DISQUS

DISQUS Hello! The Technology Liberation Front is using DISQUS, a powerful comment system, to manage its comments. Learn more.

Community Page

The Technology Liberation Front

The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Jump to original thread »
Author

Book Review: Blown to Bits by Abelson, Ledeen, & Lewis

Started by TLF · 7 months ago

I’ve just finished reading Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, and it’s another title worth adding to your tech policy reading list. The authors survey a broad swath of tech p ... Continue reading »

4 comments

  • Rationalitate

    7 months ago

    Though I'm a big believer in freeing IP from the shackles of IP law, I do recognize the value in trade secrets, DRM, and passive protection (i.e., just not putting your book free online). Creators of their works should have the right to make it more difficult to get their works through means other than the ones they'd want, but then again they also shouldn't have the courts backing them in that right. If a company can pull off DRM, or if a book's author can get away with not having their book scanned in and put online, then great, more power to them – that's perfectly within their rights.

    That having been said, I'm not convinced that this is what would happen. While books (especially monographs) may take a bit longer to come online, eventually the authors will have to start competing with pirates.
    reply
  • Tim Lee

    7 months ago

    The authors have a strongly-worded chapter on copyright that generally argues for relaxing copyright protections. Interestingly, however, (unless I am missing something) I notice they don’t offer their book for free download on their site. I’m always intrigued by copyright critics who refuse to put their own content online. Apparently, it’s another case of ‘copying is good for me, but not for thee.’

    Adam, this criticism doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Aside from Boldrin and Levin, hardly anyone advocates the abolition of copyright. What a lot of people are opposed to (i haven't read the book but I suspect this describes them) is the ever-more-draconian penalties for consumers and ever-broader scope of copyright protection. There's nothing remotely inconsistent about advocating that copyright be kept within its traditional limits while take advantage of copyright to protect one's own works.

    Now, it might be inconsistent if the authors encouraged their publishers to start suing people who shared copies of their books on BitTorrent. But as far as I know they haven't done that.
    reply
  • Adam Thierer

    7 months ago

    Tim... It's a fair point. All I'm saying is that if one is going to play up the benefits of unrestricted file sharing and repeatedly hammer on copyright protections without offering any indications of how enforcement should work going forward, then, yes, I would think it would only make sense to practice what you preach and put the complete text online for all to download free-of-charge. However, as I mentioned in my review, the authors don't really make it clear in the text how far they want to go, so my quip may have been somewhat unfair.

    Regardless, Harry Lewis has just notified me that the book goes to Creative Commons one year from original pub date (sometime in mid-2009). So it will (presumably) all be online eventually.
    reply
  • Harry Lewis

    6 months ago

    Turns out I'd forgotten what the contract actually said. It was to go to CC in six months, not one year, and that coincided with yesterday's celebration of Creative Commons. So the entire book is now up on bitsbook.com for free download.
    reply

Add New Comment

Returning? Login