Тег: Literature

Once more about intellectual property law

Suppose I am a writer. I live in Ancapistan. I wrote a book. I posted it on my website, free for readers. At the top, I put a banner that rotates with every view and brings me a little bit of money. At the bottom, I put a donation button.

A malicious pirate copied my book to his own site. He threw out a couple of chapters he didn’t like. He put his own banner at the top. He put his own donation button at the bottom.

If I take a little shotgun and go to kill him, will the jury acquit me?

анонимный вопрос

This is a supplement to the question proposed by the King of Sex and Tea Bags, but this time without a signature.

Oddly enough, I quite often do exactly what you described. Some Bitarch or Vitaly Tizun posts an article. I take the text, correct the commas, remove paragraphs I don’t like, accompany it with some comment of my own, and post it on my own site, not forgetting to place a “donations” button under the post. As it happened, none of them have come at me with a little shotgun for this; in fact, some even praise me, saying the edited text is easier to read. Perhaps it’s because I credit the author and provide a link to the original post. Therefore, the authors see their own benefit in my behavior and do not object.

But what if I ignored the norms of netiquette, took anyone’s texts, edited them however I liked according to my taste, and posted them in a channel under my own name? One thing would be obvious in this situation: it would also be unnecessary for others to observe the norms of netiquette in their attitude toward me. Perhaps the slandered authors would rain attacks on me in social networks and tediously explain to the public that they are the actual authors of the text, that the originals should be obtained from them, and that they are the ones who should be donated to if the work was liked. And I would continue my strange approach to content creation, focusing on exactly what and how I change in the posted texts. For example, I might post the text of the Iliad, leaving only the first half of the second song, and refer all those who are outraged to Mandelstam. Over time, I would gain a community of connoisseurs of my specific edits. Or perhaps the readers would quickly get bored. That’s the market.

Now, if I focused not on self-assertion through edits, but on simply posting as many “tasty” texts as possible, I would end up with a very ordinary electronic library. In this case, it would be redundant for me to cut out even the author’s name and substitute my own; I would post it as is, but I would take care of fast servers, providing the text in all popular e-reader formats, and other things valued by users. I would try to ensure that I have everything people are interested in, in the most convenient form for reading. I would develop a reader community, interview authors, and so on. And the authors would come to me themselves, suggesting, “Look, I have a fresh book here, take it, and give me a percentage of the donations.” I would say: ok. I would allocate a personal section for the author in my library, make them a moderator there, let them answer readers’ questions and entertain them in every way, and we would split the income in an agreed proportion.

Of course, if I behaved like a textbook “mudesa,” treating authors with disdain—saying, “be grateful that you talentless hacks are published anywhere at all, you should actually be paying me for this”—or, say, inserted scenes into someone’s books that made the author look like an idiot—well, then perhaps I would drive someone to the point of coming at me with a little shotgun. But I could just as easily drive anyone to that for any other reason; here, the activity of posting other people’s texts is no longer the principal issue. And the more vilely I behaved, the more people wondered how I hadn’t been shot yet—the more satisfaction they would feel upon the occurrence of that fact. Of course, those who demand compensation from the killer for my murder would find it difficult to find a sufficiently impartial court, but not everyone in the world is a fan of literature. So, they’d hardly be acquitted, but they probably wouldn’t be judged strictly either.

The Strugatskys

The Strugatsky brothers were Soviet sci-fi writers who, due to the distortions typical of a planned economy, were published by the Soviet state in much smaller print runs than the actual demand. Consequently, during the transition to a market economy, this deferred demand began to be actively satisfied, and my parents had a complete collection of their works on their shelf. I assume that the current generation of fifty-year-olds knows these books much better than those who are now twenty-five. As for me, I somehow jumped straight from childhood history encyclopedias to fantasy, then to popular science, while the Strugatskys’ collected works just gathered dust on my parents’ shelf.

Actually, I was prompted to write this post by a mention from Mikhail Svetov in a stream about how, as a child, he read authors in their entire collected works. I am not that tedious, and in the case of the Strugatskys, I ended up reading three books at different times.

The first was “Hard to Be a God”, a story about a communist “popadanets” (time-traveler/portal-jumper) in the Middle Ages. It was impossible not to read it because it is memetic, and I wanted to understand the origins of all those tales about how the “greys” are replaced by the “blacks,” and why a noble don should not see the reasons for not doing something. At the time, there was no mass literature about “popadantsy,” so the writers used another planet as a setting, but all the problematic themes perfectly align with the popadanets genre. What gives the work its originality is that the traveler failed miserably at imposing his values on a medieval society, and the mission ended in failure. Modern writers churn out more optimistic things, but here they managed to make a bestseller without a happy end; I respect that.

The second turned out to be the novella “The Predators”; here I owe thanks to Alexander Rozov, who wrote an interesting review of it. The book is about a communist who ends up in a prosperous capitalist consumer society, is horrified, and begins to make plans about what can be done with these unfortunate lost people who want to live happily and do not want to storm Mars in tight ranks. The communists faced a dilemma: either bring assault columns into the country and drive the population into the gulag, or start a multi-year brainwashing campaign. The protagonist humanely adhered to the second strategy, considering the first a failure, and for that, we can be grateful.

Finally, the third novella is “The Distant Rainbow”, which I read quite recently at the dacha when I had a free evening—a book from that very collected works happened to be next to my chair. The story tells of a planetary catastrophe that occurred due to the peculiarities of the communist system of organizing fundamental research, as well as the fact that in a planned economy there are no prices, and therefore economic calculation is impossible. The latter is illustrated with rich material. Rare instruments were brought from the metropolis, and the scientists resort to various tricks to try to obtain them out of turn, through connections (“blat”), or simply by stealing them. The option to “buy” simply does not exist for the poor souls. Energy is needed for experiments, and the scientists steal it from the local power system because the energy issued by coupons has already been spent. The option to “buy” simply does not exist for the poor souls. Another experiment ends in catastrophe (I don’t rule out that it was also caused by a competing laboratory stealing some rare controller right from the test rig, but the reasons for the tragedy remain off-screen), and it turns out that no evacuation means were provided on the planet (what safety regulations, it’s communism). To top it all off, the question of who exactly and what values should be saved first is also solved completely arbitrarily, and not by a legitimate governing body, but by the captain of the only spaceship, who decided for himself who lives and who dies, as if the ship were his private property. And it is exactly this approach, where the “Red Director” is king and god at his enterprise, that is positioned as the most morally justified. And so, back in the distant sixties, the sci-fi writers were already describing the outlines of the “Red Belt” of the nineties.

I once had to answer a question about which books are worth reading. I suggested first ensuring a frame of perception for oneself, and then you can read anything, and the result will invariably please you. Here you go: a libertarian reading of communist propaganda. Try reading all sorts of things; it’s interesting. And yes, the Strugatskys are stylistically simply wonderful, and I perfectly understand the nature of their popularity. If I have more time, I’ll read something else by them.

this very edition