My War On Cory Doctorow: Short Course

Here are the theses for my war against Cory Doctorow and against copyleftism:

COPYLEFTISM ONLY WORKS FOR A FEW HEAVILY SELF-PROMOTING PEOPLE

1. Giving away the book does not sell the book for everyone; even Raph Koster says this, who gives away music, not books. Quite a few admit *it doesn't work*. Andrew Keen has documented in Cult of the Amateur how Myspace music giveaways are not in fact sustaining bands.
2. Giving away the book is not a loss-leader like capitalism marketing, it is Maoist marketing as it oversaturates the market with freebies and destroys the incentive and market for other people to *sell* their books
3. Giving away digital books destroys RL bookstores and publishing houses which pay advances to writers.
4. Giving away books makes authors rely on lecture fees, and they can't all get them. Few could use the model of university and club lecture fees, as there are only so many slots available in these venues, and the top-fee-paying ones drop off to beer money in the long tail.
5. The lecture relies on the concept of "being about the fad of giving away", i.e. a propaganda talk, not substance.
6. Giving away books does not lead to tips that equal the living wage that books might -- those who are honest about this tell us this.
7. Giving away books is the luxury of those who have jobs in big IT, or as professors, or dwell in basements with their Mom to pay their expenses
8. Generating the demand for the million downloads that *might* make a "personal brand" require the author to become a travelling salesman and constant free social media broadcaster -- this involves not only unpaid hours.

COPYLEFTISM IS A CULT RELYING ON DESTRUCTION OF OTHER MODELS TO SUCCEED

1. Doctorow doesn't just preach this for his own niche (science fiction) which is substantially aided by his own "personal brand" as an iconic copyleftist, he insists that everybody try this and that it works -- a proposition not researched nor sustainable.
2. He preaches copyleftism and demands the removal of DRM for everybody, he doesn't just offer his own goods for free, because his technocommunism cannot survive "in one state" but has to be globalized to keep being ideologically tenable.
3. Copyleftism has destroyed the newspaper and magazine, and online versions of these media will not survive or not get all their costs paid using the same copyleftist mantras
4. Surviving online media is asked to survive by demanding that advertisers buy spots, a concept that relies on advertisers to keep buying ads that don't work, in media that can't sustain itself and is dwindling.

COPYLEFTISM RELIES ON HYPOCRISY, DISSEMBLING, AND ONE-HIT WONDERS

1. Doctorow brags that his giving away a million books enables Forbes to commission him a more expensive magazine article, although his copyleftism is what is killing magazines like Forbes that won't be able to go on surviving such as to keep giving honoraria to copyleftists.
2. Doctorow never tells you the spread sheet hard numbers on the results of his one million downloads in terms of actual sales of his books, nor can we correlate accurately those hard-copy sales with the give-away scheme when he is busy hustling the book in lecture tours.
3. Doctorow says disingenuously that he was "on the New York Times best-seller list for 4 weeks" etc. but that was in the children's chapter book list, he didnt' stay on it, nor did we hear the sales, nor did we correlate giveaways/sales.
4.Much of Doctorow's fame accrues from being "the first" to give away books and claim to make money, and relied on a solid niche sci-fi and geek fan base. He fails to acknowledge that "firsts" always make money on beta/free media (like Second Life) because they can *rely on the old media to cover their new media first*. But old media doesn't keep covering the next story, no longer a story, and old media is dying because new media is killing it!

COPYLEFTISM RELIES ON SILENCING -- OR THE FAILURE TO FOLLOW UP -- BY CRITICS

1. Doctorow, despite being an EFF fellow, accuses me, a vocal and vehement critic who rightly calls him a "bolshevik" and urges boycotting of his books, of "harassment" on Twitter and abuse reports me to try to get me banned and shut up.
2. Kevin Kelly browbeat David Pogue into giving away a book for free because David Pogue criticised copyleftism with the same theses I use here, and he was bullied into providing a book for free, evidently. But he never followed up on whether the book sold.

Comments

[ENKI-2]

Reading through, it seems more like a personal rant against Cory Doctorow. There are a number of problems with the posting. Some might be more obvious than others.

1) Doctorow's first books and short story collections were cc-licensed. I doubt that the boingboing blog has a 1:1 correspondence with his sci-fi audience -- I didn't know of the blog until after I read several of his books.
2) This is the internet. People don't have to travel across the world to spam. A lot of things that are worth buying will be reproduced and travel by themselves, particularly if reproduction is encouraged, and plenty of people spend enough of their free time on the net to spam their works without extra effort. The 'traveling salesman' bit therefore seems like an obvious strawman, or at best the retort of someone who doesn't use computers often.
3) "Remove DRM" isn't the same thing as "give away free". This kind of mental equivalence is particularly amusing since DRM is generally cracked quite quickly -- DRM-enabled stuff is pirated just as much as non-DRM-enabled stuff. Copyleft just tacitly supports the practice, rather than demonizing it.

I figure that the author would have more luck convincing people if he didn't rely upon hotbutton terms like "cult" and terms that used to be hotbutton a half-century ago like "communist" in order to pursuade people. It seems like a bit of a crutch.

[Uterine Cancer Symptoms]

I really like this blog, you are very good making them. I say that the issue discussed in this blog is quite interesting and of high quality.

[David]

How's this for a radical capitalist idea - If an author wants to give his work away that is his business. If you don't want to give yours away then don't. And yet I see that access to your blog is free, and thus waters down the saleability of all intellectual property. Ironic isn't it.

[Prokofy Neva]

A blog is just a set of casual notes, like a diary. There are people who are professional writers paid for their blogging, and that's a good thing. I actually get tips for this blog. I'd expect to be paid for my writing if I was writing for my jobs professionally.

The idea that "it's his business if he gives it away" is fake laissez-faire capitalism because that's not what is happening.

What's happening is that the nerdy little technocommunist is inciting everyone else to do the same thing, and lying that this is a business model. But it isn't. It's only a "business model" (i.e. racket) for him because he gets lecture fees giong around lecturing people to...give everything away for free...and some people send him tips/book payments. Take that away, he has no business model.
It's utter bullshit.

You need a first and last SL or RL name to continue to post here.

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[Recovering Hipster]

It's a shame that you can't say "communist" without getting accused of being a right-wing nutjob. It's a shame that the right-wing nutjobs have ruined a lot of words, but that doesn't mean the words original meanings are not useful and accurate.

At the end of the day, communism is a system where only certain people are allowed to benefit from the fruits of their labor, and everyone else must share everything they've got in exchange for scraps. (Funny enough, the communist worldview has a lot in common with the Republican worldview.) If you believe that writers should not get paid to write, and should provide free material for others to monetize and profit from via ad revenue, you are more-or-less in-line with communists.

If you think that communism isn't that bad, you're thinking of socialism, which is a much broader term. Socialism co-exists with capitalism and democracy. Communism is at odds with capitalism and democracy.