Rapture of the Nerds

coerced purchase of our humble article of commerce. USA: Amazon Kindle (DRM-free) Barnes and Noble Nook (DRM-free) Google Books (DRM-free) Kobo (DRM-free) Apple iBooks (DRM-free) Amazon Booksense (will locate a store near you!) Barnes and Noble Powells Booksamillion UK: Forbidden Planet Waterstones Amazon Rapture of the Nerds Canada: by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross Amazon Kindle (DRM-free) Kobo (DRM-free) Chapters/Indigo Amazon.ca A COMMERCIAL INTERLUDE Gondar primulon, Earthling! Welcome to the free READ THIS FIRST CC-licensed ebook! We know that there's no way This book is distributed under a Creative we could keep you from getting a free copy of this Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs from some dodgy corner of the Internet. Rather 3.0 license. That means: than send you off to the kind of site you'd better visit through a proxy with your cookies turned off, You are free: we're giving you this-here free, pristine, hand- to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit crafted ebook in a variety of formats. We hope you the work enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it (though, truth be told, we really enjoyed writing Under the following conditions: it). And we hope that, having read it, you rush Attribution. You must attribute the work in straight out to your local bookseller and buy a the manner specified by the author or copy—or, if you prefer to buy the ebook or have licensor (but not in any way that suggests the smashing and lovely physical book delivered that they endorse you or your use of the to you, here are some links that will let you reward work). our generosity and trust with a voluntary, non- Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at No Derivative Works—You may not alter, a giant global publisher before they put on a play transform, or build upon this work. based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say For any reuse or distribution, you must that people who want to "loan" their electronic make clear to others the license terms of copy of my book to a friend need to get a license this work. The best way to do this is with a to do so. Loaning books has been around longer link http://craphound.com/rotn than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing. Any of the above conditions can be waived Copyright laws are increasingly passed without if you get our permission democratic debate or scrutiny. In Great Britain, More info here: where I live, Parliament recently passed the https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law nd/3.0/ that allows corporate giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if anyone in the house is See the end of this file for the complete legalese. accused (without proof) of copyright infringement; it also creates a "Great Firewall of Britain" that is used to censor any site that record companies and movie studios don't like. This law was passed in THE COPYRIGHT THING 2010 without any serious public debate in Parliament, rushed through using a dirty process What Cory Says: through which our elected representatives betrayed The Creative Commons license at the top of this the public to give a huge, gift-wrapped present to file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got their corporate pals. some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes the US, the EU and Canada have been negotiating a long way, and more than that is too much. a secret copyright treaty called "The Anti- I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) and my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice "Trans-Pacific Partnership" (TPP) that have all the that they can't just take my stuff without problems that the Digital Economy Act had and permission and get rich on it without cutting me in then some. The plan was to agree to this in secret, for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good without public debate, and then force the world's position when it comes to negotiating with these poorest countries to sign up for it by refusing to companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's allow them to sell goods to rich countries unless experience with copyright law and licensing they do. In America, the plan was to pass it (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN without Congressional debate, using the executive agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). power of the President. ACTA began under Bush, What's more, there's just not that many of these but the Obama administration has pursued it with negotiations—even if I sell fifty or a hundred great enthusiasm, and presided over the creation of different editions of Context (which would put it TPP. The secret part of the plan failed—ACTA ran in top millionth of a percentile for reprint essay into heavy opposition in Congress and has been collections), that's still only a hundred rejected by Mexico and the European Parliament negotiations, which I could just about manage. —but the treaty isn't dead yet, has supporters on both sides of the house who keep attempting to I hate the fact that fans who want to do what bring it back under a new name. This is a readers have always done are expected to play in bipartisan lunacy. the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just stupid to say that an elementary So if you're not violating copyright law right now, you will be soon. And the penalties are about to wasn't designed at all! Rather, it evolved over a get a lot worse. As someone who relies on period of centuries, from a tool of state censorship copyright to earn my living, this makes me sick. If (you could prevent sedition by licensing big, the big entertainment companies set out to destroy heavy, old-fashioned metal-type printing presses) copyright's mission, they couldn't do any better to a tool for revenue protection (Dickens and other than they're doing now. Victorian writers were frequently on the edge of So, basically, screw that. Or, as the singer, Wobbly poverty because their works were copied without and union organizer Woody Guthrie so eloquently credit or royalty payment by any printer who put it: could get their hands on them), and finally, recently, into a tool for rent-seeking by big "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of corporations with paid lobbyists. Nobody in their Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and right mind would have designed the current anybody caught singin' it without our permission, system—but we're stuck with it, largely because will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we it's now a global mess, enshrined in law by don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. international treaty: a many-headed hydra that Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we would require broad international agreement in wanted to do." order to be replaced. What Charlie says: I am a copyright criminal, and so (in all Cory has covered the groundwork pretty well probability) are you. above, so I've got relatively little to add. No, I'm not exaggerating. I will confess to having There's an old story about a couple of tourists who cracked the DRM lock on novels that I wrote, so are on vacation in rural Ireland, and who get that I could have my very own copy of the as- themselves lost. They've got a map but they can't published text! That puts me in breach of the figure out where they are (this is the pre-GPS era). DMCA (in the United States) and the Copyright, Finally they come to a rural five-way crossroads, Designs and Patents Act (in the United Kingdom, and a farmer with a herd of sheep. "Excuse me, where I live). I've also cracked DRM on ebooks I my good man," says one of the tourists, "we're bought so that I could read them on other devices. lost! Can you tell us how to get back to Dublin?" (Did I say "on ebooks I bought"? That's the The farmer meditates for a minute, and then offers problem: I paid for them, but I don't own them in up his advice: "Sure I can, but if I were youse, I the same way that I own a chunk of dead tree; the wouldn't start from here." major ebook vendors insist that I'm merely paying a license fee to use the ebook, and that they retain (Pre-emptive apology: This old story applies to ownership of it.) You may think that's hair- just about all rural districts; it's just traditional to splitting, but it's an important point; if I complied set it in Ireland. Please don't hurt me!) with the letter of the law I wouldn't be able to use Copyright puts us all in those tourists' shoes, and those ebooks after the ereader they were licensed they pinch and they don't fit very well.

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