Archive for the ‘publishing’ Category
A Brief History of Permeable Press
Creative Commons 3.0
A draft of the new Creative Commons license has just been published. According to bOING bOING, in its first 3.5 years, 160,000,000 works were released under the license.
DRM-free Music, Books and Video
Defective by Design has a great page listing a number of online vendors of music, books and video, all of which are DRM-free. Please support these business models!
Unbounded Freedom: A guide to Creative Commons thinking for cultural organisations
“Unbounded Freedom by Rosemary Bechler is a new publication from Counterpoint to be launched in partnership with the London Book Fair on 29 September 2006.” The report is free, of course, because it’s under a Creative Commons license. Cool. Meanwhile, the British Library has published a Manifesto calling for the simplification of copyright and IP law in the digital age, as well as for reasonable and restrained statutory limitations.
Wordcraft of Oregon
Noted small-press publisher David Memmott has resurrected his much-loved press, Wordcraft of Oregon, and has a gorgeous new web site.
Puck and Permeable Press for Wikipedians
I just created articles in Wikipedia for Permeable Press and Puck magazine. I encourage all contributors to either of those enterprises to edit those articles, and to create biographical articles on themselves and then update the Permeable and/or Puck articles with the links. Likewise, you can contact me with your info, corrections or additions to the articles, and I’ll be happy to create and/or update the article(s) for you.
The Anarchist in the Library
The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System
review by Brian Charles Clark
The Anarchist in the Library is Vaidhyanathan’s second book on copyright and intellectual property (IP) after his 2003 Copyrights and Copywrongs. Where the earlier book was a straightforward and lively history of this area of law and culture, in The Anarchist in the Library Vaidhyanathan tries to put a socio-philosophical spin on the same material to achieve an apocalyptic excitement. For a number of reasons, it doesn’t work.
Vaidhyanathan tries to cram all the complex issues surrounding copyright and IP, which include those of music downloading and sampling, software and media “piracy,” print publishing, control of libraries (as in the Patriot Act), control of computer networks as well as the little publicized area of IP in science (genomics, pharmaceuticals, and so on), inside two buckets: the totalitarian “controllers” and the free-for-all “anarchists.” The alleged “clash” between the two buckets, Vaidhyanathan claims, is “crashing the system” and “hacking the real world.”
The problem is, those two categories don’t reflect reality. The categories of people he’s describing—totalitarians and anarchists—are mere caricatures of copyright combatants. Yes, many CEOs and Republicrats (since the two parties are largely indistinguishable on this topic) would like to tighten the screws and enclose the creative commons by extending copyright for longer and longer periods of time, restricting freedom of data movement and controlling media copying and (re)distribution. And yes, a few of the “hackers” of the creative commons want to completely defy all law and make everything available for détournment all the time. There are, however, large masses of people—consumers, especially, but politicians and business people as well—who are more or less in the middle and who do and will exert authority and change on the situation. Vaidhyanathan doesn’t ignore this middle ground but he only mentions it in passing, as it isn’t convenient to his hyperbolic thesis of apocalypse. Read the rest of this entry »
With Mouth to Ear: Assaying the Essay
essay by Brian Charles Clark
With Mouth to Ear, an essay by Brian Charles Clark
Why define something positive in terms of what it is not? “Non” fiction: I have no idea how this term came to be applied to writing what is, in intent, a “true” story. David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, titled his film of fictional weavings, True Stories. Although Byrne’s film is highly improbable as a series of “real” events, the voice of his film is quite believable — and true. True Stories presents a critique of contemporary consumer culture as sharp and insightful as, say, an essay by the 20th-century German philosopher, Theodore Adorno. In fact, Adorno has a great line about just such things as truth and reality: “In psychoanalysis, only the exaggerations are true.”
What I think Adorno’s gnome means for “nonfiction” — and I think especially of “creative nonfiction,” but as well of writing in general — goes something like this. The subjective is always going to be subjunctive — wishes, wants, desires, meditations — and therefore unverifiable. There’s always a point of quantum uncertainty when it comes to locating the veracity of any piece of writing. Sometimes that uncertainty reaches critical mass, and is obviously a work of fiction. At other times the quantum uncertainty shrinks smaller and smaller, collapsing into a black hole that sucks in any and all insinuations of imagination. As an example, perhaps Robert Coover’s Snow White is clearly at critical mass, while the white pages are pretty much a black hole. Unless, of course, you’re a typeface designer and are engaged in the art of creating tiny letters that can be read quickly and easily. The Dutch type design community, for instance, is famous for its innovations, both technical and stylistic, in creating utilitarian typefaces. It’s like The Rockman said to Oblio and Arrow in the animated film The Point: “You see what you want to see, and you hear what you want to hear.” Read the rest of this entry »
