Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

Bruce Sterling in WIRED online projects on the difficulties faced for literature and book publishing today. Below are what he sees as eighteen challenges for contemporary literature:

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

Internet downloading increasing in Australia

The Age reports that the use of Interent downloading of movies, TV, music etc. in Australia is on the increase, and the economic downturn seems to be a factor. Note the quote from Sony Entertainment, which points to the prevalence of "two cultures" in the entertainment media industry about the Internet and the future of providing content to audiences.

Hundreds of thousands more Australians have turned to illegal download sites in the past year to save money on movies, music, software and TV shows during the economic downturn, new figures show.

Total visits by Australians to BitTorrent websites including Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz grew from 785,000 in April last year to 1,049,000 in April this year, Nielsen says. This is a year-on-year increase of 33.6 per cent.

The figures, which do not include peer-to-peer software such as Limewire, are in line with a Newspoll survey of 700 Australians in April, which found almost two-thirds of respondents said they were more tempted to buy or obtain pirated products in tough financial times.

The movie and music industries are battling revenue declines because legal downloads are not yet making up for the drop in physical disc sales. They have ramped up the pressure on governments and internet providers around the world to do more to prevent online piracy.

"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the internet. Period," Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton said this month.

Lynton complained the internet had "created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time ... and if you don't give it to them for free, they'll steal it".

For more read here.

The Google Settlement

A very popular satirical site is Stuff White People Like. Stuff White People Like focuses on the preoccupations of American white left-liberals, such as farmers' markets, Toyota Pruises, not watching television, black music that black people no longer listen to (jazz, the blues, "old school" rap), supporting Barack Obama, and threatening to move to Canada.

One thing that White People Like is Hating Corporations (#82):

One of the more popular white person activities of the past fifteen years is attempting to educate others on the evils of multi-national corporations. White people love nothing more than explaining to you how Wal*Mart, McDonalds, Microsoft, Halliburton are destroying the Earth’s culture and resources.

There are some exceptions to this, most notably Apple. Apple products feature as #40 on the list of Stuff White People Like.

I mention this because one thing that could be added to this list of Stuff is hating copyright. Copyright has almost surpassed corporations at the top of this hate list, and corporations who profit from exploiting copyright (Disney, News Corp) feature highly on such a list. In this scenario, potential copyright busters such as Google feature as white knights taking on what authors and copyright critics such as Lawrence Lessig would refer to as Big Media.

I mention all of this as I work my head around the implications of what is known as The Google Settlement. The Google Settlement refers to the settlement of the US Supreme Court case between the Authors Guild (US) and various publishers and Google around the Google Library Project, or the plan to digitize large quantities of works held in various libraries around the world.

As a member of the Copyright Agency Limited, I received information on the Google Settlement from CAL as one of the conditions of the settlement. The relevant information can be found here . Full details on the settlement can be found here.

For authors, the key points are:

What Google is offering: A one-off payment of at least US$60 for each Book and US$15 for each Insert that has been digitised by Google up to 5 May 2009. A searchable database of those Books can be accessed via http://www.googlebooksettlement.com/ (click Claim Books and Inserts). If you choose to accept this payment, you cannot subsequently take separate legal action against Google for that digitisation. However, a rights holder can claim the Cash Payment and exclude their Books or Inserts from the other
Google schemes.
• Revenue Model: A share of revenues from the licensed uses Google proposes to offer. Click here for more information.

If you do nothing by 5 May 2009, you are taken to have opted-in to the scheme. To opt out, you need to contact this address in writing:

Google Book Settlement Administrator
C/- Rust Consulting
PO Box 9364, Minneapolis,
MN 55440-9364, USA

This is an unusual development. Is it the privatisation of copyright, or an opening up of new opportunities for author to have their works more widely distributed? Is it good or bad for authors?

If others have thoughts on the Google Settlement and what it means for authors, I would be very keen to hear them. Please post to me on this blog.

Valuing Australian copyright industries

A report released last month by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Australian Copyright Council, titled Making the Intangible Tangible, the Economic Contribution of Australia’s Copyright Industries, found that Australia’s copyright industries in 2007:

• employed more than 837,000 people (8 percent of the nation’s workforce) – up 21 percent since 1996;
• generated $97.7 billion in economic activity (10.3 percent of GDP) – up 66 percent since 1996; and
• accounted for $6.8 billion in exports (4.1 percent of all exports) – up 6.3 percent since 1996.

According to Ms Libby Baulch, Executive Officer, Australian Copyright Council, copyright was vital for innovative businesses looking to develop new products for the Australian market and for export and that “research has shown that intangible assets, such as intellectual property, represent an increasingly significant proportion of most companies’ value ... The facts are that copyright industries have increased their share of GDP and employment over the past decade while other industries such as agriculture, forestry and fishing have gone backwards.”

These figures would place the copyright industries in Australia slightly below the United States in terms of overall economic contribution (10.3% of GDP as compared to 11.1%).

For more read here.

Copyright industry working with AFP against Internet Cafe

One of the interesting things about this story is the fact that the Australian Federal Police acted against this Sydney Internet cafe for copyright infringement after "an investigation by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) and Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI)." Who is the law here is an interesting question.

Australian Internet cafe pleads guilty to copyright infringement

Late last year, on the 18th of December 2007, the Interville Technology Internet cafe at 391 Pitt St Sydney was raided by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) following a long term investigation by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) and Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI). AFACT (Word doc link) and MIPI says their investigations “confirmed that the café was charging hourly fees for customers to view infringing movies and music and selling storage devices with capacities of up to 60GBs (capable of storing over 40 movies and hundreds of music files) which customers were using to copy infringing music, movies and TV shows.” It now transpires that on the 25th of November, 2008, at the Downing Centre Local Court, Sydney, Interville Technology Pty Ltd pleaded guilty to 40 charges of copyright infringement. Magistrate McIntosh decided to impose a strong fine totalling $82,000 on the company plus court costs and ordered that the computer terminals and servers seized during the raid were to be forfeited. There were 60 computers and three servers in the cafe with a combined 8 terabytes of storage holding “hundreds of thousands of infringing movie, TV and music titles. Seized movie titles included titles not yet released in Australian cinemas including “American Gangster”, “National Treasure Book of Secrets” while numerous music tracks from over 150 well-known artists such as 50 Cent, Alicia Keys and Justin Timberlake.” Neil Gane, the AFACT Director of Operations said at the conclusion of the case that: “The conviction and sentencing marks the successful conclusion of excellent work by the Australian Federal Police. “It is satisfying to see sentences handed down which properly reflect the damage operations like this do to rights owners and the 50,000 Australians working in the film and TV industries. The sentences will send a clear message to all Internet café owners engaged in commercial scale copyright infringement – you will be caught and you risk severe penalties,” continued Gane. Sabiene Heindl, the General Manager MIPI said: “This is a fantastic result for a significant case in the fight against music piracy. For the first time, an Internet café has been targeted and justly reprimanded for its blatant facilitation of widespread copyright infringement for commercial gain.” AFACT is now taking an Australian ISP, iiNet, to court for allegedly not acting on AFACT evidence that iiNet users are engaged in piracy, with iiNet promising to vigorously defend itself in the courts. The MD of Australia’s largest ISP, Justin Milne of Telstra BigPond, has shared his views on ISPs and piracy following AFACT’s action.

Big Film and TV interests pursue iiNet for copyright infringement

This from Kim Wetherall's LawFont blog:

The Case Against iiNet

As I noted yesterday, a legal action has been launched by some 34 applicants from the television and movie industry against Australian ISP iiNet, alleging that iiNet has authorised copyright infringement by failing to take (adequate) steps to prevent sharing and downloading of films and TV shows via protocols like BitTorrent. A kind little birdie has sent me a copy of the Statement of Claim, so I have a bit more info. It makes for some interesting reading.

There are a number of interesting questions at the heart of this potential case:

1. What, exactly, are ISPs required to do when they become aware that users are potentially infringing copyright? Do they have to terminate people alleged by the movie industry to be ‘repeat infringers’?
2. How much responsibility will Australian courts put on intermediaries for ‘doing something’ about copyright infringement? So far, Australian courts have been pretty ready to impose liability on people they thought were ‘profiting from copyright wrongdoing’ - Kazaa with its P2P network, or Cooper with his ‘mp3sforfree’ website and his ISP host. What about others whose nefarious or infringing purpose is not so obvious? What, in other words, of more ‘ordinary’ service providers?
3. When the legislation requires that ISPs, in order to ‘gain absolution’ or immunity from damages, should ‘adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the accounts of repeat infringers’ - what does that really mean? Is it sufficient to terminate only those found liable for infringement? Is the court allowed to determine whether the policy is real or sufficient?

Politically, there are some equally interesting questions. Will the Internet industry respond to the lawsuit by looking for a settlement deal that goes some way towards creating the kind of ‘notice and terminate’ system that copyright owners have been pressing for? Will the government’s past approach of protecting ISPs from liability in order to further the digital economy hold? Or, has the tide turned: are we now in a climate where the courts, like the government, decide to hold ISPs to a higher standard, just as the government is trying to get ISPs to engage more actively in filtering adult content? And is this all just an attempt to promote a certain filter that purports to filter both porn and copyright infringement…?

Further analysis of the case at Larvatus Prodeo and Nic Suzor's blog.

Intellectual Property: Where is China going?

China and copyright have been something of an odd couple for some time. Since the 'reform and opening up' (gaige kaifeng) of the Chinese economy under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China has definitely been the place to pick up a cheap copy of designer label clothing, bags, DVDs etc etc.

But since China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001, this reputation has sat uncomfortably with both international (especially US) opinion and the nation's own aspirations to become a global leader in brands and IP and not just cheap manufactured goods.

The Wall Street Journal features a piece today by Wang Qishan, Vice Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, pointing to new IPR reforms in China that further harmonisation with international standards and promise greater enforcement of illegal copying.

The Beijing Silk Markets may be no more - or, as stated in the article, have undertaken "rectification" - and the Yashow Market may be too full of bus loads of Germans, but I'll bet 10 pairs of black Hugo Boss socks (cost $US10) that there is still much more to be uncovered about this question.