HelloWorld

BookCrossing

Page 131

BookCrossing are running an article about a book called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised in which it says that this is the first book to mention BookCrossing - but it's not! Hello World is! See p131:

If I combine lots of letters and make lots of words then collect them all together – as in this book for example – the book can be published and several people including me will, hopefully, earn money from it. If you buy a copy, you can install it in your brain (read it) then give it to your friend, who can install it in her brain and then perhaps give it away to a charity shop where it will be resold to someone else, or leave it on a bench somewhere as part of the new fashion for releasing books into the wild (footnote) and the cycle will continue. If, two years later, something comes up which reminds you of my book, you might want to think about it some more, and that is free of charge. And if you want to scribble in the margins and change words or cross bits out, that’s ok too.

(footnote: http://www.bookcrossing.com

Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture

Page 131

Like the alphabet, code in its broken-down components is free. How could it be any other way for either of them? Imagine if you had to pay royalties every time you wrote the letter ‘Z’ or ‘S’ - the entire literacy system would collapse! Imagine how much it would cost you to write just a shopping list, let alone a whole book!

Here's something to think about. In his new book Free Culture, March 2004, Lawrence Lessig reminds us of the debates which took place in the early days of photography. Eastman's invention of the Kodak camera made photography cheap, easy and available to all. However, the story could have been very different if the legal deliberations it gave rise to had been resolved differently.

The problem was this: Should a photographer, whether amateur or professional, obtain permission before capturing and printing an image?

As Lessig explains:

'The arguments in favour of requiring permission will sound surprisingly familiar.The photographer was "taking" something from the person or building whose photograph he shot - pirating something of value.' [Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, USA: The Penguin Press, 2004]

(This reminds us, by the way, of the story of Thoreau's poet 'stealing' from a farmer, as described in Section 6 of Hello World.)

After a number of highly-debated cases, the courts finally decided that a photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source.

I leave you to think about what would have happened if the decision had gone the other way, so that every photograph taken would, by default, have involved a system of compensation for the owner of whatever was the source of the image.

NB: Lessig's book is available as a free download, or you can buy it if you prefer. Full information here.