What will you give to the public domain this year?
December 31st, 2007The wealth of the world does not come from our material labour. This is becoming more and more obvious each day. Look around and count how much of your stuff is more than thirty years old: you will agree that what really matters is not the accumulation of material wealth from the commercial labour of past generations, but the legacy of intellectual riches from the volunteer contribution of our elders.
Let us pick a few examples from the public domain:
- washing one’s hands (the biggest life-saving practice of all times)
- quantum physics (which made the internet revolution possible)
- democracy (Athenian, American, French, …)
- crumpets, muffins, pancakes
- soccer, football, baseball, basketball, golf,…
- the English language
In fact, as soon as we are considering ideas, concepts, inventions, or intellectual production at large (except books, songs and movies), it is actually harder to find something that is not in the public domain than something that is.
However, I am worried. The public domain has seldom had powerful advocates. For the past couple of centuries, works have generally ‘fallen’ into the public domain inadvertently, instead of being given as offerings to the world. And the insane divergence of recent capitalistic greed in staking claims over things which should (and used to) belong to the common good (molecules, genes, seeds, theorems) is ominous. In my nightmares, I see large auctions in which Universal buys exclusive rights for Elizabethan theater, Monsanto buys corn (any variety), Apple buys Beethoven, Intel buys quantum physics and HSBC mathematics, and so forth, so that everything is now owned, making things so much simpler…
Meanwhile (from a very-well researched economics paper on the value of the public domain):
Older [copyrighted] works gathering dust in vaults or even rotting away (as has occurred with a large amount of early film in the United States (Lutzker et al 2002)) generate no revenue or value for society, and represent a tragedy for any nation’s cultural heritage.
On the other hand, there are also encouraging signs that mentalities may be changing. The internet is an ideal medium in which the public domain can thrive, as it considerably reduces the cost of exchanging and duplicating intellectual production. The uptake of Linux and open-source software, the growing number of GPL or other Creative-Commons-licenced content on the web, the rise of wikibooks and other books directly published in the public domain are unprecedented phenomena. My belief is that if we lean to the right side, we can sway the balance in favor of the public domain, and private owership of ideas will nicely return to its original minority niche.
If, like many, your are making a list of resolutions for the new year, let me suggest you added a line for one thing you could contribute to the public domain. The good thing about contributions to the public domain is that you never have to keep up. The cumulative nature of intellectual production is such that what is done will never have to be done again. Whereas reducing chocolate intake in the new year is an everyday’s endeavour, if you give something to the public domain just once, it will be forever: what you give will be available for people all around the world and in all future generations.
Below is a list of activities that everyone should contemplate at least once in a lifetime:
- Proofreading public-domain e-books for Project Gutenberg
- Creating, editing, completing, commenting Wikipedia articles or any wikibook
- Recording, proof-listening, editing public-domain audio-books for LibriVox
- Contributing to open-source software projects (code, documentation, support forums)
- Uploading your pictures to flickr and specifying ‘no rights reserved’
- Collecting copyrighted material for the time it goes out of copyright (be a library/vault)
- Recording public-domain music and uploading it to musopen.org
- Dropping the copyright notice on your blog
- Exchanging seeds
- Publishing and exchanging cooking recipes
- Inventing something and just publishing it instead of filing a patent
- Writing a novel and publishing it over the internet instead of running the obstacle course of finding a publisher and then having your book out of print after one year and until 70 years after your death
- Bookmooching and bookcrossing (from Dew)
- Writing quality content and making it available (if not necessarily public-domain) on a website or blog (from Dew)
If you have other suggestions, please leave a comment: I’d like this list to grow to outrageous proportions to show just how much anyone can do.
I read this post a day or two ago and I’m now coming back to it. As someone who has always dreamed of “having a book published”, it’s hard to get my head around self-publishing on the internet and how that would give a book value. Sure, if it’s good, it might find a small readership, and if it’s not, then it falls by the wayside, but how does a writer ever know without the support structure of agent, editor, publisher?
Part of me wants to be a revolutionary and part of me is scared …
There are two things which need to be better organized if self-publishing on the internet is to become the right thing to do:
- self-published authors need to setup some sort of peer-review process and community, so that readers know for sure that manuscripts have been thoroughly edited; the very same community of professional-minded volunteers could organize reviews, literary criticism and promotion. Litbloggers are a good starting point, don’t you think.
- there needs to be affordable and comfortable ways to read downloaded books. Not everybody likes to read from a laptop screen in bed, and if someone has to print a novel with the average inkjet printer, the overall cost will be much much higher than just buying the book from the next bookstore. Electronic paper technologies have improved a lot recently, and probably just a few years away from becoming mature (and inexpensive).
Meanwhile, your blogging readership will continue to grow exponentially, making for a couple thousand eager readers when the book comes out (whatever the format).
I did exactly what Charlotte did: read this a couple of days ago, then (ignoring everything else you had to say) began fretting about why I’m so opposed to the notion of publishing a novel I might write online. I even became a bit paranoid, thinking, “My God, I’ve got two ghost stories out there that any publisher could snap up right now and publish without paying me a cent.” But then I started thinking, “Is it all about nothing but money?” After all, why should I care if a publisher wants to snap up my stories and sell them as long as people are doing what I intended be done in the first place, which is reading them? I’m not a starving writer, trying to make a living at this. So, I came back on to say all this and to think about publishing a children’s book online (children, I think, are probably more likely to read something online than anyone). You know, Litlove is proving to us that one can do both, as she’s self-published a collection of her blog posts in print format for us to buy (I’d want mine to go through an editor before I braved that step, though).
Publishing online is not fully synonymous with giving to the public domain. Your ghost stories are probably safe, and unless you specifically mentioned ‘no rights reserved’, nobody may re-publish it without your approval.
That said, I am glad you think of publishing children’s stories online. I might volunteer as your translator into French…
I was thinking of Librivox when I started reading your post, and there it was at the end! My sister and I are going to record a full book on Librivox. The name is a secret for now, but the idea is to finish the book by December 2008. She will narrate the parts of the female lead while I’ll take up the two male leads. It is a translation so we are unsure about how it is going to sound.
That’s a great project. I find that solo (or quasi-solo) works are so much worth the extra effort.
My husband would agree with all this wholeheartedly. He’s a rabid fan of open source this and that, and he doesn’t believe in patents, even though he can see them making some of his coworkers rich.
If you want more ideas for exchanging, what about bookcrossing and bookmooch?
I have an idea for a project that is very much in line with all this, but I’m not ready to talk about it yet. But you have me thinking about it in a new way! Thanks.
Oh, and blogs. Radiohead put out In Rainbows and said, “Pay whatever you like.” If I did that with my blog, took off the blogher ad and instead said to my readers, “Pay me whatever you think my blog is worth to you,” they’d all just go read other blogs instead of mine. But Radiohead had established themselves as (in my opinion) the most wildly perfect and innovative band since, I don’t know, Pink Floyd? Queen? And so people like me actually did pay them something, while others who maybe weren’t such eager fans took the music free. And Radiohead had already earned tons from their previous albums, where I don’t have any Platinum Blogs in my past. So they didn’t have to worry about whether or not they’d actually earn anything from In Rainbows.
But blogs really do contribute to the public domain in so many ways. I can’t count the number of times that I had a knitting question which was answered by a blog post instead of having to pay for a knitting class or book. And a class or book has the wisdom of one person, a teacher or author, whereas the blogosphere has all the wisdom of ever experienced knitter who blogs. Just for example.
Welcome, Dew. As you will read here, I am about to start a series of articles against intellectual property (even though filing patents is part of my job attributions).
Radiohead did what I think every band should do: distribute their music as widely as possible for free or on a donation basis, and then make money giving concerts (with the increased fame gleaned from the internet).
It isn’t so much a worry that what I have out there is in the public domain, because I know that by law here, as soon as you write something down, it’s copyrighted. It’s a worry that anyone could take it, claim it was his/hers, and I’d have no idea unless I want to spend the rest of my life in a paranoid state, constantly checking every publisher, bookstore, and library to see if anyone has plagiarized me. I will definitely take you up on your offer to translate my children’s book into French. I’m going to start writing it this year with the goal of refining it and posting it in 2009.
Oh, I’m glad, I’m so glad!
[…] in by the story, and the reader’s voice was warm and charming… And now that I know, through Mandarine, that so many copyright-free books are available on Librivox and others, maybe one day, I’ll […]