Time Traveler Show: Stross, Scalzi and Buckell on International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

[james_davis_nicoll]

Stross, Scalzi and Buckell on International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

I am just going to cut and paste the description:

A special episode of the Time Traveler Show. Recorded on International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day Eve at Penguicon in Michigan (4-22-07). This panel discussion about Creative Commons and Internet Marketing broached the subject of giving your stuff away with three SF author "web scabs". Charles Stross, John Scalzi, and Tobias Buckell explain why they give away so much of their work. They even play devil's advocate explaining some arguments against putting your works out there for free.

Charlie Stross even wore his Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch shirt!

Two comments: it would have been better had they found a lucid pro-DRMer or two to take part and for the most part the comments from the audience are inaudible. Otherwise, interesting walk down memory lane for an era now lost to fading memory.

Comments

[elf]

I've yet to meet a "lucid pro-DRMer" who didn't either repeat by rote the standard publishing industry dogma, or else came across as a moralistic prig insisting that humans are innately immoral lying thieving wretches and it's good that some have risen above their base nature long enough to create tools to protect us from our own evil.

I've met some who can coherently argue either of those points, and it looks good for journalistic copy (they like to present "both sides"), but they never have any answers for why anyone would want to do business with customers who should all be treated like wannabe thieves by default.

[inklesspen.livejournal.com]

Are there any such beasts as lucid pro-DRMers?

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Yes, but they are generally not authors themselves.

The people who can make decent arguments for DRM are the people who run small game companies, more often than not -- they're the ones who watch their server logs, compare that against sales, can control pricing so they can run experiments to compare price to piracy levels, and so forth.

[inklesspen.livejournal.com]

I would wager games and books are different sorts of goods and not directly comparable, though.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Indeed. But that's also one of the reasons that they can make decent arguments for DRM :).

(And note that not all of them do so.)

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

it would have been better had they found a lucid pro-DRMer or two to take part

And maybe a unicorn. That would have worked well too.