The University of Toronto's Home About Advertise Volunteer Issues SeSartcuhdent Newspaper Since 1880 NEWS COMMENT FEATURES ARTS SCIENCE SPORTS VIDEO PHOTO MAGAZINE How to Destroy the Book, by Cory Doctorow By Jade Colbert Published: 4:55 pm, 14 December 2009 Modified: 6 pm, 11 January 2012 under Features UP DATED n November 13, Cory Doctorow spoke to a crowd of about a O hundred librarians, educators, publishers, authors, and Contributor Like 1 students on “How to Destroy the Book,” as part of the Jade Colbert Tw eet 0 National Reading Summit held at the ROM. http://var.st/8bo Doctorow has a pretty impressive bio: co-editor of Boing Boing, Follow on twitter: former Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier @cocolbert Foundation, Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, visiting Senior Lecturer at Open University, and New York Times bestselling author. He has been called (okay, admittedly by Entertainment Weekly) “The William Gibson of his generation.” Related Stories SAC gets into the book biz A book is more important than a life,’ Rushdie told Manji NEWS IN BRIEF: NFB plans documentary based on book by U of T academic star Margaret MacMillan Book Review: The Upside of Down Med-book drive takes flight What I don’t like about such bios is how they leave you without much sense for how the accolades were earned in the first place. Not to give the impression that it’s his best work, but for evidence of Doctorow’s refreshing attitude, look no further than his email signature. Whereas a typical email from Maclean’s might conclude: This e-mail (and attachment(s)) is confidential, proprietary, may be subject to copyright and legal privilege and no related rights are waived. If you are not the intended recipient or its agent, any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail or any of its content is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. All messages may be monitored as permitted by applicable law… and so on for another couple of lines, and then in French, Cory Doctorow’s emails end thusly: READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. For this alone the man deserves a medal. In October, Doctorow’s latest, Makers, hit real, physical bookshelves to generally happy thoughts from Publishers Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, and The Globe and Mail. Makers is also available as a free download, as are all of Doctorow’s books, from his website. Here is Part One to his talk. An elegy for the book I’d like to start my talk today with an elegy for the book. The first part of the elegy is called “Pirates.” Pirates There is a group of powerful anti-copyright activists out there who are trying to destroy the book. These pirates would destroy copyright, and they have no respect for our property. They dress up their thievery in high-minded rhetoric about how they are the true defenders and inheritors of creativity, and they have sold this claim around the world to regulators and lawmakers alike. There are members of Parliament and Congress-people who are unduly influenced by them. They say they’re only trying to preserve the way it’s always been. They claim that their radical agenda is somehow conservative. But what they really see is a future in which the electronic culture market grows by leaps and bounds and they get to be at the centre of it. They claim that this is about ethics, but anyone who thinks about it for a minute can see that it’s about profit. Part two of this elegy is called “The people of the book.” The people of the book We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today. Copyright recognizes this. It says that when you buy a book, you own the book. It’s yours to give away, yours to keep, yours to license or to borrow, to inherit or to be included in your safe for your children. For centuries, copyright has acknowledged that sacred connection between readers and their books. We think of copyright as something that regulates things within a bunch of buckets—DVDs, video games, records—but books are more than all of these things. Books are older than copyright. Books are older than publishing. Books are older than printing! The anti-copyright activists have no respect for our copyright and our books. They say that when you buy an ebook or an audiobook that’s delivered digitally, you are demoted from an owner to a licensor. From a reader to a mere user. These thieves deliver our digital books and our audiobooks wrapped in license agreements and technologies that might as well be designed to destroy the emotional connection that readers have with their books. These licenses of course can run up to thousands of words. If you have an iPhone and buy an audiobook from Audible using the iTunes store with it, you agree to an estimated 26,000 words of license agreement. The Canadian Copyright Act itself only runs to 33,000 words. The premise of these licenses is forget copyright. Forget the law in the public realm that gave you the rights to your books. From now on, we write the law. These licenses are of course built with unenforceable clauses. You can tell, because they’re liberally peppered with language like “If any part of this license is found to be unenforceable, the rest of it will remain in effect.” This is of course the lawyers’ way of saying, “We didn’t limit this to the things we thought a judge would smile upon. We put everything in here. It’s a kind of possible wish list and the only way that you’ll find out which parts are real and which parts are imaginary is to sue us over every point.” It’s basically a way of saying that copyright is nonsense, and that readers should stop paying attention to it, and only agree to these crazy, abusive licenses. And on top of those licenses, they add digital rights management technology. Digital rights management technology, of course, has never stopped the book from escaping onto the Internet. To those publishers here today who believe that you can buy DRM that will stop your books from appearing on the Internet without restriction, I say to you, “Behold, the typist.” So if DRM doesn’t stop people from copying books, what does it do? What it does is makes it illegal for someone to create a reader that can display a book or play an audiobook. Imagine if a giant book chain did a deal with Ikea so that Ikea would be the exclusive supplier of reading chairs and shelves and light bulbs for its books, and actually got a law passed that made it illegal to sell chairs and bookcases and light bulbs that were compatible with their books. This would not be in the interests of readers nor of publishers nor of writers. It would very much be in the interest of Ikea, because they would then have a lock in over our readers that would allow them to exercise undue power in the marketplace. We’ve heard publishers and writers and other people involved in various creative industries bemoaning for years the undue influence exerted by chains like Wal-Mart, because they control a critical distribution channel. But imagine if that control continued beyond the grave, after the sale, so that any after-market use of your collection required you have an ongoing relationship with a mere retailer or distributor. Imagine how bad that would be for publishing. So part three of this elegy is called “Saving the book.” Saving the book After years of writing and talking and thinking about books, I’ve come to a simple but important realization: I love books. Not just reading them or owning them—I have a deeply sentimental attachment to the very idea of the book.