Jim Baen's Universe Volume 1 Number 5

by Eric Flint

  From the standpoint of logic, this claim is so laughable that any student in a college course in logic who advanced it would get flunked from the course. It's a perfect example of that error in logic which is called post hoc, ergo propter hoc—and it's usually the first form of logical error that an instructor will discuss, because it's the crudest.

  The Latin phrase, roughly translated, means "after which, therefore because of which." In other words, it's the notion that because Phenomenon B happened after Phenomenon A, it must have been caused by Phenomenon A.

  Oh, sure. That makes sense! For instance . . .

  Last month, in the course of a long road trip, I got a speeding ticket just outside of Dodge City, Kansas. It happened after I spent the night at a Holiday Inn motel.

  Therefore . . . Holiday Inn was responsible.

  Uh, no. I got the speeding ticket because it was a long, straight road with almost no traffic where going 77 miles per hour was perfectly feasible as a mechanical proposition, even if it was twelve miles per hour over the posted speed limit, I'd been driving for hours and wasn't paying much attention to the speedometer, and—the rotten bastids—the local cops were lurking in ambush with a radar gun.

  Oh, the possibilities are endless, using this specious form of logic. Nor do we need to restrict ourselves to petty, personal issues. No, no!

  For instance . . .

  There was at the time and still remains an enormous range of opinion regarding the Vietnam War. Still, most people today—from whichever angle they approach the matter—will agree that it was very unfortunate that the United States got involved in the first place.

  Now—a roll of drums here, please—Eric Flint will finally advance an explanation for why that unfortunate event happened, that everyone will surely agree with, regardless of whatever else they might think about the war.

  After long and careful study, I have determined that U.S. involvement in Vietnam clearly happened after the Andrews Sisters became a popular singing trio.

  So. The truth is finally out. The Andrews Sisters caused the Vietnam War. You can blame them for the whole business.

  Granted, the claim advanced by the music recording industry that the wide spread of such things as Napster caused their decline in profits isn't as patently ridiculous as the two examples I used. That's because, at first glance, there would indeed appear—possibly—to be some connection between the two phenomena. They both involve music, at any rate.

  But it's still just about as ridiculous as my examples. Why? Because the profits a company makes are determined by a multitude of factors. That being so, how in the world can the music recording industry make the claim that "piracy" was the cause of the decline in their profits?

  The fact is, they can't. The fact is—as I will show in later essays—it is far more likely that Napster helped sustain their profits, rather than sapping them. For the good and simple reason, to summarize quickly what will be a long and detailed analysis, the entertainment market is so opaque to its customers that any method that enables customers to penetrate the fog, such as file sharing, makes them more willing to buy products of that industry, not less willing.

  By the way—this gives you another illustration of how sleazy DRM advocates are—the logic of post hoc ergo proctor hoc, as fallacious as it is, doesn't even support them in the first place. The music recording industry's endless drumbeating on the subject of the nefarious effects of Napster is designed, among other things, to obscure the fact that the big decline in their profits happened after Napster was legally banned.

  But I'll come back to that subject later. For the moment, let's return to the matter directly at hand.

  Which is not complicated. All—each and every one—of the arguments advanced by DRM advocates to substantiate their claims that "electronic piracy" is a major social problem, is based on what can, at best, be called circumstantial or anecdotal evidence.

  They have yet to prove, in any way that would be accepted in an introductory course in logic, that "electronic piracy" hurts anyone at all.

  Yes, that's true, as astonishing as it may seem. These people—these rapacious giant corporations, to name the ultimate villains—have been successfully waging an assault against basic principles of copyright that have benefited society for centuries, without ever once proving that there was any need for their measures—or that the problem those measures are supposed to solve even represent serious social problems to begin with.

  "Astonishing" is the right word for it, too. You would think that any one who stepped forward and demanded that society had to radically change long-established laws and customs would, at a bare minimum, have to prove that there was a problem that needed to be addressed in the first place.

  But they have not done so—nor, to their disgrace and the disgrace of the republic—have any but a few of the country's legislators insisted that they must do so. Instead, time after time, Congress has passed whatever new legislation was demanded by these corporations, on nothing more substantial that the say-so of the corporations themselves.

  L'etat, cest moi was originally the boast of the King of France, Louis XIV—the famous "Sun King" of the so-called age of absolutism. Supposedly, we abandoned all that feudal garbage centuries ago. But, today, the executives of the music recording industry and the movie industry could advance the same boast.

  We say it is true, therefore it is true—and you, our lackeys in Congress, must do our bidding.

  My essays focus primarily on the publishing industry, however. And, to my momentary relief, although the publishing industry has been more-or-less tagging along in the wake of the Blackbeards and Morgans who run the music and movie industries—I can play this pirate game, too—the operative term is "tagging along." Publishers haven't been leading the charge, and not only are many of them very uneasy about it, but several university publishers and one commercial publisher have already stood forthrightly in defense of traditional copyright practice.

  Of the university presses, whose practices and experience I will analyze in later essays, I think MIT Press can legitimately take of pride of place. And the one commercial publisher was my own, Baen Books.

  The founder of Baen Books, Jim Baen, died a few months ago. I said at the time in my editorial regarding his death that I thought—I certainly hoped—that someday he'd be well remembered for the crucial role he played in defeating the assault on copyright laws and principles.

  He certainly should be, because—this brings me to the last of the lies I will dissect in this issue's essay—the stakes involved go far beyond any narrow concerns regarding copyright.

  This final lie is the following:

  We need to encrypt our electronic text because otherwise it will be stolen.

  That statement is a lie, from top to bottom—and the people who advance the lie know it perfectly well.

  The reason it's a lie is because—ask any author, editor or publisher who isn't a nitwit—everybody in the publishing industry knows perfectly well how "online piracy" actually happens.

  It does not happen by some genius hacker figuring out how to crack whatever fiendishly clever code publishers might use to encrypt their text.

  Why bother? The way "electronic piracy" actually happens is that the Fu Manchu arch-villain involved goes out and obtains a paper edition of the book to be "pirated," runs it through an OCR scanner—which you can buy for a couple of hundred dollars or less in electronic stores all over the country—and, voila, the "piracy" is done. Professor Moriarty has struck again.

  The whole world saw a perfect illustration of this truth not long ago. The wildly popular author J.K. Rowling, apparently because she was deeply concerned over the possibility of "electronic piracy"—and because she apparently was incredibly ignorant of the realities of the publishing industry—refused to authorize any electronic edition of her most recent Harry Potter novel.

  The perfect encryption, you'd think. The ultimate, unbeatable code.

  Oh, what a laugh. By dawn
of the first day her book came out, there was a "pirated" copy available on the internet. Literally, by the time the sun came up. What happened was what always happens. Somebody was obviously standing in line to get a copy of the book as soon as the stores made it available—which many bookstores did at special midnight opening sales, the book was so popular—bought it, raced home and copied it on an OCR scanner and uploaded the resulting file onto the web. In this instance—which is rather uncommon—they even did a fairly decent job of proof-reading the text and getting rid of most of the typical OCR scanning errors.

  How are you going to prevent this by encryption?

  You can't. It's as simple as that. You cannot.

  Unless . . .

  You start shredding the most basic political freedoms of a modern society.

  Unless . . .

  You start placing severe restrictions on everything that involves the production and distribution of text.

  Computers must henceforth be registered and monitored. All computers must have software that allows the authorities to inspect them to make sure that no unauthorized use of copyrighted text has taken place.

  While we're at it, the same must be true for all OCR scanners or any other electronic device that allows anyone to copy text in a way that might lead to violations of copyright.

  For that matter, all PAPER books must have chips built into them that allows the authorities to track all books. That's really the only way to put a stop to this nefarious piracy.

  If you think I'm joking, I am not—and each and every one of these proposals has already started being bruited about, in one way or another.

  That's what is really at stake, in the end, with DRM. Nothing less than the right of free speech itself. Because the reality is that all the encryption being used by publishing houses is ultimately pointless—and they know it perfectly well.

  So why do they do it? Well, in the case of the publishing industry, the most common reason is stupidity, and it descends from there.

  Being fair about it, the stupidity involved is not low intelligence, as such—the average author, editor and publisher is normally a rather bright person—but functional stupidity in the sense of persisting mulishly in a form of pointless behavior simply because you can't figure out any alternative and you're too stubborn or peeved or just plain lazy to sit down and think.

  Almost everyone is guilty of that form of stupidity, at one time or another. We've all done it, sure enough. Being stumped by the task of getting a malfunctioning machine to start working again, we keep kicking it in the hopes that somehow—by who knows what mechanical magic?—the damn gadget might start working again.

  From there it descends to the next level, which is pure and simple spite. This may seem silly, but I can assure you from my extensive discussions with people in the publishing industry—authors, editors, publishers—that a great deal of the emotional force behind insisting on DRM is simply childish spitefulness.

  It's about on the level of a street gang mentality, except the vocabulary is fancier. It amounts to this:

  That sonuvabitch PIRATED my book. He DISSED me! I'll GET him for it!

  Honestly. It's no more sophisticated than a schoolboy getting into a fistfight because another schoolboy disrespected him in some way or other—or, at least, was thought to have done so. Whether or not the disrespect involved, assuming it even existed, caused any actual harm to the belligerent lad.

  Yeah, I did it too. I got into quite a few fistfights in high school, most of them over the silliest things you can think of.

  But that was then, and this is now—and I'm now well into middle age, and I haven't gotten into a fistfight in decades. I like to think, at least, that the term "maturity" isn't completely meaningless.

  Is it really too much to ask authors, editors and publishers to act their age? Is it really too much to insist that they react to electronic copyright infringement—yes, it does happen, and yes, it's certainly annoying on a personal level—by using their brains instead of their gonads? Is it really too much to demand that, if they advance a certain course of action, they have the minimal adult responsibility of gauging its potentially disastrous effect on society as whole?

  I mean, give me a break. These people all work in the publishing industry, which means they make their living by using words, in one way or another. So they have no excuse at all, where movie producers might since there is considerable evidence that they don't read anything except comic books and spreadsheets.

  Which one-syllable or two-syllable word in the following sentence does any author, editor or publisher not understand?

  Do not call for a cure that is worse than the disease.

  Presumably, not one. Yet that is exactly what most publishers are demanding today—along with, I'm sorry to say, most authors and editors.

  * * *

  All right. Enough for the moment. In my next essay for this column, I will pick up where I left off toward the beginning of this one.

  Is it true that modern electronic devices have made copyright infringement "so effortless" that it has become—or threatens to become—a serious menace to legitimate copyright owners?

  The answer is "no." In the next issue, I'll explain why.

  * * *

  The Future and You February 2007

  Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

  Listen as Elizabeth Bear, Toni Weisskopf, Walter Jon Williams, Ginjer Buchanan and L.E. Modesitt describe many of the technological and social changes which will alter your life during the next few years.

  The Future And You is an award-winning audio podcast about the future which may be downloaded and enjoyed, or even copied and shared, for free. Every episode contains many interviews which reveal a wide variety of ideas and opinion from a wide variety of people.

  * * *

  The February 1, 2007 episode includes all of the following and more:

  shares her expectations on the future discovery of earthlike planets and her ongoing involvement with SETI-@-home. She also discusses religion, agnosticism vs. atheism, buying things on eBay, non-lethal military weapons, and her reluctance to use any future version of Microsoft Windows as the primary operating system for her eventually augmented brain.

  Toni Weisskopf describes several of the trends going on within book publishing such as SF&F titles crossing over into mainstream and how the shrinking shelf life of books in stores hurts authors as well as customers.

  suggests there is a growing inflexibility in the world, and that cell phones are slowing the rate at which today's teens mature. He sees the media as promoting inflexibility most prominently in politics since they will not allow a politician to learn, grow and change his or her mind. Instead, the media will hold a politician to old statements and policy positions even if those statements or positions were made decades ago. He also suggests that the media promotes conflict, since it insists that all conflicts are between polar opposites. Disagreements which are seen as small or subtle or nuanced will not draw a TV audience or sell papers. He also describes how cell phones may be slowing maturity in students by preventing them from ever being "on their own" when facing life's problems. With cell phones, no one is ever on their own, so self-reliance becomes an option which is rarely chosen and never incorporated into the personality. Even young people's opinions seem to be formed by a committee of friends through a consensus of feelings, rather than by cold solitary logic. And when asked about eBooks, Mr. Modesitt described how Isaac Asimov formally analyzed what would make up the "The Perfect Book."

  Ginjer Buchanan (Senior Executive Editor and Marketing Director of Ace and ROC books) names those Hard SF authors she feels have the most accurate or persuasive vision of the future. Her picks include Charles Stross (a former Linux programmer), Alastair Reynolds (astronomer), Allen Steele (journalist) and Jack McDevitt. One of these authors, she discovered herself from the slush pile twenty years ago. She also addresses the question of how well Hard SF is competing in the bookstores.

  Walt
er Jon Williams says with assurance that "The war against Utopia has been won." He also asserts that the fight of the 21st century will be the war against fundamentalism. He suggests that Nanotechnology is "all over the place," and that biotechnology is likely to produce immortality within forty years. He expects the big publishers will eventually solve the problem of making money from eBooks, even if they have to use methods that appear heavy-handed. He expects wirelessly networked computers to becoming ubiquitous in most all of your household devices, even those that never before contained computers such as washers, driers, microwaves, as well as your clothes and your shoes. And that all these computers will talk to one another—about you. He also describes how consumer databases are already being used to not only market products to people but also to market political ideologies.