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Book Recommendations: Cory Doctorow

Today I want to recommend two books from one author: Cory Doctorow. Both are available as free download but you can get them as printed books on Amazon as well.

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The first one is "Content" with the subtitle "Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future". Doctorow explains in his essays, why DRM (digital rights management does not work) and he gives examples how it can prevent regular use for regular people:

"Here’s a true story about a user I know who was stopped by DRM. She’s smart, college educated, and knows nothing about electronics. She has three kids. She has a DVD in the living room and an old VHS deck in the kids’ playroom. One day, she brought home the Toy Story DVD for the kids. That’s a substantial investment, and given the generally jam-smeared character of everything the kids get their paws on, she decided to tape the DVD off to VHS and give that to the kids — that way she could make a fresh VHS copy when the first one went south. She cabled her DVD into her VHS and pressed play on the DVD and record on the VCR and waited.

Before I go further, I want us all to stop a moment and marvel at this. Here is someone who is practically technophobic, but who was able to construct a mental model of sufficient accuracy that she figured out that she could connect her cables in the right order and dub her digital disc off to analog tape. I imagine that every- one in this room is the front-line tech support for someone in her or his family: Wouldn’t it be great if all our non-geek friends and relatives were this clever and imaginative?

I also want to point out that this is the proverbial honest user. She’s not making a copy for the next door neighbors. She’s not making a copy and selling it on a blanket on Canal Street. She’s not ripping it to her hard drive, DivX encoding it, and putting it in her Kazaa sharepoint. She’s doing something honest — moving it from one format to another. She’s home taping.

Except she fails. There’s a DRM system called Macrovision embedded — by law — in every VHS that messes with the vertical blanking interval in the signal and causes any tape made in this fashion to fail. Macrovision can be defeated for about $10 with a gadget readily available on eBay. But our infringer doesn’t know that. She’s “honest.” Technically unsophisticated. Not stupid, mind you — just naive."

There are over 200 pages full with stories like these and a lot of explanation what's wrong with copy protection and how the industry should handle their digital rights. I'm currently halfway through the book and I would recommend it to everybody, not only content creators but also readers and listeners, to understand the basic problems of digital content in the 21st. century.

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Here are some titles of the essays, that he published during several years and that are now collected in this book:

• Why Is Hollywood Making a Sequel to the Napster Wars?
• How Do You Protect Artists?
• Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever
• What’s the Most Important Right Creators Have?
• Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough
• About to Steal on the Internet
• How Copyright Broke
• In Praise of Fanfic

and much more

You can download it for free form manybooks.net or you can buy a printed copy on Amazon.com:

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

The other one from Cory Doctorow is "For the Win", a 273 page young adult novel about

"economics (a subject that suddenly got a lot more relevant about halfway through the writing of this book, when the world's economy slid unceremoniously into the toilet and got stuck there), justice, politics, games and labor. For the Win connects the dots between the way we shop, the way we organize, and the way we play, and why some people are rich, some are poor, and how we seemed to get stuck there."

It's really a page-turner. I'm not through reading it completely but it's very well worth reading. It tells the story of people all over the world who do gold farming. This means playing computer games to gain virtual goods and virtual gold that can be traded into real money. The stories leads you to China, India and the USA where you meet several young people who do online gaming to support their families.

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You can download it for free at manybooks.net or you can buy a printed copy on Amazon.com

For the Win

Both books are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. That means:

You are free:

to Share -- to copy, distribute and transmit the work

to Remix -- to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way
that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

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