Money Flows Toward the Mouse

Piracy of Fiction on the Internet was a large question mark on my calendar. On the one hand, I didn’t want to miss it, but it’s such a common topic online I wasn’t sure what else they could say about it in a fifty-minute panel.

Scalzi was moderating, with Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Paul Melko¹ filling the “voice of the industry” roles: Patrick for the publishers, Paul for the writers.

Paul set the tone for the panel by saying that most SF/F writers dream of being popular enough to be pirated. Patrick added Tim O’Reilly’s comment about “an author’s biggest threat is obscurity, not piracy.” The consensus was that nobody is terribly concerned about what’s happening on the Net unless a third party is profiting.

With that out of the way, we still had forty-seven minutes of a fifty-minute panel to fill.

Patrick, who has obviously done a great deal of thinking/talking about this topic, pointed out that when you’re a kid and perfectly positioned to become the sort of voracious reader the publishing industry is built to serve, you’re too poor to take a chance on a new book. The only way to read widely and discover all the things you find fascinating is through libraries and used bookstores. Attacking these readers like the RIAA has their listeners is long-term financial suicide. Paul quoted author Charlie Stross’s two rules: 1) money flows toward the writer, and 2) don’t piss off your fans.

Then they got into the copyright rant that I think we all lined up to hear…

One argument used to defend copyright is that the words making up a book are “intellectual property” and if you write a book you own that combination of words the same way you own a building you’ve built. When you die, your “intellectual property” should be inheritable the same way your physical property is.

Patrick offered a different view: copyright is not the same as physical property because it is technically a licensing monopoly. Someone owns the right to publish — and profit from — a certain creative work for a fixed period of time. Monopolies should not be inherited.

He also pointed out that copyright itself went crazy when Disney got involved. When Walt Disney died, his heirs were terrified that the money machine that was Mickey Mouse, Snow White and Cinderella² would eventually pass into the public domain, allowing anyone to sell Mickey t-shirts or make Snow White: Part Deux without giving them a kickback. Unfortunately for his heirs,³ William Shakespeare did not have the benefit of the American legal system and his works are now free to be reproduced by anyone with a dagger, a skull, and a few friends who can say “forsooth” convincingly. The greatest writer in the history of Western Civilization is in the public domain, but “Steamboat Willie” isn’t. Ah, lawyers.

I then opened another can of worms which they ran out of time dealing with. My real job is computer programming, as a contractor for an international corporation. I write software that allows that company to track, control and analyze their product flow in new ways, enabling them to increase their profit. I pointed out that I do not get a percentage of that new profit; I get a weekly paycheck.

Patrick immediately jumped on this. Waitresses don’t get a cut of the restaurant’s profit. Computer programmers don’t get a cut. Hardly anybody in the world gets a cut unless they run the company. Writers think they’re really special. Merry Haskell coined an evocative phrase: the “fetishization” of the artist.

Patrick and Scalzi agreed writers should have a say “for awhile” just not forever. Scalzi dropped the final bomb when he said “When I die, I want my wife and my daughter to benefit from my work, but I don’t give a shit about my grandkids.”

Next up, SF is not dead, but does it smell funny? Plus, the long shadow of Will Smith.

1. author and South/Central Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America [↩]
2. The last two stolen directly from folk tales, not even invented by the Disney creative team [↩]
3. Whoever they might be; let’s not open that can of worms [↩]