On DC’s Digital Comics
I *was* going to write about Batman 700 today, but I’ll leave it til I review Return Of Bruce Wayne 3 this week, and deal with both simultaneously, because DC have announced that they’re releasing digital comics in partnership with Comixology. This has good and bad aspects:
The good:
Creators get royalties from the comics, unlike Marvel’s digital comics at the moment.
That they’re doing it at all
A proportion of money is going to help brick-and-mortar comic shops who might lose customers through this – comics retailing is such a marginal business that otherwise many smaller shops could easily go out of business.
Likewise, while old comics will be priced cheaply (good), new comics will be priced at cover price, so not giving any great incentive to move away from paper comics – I don’t want to see comic shops going out of business, as they’re mostly run by people who do it as much for love as money.
The bad:
The obsession with the sodding iPad. While this material will be available over the web, you wouldn’t know that from the press release, which just says iPad iPad iPhone iPhone iPad app app app app app. And I consider the iPhone/Pad model to be *INCREDIBLY* dangerous – anything that hypes this more is A Bad Thing. Remind me to explain why some time.
The user interface. I tried the free preview of Superman 700 at work at lunchtime and it’s just *horrible*. Rather than presenting a full page, it’s a horrible pan-and-scan thing that swoops down to different panels when you click it, without giving any option (as far as I could see) to see the page the way the artist intended. While that’s not such a problem with whoever drew Superman 700, given that comics drawn by people like Frank Quitely and Brian Bolland are available through this site I’d want to see them as they drew them.
But of course I can’t see them *at all*, because if you don’t have some iCrap you have to use a web-based viewer which requires Adobe’s proprietary Flash 10, and I’m not installing proprietary software that a lot of people go to huge efforts to *block* on my Free Software machine. (And of course any machine not running one of a handful of approved OSes, or not running on x86 architectures, can’t run Flash at all).
You also can’t, unless you’re running an iPad ‘app’ (or application for those of us who speak English rather than marketese, or computer program for those who like to be understood), save the comics you ‘buy’ to your computer, making it reliant on having a permanent internet connection and on comixology’s continued willingness to serve the files.
The annoying thing is that these limitations could be overcome – there is already an accepted file format among online comics readers, .cbr or .cbz (I prefer .cbz myself, as .cbr files require the use of .rar, which is problematic, but either is better than a Flash website). Software exists for every platform to read these, people are already used to them, and they allow people to download the comics to their own hard drives.
One can only presume that DC want to prevent ‘piracy’, but these methods actually make it more, not less, likely that someone like myself would ‘pirate’ their comics (although the only comics I’ve got on my hard drive at the moment are either those I have paper copies of or ones that as far as I’m aware are out of print). If the free-but-illegal copy is actually more convenient, easier to use, and more flexible than the legal-and-costly one, then they’re really not providing any incentive at all to buy the legal one, other than a sense of fair play.
Luckily, paper copies of new comics are even *more* convenient than torrents, so DC won’t be losing any of the money I spend on them any time soon, but I suspect they’re going to have to learn the lesson that the record companies learned a few years ago – if everyone already wants MP3s, then just sell them MP3s, not DRMd proprietary files or expensive streams.
So, substantially better than Marvel’s offering, in that they recognise that the people who write and draw their comics, and the people who sell them, are their business partners, but wake me up when they recognise that usability and freedom matter too. In the meantime, I’ll be at the comic shop, buying dead trees.
RIP Chris Sievey/Frank Sidebottom
A few years ago, my friend Tilt and I were, for reasons we shall not go into right now, watching an old episode of The Wheeltappers And Shunter’s Social Club, when Freddie Garrity of Freddie & The Dreamers came on. I mentioned how I’d been shocked that, when he died, a powerpop mailing list I was on had dozens of posts, mostly from Americans, about how upset people were – far more than I would have predicted, and far more than had been when plenty of more ‘important’ figures died. And Tilt replied “Yes, but remember that people *expect* tortured geniuses to die, and don’t really mind. But they get upset when a smiley man who makes them laugh with a silly dance dies.”
The musician, comedian, cartoonist, record company owner, animator and computer programmer Chris Sievey died on Monday night, and with him died his most famous creation Frank Sidebottom.
If you were a kid in the eighties, you knew Frank Sidebottom from his appearances on Number 73, but Sidebottom was far more than just a children’s entertainer. Along with his puppet sidekick/antagonist Little Frank, the man with the giant papier-mache head had dreams of pop stardom, mixing his own songs (“Space is ace”, “Christmas Is Really Fantastic”) with cover versions of classic hits given a new twist (“Panic! In The Streets Of Timperley”, “Anarchy In Timperley”, “Timperley Sunset”, “Born In Timperley”) and indie or ‘underground’ classics (the Beefheart cover Mirror Man, Mirror Puppet/Give Me That Harp Little Frank, or covers of The Fall).
While his act was more-or-less stolen by Graham Fellows for his character John Shuttleworth, and Caroline Aherne took a character he created as a Radio Timperley sidekick, Mrs Merton, to her own TV show, Frank Sidebottom was far more original than the low-rent Alan-Bennetisms of those two, combining that basic Northerner-trying-to-be-a-star-despite-lack-of-both-talent-and-self-awareness thing with an altogether more surreal worldview, especially in his interactions with Little Frank.
You can see this especially in his brief career as a comic character, in the children’s comic OINK!, in a strip written and drawn by Frank himself. The great Lew Stringer, one of the other OINK! contributors, writes about his work on the comic here.
Little Frank Goes On A Date (Click For Fantastic Fullness)
I must admit to not having paid a *huge* amount of attention to Sidebottom’s work over the years – just being delighted when his big papier-mache head would turn up unexpectedly, whether it be on Channel M (the Manchester local TV channel) presenting his Proper Telly Show In Black & White (so you don’t have to turn the colour down) or as a presenter on local TV news.
I only discovered a few months ago, in fact, that Sidebottom was originally created as a side-project. He was meant to be the biggest fan of Chris Sievey’s band The Freshies, who did some genuinely fantastic punk-pop songs, of which probably the best was the minor hit I’m In Love With The Girl From The Virgin Manchester Megastore Checkout Desk (presented here in the slightly-rerecorded version with Virgin replaced with Certain):
I should have realised the link earlier, really – the combination of songs about mundane incidents and buying records ( I Can’t Get Bouncing Babies By The Teardrop Explodes) and spaceships (Let’s Go Space City) with lo-fi production values and simple three-chord melodies clearly points the way to Sidebottom’s later career.
And not only was Sievey/Sidebottom a musician and comedian, he was also a pioneer in multimedia. He wrote two computer games – The Biz (a game about becoming a rock star) and Flying Train (in which you have to put a train together before flying it to the moon to view a supernova) – for the ZX81, both of which were released on tape along with Freshies songs.They can be played online – flying train and The Biz – if you have a Java browser plugin.
Sievey also worked as a stop-motion animator, not only working a day job at HOT animation (who produce among other things Pingu and Bob The Builder) but making his own animated film, Franksworld:
Frank Sidebottom kept going right to the end – he was tweeting in character mere hours before Sievey died, and his Twitter stream was where we could hear about the progress of the bobbins cancer that he seemed convinced he was going to beat, though one of his last tweets was about how he was ‘still feeling very poorly’. Only last week he premiered his World Cup anthem Three Shirts On My Line.
I’ve heard from a couple of people that Chris Sievey wasn’t a particularly nice man ‘in real life’ (whatever that is). Be that as it may, Frank Sidebottom was a silly man who made us laugh with his silly songs, and it is absolute bobbins that he’s dead. You know it is. It really is.
Ada Lovelace Day: Emily Short
Ada Lovelace day is “an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.” by blogging about a woman in technology.
Unfortunately, it’s also a day when I’m getting over a bad case of the ‘flu, and not really coherent enough to write well, and I was seriously considering not doing this at all – after all, earlier this year when my work were after nominations of names of computer scientists to name their meeting rooms after, I’d named Ada Lovelace there, so I could have done my bit. But I’ve decided to go ahead with a post about Emily Short.
(I feel quite embarrassed writing about her as she’s someone I don’t know – at all – but who blogs and whose blog I’ve commented on, and so she may well read this. I just wanted to write about a programmer who’s actually one of those responsible for something I actually use on a regular basis).
Short is the writer of a series of games, all of them ‘interactive fiction’ – the kind of thing that used to be called text adventure games. And while I don’t know as much about the genre as I should, I do know that her games are among the best I’ve played, and are regarded as such by the small community of people who are still interested in these things. Rather than be Zork-esque ‘GET LAMP, KILL TROLL’, her stuff is actual art, its sophistication limited more by the relatively crude tools at her disposal than by her imagination or writing ability – a classicist, she often uses figures from Greek and Roman history and myth (I’ll have to replay Damnatio Memoriae soon, as I’ve recently been rewatching I, Clavdivs), and manages to get quite an astonishing level of characterisation and interaction from her NPCs.
But more important than her games, as far as this goes, is her work on Inform 7, a programming language I’ve written a little about before ( here and here ).
The basic concept behind Inform 7 – and the bulk of its implementation – are the work of Graham Nelson, a mathematician. But Short is the co-maintainer of the project (and increasingly its public ‘face’) , and wrote many of the built-in ‘extensions’ (what most programmers would probably refer to as libraries) to the language – as well as providing more than thirty further extensions on the Inform Extensions Page. She also wrote the vast bulk of the 300+ example programs in the Inform documentation, and the regression test suite used on every release (and as someone whose day job involves, in large part, regression testing software, I can tell you what a tedious, thankless, but necessary job that is).
And on top of that, she’s put in this huge amount of work on a community software project (albeit one not yet fully under a Free license, though getting released that way piecemeal) not for any cash, and not even (as far as I can tell) for ‘real-life’ credit – according to Wikipedia, ‘Emily Short’ is a pseudonym.
No doubt there are better candidates for celebration on Ada Lovelace Day, but I’m assuming you all know about Grace Hopper and Rosalind Franklin, so someone doing good work in a tiny niche, but work I for one appreciate, deserves writing about as much as anyone else…
Tories, ‘hacking’, Twitter and #cashgordon – Look, I Just ‘Hacked’ Mark Reckons’ Site Lib Dem Voice!
ETA: Actually Mark doesn’t use the Lib Dem Blogs RSS feed – just features the RSS feeds of various Lib Dems, under a ‘lib dem blogs’ header, so I thought he did. Feel free to substitute in the name of $prominentlibdemblogger below
Yesterday, a website run by the Conservative party, cash-gordon.com , got redirected to various supposedly-offensive (if you consider elderly people engaging in consensual homosexual acts offensive, which I personally don’t) websites. A lot of people are claiming that it was ‘hacked’ by ‘Labour stooges’.
Now, the Conservatives are claiming that this was people ‘hacking’ their site – and people have been getting threatening ‘phone calls at work about their alleged part in this ‘hacking’ – and arguing that this means there should be more regulation of the internet. In fact all that happened is the Conservatives were incredibly, ridiculously stupid.
The Tories set up a new website, to try to make the Labour party look bad for taking money from unions, to deflect from their own problems with funding from non-domiciled billionaires to whom they gave peerages, though exactly why it’s meant to be bad that the Labour Party were given millions by a union I have yet to understand (and I am no supporter of Labour, as you know). To promote this site, they started a #cashgordon hashtag on Twitter, and got excited when it started trending – even when it turned out that most of those using the hashtag were making fun of the Tories, because they said ‘all publicity is good publicity’.
They even had an unmoderated ‘twitterstream’ on the website, displaying every single post anyone made to Twitter using this hashtag. Can you see the problem yet, boys and girls?
They should have learned from the Torygraph, which last year during the budget had a live twitterstream which very quickly turned into a stream of abuse against the Telegraph, jokes, and general anarchy (a couple of my ‘tweets’ then actually got quoted in Private Eye at the time, because mine were some of the few printable ones). If nothing else, they should have realised that as soon as a hashtag starts ‘trending’ (showing up in a list of popular hashtags), spambots start posting using that hashtag, so very quickly a large proportion of the tweets using that hashtag – and thus showing up on their website – were by that popular Twitterer Ms Britney Fuck-Vids.
However, some people wanted to experiment a bit more, and started posting little bits of JavaScript to Twitter, along with that hashtag. Now, Twitter is a properly-designed website. If you post random bits of JavaScript to it, it displays them as text. However, cash-gordon.com was designed (for $15,000 ! ) by people who literally don’t know the first thing about web design. So it ran this JavaScript in the browsers of people visiting the site.
Those people are *very* lucky that the JavaScript in question merely redirected their browsers to lemonparty ( a site which, I am given to understand, having never visited it myself, shows three elderly gentlemen engaging in mutual oral sex) or, far more offensively, the Labour party website. That shows, if nothing else, that this was people playing around and having fun, not doing anything malicious – allowing for execution of arbitrary JavaScript code from unknown sources could very easily lead to much, much worse (and it’s lucky this was noticed, and the site pulled, before someone put in a link to a Windows virus or phishing site).
But looking at what’s happened, it’s absolutely obvious that nothing was ‘hacked’ (in the vernacular sense of someone ‘breaking in’ to someone else’s website, rather than the sense used by computer people – in that sense it was quite a funny ‘hack’) at all – people posted material that was *perfectly safe* to *their own twitter streams* – their own websites. The fact that the Conservatives – in attempting to use that material for political gain – did incredibly unsafe and stupid things with that material is fundamentally neither the Twitterers’ fault nor their problem.
For an analogous situation, many Liberal Democrat bloggers include a feed from Lib Dem Blogs on their page, showing the titles of the most recent blog posts by Lib Dems. Were I to title a post “Pee Po Belly Bum Drawers”, that title would show up on Mark Thompson’s site. I would not, however, have ‘hacked’ Mark’s blog. I wouldn’t even have visited his blog, or necessarily even known that my post had showed up there (I read Mark’s blog through a feed reader). I hope you are all suitably impressed with my ability to get profanity onto the site of the 20th most influential blogger in Britain. F33r my 133t h4x0r 5ki11z!
However, there are a few differences. Firstly, were I to title my post ” <script type=”text/javascript”>window.location=’http’ + ‘://lemonparty.org/’</script> ” it wouldn’t turn into executable script that redirected Mark’s blog to geriatric porn, because neither Mark nor Ryan who runs Lib Dem Blogs are the kind of complete imbecile who would let that sort of thing happen. Secondly, all blogs whose RSS feeds are aggregated at Lib Dem Blogs have to be manually approved, and can be removed if they start doing that sort of thing, so it’s a relatively trustworthy source. And thirdly, these feeds only go on people’s personal blogger accounts, not on official party sites that cost tens of thousands to build.
So no-one was ‘hacked’, and this was nothing regulation could or should have stopped (though were there some kind of ‘internet roadworthiness’ test along the lines of an MOT, that site would have failed it, and likewise all those responsible for its creation just failed their ‘driving test’). Quite simply, if you put up a giant billboard and a free supply of marker pens, along with a sign saying ‘please draw whatever you want on here’, and you come back a while later and see someone has drawn a great spunking cock on it, that should be *what you expected to happen*, not a shocking discovery. If you don’t want people to graffitti your site, *DON’T ASK THEM TO*
And one final thing – the Torygraph have been claiming that this ‘hacking’ – which we have now proved was nothing of the sort, was by ‘Labour stooges’. As I was following events as they happened, I happen to know that the lemonparty redirect was courtesy of ‘liberal provocateur‘ , who tweets as @hashbangperl (and whose description of himself as a ‘hacker’ on Twitter should definitely be taken in the sense I linked above, and *NOT* in the sense most people use it…)
So, in total, what we have learned today is that if you’re going to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an exciting whizzy social media site for your political campaign, you should give it to somebody with the first clue about what they’re doing. An expensive lesson, and one I suspect the Tories won’t actually have learned…
The iPad
So… let me get this straight…
You can only run programs that Apple has authorised.
It comes with 16G (woo! A whole 16 gigabytes!) flash memory. (You know, that really good kind of memory where if you write to it too often it stops working).
It doesn’t have a keyboard.
You need to buy extra adapters if you want to be able to use any USB devices or SD cards with it.
It won’t run Flash, or Skype, or Netflix (none of which are programs I run, BTW, being a Free Software kind of person, but I believe some other people might wish to use them).
You can run one – *one* program on it at a time, so you can’t, say, IM and listen to music at the same time.
Yet this is ‘better than a laptop’ and ‘the most exciting thing Steve Jobs has ever worked on’?
The ridiculous thing is, it’ll sell millions, and the people buying it will actually think they’re being rebellious and edgy and cool.
Will someone please give me billions of quid for giving them bits of white curvy plastic that aren’t as good as real computers ?
(Magical Mystery Tour post shortly, but trying to write about both I Am The Walrus and Strawberry Fields in the same post is almost impossible, so it may be tomorrow)
Linkblogging For 29/10/09
Just a few quick links today…
Ubuntu has released its latest version today, Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. Ubuntu isn’t my GNU/Linux distribution of choice, but it is far and away the best for people who’ve had little previous experience with GNU/Linux, so if you’ve been thinking of shelling out a few hundred quid for WIndows 7, and maybe having to buy a new computer to run it on, why not try downloading a totally free, better new OS instead?
Those of you who don’t read XTC’s MySpace blog really should. This week, Andy Partridge is interviewed about Collideascope, and briefly references Ditko and Kirby.
The Mindless Ones posted some Annocommentations for League: Century, but like the teases they are they took it down again. I have a cached copy, though. Mwahahaha etc. They do still have a pretty spot-on review of the last issue of Planetary though.
An interesting article on ‘doing your good deed for the day‘. Remind me sometime to explain how this ties in to my belief that almost all political blogging is counterproductive (I don’t do my own blogging to be productive – I do it to let off steam. If I want to make an actual difference I’ll go out and do actual campaigning, which I don’t do enough of).
And some Twain and Einstein adventures by Michael Kupperman…
(Tomorrow, if you’re lucky, a defence of libertarianism…)
Linkblogging for 12/10/09
Just a few quick links today:
An app for (ptui!) iPhone that splits the universe for you.
Terence Eden suggests we should mutualise the post office.
Rick Veitch draws Harvey Pekar as Darkseid.
Peter Watts wonders what the drug companies are going to do about the apparent increased effectiveness of placebos.
Pillock saw Yoko Ono in a Corolla.
And Marc looks at his favourite solo Lennon.
Copyright, Copywrong and Copyleft Part 2 – “Let The Artist Decide?”
I’ve got several other posts planned out – one on Darkseid, one on the Beatles, a new playlist, and so forth, but I’ve spent most of today reading the new Pratchett (not a masterpiece like Nation, but solidly entertaining and summing up a lot of my conflicted thoughts about football – and at this point, the fact that Terry Pratchett is capable of producing ‘an average Terry Pratchett book’ is well worth celebrating). They will be coming over the next few days – having four days off work has made me far less ill.
But I’m going to deal here, briefly, with one of the comments from my last post – LemmusLemmus saying “Revolutionary idea: Let the artists decide whether they want to give their work away or not.”
Which brings me to a point I was going to make anyway – why should it be the artist’s decision, at all?
Essentially, saying the artist has a right to prevent someone who has purchased their work from copying it, is to privilege (literally – ‘private law’) the artist as opposed to the rest of society. When anyone else sells you a product, they don’t actually get to prescribe how you must use it, and proscribe uses that offend them. When I bought my banjo and mandolin, they didn’t come with special songbooks and a rule that I can’t play any other songs on them. When I buy my computer, it doesn’t come with a rule as to which software I can run on it (it might if you run Windows, but I don’t do that).
So why, precisely, should artists and authors be given a right to control what is done with their work once it’s paid for?
Currently they are given such a right, but what I’m questioning is why they should be given such a right. As a more reasonable analogy than the ones above, if I buy an apple and plant the seeds from it, I can grow many apples, which I can give to my friends who can then grow their own apples. We could put greengrocers out of business! Yet nobody has yet attempted to criminalise the growing of trees in one’s garden.
To my mind, the issue of copyright in fact breaks down into several totally different – and possibly incompatible – ‘rights’ for the purchaser and the artist.
1) The moral right of the artist. The artist should have the right to be identified as the creator of the work, and should also have the right to control some minimal set of uses of it. Paul McCartney, a famous vegetarian, should be able to stop people using recordings of his voice to sell sausages, as that would give the impression that he in some way endorses those sausages himself, which he might well consider defamatory.
2) The right of the artist to be compensated for commercial exploitation – I don’t think anyone disagrees that if someone is going to make money from the work then the artist should get some of that money. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with sharing recordings of Please Please Me by The Beatles – I think Messrs McCartney and Starr have probably been paid enough for their ten hours of work done when my mum was four years old. But if someone’s going to put that album out in a CD box set and charge people two hundred quid for it, it’s only fair that they should get a bit of that two hundred quid.
3) The right to share. This isn’t a legal right in the same way the above two are, and I think this is a problem. I think pretty much every decent human being will, if they have something they like, that they think their friend will also like, want to share that thing with their friend – especially if they can do so at no cost or inconvenience to themselves. I think that this is such a general instinct in humanity that trying to legislate against it is pointless, even were it a negative thing, which I don’t believe on the whole that it is.
4) The ‘right’ of artists to get paid. This is the one that most people focus on, even though the world doesn’t actually owe anyone a living for writing or singing or acting. A recording, book or whatever is only worth what people are prepared to pay for it.
So what we need to have for copyright (and please note I am here only talking about copyright, not ‘intellectual property’, which lumps a load of different, incompatible laws about trademarks and patents into one category) to function well – and whatever your view of the rights and wrongs of the current law, I think we can all accept that it simply doesn’t function – is some system that protects rights one through three, while at the same time providing some form of compensation for artists for ‘right’ four.
I’m going to talk about some of the ways we can do this in future posts, but for now I’ll just say that ‘letting the artist decide’ is not only simply not working – and prohibition of anything where tens of millions of people both engage in that activity and consider themselves justified in doing so is never going to work, no matter how much you may wish it – but also on shakier moral ground than it at first appears.
Copyright, Copywrong And Copyleft Part 1 – Is Filesharing Stealing?
There’s been a lot of debate recently about the morality, ethics and legality of filesharing – between the success of the Pirate Party in the European elections, the formation of a similar party here, the proposals to cut off internet access for ‘offenders’ and the comments made by that towering intellect Lily Allen.
As someone who makes music myself (MP3s of which can be purchased here (along with CDs by my friend and collaborator Blake Jones) for a very low price, or you can listen on Spotify here), and would very much like to get some money from doing it some day, I obviously have very strong opinions about this. But before I get to what I think we should *do*, I’ll just use a few anecdotes (anecdotal data – the best kind!)
In 1999, I was a student. I read in Mojo magazine about the Nuggets box set, which sounded like just my sort of thing. However, it cost sixty quid, which to a student is a lot of money. I couldn’t justify spending that on a box set of CDs without having heard any of the songs. However, my then-flatmate had this thing called Napster on his computer, so I downloaded a few songs from it – Psychotic Reaction by The Count Five, I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night by The Electric Prunes, and a few others. As a result of this I bought the box set, because I loved those tracks. As a result of *that* I bought albums by The Knickerbockers, Sagittarius, Love, The Thirteenth Floor Elevators and many more, as well as the Nuggets 2 box set and various other albums branded ‘Nuggets’, ‘Pebbles’ or ‘Ripples’. As a result of *those* I also bought albums by Curt Boettcher, Sandy Salisbury, The Millennium, Gary Usher, Roky Erickson & The Aliens and more than I care to think.
I also went to see both Love and The Electric Prunes live. As a result of the Love gig I bought albums by the backing band Baby Lemonade, and I also became a fan of the support act, Stew, which led to me buying albums by Stew, The Negro Problem, The Passing Strange Original Broadway Cast, Candypants, Carolyn Edwards, Kristian Hoffman and The Stool Pigeons, as well as spending several hundred quid commissioning Stew to write and record a customised song for my wedding (a really fantastically good song, incidentally – I doubt he’ll ever do that again now he’s a Tony award-winning Broadway composer whose musical has just been released as a Spike Lee film, but if he does it’s more than worth the money).
At a very conservative estimate, me downloading that handful of songs ten years ago has led to me spending at the very least a couple of thousand pounds on obscure music – and most of that spent during times when I was a student, unemployed, or on minimum wage (which I was until about a year ago).
In 2002 I bought Neil Gaiman’s book Adventures In The Dream Trade, a collection of miscellany which included forewords for a lot of comic collections. I had been a comic fan in my teens, but had more or less dropped the hobby, but thought ‘some of these sound good’, so I downloaded a few random issues of Cerebus, Brat Pack and Astro City from Soulseek. I now have two bookcases groaning under the weight of trade paperbacks (one has literally broken under the strain this week), a few longboxes full of individual issues (I would have more but I regularly clear out less-good comics and give them to my niece), and spend about fifteen quid a week on comics – because of that handful of downloads.
Around the same time I remembered how much I’d liked Doctor Who as a kid – I’d been a HUGE fan while the show was on, and for a couple of years afterwards, but living in a small town and being very young had no access to fandom so once the local newsagent stopped stocking DWM, I’d dropped away. But I thought “I wonder if it was as good as I remember? I’ll download one of the ones Douglas Adams did – that should be good”. I now have fifty-nine stories on DVD alone (depending on how you count the Lost In Time and Trial Of A Timelord sets), along with books (both novels and reference books), audio dramas (spent twenty quid on those *yesterday alone*), toys (a little mini K9 my wife bought me), posters and the occasional conference visit. (I have many of the rest of the stories as downloads, incidentally, but will be buying the DVDs in due course). I definitely spend several hundred quid a year on Doctor Who, largely as a result of that single download.
So when I read all these ‘home taping is killing music’ type articles, I just find it ludicrous. When I have downloaded stuff via filesharing programs (as opposed to legal downloads via emusic) in the past, it has been literally impossible for it to have been taking any revenue from the artists who worked on it, because every single penny of disposable income I have had – and to be honest quite a lot of money that should have been spent on things like clothing, rent and utility bills – has gone directly to those very same artists. Short of getting another job, or robbing a bank, there is no way I could have given any more money to those people – and most of them would have not got a penny without my initial exposure via filesharing.
So I hope that disposes of the ‘filesharing is stealing!!!!’ part of the argument against filesharing. Sharing is, in and of itself, about as far from stealing as one can get – sharing information, especially, is in my view a wholly good thing, because nobody has been deprived, and someone has gained.
However, there are other arguments that are tied up in the filesharing issue, and the issue of copyright in a digital age, and I would like to deal with them in separate posts, simply because this one is already far longer than I planned on it being. Those other posts, which I’ll do over the next few days, will deal with the issues of ‘moral rights’, of compensation of artists, of new artists gaining recognition, and what I hope will be the solutions to this.
There are some huge problems with the current models for artistic compensation and copyright, and these are particularly hitting people like me, who are capable of making (I believe) very good recorded music but who are not able to perform live for whatever reason. I hope to point out some ways that these problems can be overcome in the next few essays (next part probably on Tuesday).
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