Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Cory Doctorow - Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future




Cory Doctorow - Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
Publisher: Tachyon Publications 2008 | ISBN: 1892391813 | PDF | 224 pages | 4,01 mb


Doctorow here proves he’s smart, funny, and good at accessibly boiling down issues he’s passionate about. On topics ranging from fanfic (readers’ additions to their favorite authors’ creations, usually online) to the terrible business model Microsoft presents by treating customers like potential thieves from the beginning, Doctorow moves to the forefront of conversations likely to determine how creators and audiences are able to use new technologies. He compares Internet content-management problems to similar technological snafus—such as the transition from live performance to radio, and from manuscript to printed books—and how the established order of the day reacted, demonstrating his grasp of the ways in which history repeats itself and how we can use the lessons of history to cope with further changes in the exchange of information. Doctorow excels in writing short forms, the essay no less than the short story, making this collection a pleasure to read, not to mention thought-provoking. --Regina Schroeder


Contents

1. Microsoft Research DRM Talk

2. The DRM Sausage Factory

3. Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America Chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart, and Why It’s Doomed Us, and How We Might Survive Anyway

4. Why Is Hollywood Making a Sequel to the Napster Wars?

5. You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen

6. How Do You Protect Artists?

7. It’s the Information Economy, Stupid

8. Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever

9. What’s the Most Important Right Creators Have?

10. Giving it Away

11. Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet

12. How Copyright Broke

13. In Praise of Fanfic

14. Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-Men of the Meta-Utopia

15. Amish for QWERTY

16. Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books

17. Free(konomic) Ebooks

18. The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights

19. When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil

20. Wikipedia: A Genuine HG2G — Minus the Editors

21. Warhol Is Turning in His Grave

22. The Future of Ignoring Things

23. Facebook’s Faceplant

24. The Future of Internet Immune Systems

25. All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites

26. READ CAREFULLY

27. World of Democracycraft

28. Snitchtown

29. About the author