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Goblins at the Printing Press

By on December 26, 2007 5

One downside of the lower cost of publishing that computer technology has made possible is the proliferation of sloppy publishing houses. Now don’t get me wrong – the benefits definitely outweigh the costs. But the costs are real, and I’m entitled to gripe about them. Kessinger Reprints comes to mind – their productions range from the good (Isabel Paterson’s Never Ask the End, a perfectly fine facsimile edition) to the bad (Jules Verne’s Children of Captain Grant, filled with scanning errors) to the ugly (Lysander Spooner’s Vices Are Not Crimes, which includes the footnote markers but omits all the actual footnotes, in addition to mangling the subtitle).

Princess Irene But what I’m griping about today is the Quiet Vision Press edition of George MacDonald’s fantasy classic The Princess and the Goblin.

The text itself is pretty much okay – just a few typos (mostly capitalisation and hyphenation errors). But …

First, on the back of the book it says:

The Princess Irene has been kidnapped by Goblins. And it is up to an unlikely hero, Curdie the Miner Boy, to save the day.

Um, no.

It’s admittedly true that throughout the book the reader is continually led to expect that Irene will be kidnapped by the goblins and that Curdie will have to rescue her. But it never happens; MacDonald is too clever a writer to be that predictable. Instead it’s Curdie who gets kidnapped, and it’s Irene who has to rescue him. So, strike one.

Next, the back of the book continues:

An amazing tale from one of the founders of modern fantasy, George MacDonald. Including illustrations from a late 1900th century edition.

Wow, that’s really old. Or else from far in the future – one or the other. Strike two.

Finally, on the first page of the book there’s a place for the owner to write his or her name, and here, in fancy Gothic font, we see printed:

This Books Belongs To ____________________

Strike three!

And then, to add insult to injury (or perhaps injury to insult – or at least threat to incompetence), the copyright page sternly informs us that “No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted,” blah blah blah, “without permission of the publisher.” This in a book where both text and pictures date from the 19th (or 1900th?) century and so are in the public domain! I wonder if there are any legal penalties for claiming copyright protection when you don’t actually have it?

Cover Charge

By on November 25, 2007 1

The Romantics are suing the makers of the game Guitar Hero for including a cover of their song “What I Like About You” in the game.

Why? Did the game makers use the song without permission? Nope. They had permission.

The Romantics So what’s the problem? Well, it turns out that the cover sounded too much like the original, and so “infringed the group’s right to its own image and likeness.” (I’d always thought “image and likeness” was a Biblical phrase, not a legal one.) “I was very upset,” explained the lead singer of this band that borrowed its name from an 1894 play by Edmond Rostand, “because the band had worked very hard over many years to develop and use its distinctive sound.”

Well, who wouldn’t be upset if somebody took away from them something they’d worked many years to develop and use? But I don’t see how this applies in the current case. Has the Romantics’ distinctive sound really been taken away? Did they go to practice one morning and suddenly find out that they sounded different?

And even if I believed in IP – which I don’t – I have trouble seeing how the Romantics have much of a case when they gave Guitar Hero permission to do a cover in the first place. Covers that sound a lot like the originals are not a particularly unusual phenomenon; indeed there are cover bands – and not just amateur ones either – that specialise in sounding like the originals. (For example, doesn’t the Swingin’ Swamis’ version of “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” sound a lot like Mari Wilson’s more famous version – which of course is also a cover?) It seems to me that when you give permission to do a cover, it’s a reasonable expectation that you might get an imitation of the original unless you specify otherwise.

I suspect what’s really going on here is that Guitar Hero turned out to be more lucrative than the Romantics expected, and they’re kicking themselves for not asking for a better deal up front – so they want to rewrite the contract retroactively. Money quote (literally), from a spokesman for the band: “The sales of this game are huge …. We’re all for good commerce. We just want to share in it.”

Science Fiction Writers for Censorship

By on November 22, 2007 2

As I’ve mentioned before, while I (mostly) support the demands of the striking Hollywood writers, I don’t regard those demands as representing pre-contractual IP rights (since I don’t believe in IP). Rather, in my view their demands are ones that can become rights only via contract; I just think the contractual rights they’re negotiating for are ones that are on the whole fairer than the media companies’ proposal.

Verne spaceship Of course in our current culture of political confusion these distinct issues are bound to get muddled together. Hence I was interested to see this piece on AICN:

Mike Capobianco, president of the Science Fiction Writers of America (the organization that represents, well, I guess it’s self evident…) has released a solidarity statement endorsing the WGA’s strike against Big Media. But reading it over, am I the only one who noticed a very interesting subtext going on? See, this comes less than two weeks after the SFWA Copyright Exploratory Committee, which was hastily assembled following the disastrous cock-up that led to the dis-banding of the organization’s e-piracy committee, released its recommendations for dealing with digital rights management. As we recall, the misuse of the DMCA, not to mention the strong-arm tactics on behalf of even writers who had even released the material under creative commons license, ignited the blogosphere and had some people calling for the resignation of the SFWA’s leadership. (Which, granted, was a bit of an overkill.)

So when Capobianco talks about how “writers and other creators are having their work distributed digitally without seeing any benefit at all,” and how “these precedents will hurt creators as digital distribution [becomes] the predominant method for distributing and accessing content”, it almost feels like he’s not just talking about the WGA. Is he trying to lend a little bit of moral authority to SWFA’s anti-piracy actions by somehow tying it into the WGA’s struggle to keep the tradition of residuals alive in the information age? Is he maybe wagging the finger a little bit at the Scribds out there who are peer-to-peering SFWA members’ works without their approval? Probably not. I’m sure I’m just imagining.

Capobianco’s letter of support for the WGA is here. Material from the SFWA website relevant to the e-piracy flap is here, here, here, here, here, and here. For two opposing takes on the issue, see Cory Doctorow and Ursula LeGuin. (Am I the only one who finds it a bit ironic to see the author of The Dispossessed eager to restrict others’ freedom in the name of property rights?)

One interesting, perhaps non-coercive way to combat “piracy” is this one. It borders on fraud (representing inaccurate copies of copyrighted works as accurate), and I suspect it’s immoral, but if no consideration is exchanged it may not be unjust. What do you think?

Free Roark!

By on November 1, 2007 2

Amazingly, the entire film of The Fountainhead – with all its many cinematic virtues and vices (I’ll get into a list of each some other time) – appears to be available to view online. As I assume this film is still under Time-Warner’s IP control, I suspect it may be yanked down before long. But for now, there it is.

Ayn Rand Institute Lets Us Read Some Rand!

By on October 30, 2007 7

People will be able to look up BREAKFAST and see
that I did not advocate eating babies for breakfast.

– Ayn Rand

If I were running the Ayn Rand Institute – admittedly an unlikely turn of events – I’d make all of Rand’s writings available online. (So far the only major Rand work available online got there by mistake, because Peikoff & Co. apparently forgot to renew the U.S. copyright on Anthem.) So why hasn’t ARI taken this obvious step? Do they really value copyright revenue more than the chance to promote Rand’s ideas? If so, they’re still probably miscalculating: I suspect putting Rand’s works online would stimulate more book sales than it would stifle. (The Mises Institute, for example, puts loads of stuff online and yet the paper versions sell like hotcakes.)

Ayn Rand looking scary But I suspect ARI’s decision not to put the writings online has been driven less by mercenary considerations than by some sort of notion that it’s immoral, a violation of the Trader Principle, to hand out benefits without receiving anything in return. If so, it’s a misunderstanding of the Trader Principle; unless the folks running ARI regard themselves (or Rand, insofar as they take themselves to be her agents) as having no personal interest in promoting Rand’s ideas (in which case, what’s the point of ARI?), they presumably would receive a “selfish” benefit by putting them online, and thus could do so with a clear egoist conscience.

Whatever the reason, ARI’s refusal to disseminate Rand’s writings in the most effective manner seems nearly as self-defeating as Andrew Galambos’s refusal to disseminate his writings in any form. (I’m reminded of the Shakers, a sect which died out because its tenets forbade reproduction.)

But a small chink has appeared in the armour of ARI’s anti-web policy: the Ayn Rand Lexicon has been placed online. (Conical hat tip to Karen DeCoster.) Admittedly this is a comparatively unimportant text; it’s just a collection of quotations from Rand (and sometimes her acolytes as well) on various subjects, arranged alphabetically by topic (apparently the editors were under the misapprehension that alphabetical order of topics is sufficient to make a book a “lexicon”). But it’s a start.

Randian Queries

By on October 28, 2007 0

universal and particulars 1. A theory of universals is traditionally supposed to answer two questions: first, what makes generic identity possible across specific difference (e.g., what makes red horses and brown horses both count as horses?), and second, what makes qualitative identity (whether generic or specific) possible across numerical difference (e.g., how can red-horse-hood exist in both of these red horses at the same time when they are two horses rather than one?).

I understand Rand’s answer to the first question: red horses and brown horses possess different measurements of the same attribute, and we grasp the attribute by mentally omitting the measurements. But this can’t be her answer to the second question, since this solution, by helping itself to the notion of “same attribute,” presupposes that the second question has already been answered.

So what I’m wondering is: what is Rand’s answer to the second question? Does she even address the second question, or does she mistakenly think that all the philosophical fuss about universals has solely been about the first question? One reason for thinking she doesn’t quite see the second question is that when she first introduces the problem of universals (in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology) she describes it this way:

When we refer to three persons as “men,” what do we designate by that term? The three persons are three individuals who differ in every particular respect and may not possess a single identical characteristic (not even their fingerprints). If you list all their particular characteristics, you will not find one representing “manness.” Where is the “manness” in men?

It’s clear from what Rand says here (e.g. the reference to fingerprints) that by “differ” and “identical” she means to signify qualitative difference and qualitative identity, not numerical difference and numerical identity. But in that case she’s missed half the question. Before we can start worrying about how it’s possible for two things to be qualitatively identical in the generic sense without being qualitatively identical in any specific sense, don’t we first need to justify the puzzling notion of qualitative identity per se?

Ayn Rand 2. In her 1964 article “Patents and Copyrights” (reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal) , Rand offers inter alia the following argument:

As an objection to the patent laws, some people cite the fact that two inventors may work independently for years on the same invention, but one will beat the other to the patent office by an hour or a day and will acquire an exclusive monopoly, while the loser’s work will then be totally wasted. This type of objection is based on the error of equating the potential with the actual. The fact that a man might have been first, does not alter the fact that he wasn’t. Since the issue is one of commercial rights, the loser in a case of that kind has to accept the fact that in seeking to trade with others he must face the possibility of a competitor winning the race, which is true of all types of competition.

Here my question is this: does the patent office create the right, or merely record a pre-existing right? Because if the patent office creates the right, that seems to attributing to government a more sweeping authority than Rand ordinarily wishes to grant. But if instead the patent office records a pre-existing right, then that right, existing prior to certification by the state, cannot be lost by failing to receive such certification.

Nor is Rand’s analogy with commercial competition helpful. What I have on entering the market is not an unconditional right to sell my product, but only a right to try to sell it, or in other words, a right to sell it if I find a willing buyer. So if I am outcompeted by a rival seller who snaps up all my potential customers first, I haven’t lost any right. But if my rival beats me to the patent office, I do lose the right to try to find a willing buyer for my product (and the potential buyers likewise lose the right to try to buy from me). What justifies this?

After I wrote the above, I thought to look through my older writings on copyright to see whether I’d commented on Rand’s argument before. Turns out I did, and said basically the same thing:

Rand is suggesting that the competition to get to the patent office first is like any other kind of commercial competition. For example, suppose you and I are competing for the same job, and you happen to get hired simply because you got to the employer before I did. In that case, the fact that I might have gotten there first does not give me any rightful claim to the job. But that is because I have no right to the job in the first place. And once you get the job, your rightful claim to that job depends solely on the fact that your employer chose to hire you.

In the case of patents, however, the story is supposed to be different. The basis of an inventor’s claim to a patent on X is supposedly the fact that he has invented X. (Otherwise, why not offer patent rights over X to anyone who stumbles into the patent office, regardless of whether they’ve ever even heard of X?) Registering one’s invention with the patent office is supposed to record one’s right, not to create it. Hence it follows that the person who arrives at the patent office second has just as much right as the one who arrives first – and this is surely a reductio ad absurdum of the whole notion of patents.

Oh well, I guess there’s nothing wrong with having two different wordings of the same objection out there.

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