Obscurity is worse than piracy (an o'reilly classic)
Monday, February 19, 2007, 04:48 AM - Theory, Copyfight
PIRACY IS PROGRESSIVE TAXATIONand Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution
by Tim O'Reilly 12/11/2002
The continuing controversy over online file sharing sparks me to offer a few thoughts as an author and publisher. To be sure, I write and publish neither movies nor music, but books. But I think that some of the lessons of my experience still apply.
Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Let me start with book publishing. More than 100,000 books are published each year, with several million books in print, yet fewer than 10,000 of those new books have any significant sales, and only a hundred thousand or so of all the books in print are carried in even the largest stores. Most books have a few months on the shelves of the major chains, and then wait in the darkness of warehouses from which they will move only to the recycling bin. Authors think that getting a publisher will be the realization of their dreams, but for so many, it's just the start of a long disappointment.
Sites like Amazon that create a virtual storefront for all the books in print cast a ray of light into the gloom of those warehouses, and so books that would otherwise have no outlet at all can be discovered and bought. Authors who are fortunate enough to get the rights to their book back from the publisher often put them up freely online, in hopes of finding readers. The web has been a boon for readers, since it makes it easier to spread book recommendations and to purchase the books once you hear about them. But even then, few books survive their first year or two in print. Empty the warehouses and you couldn't give many of them away.
Many works linger in deserved obscurity, but so many more suffer simply from the vast differential between supply and demand.
I don't know the exact size of the entire CD catalog, but I imagine that it is similar in scope. Tens of thousands of musicians self-publish their own CDs; a happy few get a recording contract. Of those, fewer still have their records sell in appreciable numbers. The deep backlist of music publishers is lost to consumers because the music just isn't available in stores.
There are fewer films, to be sure, because of the cost of film making, but even there, obscurity is a constant enemy. Thousands of independent film makers are desperate for distribution. A few independent films, like Denmark's Dogme films, get visibility. But for most, visibility is limited to occasional showings at local film festivals. The rise of digital video also promises that film making will soon be as much a garage opportunity as starting a rock band, and as much of a garret opportunity as the great American novel.
Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.
Our current distribution systems for books, music, and movies are skewed heavily in favor of the "haves" against the "have nots." A few high-profile products receive the bulk of the promotional budget and are distributed in large quantities; the majority depend, in the words of Tennessee Williams' character Blanche DuBois, "on the kindness of strangers."
Lowering the barriers to entry in distribution, and the continuous availability of the entire catalog rather than just the most popular works, is good for artists, since it gives them a chance to build their own reputation and visibility, working with entrepreneurs of the new medium who will be the publishers and distributors of tomorrow.
I have watched my 19 year-old daughter and her friends sample countless bands on Napster and Kazaa and, enthusiastic for their music, go out to purchase CDs. My daughter now owns more CDs than I have collected in a lifetime of less exploratory listening. What's more, she has introduced me to her favorite music, and I too have bought CDs as a result. And no, she isn't downloading Britney Spears, but forgotten bands from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, as well as their musical forebears in other genres. This is music that is difficult to find -- except online -- but, once found, leads to a focused search for CDs, records, and other artifacts. eBay is doing a nice business with much of this material, even if the RIAA fails to see the opportunity.
Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Piracy is a loaded word, which we used to reserve for wholesale copying and resale of illegitimate product. The music and film industry usage, applying it to peer-to-peer file sharing, is a disservice to honest discussion.
Online file sharing is the work of enthusiasts who are trading their music because there is no legitimate alternative. Piracy is an illegal commercial activity that is typically a substantial problem only in countries without strong enforcement of existing copyright law.
At O'Reilly, we publish many of our books in online form. There are people who take advantage of that fact to redistribute unpaid copies. (The biggest problem, incidentally, is not on file sharing networks, but from copies of our CD Bookshelf product line being put up on public Web servers, or copied wholesale and offered for sale on eBay.) While these pirated copies are annoying, they hardly destroy our business. We've found little or no abatement of sales of printed books that are also available for sale online.
What's more, many of those who do infringe respond to little more than a polite letter asking them to take the materials down. Those servers that ignore our requests are typically in countries where the books are not available for sale or are far too expensive for local consumers to buy.
What's even more interesting, though, is that our enforcement activities are customer-driven. We receive thousands of emails from customers letting us know about infringing copies and sites. Why? They value our company and our authors, and they want to see our work continue. They know that there is a legitimate way to pay for online access--our Safari Books Online subscription service (safari.oreilly.com) can be had for as little as $9.95 a month--and accordingly recognize free copies as illegitimate.
A similar data point comes from Jon Schull, the former CTO of Softlock, the company that worked with Stephen King on his eBook experiment, "Riding the Bullet". Softlock, which used a strong DRM scheme, was relying on "superdistribution" to reduce the costs of hosting the content--the idea that customers would redistribute their copies to friends, who would then simply need to download a key to unlock said copy. But most of the copies were downloaded anyway and very few were passed along. Softlock ran a customer survey to find out why there was so little "pass-along" activity. The answer, surprisingly, was that customers didn't understand that redistribution was desired. They didn't do it because they "thought it was wrong."
The simplest way to get customers to stop trading illicit digital copies of music and movies is to give those customers a legitimate alternative, at a fair price.
Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
While few of the people putting books on public web servers seek to profit from the activity, those who are putting up CDs for sale on eBay containing PDF or HTML copies of dozens of books are in fact practicing piracy--organized copying of content for resale.
But even so, we see no need for stronger copyright laws, or strong Digital Rights Management software, because existing law allows us to prosecute the few deliberate pirates.
We don't have a substantial piracy problem in the US and Europe. The fact that its software products have been available for years on warez sites (and now on file trading networks) has not kept Microsoft from becoming one of the world's largest and most successful companies. Estimates of "lost" revenue assume that illicit copies would have been paid for; meanwhile, there is no credit on the other side of the ledger for copies that are sold because of "upgrades" from familiarity bred by illicit copies.
What we have is a problem that is analogous, at best, to shoplifting, an annoying cost of doing business.
And overall, as a book publisher who also makes many of our books available in electronic form, we rate the piracy problem as somewhere below shoplifting as a tax on our revenues. Consistent with my observation that obscurity is a greater danger than piracy, shoplifting of a single copy can lead to lost sales of many more. If a bookstore has only one copy of your book, or a music store one copy of your CD, a shoplifted copy essentially makes it disappear from the next potential buyer's field of possibility. Because the store's inventory control system says the product hasn't been sold, it may not be reordered for weeks or months, perhaps not at all.
I have many times asked a bookstore why they didn't have copies of one of my books, only to be told, after a quick look at the inventory control system: "But we do. It says we still have one copy in stock, and it hasn't sold in months, so we see no need to reorder." It takes some prodding to force the point that perhaps it hasn't sold because it is no longer on the shelf.
Because an online copy is never out of stock, we at least have a chance at a sale, rather than being subject to the enormous inefficiencies and arbitrary choke points in the distribution system.
Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
The music and film industries like to suggest that file sharing networks will destroy their industries.
Those who make this argument completely fail to understand the nature of publishing. Publishing is not a role that will be undone by any new technology, since its existence is mandated by mathematics. Millions of buyers and millions of sellers cannot find one another without one or more middlemen who, like a kind of step-down transformer, segment the market into more manageable pieces. In fact, there is usually a rich ecology of middlemen. Publishers aggregate authors for retailers. Retailers aggregate customers for publishers. Wholesalers aggregate small publishers for retailers and small retailers for publishers. Specialty distributors find ways into non-standard channels.
Those of us who watched the rise of the Web as a new medium for publishing have seen this ecology evolve within less than a decade. In the Web's early days, rhetoric claimed that we faced an age of disintermediation, that everyone could be his or her own publisher. But before long, individual web site owners were paying others to help them increase their visibility in Yahoo!, Google, and other search engines (the equivalent of Barnes & Noble and Borders for the Web), and Web authors were happily writing for sites like AOL and MSN, or on the technology side, Cnet, Slashdot, O'Reilly Network, and other Web publishers. Meanwhile, authors from Matt Drudge to Dave Winer and Cory Doctorow made their names by publishing for the new medium.
As Jared Diamond points out in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, mathematics is behind the rise of all complex social organization.
There is nothing in technology that changes the fundamental dynamic by which millions of potentially fungible products reach millions of potential consumers. The means by which aggregation and selection are made may change with technology, but the need for aggregation and selection will not. Google's use of implicit peer recommendation in its page rankings plays much the same role as the large retailers' use of detailed sell-through data to help them select their offerings.
The question before us is not whether technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing will undermine the role of the creative artist or the publisher, but how creative artists can leverage new technologies to increase the visibility of their work. For publishers, the question is whether they will understand how to perform their role in the new medium before someone else does. Publishing is an ecological niche; new publishers will rush in to fill it if the old ones fail to do so.
If we take the discussion back to first principles, we understand that publishing isn't just about physical aggregation of product but also requires an intangible aggregation and management of "reputation." People go to Google or Yahoo!, Barnes & Noble or Borders, HMV, or MediaPlay, because they believe that they will find what they want there. And they seek out particular publishers, like Knopf or O'Reilly, because we have built a track-record of trust in our ability to find interesting topics and skilled authors.
Now, let's take this discussion over to music file sharing. How do people find songs on Kazaa or any of the other post-Napster file sharing services? First, they may be looking for a song they already know. But such searches for a known artist or song title are fundamentally self-limiting, since they depend on the marketing of a "name space" (artist/song pairs) that is extrinsic to the file sharing service. To truly supplant the existing music distribution system, any replacement must develop its own mechanisms for marketing and recommendation of new music.
And in fact, we already see those mechanisms emerging. File sharing services rely heavily on that most effective of marketing techniques: word of mouth. But over time, anyone who has studied the evolution of previous media will see that searches based on either pre-existing knowledge or word of mouth represent only the low-hanging fruit. As the market matures, paid marketing is added, and step by step, we build up the same rich ecology of middlemen that characterizes existing media marketplaces.
New media have historically not replaced but rather augmented and expanded existing media marketplaces, at least in the short term. Opportunities exist to arbitrage between the new distribution medium and the old, as, for instance, the rise of file sharing networks has helped to fuel the trading of records and CDs (unavailable through normal recording industry channels) on eBay.
Over time, it may be that online music publishing services will replace CDs and other physical distribution media, much as recorded music relegated sheet music publishers to a niche and, for many, made household pianos a nostalgic affectation rather than the home entertainment center. But the role of the artist and the music publisher will remain. The question then, is not the death of book publishing, music publishing, or film production, but rather one of who will be the publishers.
Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service
A question for my readers: How many of you still get your email via peer-to-peer UUCP dialups or the old "free" Internet, and how many of you pay $19.95 a month or more to an ISP? How many of you watch "free" television over the airwaves, and how many of you pay $20-$60 a month for cable or satellite television? (Not to mention continue to rent movies on videotape and DVD, and purchasing physical copies of your favorites.)
Services like Kazaa flourish in the absence of competitive alternatives. I confidently predict that once the music industry provides a service that provides access to all the same songs, freedom from onerous copy-restriction, more accurate metadata and other added value, there will be hundreds of millions of paying subscribers. That is, unless they wait too long, in which case, Kazaa itself will start to offer (and charge for) these advantages. (Or would, in the absence of legal challenges.) Much as AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Cnet, and many others have collectively built a multi-billion dollar media business on the "free" web, "publishers" will evolve on file sharing networks.
Why would you pay for a song that you could get for free? For the same reason that you will buy a book that you could borrow from the public library or buy a DVD of a movie that you could watch on television or rent for the weekend. Convenience, ease-of-use, selection, ability to find what you want, and for enthusiasts, the sheer pleasure of owning something you treasure.
The current experience of online file sharing services is mediocre at best. Students and others with time on their hands may find them adequate. But they leave much to be desired, with redundant copies of uneven quality, intermittent availability of some works, incorrect identification of artist or song, and many other quality problems.
Opponents may argue that the Web demonstrates precisely what they are afraid of, that content on the Web is "free", that advertising is an insufficient revenue model for content providers, and that subscription models have not been successful. However, I will argue that the story is still unfinished.
Subscription sites are on the rise. Computer industry professionals can be seen as the "early adopters" in this market. For example, O'Reilly's Safari Books Online is growing at 30 percent a month, and now represents a multi-million dollar revenue stream for us and other participating publishers.
Most observers also seem to miss the point that the internet is already sold as a subscription service. All we're working on is the development of added-value premium services. What's more, there are already a few vertically-integrated ISPs (notably AOL Time Warner) that provide "basic" connectivity but own vast libraries of premium content.
In looking at online content subscription services, analogies with television are instructive. Free, advertiser-supported television has largely been supplanted--or should I say supplemented (because the advertising remains)--by paid subscriptions to cable TV. What's more, revenue from "basic cable" has been supplemented by various aggregated premium channels. HBO, one of those channels, is now television's most profitable network. Meanwhile, over on the internet, people pay their ISP $19.95/month for the equivalent of "basic cable", and an ideal opportunity for a premium channel, a music download service, has gone begging for lack of vision on the part of existing music publishers.
Another lesson from television is that people prefer subscriptions to pay-per-view, except for very special events. What's more, they prefer subscriptions to larger collections of content, rather than single channels. So, people subscribe to "the movie package," "the sports package" and so on. The recording industry's "per song" trial balloons may work, but I predict that in the long term, an "all-you-can-eat" monthly subscription service (perhaps segmented by musical genre) will prevail in the marketplace.
Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it.
A study of other media marketplaces shows, though, that there is no single silver-bullet solution. A smart company maximizes revenue through all its channels, realizing that its real opportunity comes when it serves the customer who ultimately pays its bills.
At O'Reilly, we've been experimenting with online distribution of our books for years. We know that we must offer a compelling online alternative before someone else does. As the Hawaiian proverb says, "No one promised us tomorrow." Competition with free alternatives forces us to explore new distribution media and new forms of publishing.
In addition to the Safari subscription service mentioned above, we publish an extensive network of advertising-supported "free" information sites as the O'Reilly Network (www.oreillynet.com). We have published a number of books under "open publication licenses" where free redistribution is explicitly allowed (oreilly.com/openbook). We do this for several reasons: to build awareness of products that might otherwise be ignored, to build brand loyalty among online communities, or, sometimes, because a product can no longer be economically sold in traditional channels, and we'd rather make it available for free than have it completely disappear from the market.
We have also published many of our books on CD ROM, in a format referred to as the CD Bookshelf, typically a collection of a half dozen or so related books.
And of course, we continue to publish print books. The availability of free online copies is sometimes used to promote a topic or author (as books such as The Cathedral and the Bazaar or The Cluetrain Manifesto became bestsellers in print as a result of the wide exposure it received online). We make available substantial portions of all of our books online, as a way for potential readers to sample what they contain. We've even found ways to integrate our books into the online help system for software products, including Dreamweaver and Microsoft's Visual Studio.
Interestingly, some of our most successful print/online hybrids have come about where we present the same material in different ways for the print and online contexts. For example, much of the content of our bestselling book Programming Perl (more than 600,000 copies in print) is available online as part of the standard Perl documentation. But the entire package--not to mention the convenience of a paper copy, and the aesthetic pleasure of the strongly branded packaging--is only available in print. Multiple ways to present the same information and the same product increase the overall size and richness of the market.
And that's the ultimate lesson. "Give the wookie what he wants!" as Han Solo said so memorably in the first Star Wars movie. Give it to him in as many ways as you can find, at a fair price, and let him choose which works best for him.
3 comments PLAY ME VI
Wednesday, February 14, 2007, 12:26 AM - Beautiful Code
The Ecstasy of Influence
Monday, February 12, 2007, 02:18 AM - Copyfight
A PLAGIARISMBy Jonathan Lethem at Harper's
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .
—John Donne LOVE AND THEFT
Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.
The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg's tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov's Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?
“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach's blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth—to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience—in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into “Absolutely Sweet Marie”? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?
Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan's music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott's study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they do so often in Dylan's songs. Lott's title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael and Queequeg—a series of nested references to Dylan's own appropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dylan's art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan's newest record, Modern Times. Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.
The same might be said of all art. I realized this forcefully when one day I went looking for the John Donne passage quoted above. I know the lines, I confess, not from a college course but from the movie version of 84, Charing Cross Road with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. I checked out 84, Charing Cross Road from the library in the hope of finding the Donne passage, but it wasn't in the book. It's alluded to in the play that was adapted from the book, but it isn't reprinted. So I rented the movie again, and there was the passage, read in voice-over by Anthony Hopkins but without attribution. Unfortunately, the line was also abridged so that, when I finally turned to the Web, I found myself searching for the line “all mankind is of one volume” instead of “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume.”
My Internet search was initially no more successful than my library search. I had thought that summoning books from the vasty deep was a matter of a few keystrokes, but when I visited the website of the Yale library, I found that most of its books don't yet exist as computer text. As a last-ditch effort I searched the seemingly more obscure phrase “every chapter must be so translated.” The passage I wanted finally came to me, as it turns out, not as part of a scholarly library collection but simply because someone who loves Donne had posted it on his homepage. The lines I sought were from Meditation 17 in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which happens to be the most famous thing Donne ever wrote, containing as it does the line “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” My search had led me from a movie to a book to a play to a website and back to a book. Then again, those words may be as famous as they are only because Hemingway lifted them for his book title.
Keep reading The Ecstasy of Influence
deconstructing art
Thursday, February 8, 2007, 01:50 PM - Copyfight
Boston News published a comment on the looping issue of Lichtenstein's use of foreign artwork, mostly comic artwork from DC Comics. It is called Lichtenstein, creator or copycat?:
Art teacher David Barsalou has an interesting avocation. He has found and catalog ed almost every comic book panel later blown up and sold for megabucks by 1960s Op Art icon Roy Lichtenstein. So far, Barsalou has about 140. You will see a sample on this page, or go to his website, Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein.
Color me naive, but I never thought Lichtenstein's work was a direct copy of scenes from comic books. I assumed that he stylized certain scenes suggested by the comic vernacular of the 1950s and 1960s. ``He tried to make it seem as though he was making major compositional changes in his work, but he wasn't," says Barsalou, who teaches at the High School of Commerce in Springfield. ``The critics are of one mind that he made major changes, but if you look at the work , he copied them almost verbatim. Only a few were original."
"Barsalou is boring to us," comments Jack Cowart, executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation. He contests the notion that Lichtenstein was a mere copyist: "Roy's work was a wonderment of the graphic formulae and the codification of sentiment that had been worked out by others. Barsalou's thesis notwithstanding, the panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and in their implications. There is no exact copy."
There is no exact copy. Eddie Campbell also writes a handsome post where he expains, among other things, the value of the actual process in the art production:
Showing them side by side like this is useful for an understanding of the iconographic connections, but it does miss the essence of the exercise, that is that Lichtenstein took a tiny picture, smaller than the palm of the hand, printed in four color inks on newsprint and blew it up to the conventional size at which 'art' is made and exhibited and finished it in paint on canvas. In theory it was like painting a view of a building, or a vase. He worked through a long series of the same kind of thing before applying the particular treatments he had devised, such as the mechanical dots, to other kinds of images, ultimately including abstract images as in the brushstroke series. I find his whole project quite astonishing and invigorating. It was good for art. Hell, it was even good for the comic book medium, setting a precedent for it to be taken seriously.Cambell's post is stuffed with interesting sideviews, including a suggestion from his comment system, Historically, copying the Masters was considered to be a part of the painter’s training, not the final product . . .
qué talento para el mal
Wednesday, February 7, 2007, 05:56 PM - Copyfight, Media
Steve Job's thoughts on music. Music meaning DRM:
Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store – they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.I'm impressed. And so is Jon Lech Johansen.
Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.
MORE: You say you want a revolution | Norway responds to Jobs' open DRM letter
EXTRA: Apple vs Apple is over
On Plagiarism
Monday, January 29, 2007, 12:09 AM - Copyfight
Richard A. Posner, The Atlantic Monthly; April 2002
Recently two popular historians were discovered to have lifted passages from other historians' books. They identified the sources in footnotes, but they failed to place quotation marks around the purloined passages. Both historians were quickly buried under an avalanche of criticism. The scandal will soon be forgotten, but it leaves in its wake the questions What is "plagiarism"? and Why is it reprobated? These are important questions. The label "plagiarist" can ruin a writer, destroy a scholarly career, blast a politician's chances for election, and cause the expulsion of a student from a college or university. New computer search programs, though they may in the long run deter plagiarism, will in the short run lead to the discovery of more cases of it.
We must distinguish in the first place between a plagiarist and a copyright infringer. They are both copycats, but the latter is trying to appropriate revenues generated by property that belongs to someone else—namely, the holder of the copyright on the work that the infringer has copied. A pirated edition of a current best seller is a good example of copyright infringement. There is no copyright infringement, however, if the "stolen" intellectual property is in the public domain (in which case it is not property at all), or if the purpose is not appropriation of the copyright holder's revenue. The doctrine of "fair use" permits brief passages from a book to be quoted in a book review or a critical essay; and the parodist of a copyrighted work is permitted to copy as much of that work as is necessary to enable readers to recognize the new work as a parody. A writer may, for that matter, quote a passage from another writer just to liven up the narrative; but to do so without quotation marks—to pass off another writer's writing as one's own—is more like fraud than like fair use.
"Plagiarism," in the broadest sense of this ambiguous term, is simply unacknowledged copying, whether of copyrighted or uncopyrighted work. (Indeed, it might be of uncopyrightable work—for example, of an idea.) If I reprint Hamlet under my own name, I am a plagiarist but not an infringer. Shakespeare himself was a formidable plagiarist in the broad sense in which I'm using the word. The famous description in Antony and Cleopatra of Cleopatra on her royal barge is taken almost verbatim from a translation of Plutarch's life of Mark Antony: "on either side of her, pretty, fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth the god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with which they fanned wind upon her" becomes "on each side her / Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, / With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem / To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool." (Notice how Shakespeare improved upon the original.) In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot "stole" the famous opening of Shakespeare's barge passage, "The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water" becoming "The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Glowed on the marble."
Mention of Shakespeare brings to mind that West Side Story is just one of the links in a chain of plagiarisms that began with Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe and continued with the forgotten Arthur Brooke's The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, which was plundered heavily by Shakespeare. Milton in Paradise Lost plagiarized Genesis, as did Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers. Examples are not limited to writing. One from painting is Edouard Manet, whose works from the 1860s "quote" extensively from Raphael, Titian, Velásquez, Rembrandt, and others, of course without express acknowledgment.
If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism. They show that not all unacknowledged copying is "plagiarism" in the pejorative sense. Although there is no formal acknowledgment of copying in my examples, neither is there any likelihood of deception. And the copier has added value to the original—this is not slavish copying. Plagiarism is also innocent when no value is attached to originality; so judges, who try to conceal originality and pretend that their decisions are foreordained, "steal" freely from one another without attribution or any ill will.
But all that can be said in defense of a writer who, merely to spice up his work, incorporates passages from another writer without acknowledgment is that the readability of his work might be impaired if he had to interrupt a fast-paced narrative to confess that "a predecessor of mine, ___, has said what I want to say next better than I can, so rather than paraphrase him, I give you the following passage, indented and in quotation marks, from his book ___." And not even that much can be said in defense of the writer who plagiarizes out of sheer laziness or forgetfulness, the latter being the standard defense when one is confronted with proof of one's plagiarism.
Because a footnote does not signal verbatim incorporation of material from the source footnoted, all that can be said in defense of the historians with whom I began is that they made it easier for their plagiarism to be discovered. This is relevant to how severely they should be criticized, because one of the reasons academic plagiarism is so strongly reprobated is that it is normally very difficult to detect. (In contrast, Eliot and Manet wanted their audience to recognize their borrowings.) This is true of the student's plagiarized term paper, and to a lesser extent of the professor's plagiarized scholarly article. These are particularly grave forms of fraud, because they may lead the reader to take steps, such as giving the student a good grade or voting to promote the professor, that he would not take if he knew the truth. But readers of popular histories are not professional historians, and most don't care a straw how original the historian is. The public wants a good read, a good show, and the fact that a book or a play may be the work of many hands—as, in truth, most art and entertainment are—is of no consequence to it. The harm is not to the reader but to those writers whose work does not glitter with stolen gold.
On Plagiarism
inside eBay's Innovation Machine
Thursday, January 4, 2007, 04:39 PM - Beautiful Code, Media
Business is steady on an early december afternoon at the iSold It consignment store on Skeet Club Road in High Point, N.C., as customers drop off items to be sold on eBay. Bikes, electronics, power tools --a steady flow of stuff, forming a tributary to the nearly $50 billion flood of goods and services that will be sold on the giant online marketplace in 2006.
iSold It LLC, with almost 200 outlets from coast to coast, has become one of the largest sellers on eBay Inc. by making it simple for anyone to move merchandise across the sprawling auction site. Simple for the folks consigning the stuff, that is -they just fill out a quick form, then go home to watch their online auction and wait for a check- but a fair amount of work for iSold It's employees, who must check the items in, list them in the most advantageous areas on eBay, keep track of bidding and sales, and follow through with shipping and payment.
Multiply that by the 50,000 different auctions iSold It manages in a typical month -about 15,000 at any given moment, closer to 18,000 during the December holiday rush- and, well, "it gets very complex," says Dave Crocker, senior vice president of business development at the privately held Monrovia, Calif., company. To deal with that complexity, iSold It is switching from internally developed software to a more sophisticated application from a Salt Lake City firm called Infopia Inc., which links directly to various eBay sites and handles pricing, listing and other key tasks more efficiently.
Infopia is not just another software vendor. It's part of a growing community of some 40,000 independent developers, all building products using eBay's own application programming interfaces, or APIs -the connection points that let a program share data and respond to requests from other software. These applications are tailor-made to work seamlessly with eBay's core computing platform. eBay provides its APIs to the developers for free; its cost is limited to maintaining the code and providing some support resources for the developers.
The payoff: a network of companies creating applications that help make eBay work better, grow faster and reach a broader customer base. (eBay's other business units, Skype and PayPal, also have open APIs and developer programs.) eBay says that software created by its developer network—there are more than 3,000 actively used applications, including a configurator that allows high-volume sellers to list items more efficiently, and a program that notifies buyers of auction status via mobile phone -plays a role in 25 percent of listings on the U.S. eBay site. The company has about 105 million listed items at any given time; roughly half of its sales come from within the United States.
Sharing APIs is common practice for software companies, but eBay, along with its fellow online-retail pioneer, Amazon.com, is breaking new ground in its industry by establishing a large community of outside developers. And the implications of this strategy go much further than the world of auctions and electronic storefronts. "It's about allowing people outside your company to write services that communicate with you-—it could be companies in your supply chain, sharing information about inventories or billing," says Adam Trachtenberg, senior manager of platform evangelism at eBay (i.e., the guy responsible for the care and feeding of the developer program).
"In the next few years you will see more and more companies with third-party developer networks, even companies you might not think of as likely candidates," adds Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president of enterprise research at Yankee Group. That could mean companies in far more traditional businesses than eBay, including manufacturers, he says. "These days, executives are telling me 'we're more like a software company than a hardware company'—and I say, then act like one. The long-term winners and losers in markets are determined by ecosystems around them, and developer networks fit that model. Developer communities allow companies to do things over the Internet with resources they don't have themselves," he says. Companies can't just flip a switch and join the game, though, says Daniel Sholler, a research vice president at Gartner Inc. They may need to first embrace the design model of service-oriented architecture, which hides the underlying complexity of a system from users, and allows components of an IT infrastructure to be reused and recombined to support particular processes instead of dedicated tasks. "This is part of the maturation of the Web, the trend toward service-enabling all kinds of systems and sharing information more freely," Sholler says.
Companies such as Infopia are now creating mash-ups—applications built around APIs from eBay and other firms such as SalesForce.com Inc. and FedEx Corp.—that extend the relationship between different companies and their customers. The mash-ups loosely join unrelated entities, portending a new level of interactivity between companies and customers of all kinds. "This is what Web 2.0 does for business," says Infopia CEO Bjorn Espenes. "Everyone can pick and share information in different ways that are much more automated."
Keep reading Inside eBay by Edward Cone at Cio insight!
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