For Grady Booch, the nightmare goes something like this: Deep in the future, a team of archaeologists stumble onto a rare cache of 20th century art, a major assortment of works thought lost to the ravages of time.
The only problem, of course, is that they don’t know it. All the images are recorded in an obsolete digital format, JPEG, and nobody knows how to unscramble the data. As a result, the hard disk containing said artwork spends its days not in a museum but as a coffee coaster in some college professor’s crowded office.
“It might seem silly now, but put yourself 1,000 years in the future,” says Booch, chief scientist at IBM’s Rational Software subsidiary. “It’s not too hard to imagine.”
In an industry where one man’s clever C code is another man’s Linear B, Booch already knows the frustration of playing software archaeologist. As co-developer of the Universal Modeling Language (UML), a mid-1990s effort to create a common “blueprint” notation for object-oriented software programs, he’s spent the last 10 years laboring to spare future programmers the same torment.
It’s an uphill battle on a hill that is only growing steeper. With new programs replacing old and no major company or institution playing the central role of source-code archivist, the amount of software history currently circling the memory hole is scarily large. And even if there were a central institution, recent changes to the copyright code have made the transfer of source code from old media to new forms of storage a dicey prospect, legally. Add it all up, and you have the ideal makings for what some are already calling the “digital dark age.”
“Things are going to be lost not because people don’t want to save them or because the original creators don’t want to save them, but because they can’t save them,” says Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, an institution that has lobbied for a safe harbor within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to shield institutions looking to archive source code.
For Booch, the barriers to software preservation aren’t so much legal as educational. Most developers have come to accept the evolvable nature of software programs. What is lacking is the ability to examine static source-code snapshots with a scholarly, comparative eye. In the interest of encouraging that skill, Booch this fall will lead a seminar on software archaeology and preservation at the newly reopened Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
“Our industry has had a major effect in changing the world,” says Booch, talking over the phone from his Denver, Colo., office. “It would be great if we could preserve the artifacts and interview the architects while they’re still alive.”
Booch isn’t alone. Now that the hysteria surrounding Y2K has faded, developers are free to worry about legacy code again. One increasingly common worry is what to do with it? For every modern offshoot of DOS/Windows, Unix and Macintosh OS evolving with the marketplace, a dozen ghost programs lurk inside yellowed engineering pads, punch-card stacks and slowly degaussing magnetic memories. Even if programmers could get their hands on these programs and find a way to preserve and update their contents, a new question emerges: How do you qualitatively analyze those contents on a historical basis?
“It’s funny,” says Dave Thomas, a Dallas software consultant and co-author, with Andrew Hunt, of “The Pragmatic Programmer,” a 1999 book on software design methods. “Colleges spend a lot of time teaching people how to write code, but very few teach them how to read code. When you think about it, we programmers spend most of our time reading code, not writing code.”
To help fill the gap, Thomas served as cohost of the 2001 Software Archaeology: Understanding Large Systems workshop, hosted by Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Architecture (OOPSLA). Starting with the unifying question, “How do you come to grips with 1,000,000 lines of code right away?” conference speakers traded various tips, tools and techniques acquired through professional and personal encounters with unfamiliar systems.
“Whenever we’re faced with big problems in software, we tend to fall back on metaphors,” says Thomas. “In this case archaeology metaphor happens to be a good one. Sometimes you do archaeology with a backhoe. Sometimes you do it with a toothbrush.”
Those partial to the backhoe approach can use Ward Cunningham’s Signature Survey program. Billed as a “method for browsing unfamiliar code,” Signature Survey scans through source code and compresses lines of text into a single punctuation symbol. Operating on the assumption that a file’s size is proportional to the number of punctuation marks separating individual elements (packages and files in Java, for example), Signature Survey offers a quick guide to programming thickets and areas of quick repetition.
“It’s a satellite system for looking over large bodies of work,” Cunningham says. “It lets you use your own human pattern recognition to see variation over the whole program. It also leads you to interesting parts of the program to read.”
Thomas says his own preferred technique is to import a program’s contents into Microsoft Word and reduce the zoom factor as far as it will go. The resulting 50-page image leaves little for the eye to make out other than jagged patterns of text and blank page. Still, even these patterns can reveal peculiar anomalies in developer mood or style. “Sometimes the structure is easier to see at that level than if you’re digging around line-by-line,” he says.
Both Thomas and Cunningham liken their techniques to the aerial surveys some archaeologists use to spot the overall structure of burial mound networks, neolithic cairn patterns, etc.
“It shows the most interesting places to dig,” says Cunningham.
It also provides a quick way to track the flow of ideas and source code from one program to the next. Cunningham, a man best known on the Web as the creator of the Wiki collaborative online authoring language, has loaned out his forensic talents to companies embroiled in legal disputes over intellectual property and prior art. He’s also used it to refactor, or streamline, his own programs, stripping out redundant sections and commands.
When it comes to the toothbrush level, forensic tools and techniques are still in development. Booch says the fall workshop will discuss ways to analyze the fine structure of programs and to detect the emergence of novel techniques. One potential benefit of such knowledge would be a steep reduction in the number of frivolous patent claims filed by software companies.
“IBM believes in patents. I believe in them, too, but there are a lot that look suspicious,” Booch says. “What better way to check for prior art than to have the source code ready and available for inspection?”
Herein lies the final goal of the fall Computer History Museum conference: to provide a foundation for a future exhibit on classic software programs and to provide a “vocabulary” for the intellectual dissection and discussion of these programs.
“Maybe I’m horribly geeky,” says Booch, “but I find tremendous beauty in looking at well-written software programs. There’s an elegance, a brilliance that we’re only now developing the critical means to describe. We have literary critics. We have art critics. We don’t have any software critics, yet. We need software critics, too.”
Booch and his allies will need to overcome a number of obstacles, first. The largest obstacle at the moment is the lack of a central source code repository. In an online article, Elisabeth Kaplan, an archivist at the University of Minnesota’s Charles Babbage Institute, lays out the frustrating history of software preservation. In 1986 the Computer Museum, a Boston forerunner of the current Computer History Museum, commissioned a report on how to archive software programs. That report identified many of the challenges but left the solutions to future reports. In 1988, the Library of Congress created a Machine Readable Collections Reading Room, essentially a repository of old machines capable of reading out-of-date programs. The project was phased out a few years later, however.
Since then, the topic of preservation has resurfaced every three years or so, a periodic rate roughly coincidental with the upgrade cycle of most commercial software programs, by the way.
“The issue comes up again and again,” says Kaplan. “From an archival perspective, though, it’s just not worth it to put resources into preserving software. There’s just not enough projected use. The fact is, when you add up the amount of people who can use these programs, there are like five of them.”
One institution willing to take up the burden is Kahle’s Internet Archive. The Internet Archive already stores screen shots of Web sites and other artifacts of the digital age. Adding source code to the mix would be easy enough, says staff software preservationist Simon Carless. Unfortunately, legal issues and aging copy-protection mechanisms make it difficult to provide a decent record of historic programs.
Carless says the Digital Millennium Copyright Act clouds the current preservation landscape. Although the 1998 law lets archives make copies of copyright-protected works for preservation purposes, it imposes harsh criminal penalties for any circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms. Rather than risk legal blowback, Carless and the Internet Archive are currently petitioning Congress to clarify that archival organizations are exempt from such penalties.
“Even if you’re an institution that’s allowed to archive stuff, there’s still a possible DMCA problem,” Carless says. “If there’s a physical hardware dongle that restricts copying, are you allowed to emulate that dongle to get the software running or does that qualify as a circumvention? We don’t know.”
Carless and the Internet Archive have recently requested that Congress expand its list of exemptions to Sec. 1201 of the DMCA, the portion that prohibits the circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms, to include software source-code preservation efforts. While waiting for a response, the Internet Archive has built a page displaying famous programs currently on the brink of software extinction.
In a similar attempt to rally the public, the Computer History Museum’s Booch has sent out surveys asking programmers to nominate “classic” programs for a potential source-code exhibit. The list, originally intended to be a Top 50, already includes more than 150 games, applications, tools and programming languages. He hopes to devote the upcoming seminar to discussing how to present such programs to the public in a way that encourages further study and preservation.
“There’s a great difference between walking up and showing somebody the Illiac and showing them the original source code for Lotus 1,2, 3,” Booch admits.
Booch hopes to ally the preservation movement with two powerful forces: the World Wide Web and the open-source software community. Both have already proven invaluable in the preservation and publication of coding techniques, he says. He also plans to lobby companies with a stake in seeing their early works preserved.
Though Booch is hesitant to predict a donation of the original DOS source code from Microsoft, he has spoken with archivists inside the Redmond-based company wrestling with the same ideas. He also holds out hope that, with a little schmoozing and a little ego massage, the Computer History Museum might be able to encourage a more direct form of participation.
“Imagine somebody 100 years from now watching Bill Gates explaining the structures of his first program,” says Booch, throwing out yet another hypothetical scenario. “Just think: Fox could have a reality show on software programming.”
Booth punctuates his dream scenario with a quick laugh: “Actually, that’s pretty scary when you think about it.”
In an otherwise civil discussion of “Downton Abbey’s” second season, actor Hugh Bonneville let loose on an interviewer who casually let it slip that she’d gone online and viewed a pirated version of the British period drama’s Christmas special, which aired in the U.K. in December but won’t hit PBS until Feb. 19. This turned out to be the wrong thing to tell the man who plays proud patriarch Robert Crawley.
“I wish you hadn’t told me you watched it illegally,” said Bonneville, choosing words that suggested he shouldn’t be writing dialogue for the nobleman otherwise known as the Earl of Grantham. “That’s really pissing me off. Shame on you. Be ashamed.”
Like so many other nerdy “Downton” fans, I also greedily consumed the Christmas special over the holidays in some dark corner of the Internet — but without feeling any such shame.
The reason? Over the past few years, with potential spoilers lurking behind every clicked Web link, rabid American fans of cult-friendly British programming have grown increasingly frustrated that television hasn’t truly gone global. Well into the age of YouTube, iTunes and on-demand viewing, obsessive fans are still thwarted by international restrictions that prevent them from accessing episodes as they become available, even on official sites. And the region-specific system of DVD coding still exists to drive all but the most tech-savvy Anglophiles from ordering copies when they are released overseas (as the second season of “Downton Abbey” was back in November).
Instead, fans are forced to make an outdated choice: Wait it out — sometimes for months — until new episodes of our favorite overseas shows make their U.S. debuts, or find pirated versions somewhere online that abet a ravenous craving to stuff their eyeholes with tweedy goodness. (The controversial SOPA bill, stalled indefinitely in Congress after protests, were aimed, in part, at stopping this kind of downloading. Sites like the Pirate Bay, hosted by overseas servers, often contain access to torrents of full seasons of shows; but truth is, a good Google search will turn up much of what you’re looking for, as well.)
With the old model of importing shows at the speed of a steamship chugging across the Atlantic as obsolete as Mr. Carson’s job in an industrialized Britain, and with few sensible solutions, it’s no surprise that a growing number of superfans feel like their piracy is justified. (Especially when PBS is free anyway! Who loses?)
“I only download when it’s something I just can’t bear to wait for,” says a Brooklyn-based friend of mine, who requested anonymity not for fear of getting outed as a mega-geek but of being charged with copyright infringement. A self-described “nerdy American Gen-Xer who grew up watching the classic ‘Doctor Who’ series when it aired on PBS in the ’70s and ’80s,” he has no qualms about using outlaw means to watch his pet programs, which include ITV’s “Downton Abbey” and the BBC’s boffo “Sherlock” adaptation.
He says that he does so for two logical reasons — for his own gratification, and so that he can geek out with his English friends and others who have viewed the shows as they air or shortly thereafter. But he also says that the versions that air here are subtly different than they were in the U.K.
“I’m kind of wary of waiting for British TV to show up on PBS or BBC America,” he says. “It’s not only the time lag that’s maddening, but the way those versions of the shows sometimes get edited. PBS rejiggered the first season of ‘Downton Abbey’ for reasons I still don’t understand, and BBC America sometimes cuts down shows to jam in more commercials and adds gratuitous intros or voice-overs that I have no use for.”
According to Rebecca Eaton, the executive producer of “Masterpiece Theatre,” there’s not much PBS can do about either problem. In an interview, she jokingly refers to people like my friend as “pirates” and further disparages them by growling “arrrrgh” in her best Blackbeard voice. But it’s with a sense of humor and resignation. “We are completely separate networks, and we program differently than ITV,” she explains. “It’s literally the difference between the way one network broadcasts and the way the other one does.”
When I press Eaton to elaborate on what might be holding them back from making the episodes available more quickly, she is quick to say, “ITV is a commercial station, they have ads, and their shows have to be reformatted to fit the ‘Masterpiece’ time slots.” The reformatting includes editing for length and adding PBS branding. “And ‘Masterpiece,’ every year, has to avoid certain weeks because of pledge,” she adds. “It’s a puzzle of where to fit programs in here.” Her advice to fans here in the States: embrace the concept of delayed gratification.
Eaton does admit that, with a bit of scheduling luck, the turnaround time could be shortened, to a month or so instead of four, as it was with both “Downton” seasons. But, she says, people would still complain about not being able to watch episodes in sync with the Brits. “If they aired a day later,” she says, “illegal pirating would be going on.”
BBC America has satisfied many U.S.-based “Doctor Who” aficionados by airing new episodes of the exuberantly bizarre sci-fi program on the same calendar day as the BBC. “We listened to our fans who wanted to be part of a global conversation,” said Richard De Croce, BBC America’s senior vice president of programming. While the feed still arrives to East Coast viewers a few hours after it airs in the U.K., it’s not much different than American networks delaying broadcasts so that viewers in Western time zones can watch in prime time. But unlike PBS, BBC America has the benefit of being part of the BBC.
So why haven’t TV entities and producers from both countries gotten together and figured out a solution to the issue, especially when there are so many fanatics on both sides of the pond — and, to be clear, this problem goes in both directions — who would be willing to pay for the pleasure, and legality, of instantaneous viewing?
Until international immediacy is embraced by the television industry as a whole, American superfans of British programming who aren’t into delayed gratification will continue to seek out ways to view their shows as if they lived abroad. And, as any shoplifter could tell you, there is an associative thrill that comes with sneaking stuff out of the store. When I asked her to take a stab at what Maggie Smith’s gloriously wry Dowager Countess might say about all of this, Eaton summed up the issue nicely: “Piracy, how thrilling!”
Over the last few weeks, Salon has been looking at the destruction of the creative class by the Internet, the recession and a transforming economy. A new book, “Free Ride,” by the journalist Robert Levine, intersects with some of these concerns. Subtitled “How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back,” Levine’s book looks at how publishing, the music industry, newspapers and other industries drank the dot.com Kool-Aid, effectively killing themselves off. He’s particularly interested in copyright, the U.S. government’s role in unleashing the Internet and the impact of digital piracy.
Levine, a former Billboard executive editor who has also contributed to Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and the New York Times, asks, effectively: Can the culture business survive the digital age? It’s a welcome reconsideration after the cheerleading that has greeted the Web and the structural changes in the U.S. economy. We spoke to the Berlin- and New York-based Levine about how we got here and where we go next.
The Internet has caused a revolution, and in any revolution there are winners and losers. How do you think that’s worked out here? Who’s won and who’s lost, so far?
I think the revolution is still ongoing. The short-term losers are media companies. The short-term winners are technology companies. The long-term loser is everyone. I don’t think anyone wins. The premise of my book is that most online companies rely for their content, and hence for their money, on traditional media companies. If they destroy that business model, it’s unclear what they’re going to have to distribute. If you look at YouTube, eight of the top 10 videos are major-label music videos. If the major labels shrank to the point where they can’t make videos, YouTube isn’t much of a business. It’s still a great social phenomenon, but it’s not much of a business.
Was this inevitable, or were there policy choices that led to this state of affairs?
Oh, I think it’s all policy choices. It’s inevitable that there would be a problem, but technology creates uncertainty and regulation solves uncertainty. When the car was [created], no one knew how fast you were allowed to drive. We came up with speed limits and that solved some of the uncertainty – didn’t solve it perfectly, but it made the roads safer. As copying technology evolved, we came up with other copyright laws to regulate it. Media companies thrived. Technology companies thrived. And despite not liking each other, they thrived together. A VCR isn’t very valuable if you can’t rent any good movies. Movies aren’t very valuable if you can’t watch them on a VCR. Then [Congress] came up with the DMCA, which I think was sort of the original sin. The idea was we have to say something before you want to take something that infringes on copyright down…
And DMCA is?
I’m sorry, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The important provision was notice and takedown. You have safe harbor from copyright liability if you follow this notice and takedown procedure. It turns 300 years of copyright law on its head by making it an opt-out system instead of an opt-in system. Dozens of sites will use this interview until you specifically tell them not to. That’s very different from “they can’t use it until they ask for permission.” What that does is it destroys the market.
One of the desirable things that copyright laws do is create some kind of market for intellectual property. We’ve had that for 300 years. That should change and it should evolve, but what we’re doing now is we’re dismantling that market. I think that’s really scary, because, first of all, you are going to see a lot of job loss. Secondly, I think you’re going to see the quality of things get affected. You see that happening with newspapers already. Third, I think the whole system suffers. Google News is not as useful if there’s not as much news to Google. I mean, Google is an information search tool, right? It’s not a moral issue. But the problem you’ve created, you create a very powerful incentive for somebody to create a better search engine. You eliminate [the] incentive to create better journalism. That is a problem.
Music was one of the first businesses to get hit hard. What happened there? Was it all piracy?
This is one of those questions that is hard to answer. It’s very hard to say exactly what caused what, and I would argue that separating those things out is impossible. Right now, the single biggest problem with CD sales is all the stores where you used to buy CDs are closed. Well, what caused that? Well, people started buying songs online. That became a problem because people were only buying singles instead of albums and they weren’t spending a lot. Well, why did that happen? Because piracy put so much downward pressure on prices that you have to take any deal, whether it’s a good deal or a bad deal. It’s very hard to separate these things. Any study where people say this has nothing to do with piracy is a bunch of bullshit.
When the Internet emerged, we thought we would be dropping the middleman out of this, that musicians and artists would connect directly with their fans.
The middleman hasn’t been eliminated. There’s a new middleman. YouTube is the new middleman. YouTube, just now, was giving professional content creators advances against future royalties. Is it a good middleman? I don’t know. YouTube has a lot of good technology. They obviously have other advantages. It could be a smart deal. It depends on the advance; it depends on what you want. But I would say that the idea that YouTube is fundamentally different from a record company is silly. YouTube probably has a higher percentage of the market for online video than all four major labels combined have of recorded music. Who’s stopping their market power? No one, and everyone is saying it’s a progressive thing.
Europe has responded a little differently to piracy and assaults on copyright. What effect has it had?
Well, I think it’s two things. One is, in continental European law, there’s a different tradition of copyright. One of my problems with the “copyleft” is that you don’t hear that. If you read Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu and all those sort of copyleft books, and there are 25 or 30 of them, you’ll see copyright is a limited monopoly and a balance between the author and the public interest, if you will. That is very true. It’s the roots of Anglo-American copyright law. What you rarely hear is that the French tradition – and this applies, to varying degrees, to a lot of other countries in Europe – copyright is a fundamental right. It is your work and you have a fundamental right to it. What’s interesting is you have a lot of people talking about the right to remix. In Europe, not only is there very little legal support for a right to remix, there’s a decent amount of support for a right not to be remixed. You have a right to the paternity and the integrity of your work. It’s a moral right. So someone says, “I want to remix Rob Levine’s book so that every 10 words it’s going to say: Rob Levine eats stinky poo” – by the way, I’m fairly certain that somebody would call this an art project – I can say, “No. I have a right to my work.” I think a lot of people would find that very reasonable.
The idea that the Internet is somehow immune from law or regulation or the protection of people’s rights has been seen as a progressive idea. It’s the “free and open Internet.” But if you really think about that for a second, that’s not a progressive argument. It’s a libertarian argument, because the same regulations that annoy you might be the regulations that protect me.
From the beginning, hasn’t the Internet been framed as the second coming of the Wild West?
I think it’s been framed as the second coming of Jesus H. Christ in full 3-D Cinerama Smell-O-Vision. Look, a lot of very smart people believe the Internet will change things that won’t change because they come out of human nature. Like people look at Wikipedia and they say, “See. People will all work together. We don’t need regulations.” I think that Wikipedia is a great thing but I wouldn’t want to change my system of government based on the 10-year track record of Wikipedia. Right? It gets a little wacky. People like to cooperate; people like to give things away. Yes, but people also like to violate the rights of other people. I want certain kinds of protections.
Your book is about several industries. You talk about the music industry, the movie industry, publishing, etc. I wonder if there is a common mistake that you saw most or all of these industries make along the way?
Yes. Listening to people who don’t have your interest in mind – they have their own interest in mind. When Google says newspapers should be free on the Internet, they may really believe that, but you also have to keep in mind that it’s a huge help to them. Right? I was on a panel a couple of weeks ago and this guy from Creative Commons said: “You should concentrate on art; you shouldn’t worry so much about these contracts.” That’s exactly what any artist should never do. The record company guy does not want to make you money; he wants to make him money. Same with your concert promoter. Same with Google. They are not on your side. They’re on their side. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, because Google’s greed and self-interest has led to the creation of a valuable company, and many jobs, and some really remarkable technology, but it’s the government’s job to make sure they don’t trample the rights of other people.
How often is free speech used as a cudgel against copyright that claims free speech?
Several times a minute. Free speech is very important in the U.S. It’s a more important value than copyright. In most countries it is. But there’s an argument on the other side. There’s a great quote by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor that says: “The Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression. By establishing the marketable right to the use of one’s expression, copyright supplies an economic incentive to create and disseminate.” That’s a pretty powerful argument on the other side.
Her argument, which I think is yours, is that copyright doesn’t inhibit free speech, but encourages free speech.
I think it does both to different degrees. It’s not that simple. Let me be clear, I hammer on that Justice O’Connor quote because it’s not something you’ll see in a lot of other books. But this is a complicated issue. Copyright often encourages free speech. It sometimes inhibits free speech. The idea that copyright is the be-all and end-all of free expression is simplistic. The idea that it inhibits free speech is simplistic. I think this is true of politics in general, but everyone argues about stuff like a 4-year-old.
Entertainment companies talk about digital theft. In my mind, that’s not a useful way to talk about a problem. The problem is copyright infringement. If you download my book illegally, I’m not angry. I hope you don’t. If a lot of people do it, I’ll be angry. The idea that someone is going to download my book illegally doesn’t bother me. The idea that someone is selling advertising against that transaction and profiting from it really does upset me. There’s just a lot more nuance there. You have one side calling it digital theft and saying that downloading things is a moral wrong. You’d have to ask a philosopher. Then you have another side saying you have the right to see movies. Well, that’s even dumber. I don’t think anyone is going to go to hell for downloading “Iron Man 2.” But saying you have the right to download it is also pretty silly.
We need to look at what copyright was meant to do. It was not meant to inhibit the copying you do at home. It was meant to give you monopoly that’s limited in scope and that’s limited in time to profit from your own work. That’s what I want. I want to have a monopoly on profiting from my own work. So, if you lend my book to a friend, God bless you. If you put it on the Internet and distribute it to 100 people, even if you are not benefiting from it directly, that goes against what we’re talking about on a very basic level. You can hire expensive lawyers to parse this in all sorts of ways, but let’s get real here. Mass distribution of stuff like this is really a problem. That’s what I’d like to see: a nuanced legal solution to solving and a nuanced discussion of what’s going on.
If you look at countries with functioning copyright systems and countries without functioning copyright systems, who creates more culture? That’s not a question. Cory Doctorow gave a speech at the New America Foundation about how copyright endangers democracy. That’s not a responsible comment. That’s just a bunch of bloviating. Democracies tend to have copyright. Countries with copyright tend to be democracies. I’m not suggesting a causal relationship, but to suggest that copyright endangers democracies – it doesn’t even meet the laugh test.
Let’s look to the future. You say in your last chapter: “Over the next decade, we will choose between two competing visions for the online world: media companies want the Internet to work more like cable television, while technology companies want cable to run more like the Internet.” Tell us what you mean by this.
If you think about the cable system, it’s closed. You can’t publish or broadcast without permission; you can’t receive or consume without paying. On the Internet it’s the opposite. Anyone can publish or broadcast; just about anyone can consume without paying. And again, sorry to keep hammering on this, I would say that those are two absolutes. There’s a lot of problems with the cable system. It leads to monopolization. The prices keep going up and there’s a lack of diversity of points of view. But there’s also good things about it. Television has never been better. We enjoy better TV. If you say, “Oh my God. Look how my cable bill rose in the last 10 years,” what you get is completely different. It’s a revolution of quality. Now let’s look at the Internet. It does a lot of things as well. You’ve got free expression. It’s a great thing. The Internet is very valuable. You get an incredible diversity of opinion. It’s very cheap. There’s a lot of good things about it. There’s also some bad things about it. It resists regulation in a very fundamental way. You have some people saying the Internet must be cable-ized; you have other people saying that cable must be Internet-ized. Is that really the best we can do? My argument is that we deserve better. I don’t want to choose between “Breaking Bad” and the skateboarding bulldog.
I would like to see the advantages of both. I would like to think the technology would allow that. And I’d like to think we can regulate smartly to encourage that.
What would you like to see happen? What’s the best-case scenario for the situation we’re in now? Because some things aren’t coming back totally. Newspapers, publishing, probably not coming back.
I’d like to see enough law applied in a smart way that we can bring back a market. U.S. publishing is never coming back, but I think we can enforce enough law to create a market, and that’s what we need. There’s obviously problems with the market. I’m not one of these “worshiping at the altar of the market” kind of dudes. But the market for intellectual property has served us very well both in terms of job creation and in terms of art. And I think that that is very important.
A passage from Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, “Swerve,” on Renaissance book culture, has this to say about how writers paid their bills several centuries ago:
Authors made nothing from the sale of their books; their profits derived from the wealthy patron to whom the work was dedicated. (The arrangement — which helps to account for the fulsome flattery of dedicatory epistles — seems odd to us, but it had an impressive stability, remaining in place until the invention of copyright in the 18th century.)
We’re so accustomed to thinking of copyright as the foundation of a writer’s livelihood that it’s difficult to imagine how authors could survive without it. Yet we may need to start doing just that.
Our current copyright laws and (often ham-fisted) attempts to enforce them have many critics, but you don’t see a lot of people advocating their complete eradication. They don’t really need to. The biggest threat to copyright comes from the advent of digital reproduction, which has made piracy much, much easier. Reform could well be beside the point; copyright seems poised to die the death of a million cut-and-pastes.
If that happens, and authors can again expect to make nothing from the sale of their books, how will they get by? The majority of authors, of course, can’t make a living from book sales as it is. They teach or work for the phone company or scrape together enough grants and fellowships to keep a roof over their heads. It’s possible that writing books will become a hobby rather than a profession — like, say, golf — for all but the tiniest minority of superstars, people so famous they can charge fees to make personal appearances.
Writers are understandably dismayed by this scenario, but readers ought to be, too. The eight hours or more per day that your favorite authors will spend servicing air conditioners or drafting marketing reports is time they won’t have to devote to writing their next book, the one you’re so eager to read. That means fewer books from some of our most talented novelists, and perhaps fewer yet from historians and other nonfiction writers; the research for their work can take even more time than the actual writing.
If this comes to pass, we may indeed see a revival of the patronage model Greenblatt describes, with wealthy fans supplying the writers they admire with the funds they need to concentrate on their work. In truth, we already have an indirect version of this in the form of arts foundations underwritten by private donors. The notion of a writer being personally sponsored by a rich individual may strike the contemporary American as distasteful, but as Greenblatt points out, unless you want to dismiss the entire corpus of Western literature written before the 1700s, you have to admit that the arrangement can produce great books.
Still, it’s a system inclined to serve the interests of the rich, and it’s not like we need any more of that. Recently, the technology that led to this dilemma has also offered a potential solution in the form of crowdsourced patronage. The best-known of these new funding platforms is Kickstarter, a website that allows people to raise money for all kinds of projects, including books (and magazines and bookstores). The would-be creator presents a proposal consisting of a written description of the project, a list of premiums awarded to donors depending on the amount they pledge, and, most important, a video pitch. The creator sets a funding goal and a closing date for the proposal. If the full amount isn’t reached by the time the proposal expires, the creator gets nothing.
The donors to a Kickstarter project don’t own any rights to the results, but their donations can win them such unusual benefits as having characters named after them in a forthcoming novel. The author may promise to write an ancillary short story about the supporting character of their choice. Other authors provide special signed editions of the book or, in a few cases, even a chance to offer input while the work is in progress.
On Kickstarter, book proposals have attracted from as much as $85,000 (for a memoir about psychedelic visionary Terence McKenna, to be written by his younger brother) to as a little as $324 (to commission original cover art for a self-published e-book). The more modest the goal, the more likely it will be met. At the very least, a Kickstarter project looks like an excellent way to cadge money from friends and family without having to face them in person with your hand out. The average successful proposal seems to run a few thousand bucks — not as much as a traditional hardcover book advance, certainly, but more than what many writers might get from a small press.
This fundraising method is perfect for modest projects aimed at a limited, but still keen, readership. The earnest confessional poetry of Anne Jackson, for example, would never find much favor in the poetry establishment, but there are enough investors moved by her story of creative struggle following a close friend’s death to contribute a total of $11,700 for an e-book of “poetry, photos & stories behind them.” Quite a few traditionally published poets would regard that as a decent advance. It helps that Jackson already has a following as a result of the spiritually oriented self-help books she wrote for a traditional publisher — and that she’s young and personable.
Many aspiring writers fantasize about the audience they’d find if interlopers like publishers and agents would stop coming between them and the reading public. Publishers, they complain, fixate too much on superficial assets like a mediagenic face or personality, influential connections, an established name or a promotional “platform” instead of just concentrating on literary merit.
To judge by what works on Kickstarter, however, democracy won’t offer any improvement. Those flashy garnishes are exactly what the public cares about. The most successful book projects have an already-established audience, an attractive creator, a high-concept premise and/or an affiliation with someone famous. Above all, as Rob Walker observed in the New York Times, a stand-out video presentation is crucial to sealing the Kickstarter deal.
April Winchell, the founder of the humor site Regretsy.com, for example, raised an impressive $65,ooo to publish a book of fake Finnish folklore and pay for a trip to Finland by calling on her established fan base and putting together a hilarious video. Does anyone really care much about the book — or, for that matter, about an edition of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in which every instance of the word “nigger” has been replaced with the word “robot”? Probably not. Yet both pitches are amusing enough to elicit a surprisingly large number of small, what-the-hell pledges.
A classic midlist novelist who published two books with small presses but couldn’t place his third, Scott Morris managed to raise $12,700 to help him keep working on it. Would he have been as successful if he didn’t look like the popular conception of a ruggedly sensitive writer, or if his video didn’t feature several handsome and vaguely familiar actors (the guy who played the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network”!) talking him up? Hard to say.
Whatever the merit of these individual projects, it’s hard for a reader to get enthused about a system in which the worth of a writer’s next book is judged by his or her ability to make a catchy video. The correlation between those two skills is far from obvious, as Jonathan Franzen demonstrated in the promo video he was obliged to make for “Freedom.”
With primarily visual works — comics and art or photo books — Kickstarter seems a great way to solicit the extra cash needed to produce top-drawer work. Comics creators have flocked to it, hoping to finish discontinued series or add color to black-and-white books. But can it bring us the next Ann Patchett or Robert A. Caro? Or is that another part of our future that will be determined by billionaires?
(Credit: l i g h t p o e t via Shutterstock) 
(Credit: iStockphoto/NickS) 
"The Wizard of Oz." 
Tyson's tattoo on Helm's face. 
