ‘average’ compensated author has 2.09 works in the registry; however, compensation is calculated using a sliding scale whereby recent works are worth more than older ones.
I can’t help but wonder if Cory, an ex-pat Canadian, has registered any of his numerous titles?
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