Cory Doctorow On For the Win, Gold Farming, and DRM 179
adaviel passes along a New Scientist interview with Cory Doctorow, who has been touring for his new book For the Win. The SF author and technology activist talks about DRM, gold farming, and much else besides.
Re:Gold Farming History (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention that, but the reason people hate gold farmers isn't about racism. It has 0 to do with race and everything to do with the fact they get their "lot" by stealing from people.
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:0, Insightful)
Doctorow is great at self-promotion. It's too bad he's shit at everything else.
Re:Indeed, he is a tool. (Score:3, Insightful)
Who, exactly, is Doctorow a tool of? Independent free thinkers?
In addition, given that he gives away his work in addition to publishing it, how exactly do you consider him a "shameless self-promoter"?
Sounds like some jealousy is at work here, mister AC Troll.
SB
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but after the obscurity, THEN artists get interested in DRM.
EXCELLENT interview! (Score:3, Insightful)
I've recently become a big Cory Doctorow fan, reading several of his sci-fi books in electronic format. (I'm reading through "Down and out in the Magic Kingdom" right now on my iPad.)
This interview just further impressed me with him... Great, insightful comments on both DRM and on "piracy" vs. "publicity"!
I'll admit that as much as I like science-fiction, I'm not exactly an "avid reader" - so maybe some of Doctorow's work is just a "re-hash" of ideas already used before. But I found lots of very interesting and unique (at least to me) concepts in his writing. I particularly like his premise in "Down and Out..." that the world has solved its energy problems, which led to sort of a new "enlightenment" era of rapid advances in technology - with one of them being the ability to "reboot" a dead person from recent backups of the knowledge in their head that were taken at regular intervals. People measure their age in how many lifetimes + years old they are. Of course, this leads to massive overpopulation, but the masses accept it because they're confident that problem can also be resolved somehow. And in the meantime, many people opt to "deadhead" for X number of hundred years - voluntarily putting themselves in a suspended state, when they feel they've done everything they really want to do and see everything they want to see. This just seems a few steps beyond the material you typically find in science fiction in the movies or on TV, not to mention in other books I've read so far!
Re:Gold Farming History (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that all the early gold selling (AC, EQ) was individuals selling stuff on ebay, and not some sort of organized business.
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:4, Insightful)
The view changes dramatically when you are "on top". Protecting your IP once it has value becomes important for a lot of people.
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:2, Insightful)
that's how he gets famous - by taking other people's ideas and regurgitating them as if they were his own.
Like everybody else. Writers are not philosophers or physicists. They are not supposed to come up with new ideas, but to express the old ideas in interesting ways.
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:3, Insightful)
The view changes dramatically when you are "on top". Protecting your IP once it has value becomes important for a lot of people.
But only after they've already profited handsomely from it.
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:3, Insightful)
And how often do you casually repeat insightful/witty statements made by other people in conversation without bothering to give a citation? Everyone does it, sometimes without even realizing it.
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't lie, you fucking love it.
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:3, Insightful)
Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief. All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief
U2, The Fly [songmeanings.net]
Re:BoingBoing (Score:2, Insightful)
Belay that order; Cory Doctorow is the John Katz of the Internet 2.0. Avoid at all costs.
Most of the other posts in this thread will agree with me. Lots of "anonymous cowards" who seem to disagree with the regular posters on slashdot who seem to dislike Doctorow's shameless self promotion. Hmm...
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:1, Insightful)
This is commonly called "culture" (evolution of culture [wikipedia.org]). It's why you and me post on Slashdot and expect other people to be willing to understand our verbal diarrhoea. Or am I misunderstanding what you mean?
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:5, Insightful)
Writers are not philosophers or physicists
As a physicist and philospher who is currently developing his writing career, I don't agree with this. It's true that some writers are just what you describe. They aren't artists, they aren't original thinkers. They are what used to be known as "hacks".
Writers, however, are expected to come up with their own ideas, and in the case in point, with their own words--at least some of the time. While it's true that "mediocrity borrows, genius steals", it takes more than theft to make a genius: it takes intelligent transmutation of the stolen material into an original and interesting form. Insofar as a writer does that, they are not a hack, but that is a requirement, not just "expressing old ideas in interesting ways."
And the best writers, of course, express new ideas in interesting ways. Melville wasn't just regurgitating facts about whales (although he was doing that too...)
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's natural for someone who hates DRM as much as Cory Doctorow not to give credit for quotes.
I think it's weird that you can't distinguish between broken tech like DRM and a perfectly legitimate desire for an artist to be recognized and compenstated for their work. The latter is expressed by a variety of intellectual property law, which Doctorow is not absolutely against.
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure you've heard the quote often attributed to the artist Pablo Picaaso, that "good artists borrow, great artists steal."?
The fact is that any artist is a giant milling machine - in goes ideas and concepts and styles and techniques and disparate things (like banana cereal and dogs peeing against trees) and they all churn and ferment and process and grind and beak down and clump together and then ... ping ... up pops an idea, which because the milling machine is an artist of some description, needs to get expressed in some manner (the non-artist merely stalls at the last step - the process is not unique to artists).
The expression in turn becomes more grist for the mills of others.
Rip people off? No. Tuck into the feast of ideas and creativity? Yes!
The only bad thing is when people simply plagarise - but just because somone's expressing an idea that someone else has, does not mean that they're trying to pass those ideas off as their own for the sake of appearances; you can't assume that they haven't had those ideas slosh about inside them and find affinity with them and become caught in the current of that need for expression. I mean - we all know this - people say things that express how we feel about something and we take the bits we like, pass it through the filter of ourselves and express the same basic idea in a different manner.
No one OWNS ideas. It's all a big ocean full of plankton and we're like basking sharks swimming through it's currents and eddys, breathing it in, filtering it, pissing and shitting it out and releasing our spawn into it. (And that's why copyright - walls in a constantly churning ocean - is a fundementally awkward thing doomed to imperfect implementation and why the IP Monopolists are fated to much unhappiness (by equating it to real tangible property)).
Even if you sit in a cave and never encounter other people's ideas, the chances of you coming up with an idea that's not already been manifested by people swimming throght the ocean of ideas and expression, is slim to none.
And why the hell would you want to do that? It doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me.
Re:interesting quote from the subject of the artic (Score:3, Insightful)
He may not credit Tim (or the masturbation guy) every single time he utters those words but he has indeed credited him: [craphound.com]
For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism).
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of slagging Cory. Do you realize how long it would take for Cory, or anyone, to talk if they had to cite the origin of every single thought they're expressing?
Re:Gold Farming History (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I think it is racist in the tenor as well as the use.
They're not "Chinese" because they are from China. The term is attached to indicate that they're willing to work for long hours for little pay, that they care little about the damage they do to the world, and that their product cheapens even similar products because it is so very crappy. It mostly exists as a contrast to the home-grown varieties which are implied to be both superior in quality as well as safety.
This is the connotation applied to nearly all imports from China, so why not their gold as well?