Parliament's back in session, and seriously lacking some new material. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Noema Pérez

When the last parliament dissolved for the 2011 Federal Election, we profiled five bills that died when the writ was dropped. Four of those — cheaper HIV drugs for the developing world, protecting trans rights, improving water for First Nations, and improving decorum in the House — were real losses (the last, a painfully flawed copyright bill, we were not sorry to see go).

With parliament returning today, we were curious to see what’s coming back, and the answer is disappointing. Here are two bad bills that just won’t stay dead. Both are scheduled for passage this fall:

Bill C-4, formerly Bill C-49 “The Human Smuggling Bill”

Check out Jason Kenney’s point of view on this returning bill. Reintroduction of The Human Smuggling Bill has intense opposition from groups such as the Canadian Council for Refugees and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

Bill C-32 “The Copyright Bill”

Heritage Minister James Moore laments the multiple attempts at passing the Copyright Modernization Act in this article. He hopes to see amendments to the bill completed by Christmas. Sponsored in partnership with Tony Clement, Moore’s Copyright Bill is also cloaked in controversy as educators fear the loss of their rights to use copyrighted materials in their classrooms.

It’s not all bad news. Showing unexpected endurance is Bill C-389, which would include gender identity and gender expression in the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. The NDP hopes to reintroduce the bill, which passed its third reading during the last parliament, in which six Conservatives voted in favour. It’s faint hope at best, however: its previous demise in a senate chock-full of Conservatives gives it little chance of survival in a Tory-majority parliament.

Compiled by Dylan C. Robertson & Victoria Salvas

This election means death. Not only have Ottawa scrums, filibusters, and drawn-out committees been killed, pieces of legislation making their way through parliament have all met a harsh end as politicians take to the campaign trail.

Before a bill becomes law, it is introduced in either the House of Commons or the Senate. Subsequently the bill goes through readings where it is introduced, given a number code and debated. It can be read again, amended then passed, from the House to the Senate but only becomes law if it is given Royal Assent by the Governor General.

But bills are stopped in their tracks when an election is called. We tracked down the people who pioneered five of the most important bills that died on the order paper when the writ dropped. We asked what they thought of the abrupt death of their projects and if they’ll attempt rebooting them.

While government bills (titled C- with a number under 201) can be reintroduced at an advanced phase with the consent of the House, private members’s bills and motions are entered in a lottery to determine their Order of Precedence, meaning the order in which they can be re-introduced. Only 30 members per session have their motions considered, although the list is replenished if all motions are dealt with.

Here’s a look at the five bills that may or may not rise again:

1. Cheaper HIV Drugs:

Bill C-393, An Act to amend the Patent Act (drugs for international humanitarian purposes), was introduced by then NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis in May 2009. After she left to run for mayor of Winnipeg, the bill was adopted by another NDP MP, Paul Dewar.

The bill, which came to be known as “the AIDS drug bill” would’ve allowed generic drug makers to supply their products to developing countries, so they could fight diseases like tuberculosis and malaria, and help the world’s 15 million AIDS victims. Apotex Inc. had promised to make much-needed antiretrovirals for children, should the legislaiton pass. The bill, which was passed earlier this month by the House of Commons, was sabotaged by its review committee and then by the Conservatives’s attempt to effectively whip the senate, feeling it would hinder Big Pharma.

“It’s pretty outrageous,” said Richard Elliott, executive director of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. “This bill had a lot of potential, and we pushed really hard to get it to pass. We had a lot of support from MPs in all parties.”

Dewar said he plans to reintroduce the bill. “We have to abolish the senate though, first,” he laughed. “That’s my plan. Well I’m just joking… but not really.” Dewar noted the bill was lucky to be successfully transferred after Wasylycia-Leis’s leave, as it is not an automatic process. “It was revived when actual co-operation broke out in the House of Commons,” he said. “Through unanimous consent, I was able to pick the bill up. “I’m ready, able, and willing to carry it forward after the election,” said Dewar, who hopes it ranks high in the order or precedence. “There’s so much public support for it. I don’t think they could get away with this again.”

2. Civilizing parliament:

Private Member’s Motion M-517 proposed a reform of Question Period. Conservative MP Michael Chong’s pet project aimed to civilize parliament’s most savage — and ironically unproductive — 45 minutes each sitting day.

The motion sought to strengthen how much discipline a speaker can give, lengthen the alloted time for each question and answer, and aimed at “examining the convention that the minister questioned need not respond.”

“Parliament needs to be reformed and I think the reform of parliament should begin with the reform of Question Period,” said Chong. If passed, the motion would have also stipulated who should be asked questions, most notably dedicating Wednesday exclusively for questions to the Prime Minister, and requiring ministers be present for two of the other four days. Chong noted that he was listed in the Order of Precedence for the first time in six years, and said he would re-table his motion in the rare chance he was listed for the next session. “I’m disappointed that the committee didn’t have a chance to deal with it before the election.”

Chong explained that while many members add motions and bills to the order paper solely to generate publicity for an issue, he fully intends to enact this reform. “I’ll continue to work on this issue through whatever mechanisms are available to me after the election,” said Chong. “Because this problem isn’t going away and I think Canadians want it to be addressed.”

3. Protecting trans rights:

Bill C-389, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (gender identity and gender expression), was a private member’s bill sponsored by NDP MP Bill Siksay. Introduced in early 2009, the legislation would have make it illegal to discriminate based on gender identity, and aimed to protect transgender individuals by amending the Human Rights Act.

These amendments would have also been made to the Criminal Code, rendering these acts of discrimination hate crimes. The House passed the bill in February, against Stephen Harper’s wishes. However, the fact that it received “unanimous support from the Bloc, several Conservatives, and the Liberals bodes well for the next parliament” says Siksay. The MP is confident in the future of the bill; passing it again will demonstrate the governments’ “commitment to human rights.”

4. Improving First Nations’ water:

Bill S-11 Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act, was introduced in May 2010 and would have developed federal regulations for governing water provision, disposal and quality standards in First Nations communities.

An issue that has received much attention recently is the issue of providing First Nations reserves with safe drinking water. An assessment from 2001-2001 found that three quarters of the drinking water systems in First Nations communities were at risk.

Despite the dire situation on many reserves, many First Nations leaders criticized the bill, feeling they were left out of the creating of the legislation and not offered funding to get it off the ground. The Assembly of First Nations felt that the bill presented lofty goals but sparse plans for financial investment and support, which in the long run, could leave reserves in worse condition.

5. Copyright reform:

Bill C-32, An Act to amend the Copyright Act, was the third attempt at copyright reform killed by an election call, dragging on a 14-year effort.

The bill sparked controversy for attempting to criminalize the use and promotion of software that circumvents digital locks, generating high-profile criticism, a minister’s comment that critics were “radical extremists,” and an indutry-led astroturfing campaign. But the bill also aimed at tackling online piracy, and making it legal to transfer music from CDs to iPods.

MP Tony Clement, who introduced the bill as Minister of Industry, told us he plans to reintroduce the bill if re-elected. “It’s just another example of important legislation that has now been discontinued because of the opposition parties passing a motion of non-confidence,” said Clement. “This is a very necessary piece of legislation to help regularize certain habits of consumers and also protect artists from wealth-destroying pirates. “I’m hoping that if we get a majority government, we can actually concentrate on the issues like C-32 and privacy protection and other aspects of the digital economy.”

Industry Minister Tony Clement’s iPod contains 10,452 songs, he told reporters on May 26, most of them transferred from CDs he bought. It’s a widespread practice generally known as “format shifting,” and in Canada, it’s illegal.

The minister didn’t shamefacedly admit his crime in an embarrassing gaffe; he called a press conference and announced it in order to make a point. Copyright law in Canada has lagged behind social and technological reality for years now, impotently policing an extinct world of mimeographs and cassette tapes while the rest of us got on with things. Ever ripped a CD to your computer or MP3 player like Minister Clement did? Ever taped a TV show to watch later? Had a cellphone unlocked? All are currently illegal in Canada, even as they happen every day. So on June 2, Heritage Minister James Moore introduced the Conservatives’ latest attempt to update Canadian copyright, Bill C-32.

There is some good news. The bill proposes new freedoms for people to make copies of protected material in non-commercial ways: transferring that bought-and-paid-for CD to your iPod would be legalized, as will taping a TV show to watch later. There is a new provision for artists to use copyrighted material in parody and satire. And the bill would legalize the use of protected works in many educational contexts. These new rules will finally bring the law into some sort of alignment with reality.

But there is a glaring problem: all these new freedoms are overridden by the government’s total surrender on the matter of “digital rights management,” restrictive types of software that control our use of the e-books, DVDs, or video games we purchase—what devices we may use, who we may share with, and how many times. No one would stand for a shirt that self-destructed unless worn with a certain brand of jeans, but that is the essence of DRM—the things you purchase never belong to you. Under C-32 as currently written, circumventing any digital lock would be a crime, even if the purpose were legal. With this measure, the bill legitimizes the sinister notion that large corporate interests are entitled to broad, intrusive powers to control how individuals consume culture. That idea is dangerous.

Yes, artists need legal protections to ensure they are compensated for their work. But it is not in the interest of any Canadian—including Canadian artists—to shackle artworks to technology that invades our privacy and criminalizes the normal exchange of ideas that constitutes all culture. It may still be possible to reopen the digital lock provision; a strong and unambiguous public response is the key.

Today’s the day! Heritage Minister James Moore will apparently introduce new legislation to update Canada’s copyright laws this afternoon. Michael Geist, the usual go-to guy for all discussion on this topic, has a quick introduction on his site. Basically, fair dealing will remain pretty strict; Geist has complimentary things to say about how internet intermediaries like ISPs will be treated; and then we get to the mess that is digital locks and DRM:

Third, the bill will include digital lock provisions, known as anti-circumvention rules.  These rules, which will allow Canada to implement international copyright treaties it signed over ten years ago, was the most-discussed issue during the consultation.  Thousands of Canadians argued that Canada should adopt a flexible implementation that renders it illegal to “pick a digital lock” for the purposes of copyright infringement, but preserves the right to do so for legal purposes.

Sources say the government has rejected the flexible approach in favour of the U.S.-style ban on circumvention (subject to a handful of limited exceptions).  If true, the problem with the approach is that it undermines both the new and existing exceptions.  For millions of Canadians, that means that their user rights will be lost whenever a digital lock is present including for CDs, DVDs, electronic books, and many other devices.  In the process, the balance will tilt strongly away from consumers and their property rights over their own purchases.

In other words, any fair dealing privileges that you could have enjoyed previously can be revoked if publishers include some  lame, already-cracked DRM junk in their products.

Back in July of 2009, the Canadian government launched an eight week public consultation on copyright reform.  Members of the public were invited to let their will be known surrounding issues such as fair use, copyright terms, ISP neutrality and a host of other issues. With over 8,300 respondents in total an astounding 6183 people made it known that they opposed another bill C-61 (a meager 54 respondents favoured the bill)

Bill C-61, of course, was the draconian U.S. DMCA-style copyright reform bill that former Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced to parliament in June of 2008. The bill was ultimately abandoned when an election was called that fall, but has remained on the periphery since. The Conservatives have attempted to pass copyright reform three times without public consultation, bending to the will of industry lobbyists.

So, finally, the public has spoken and in near unison oppose the claustrophobic sanctions of bill C-61. Canadians, in fact, are a much more generous and trusting population than we could have guessed. The overwhelming majority support stronger fair use/fair dealing protection, shorter copyright terms, and believe individuals should be protected from liability for non-commercial use. Moreover, as popular as lightening copyright restrictions was, the opposite is equally equally true: only 153 respondents favour limiting or halting unauthorized filesharing and only one, one single respondent, supported fining those for copyright violation.

So what does this mean?  Essentially, Canadians are asking for the very opposite of what the government has been trying to pass for years. The question now is whether current Industry Minister Tony Clement is listening.

After the jump, the full results of the questionnaire, courtesy Michael Geist:

In some corners of the web, piracy is a form of curation. Illustration by Matt Daley.

In the summer of 1999, a terrifying rumour began circulating on the then-young internet, gluing millions to their screens: Napster, the illegal music service, was about to be shut down. It seemed like the party with an endless soundtrack was coming to an end.

The site, which famously provided access to millions of illicitly copied songs, introduced internet piracy to the masses. Once people had a taste for a web that was a unending cultural smorgasbord, there was no going back: piracy has now become as central to web culture as celebrity news and porn.

But though the greedy rush to download anything and everything remains, a new and surprisingly widespread breed of piracy has been quietly simmering in the corners of the internet. Rather than encouraging users to grab as much pop culture as they can, these sites are about quality, not quantity. Instead of an anarchic free-for-all, they’re more like a curated exchange amongst aficionados. By most definitions, it’s still stealing, but stealing with a “Robin Hood” twist: the ultimate goal is to spread good art and challenging ideas—for free. That may be controversial, but as principles go, it’s a pretty noble one.

Today, the most common way to download copyrighted material might be a site called The Pirate Bay. It’s just one of the sites that index content scattered across the internet rather than housing it, making them harder to shut down. Every day, millions of films, songs and books are downloaded; unsurprisingly, the most commercially successful entertainment is also the most pirated. A perhaps unintended consequence of the entertainment industry’s hype for the new and popular is that it also drives those who steal from it.

But another approach to piracy has been evolving, too. Rather than an all-you-can-eat buffet, these sites are more akin to an underground dinner club for foodies. Instead of an array of popular, everyday items, one is presented with the crème de la crème of culture, whether a pristine copy of a Fellini film or that Ella Fitzgerald recording few have ever heard.

It was perhaps a music community named OiNK.cd that was the most prominent of these more rigorous sites. This go-to place for quality tunes was shut down by a legal challenge in 2007, though the site’s owner was recently cleared of charges. Nonetheless, What.cd and Waffles.fm (which, for visitors to its homepage, pretends to be a site about recipes), quickly took the place of OiNK. cd. In function, these sites work much like The Pirate Bay. In philosophy, they differ significantly. Many users take time to find and upload obscure tracks of smart, Scandinavian electronica rather than something by Beyoncé. Discussion on the sites’ forums often reflects this commitment to hidden gems, and those who share obscure or difficult works often gain credibility. Instead of mirroring the behaviour of the populist industries they seek to undercut, the sites are unapologetically elitist.

But to characterize these sites as a paradise for thieves with highbrow tastes would be to miss part of the picture. The original material might have been pirated, but these sites make members share amongst themselves. Ratios of uploads to downloads are enforced. Download every available bit of Spanish jazz without sharing in kind and you will be ruthlessly and quickly ejected. What’s more, rather than the populist grab-whatyou-can ethos of The Pirate Bay, you have a community of invested, informed people to guide your wanderings, introducing you to the innovative and new as you return the favour with your own obscure treasures.

Nor is this phenomenon limited to movies and music. AAAARG.org, a site that stores hundreds of academic articles, has electrified cultural theory geeks by finally putting some of that anti-establishment Marxist thinking into practice. When an academic publisher recently requested an article be taken down, it was met with angry and erudite responses about “the exploitative forces of capital.” To the publisher, a copyrighted work was being distributed without compensation; to the sites’ users, ideas were being shared for the greater good.

From the start, we knew the web was going to change things. What we possibly didn’t realize was, unbeknownst to many, new modes of cultural exchange were being born that replaced blind consumption with careful curation, often by simply removing the costly barriers erected around “the good stuff.” As a result, those who adhere to the letter of the law, and the spirit of copyright and ownership that underpin it, believe these sites are simply dens of theft.

But such a view is short-sighted. What these services let us see is that when the exchange of ideas, rather than the exchange of dollars, is the controlling principle, communities will form around the best and most challenging of what culture has to offer. Call me a naive idealist, but I think that’s a good thing. And when history looks back on this moment, rather than maintain the status quo, I’d rather it be known I was in Robin Hood’s band of merry thieves.

Politically speaking, it was a pretty good haul of booty.

On June 7, an organization of self-described “pirates” took what was a fairly small step toward gaining real political clout, but a gigantic leap for everyone in the world who has ever downloaded an MP3 file without paying for it.

By winning around seven percent of the vote and a seat in the European Parliament, Sweden’s Pirate Party—dedicated to freedom of information on the internet and the abolishment of restrictive copyright laws—did more than demonstrate the power of online rabble-rousing and grassroots net activism; it offered concrete evidence of the viability of a campaign built around the legalization of online file sharing.

With the Swedish vote, Western news outlets saw either an example of the growing role of the internet in politics, or a quirky story to throw in at the end of a newscast. But a group of Canadian activists saw something more: an opportunity.

“One of my buddies sent me a link on Facebook, and from there I joined up and it just took off,” says 18-year-old Jake Daynes, a Vancouver native who, a few scant weeks after joining, found himself the de facto chief spokesperson for the fledgling Pirate Party of Canada.

First it was a few dozen people like Daynes joining a Facebook group, then several dozen more. Then the question went around: “Who wants to make a website?” Next came a message board and chat room on a clunky-looking DIY homepage. Then came a party constitution, a set of bylaws, and some interim party officials.

Seven weeks after the official Pirate Party celebrated its victory in Sweden, Canada’s incarnation was closing in on a thousand members in its Facebook group, had a flashier, brand-new website (pirateparty.ca) a communications director hustling for press contacts, was planning its first internal elections, and— maybe, just maybe—looking at some candidates to run in the next federal election.

They’ve got a plan: To appeal to their strengths (demographic analysis of ridings that have the highest percentage of under-30 voters), a message to rally the unbelievers (“We point out to older and more Conservative voters that issues like net neutrality and deep packet inspection are very much privacy issues, which is a core Conservative belief,” says Daynes), and a word-of-mouth (or word-of-Facebook) campaign that keeps spreading.

“So far the response we’ve been getting is very positive,” Daynes says. “If we keep growing like this, within the next few months, we hope to be fully registered and a recognized political party.”

A little more than 10 years after university students began whispering amongst themselves about a miraculous new program called Napster, the subterranean rumblings of the Pirate Party of Canada may similarly signify a turning point in the battle for freedom from restrictive copyright law.

The Pirate Party of Canada stops short of calling for full legalization of music file sharing, but part of its platform— “We must fight for fair copyright laws. Laws that are fair to consumers, as well as artists … We must also promote and contribute to the sharing of art and culture”—certainly puts it in line with a radical plan for copyright reform that aims to make online peer-to-peer music sharing in Canada completely legal.

This plan, conceived by the Songwriters Association of Canada, has been around for two years and has gone through several drafts. Artists would be compensated through a levy charged by internet service providers to all broadband internet users who engage in file sharing (users who didn’t share files could opt out). In exchange for this levy, the user would be free to download as much music as he or she wanted, from as many sites as desired, to keep it for as long as it’s wanted, and to share it with anyone else who paid the levy. The fees would be pooled to create a fund to pay the artists whose music has been downloaded. An industry collective would distribute the money based on data collected by Canadian internet service providers (like Nielsen ratings measure television, only if every television had a Nielsen box). The more an artist’s music was shared, the more she would be paid. The revenues, according to SAC’s calculations, could be substantial.

“At $3 a month, when there are 15 million broadband households in Canada, that’s about $500 million per year by 2010,” says Eddie Schwartz, president of SAC. He believes the system would be more equitable for small and independent music acts, allowing them to actually make money from online music even if they lacked the infrastructure the major labels enjoy.

“There are musicians out there who, in the world of record labels handling promotion and distribution, have no opportunity for a career in music anymore,” says Schwartz. “The labels are signing very few people and the independent movement has really taken off because there’s so much more talent out there that can’t get signed and promoted. But the independents are being [illegally] file shared as well, so it’s not a career option, really. But if we had a monetization plan for file sharing, those independents would be seeing 100 percent on the dollar, because they’re doing it all themselves.

“Independent musicians make up about 30 percent of the music industry now. That’s $150 million going to independent artists in Canada alone.”

“The existence of free music has helped make the major labels irrelevant. The internet gave artists the power,” says independent singer-songwriter Emm Gryner, herself a member of SAC. “The only problem is, we’re lacking a ‘supervisor’ or ‘boss’ who can look out for songwriters and music-makers as a collective, and make sure we are compensated for our work.” Despite the support of artists like Gryner, the plan wasn’t a big hit when SAC first proposed it in 2007.

“Initially it seemed to engender a lot of criticism,” says Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa.

Not only was it unclear whether or not the plan would fit within the boundaries of Canada’s copyright law, but the levy was planned to be mandatory for anyone with a broadband account—a notion that understandably upset listeners who still planned on buying their music in stores or from online retailers. Another major problem, says Schwartz, was that SAC didn’t explain the plan properly before releasing it. “There was an assumption among the general public that this would just be one more way to pay for music,” he says. “People were thinking that they already buy CDs, they pay for music through iTunes and this was just one more way they could pay, so why bother?”

Subsequent versions of the SAC plan addressed these concerns by making the plan optional for both artists and consumers, thus allowing for compliance to international copyright law, and by leaving it in the hands of the Copyright Board of Canada to set the fees. Studies commissioned by the organization showed that the plan had serious promise, according to Schwartz.

“We consulted with creator groups in Europe, in the United States, and with francophone groups in Quebec. We did a lot of research. We had three studies commissioned on international copyright law, an economic study to ensure the numbers were right. We didn’t just jump into this.

“Eventually this is going to reach critical mass,” says Schwartz. “Perhaps not as soon as I’d like, but consumer groups have expressed support, artists, songwriters, even ISPs are coming around. There is no doubt in my mind this is going to happen. It’s just a question of when it reaches critical mass.”

Opposition to the SAC proposal won’t go quietly. “The more recent revised SAC proposal that came out this year tried to address many of those concerns,” says Geist, “but [the recording industry] is the most deep-pocketed voice, the one with the extensive contacts from a lobbying perspective, and they are one group that’s not onside.”

The Canadian Recording Industry Association ignored requests for comment on the SAC proposal, but has made its dislike of the idea clear. CRIA president Graham Henderson told Reuters early in 2009, shortly after the proposal was released, that his organization wouldn’t be commenting on details of the SAC proposal, telling the news organization that “we don’t want to pursue what amounts to a pipe dream that is presented as a quick fix.” CRIA refused repeated interview requests for this article.

The plan faces legal obstacles too. Canada’s copyright laws are currently under reconstruction. The federal government held public forums across the country last summer to prepare to draft and table new legislation, that may or may not include a revival of Bill C-61, which targeted file sharers by introducing a $20,000 fine for uploading copyrighted material. Artist support for file-sharing, however, is less and less a matter of debate. In the past two years, more and more artists have either made their music available via free or pay-what-you-can downloading, essentially taking control of their own online destiny.

One of the world’s biggest rock bands, Radiohead, offered up their last album, In Rainbows, as a pay-what-you-want download through their website, released the CD in stores a few weeks later, and still made out like, well, pirates. According to the band’s publisher, Warner Chappell, a year after the album’s fall 2007 release, Radiohead made more money off the pay-what-you-want downloads alone than they made in total from their last album, Hail to the Thief.

“I know a lot of people download my stuff for free, maybe because they’re broke or lazy or just curious,” says Gryner, who has won critical acclaim as an independent artist, but is currently co-hosting radio shows while recording her next album, trying to make her music career financially viable. “I don’t think it’s their fault that they’re trying to save a buck. I think the fault lies in the system that there are not enough regulations or options, especially for younger people who are used to downloading for free, or who don’t have credit cards.”

Other artists have spoken out, in interviews, on their websites, and from the stage at concerts against overly restrictive copyright policies. Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor famously yelled at fans to “steal, steal, and steal some more” in 2007, and also proposed a levy system similar to the SAC proposal in an interview with tech website CNET. Artists have also formed coalitions to fight for industry reform. Reznor, by the way, flat-out gave away his 2008 album, Ghosts I-IV, on his website. It still ended up at the top of Amazon.com’s list of bestselling albums of that year.

Alternative rock legend Billy Bragg penned an editorial in the Guardian in May of this year, on behalf of the Featured Artist Coalition he heads—a U.K.-based artists’ collective of music-industry heavyweights such as Robbie Williams, Radiohead, Annie Lennox, and members of Blur and Pink Floyd. The FAC didn’t call for an end to file sharing, but to embrace it as a distribution medium.

“If technology allows people to access music for free, they will take advantage,” Bragg wrote. “The next generation of music fans may no longer want to pay for music, but they are still hungry to hear it. The challenge to the industry is to find ways to monetize their behaviour.”

When a British ISP owned by Virgin Media planned early in 2009 to launch a subscription-based file-sharing service, its research predicted that 80 percent of music downloaders would be willing to pay for a legal file-sharing method. But the project was later scuttled after participating record labels demanded stringent anti-piracy regulations be attached to the service.

Scores of popular artists back a file-sharing subscription system and argue against restrictive copyright laws. Consumers say they’re willing to pay for file sharing. Political parties that support less restrictive copyright laws are gathering steam and Canada’s government spent the summer asking the public for guidance on the topic. A proposal that would legalize file sharing, compensate the artist, and move the music industry forward—and away from a battle that was lost more than a decade ago—has spent two years under construction. And yet the average music fan still wonders what will happen if he gets caught downloading the latest Tragically Hip album and worries about a $20,000 fine for uploading music if Bill C-61 is eventually passed. Why?

The last roadblock to the future of music distribution is the same as it was more than 10 years ago: the music business itself.

“[The record labels] can’t let go because we’re seeing the middleman, so to speak, largely eliminated,” says Geist. “If you’re thinking about this from an industry perspective, you’re wondering, ‘What’s the value-add that industry has typically provided?’ It’s been about marketing and distribution. And they’re just not providing a whole lot of value-add in regards to that anymore.”

Legalizing file sharing is the musical equivalent of legalizing prostitution: it’s already happening, crackdowns don’t stop it, and there are existing commercial frameworks that would improve working conditions and curtail exploitation.

The only things standing in the way—in both cases—are the taboo (it’s still illegal, after all) and the middlemen, those who stand to lose millions of dollars if the workers are allowed to own the means of production.

The technology isn’t disappearing. The lawsuits aren’t working. Public support for a better way is only increasing. It’s time to legalize online music sharing.

“The music industry just never believed that any of this was going to become a big issue,” says Geist. “Then they thought that if you adopt some tough legal tactics this thing will just go away. But as successive media industries have learned, be it newspapers or film or music, the internet is a game changer, in pretty dramatic ways. You have to adapt.”

Before my son Louis could walk, he could surf. He took to the internet like an aquatic creature, swimming easily and confidently. It was cute to see him perched at the computer, his big baby head topped off by a pair of giant headphones. But his avidity made me uneasy, a disquiet that lingers still, when I hover over his shoulder trying to see what he’s watching, making, understanding.

Generations see screens differently. Illustration by Dave Donald

I come from a generation of watchers — of movies, of TV — but Lou belongs to a generation of makers. Even though he’s only seven years old, already he’s leaving me behind, moving from consumer to creator, making and posting videos of his Lego men, swimming in a vast sea of video clips, remixes, parodies. To him, culture isn’t a static thing to be passively imbibed, but something to act upon; not an inviolate product, but simply material. As much as I admire the next generation’s digital fluidity, I miss the bigger picture — something that isn’t cut up, sliced into bits and pieces. More importantly, I worry that Lou will miss it also.

The break between the emerging culture of the empowered creator and the old-fashioned passive consumer is the subject of Brett Gaylor’s award-winning documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto. RiP picked up the 2008 Dioraphte Audience Award at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam and is being released this spring online and in theatres. The subject of the film is how current intellectual property laws affect the culture being made by a new generation. The copyright debate is something of a Wild West show at the moment, and no one embodies that spirit more fully than a musician named Gregg Gillis, who records and releases under the name Girl Talk. Gillis combines hundreds of samples from other artists’ songs into mashups, and in so doing, risks lawsuits, prison time, and massive fines. The film uses Girl Talk as a test case for current copyright laws, but also poses fundamental questions about how new forms of culture always need to build, borrow, or outright steal from the past.

In one of the film’s more thought-provoking segments, Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and founder of Creative Commons, argues that overreaching copyright laws have strangled creativity and eaten away at the public domain in the name of money and control. Despite lawsuits and penalties, people continue to rip, remix, and sample with gusto. After all, Lessig argues, the desire to play along is a natural form of creativity. And to punish or outlaw such a manifestation is tantamount to creating a generation with no respect for the law. (Lessig’s talk, included in the film, is available online at ted.com.)

I think Lessig is right about the importance of sharing ideas, but my misgivings linger — not just about how material is used, but how it’s perceived. It’s not because I’m afraid Louis will get sued one day. It’s because when films are simply something to be cut up, reworked, made into goofy commentary, and viewed ironically, I think something is lost. The ability to follow a sustained narrative has been fundamental to human nature, but it’s been so fractured, so chopped into small pieces, that it sometimes seems in danger of disappearing.

Louis informed me the other day that YouTube was better than TV and movies because you could watch whatever you wanted, and no one made you watch something (like ads) that you didn’t want to see. Here I am in danger of dating myself terribly, but this makes me think about how the medium carries the meaning. I am reminded of what it once was to listen to records. The A- and B-sides, the sequential tracks, formed a journey — and to interrupt this process was to miss the larger impact. You were meant to move in a linear fashion, from beginning to end.

That straight-line mentality has been disrupted, and not simply because there is often no top or bottom, no beginning or end, on the internet. When the larger arc is missing, the fundamental nature of story can change, becoming smaller and less affecting.

But the loss of the experience of sitting quietly in a darkened theatre to watch a movie — something I still love, but can’t truly share with my son — makes me sad. My experience has been shared by countless parents, who watch their children launch into some new world we can only fleetingly grasp. All we can do is wave goodbye from the shore, as they swim away.

Alas, we were already infected with unhappiness. We were a miserable, whiny group. The musicians got it started, with Laura Doyle, a singer-songwriter, bitterly complaining that even though songs from her new recording were featured on the thankfully defunct teen drama Dawson’s Creek, the majority of her prospective buyers downloaded her tunes for free—without buying the disc. This set off a torrent of commiseration. Apparently, songs are being traded, paintings are being scanned and slapped on covers and books are being photocopied, while artists go broke.

It’s a desperate situation, one that everyone from Rob Baker (The Tragically Hip guitarist) to André Cornellier (Montreal-based photographer) to Pat Durr (spokesperson for a national visual artists’ group) were pleased to bemoan at length. Every once in a while, Minister Copps would weigh in and commiserate. At one point, she compared culture to a loaf of bread—we don’t expect to get our bread for free now, do we?

Since I only agreed to attend for the complimentary sandwiches and the weekend stay in a luxury hotel (and didn’t bargain on cpac), I sat back and waited for someone else to elevate this discussion. But my peers were unanimous: the nasty consumer was getting one over on the increasingly desperate Canadian artist; the solution was simply a matter of tough-love copyright laws and more technologies to prevent unlicensed copying.

Quickly smoothing my uncombed hair through my fingers in an attempt to go telegenic, I found myself breaking into yet another Copps soliloquy with one of my own. It went something like: Yes, artists need to be compensated for their work. But, at the same time, the free and unfettered exchange made possible by the internet is the best way for Canadian creators to get their work out to Canada and the world. Because we live in a highly commercialized society where all the cultural distribution nodes are tightly controlled to maximize profit, the vast majority of Canadian cultural creations have extreme difficulty finding an audience. A song that does not fall into an accepted pop category and appear on an album sanctioned by a multinational label? You won’t hear it on any commercial radio station. A book by a first author published by a small press? Good luck finding it in the bookstore. A Canadian film not deemed marketable enough by the handful of distributors who control access to our movie screens? You will never have the chance to see it. So, I argued, internet conduits offering unmediated connections between cultural producers and a potential audience are actually a giant step forward, a way to take culture out of the capitalist system and return it to the community where it belongs. Finally, I said, though artists need to be compensated when their works are traded online, if I had to choose between having the opportunity to get my books out to a large, non-paying public or permanently shutting that conduit down, I would choose door number one.

My thoughts went over like stockwell in a wetsuit. Minister Copps peered at me with annoyance. The high-priced moderator—an aggressively bilingual former Miss Canada—was momentarily stunned. She quickly regained her senses and led a lengthy round of Hal-bashing that culminated with the minister patiently explaining to me that culture is like Aspirin—you don’t expect to walk into a drugstore and walk out with free Aspirin, now do you?

Only fellow writer Susan Crean stood up for me, noting that what we need in our copyright policy is balance, balance between the needs of the users and the needs of the creators. This idea, that the culture consumer also has rights and needs, that culture is not just a commodity artists make in order to gain fame and riches, was clearly a new one to most of the meeting’s attendees.

“But,” noted Baker of The Hip, “they’re stealing our music!”

Baker has little to gain from internet distribution, of course. His band’s albums are in every record store, played on every station. Laura Doyle, on the other hand, seems to be missing the point. Outside of her homebase Vancouver, where, exactly, are the Dawson faithful supposed to buy her self-released indie CD? None of the record stores I called in Toronto (including indie great Soundscapes and hmv’s giant flagship on Yonge) carried it.

This is not a commentary on the CD’s worth or Doyle’s talent; it is a reflection of the way the production side of any cultural industry colludes with the retail side. Supposedly, it is only through record stores and sanctioned online venues that the system can recoup the royalties we rightfully owe the artists. But this also means it is easy for publishers, production companies and retailers to control what we are exposed to. For every album that does gangbuster business in the Canadian record store, there are 100 just-as-good albums that are totally excluded from radio, video and store racks.

Online file-sharing threatens the large for-profit cultural industries with irrelevance—which is why the Hollywood studios and big five record companies react so virulently against it. But for an artist like Laura Doyle, it is the only way that she can reasonably expect fans to find her music.

It is not hard to imagine moving from a copyright-violating free exchange of music on the net to the complete redundancy of the entire corporate-controlled system. What is really interesting is not how many people ignore copyright to get access to free music, but what systems like Kazaa and Morpheus represent: total unfettered equal access for anyone with access to a computer. The flouting of copyright is the beginning of the end for a business model that has always depended on its ability to control what we hear, see—and find on our shelves.

And yet, I still want to make a living as a cultural creator. Can we have a system that cuts out the middleman while still finding a way to remunerate artists? I believe we can. Unfortunately, the copyright forum was never really about instituting meaningful solutions. Twenty artists were flown in from around the country for consultation, but when we got there, we discovered that the forum was scheduled to span a whole two hours. One singer-songwriter barely said a single word. Jane Siberry had a few interesting things to say about running her own record company, but she also digressed in order to make a point about the relationship between the arts and the heavens. Others, like Mad Child (a rapper from Vancouver’s Swollen Members) who, as a representative of the hip-hop set, might have had something to say about the way copyright laws restrict those who seek to borrow snippets from other songs in the spirit of creativity, seemed to think that the gathering was a perfunctory PR stop. “Canada’s a great country,” Mad Child told the gathering. “We feel really supported.”

Buoyed by such sentiments, the two hours flew by without any talk of solutions. An opportunity lost? Well, at the next night’s official government Juno party attended by 1,000 or so bureaucrats rubbernecking absent celebs (all at private parties with their record company pals), the minister’s assistant pulled me aside and invited me to put my comments down on paper.

So here they are.

Digital technology is making it impossible to control the spread of intellectual property. So, how are artists supposed to make a living from their work? Give it away.

Every line we succeed in publishing today—no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it—is a victory wrenched from the powers of darkness. —Walter Benjamin

For about five years now, I’ve been obsessed with the search for practical answers to various aspects of one overarching question: Given the Dismal State of Canadian Book Distribution and Retailing, the Scanty Amount of Government Funding Available to both Writers and Presses, the Growing Governmental Emphasis on the Creation of Cultural Industry over the Creation of Culture, the Increasing Avariciousness of Multinational Conglomerates Bent on Maximizing Profit from their Copyrights and Patents by Putting the Squeeze on Independent Artists and Arts Publishers, the Resultant Paranoia and Reactionary Behaviour Among the Few Remaining Independents and, Most Pressingly (or De-Pressingly), the Still-Being-Determined Effect of the Internet On All Of the Aforementioned, How Do We Get to Keep Being Writers and Publishers?

Bloody hell. Mapping the human genome in my spare time would have been less frustrating.

Yes, the GNU/Linux movement has successfully challenged the Microsoft monopoly, and has also made us rethink the entire process of licensing and copyrighting content. And yes, it’s getting easier and cheaper to publish online. But on the other hand, as many writers, programmer-activists and watchdog groups work tirelessly to demonstrate, media conglomerates and industry associations, in collusion with increasingly conservative governments, are working equally tirelessly to do away forever with concepts such as the public domain and fair use. Meantime, publishers, especially small presses, are struggling to keep producing books for a market that seems to be supported only by an ever-decreasing trickle of government funding and bailouts. What’s a poet to do?

1. Welcome to Amateur Hour

Make It Everywhere. —Kenneth Goldsmith

We live in a world in which almost every surface is covered with writing: billboards, advertisements, logos, graffiti, video marquees, free daily and weekly newspapers, the internet, T-shirts·the list is endless. Most of it begs—screams, even—to be read. For free.

The value of professional writing, that is, the stuff inside books and magazines that we pay to access, has always been arbitrary, linked more to the names of writers currently in vogue than to any intrinsic qualities of a given text. But internet technologies, especially recent advances in weblogging software, which allow anyone to cheaply, quickly and easily publish reams of text and imagery to the web with little technical know-how, present a radical challenge to the economy of professional writing and publishing, threatening to tip everything in the direction of freedom and plenitude for the foreseeable future.

Weblogs surpass predecessors such as zines and garden-variety web pages by combining the cost-effectiveness of zines with the global reach of the web. Not only are the most popular weblogging software and services free, weblogs remove many of the technical barriers associated with online publishing by automating the process. It’s no longer necessary to mess with HTML, FTP, GGI scripts or any of the other arcane acronyms that guard the gates of the internet; just log in to a web page, cut and paste some text out of your word processor, click a button and presto, you’re published (in the original sense of “to make public,” at least).

Blogs came of age during the 2003 Iraq War, demonstrating that the sheer volume of reportage they produced—warts and all—was more than a match for the shortcomings of the major news networks and their embedded reporters, who did little more than parrot back the official White House message of the day.

Unlike traditional publishing—which adds value to writing by filtering the raw material (editing) and investing in the material production of an object (book, article, photograph, film), weblogs serve up great gushing streams of unmediated digital content to anyone who cares to search and browse it. Technopundit Clay Shirky claims that “weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity.” As a result, writing is once again becoming the provenance of amateurs in the original sense of the term—people who write for the love of doing so rather than for remuneration. Weblogging won’t create a new army of professional writers, because, as Shirky observes, “mass professionalization is an oxymoron; a professional class implies a minority of members.” Which means, of course, that almost no one gets paid cash for pure digital publishing.

Some people, Shirky included, revel in this situation, celebrating it as the levelling of the free-speech playing field: “We want a world where global publishing is effortless. We want a world where you don’t have to ask for help or permission to write out loud.” Other people—predominantly those who control the existing entertainment and publishing conglomerates—are scared silly, and are doing their best to maintain their dominance through the application of what I’m going to call, for lack of a better term, common-sense logic. All we need to do, they reason, is import the logic of exchange in the physical world—a logic based on creating demand though artificial scarcity—into the digital world.

2. Common Senselessness

Economy, n. Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the price of the cow that you cannot afford. —Ambrose Bierce

Common sense is all about maintaining the status quo. Common sense says, privatize everything, even the stuff that seems too cheap to meter, and let the market decide its value. Common sense says, If we can sell a paper book, we should be able to sell an e-book. In the world of Canadian letters, common sense, in the guise of a burgeoning anxiety about the importance of intellectual property and the sanctity of authors’ rights (concepts that allow us to assume an equivalence between physical commodities, digital commodities and ideas) has instilled an odd conservatism in the most unlikely of constituencies—writers.

Of all people, writers should be cognizant of the capriciousness of the value of what they produce; depending on the reader, your work is either a crock of shit or pure gold. If you’re a writer and you haven’t figured this out yet, go read Georges Bataille and Kathy Acker for starters, then get back to me. You could die stinking rich or penniless and alone; it’s a crapshoot. Either way, what you do lies outside of the normal processes of exchange and value-making.

But many of the writers I know, particularly very young fiction writers who haven’t placed their first books and senior writers with several out-of-print titles, are becoming increasingly obsessed with monetizing their creative output. The young fictioneers are all about The Big Score—securing an agent and landing a whopping huge advance and accompanying international publishing deal. The older writers, long since disabused of such folly by many years of difficult, thankless, low-paying work, and facing retirement without pension, benefits or substantial savings, are scheming to wring a few more coins out of their handful of forgotten, out-of-print books.

Writers in both of these situations are susceptible to what Dr. David P. Reed calls the “Intellectual Property Meme.” Reed is best-known as one of the inventors of the software protocols that make the in
ternet run—protocols that he and his associates released openly, without any licensing structure, which helped ensure their success, and the success of the internet itself. What concerns Reed is that many people have begun to bandy about the term “intellectual property” uncritically, without considering how it affects the way that we deal with ideas—or what the alternatives might be.

Unlike the vague and all-encompassing “intellectual property,” Reed argues that patents, copyrights and trademarks are all reasonably well-defined terms that serve a reasonable social good by granting limited monopolies to creators on concepts that came in part from the public domain, and will eventually return there. With the concept of intellectual property gaining a foothold, on the other hand, we are starting to assume that control should be the norm rather than the exception. Suddenly, anyone who champions the free and open exchange of ideas and creative works is bludgeoned with demands to explain why they’ve advocated “stealing” the value that the “owner” would be able to extract if they were able to license the “intellectual property” in perpetuity.

As the concept of intellectual property takes hold, the public domain continues to atrophy. The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected Eric Eldred’s challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, implying that further extensions to the duration of copyright terms will also be possible. Mexico is considering extending its copyright terms from the life-of-the-author plus 70 years to life-plus-100 years, and worse, allowing the government to charge royalties for works once they pass into the public domain. Everywhere, government and big business (those who really profit from the notion of intellectual property) are building deeper and deeper storage silos for creative work, with the intention of metering and charging for every grain of intellectual property that finds its way into public hands.

The impact on the creative process is substantial. At the opening of The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig quotes Davis Guggenheim, director of the TV series 24, as saying, “I would say to an 18-year-old artist, you’re totally free to do whatever you want. But—and then I would give him a long list of all the things he couldn’t include in his movie because they would not be cleared, legally cleared·You’re totally free to make a movie in an empty room, with your two friends.”

3. No Silos

Give it away, give it away, give it away, now. —Red Hot Chili Peppers

Common sense dictates that selling a commodity in one form and simultaneously giving it away in another is a Bad Idea.

But for many years now, the creators of GNU/Linux and other forms of Free Software have known something that writers and publishers are only beginning to discover: giving away a free digital version of a product can actually spur the sales of the version that’s built out of atoms.

Examples? There are plenty. Take the Baen Free Library, for example·all of it.

Baen Books, a major U.S. science fiction imprint, has, for almost three years now, offered a large number of its titles, including work by major SF authors such as Mercedes Lackey, Keith Laumer, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven for download, absolutely free. Author Eric Flint, the “First Librarian” of the Baen site, began the project in order to demonstrate that there are options to the common sense approach to publishing online (which he characterizes as Gestapo tactics: “All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences! Alles in Ordnung!“). Flint summarizes his own opinion as follows:

1. Online piracy—while it is definitely illegal and immoral—is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We’re talking brats stealing chewing gum here, not the Barbary Pirates.
2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engenders. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.
3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market—especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people—is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The “regulation-enforcement-more regulation” strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

Jim Baen, Flint’s publisher, asked him to put his money where his mouth was,** so Flint volunteered his first novel, Mother of Demons, as a test case. Within a day, that gesture began to translate into positive feedback · and eventually, to sales of paper books.

Thus, a short-term loss translates into a long-term gain in sales as your audience expands. Flint notes “any kind of book distribution which provides free copies to people has always, throughout the history of publishing, eventually rebounded to the benefit of the author.” Word-of-mouth provides the best kind of promotion because it’s based on trust—someone you know telling you a book is worth reading is going to mean more than seeing the same claim on a billboard. The internet is all about word-of-mouth; some of its greatest successes (such as Hotmail and Amazon) work because they have integrated word-of-mouth referrals into their structure.

Another example, and one that’s closer to home is Coach House Books, where I was an editor for five years. Coach House was Canada’s first publisher to begin to put the full content of its entire front list online—always with the authors’ explicit permission in their contract, of course. The surge in publicity that resulted from the online publications (the massive Coach House clipping file is several inches thick and still growing) helped return the press to the level of national and international prominence that it currently enjoys.

Hang on—it gets better. Canadian media activist and SF writer Cory Doctorow has taken the success of a hybrid online/print approach to publishing and cranked it up to 11. His novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was simultaneously published in hardcover by Tor Books and made available for free download from the author’s website. Doctorow reports that the book received over 75,000 downloads in the first month. Many of those people will shell out for a print copy of either Down and Out or Doctorow’s other titles, partly because reading off of a screen is an intensely annoying experience, partly because people crave the solidity of a book the same way that they fetishize any other object (yes, book readers, you are all perverts), partly because they want to show support for what they believe is a good idea. Doctorow has built a massive, appreciative audience based on goodwill. And what’s the point of writing without an audience?

4. Resodding the Commons

Cooperation is more important than copyright. —Richard M. Stallman

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is also the first book to be released under a Creative Commons license. This allows Doctorow to specify that anyone may copy, distribute, display and perform the novel, as long as they don’t do so for commercial purposes, don’t remove his author credit and don’t alter the text. None of
these conditions interferes with his copyright or with the rights of his print publisher.

The Creative Commons was founded in 2001 by a group of cyber law and copyright experts including Stanford Law professor and author Lawrence Lessig. The group is dedicated to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share. Their goal is not simply to increase the amount of primary content that is available online, but also to make it easier and cheaper for an audience to access it.

Drawing their inspiration in part from the licensing systems developed by the gnu/Linux community, Creative Commons has developed a set of tools that help people who have produced creative works (such as websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature and courseware) to make their creations free for certain uses, or to dedicate them entirely to the public domain.

There are 11 Creative Commons licenses. Each has a set of familiar conditions: every license allows you to retain your copyright, and to announce that other people’s fair use, first sale, and free expression rights are not affected by the license. Each requires licensees to obtain your permission to perform any of the activities that you restrict, to keep your copyright notice intact on all copies of the work, not to alter the terms of the license and so on. The licenses apply worldwide, last for the duration of the work’s copyright and are irrevocable.

The less familiar, and most interesting, aspect of the license is what they allow people to do with your work—to copy, distribute, perform or shift media in a variety of ways that you can specify from a set of mix-and-match distribution conditions:

Attribution: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work—and derivative works based upon it—but only if they give you credit.

Noncommercial: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work—and derivative works based upon it—but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike: You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. (A license cannot feature both the Share Alike and No Derivative Works options.)

When you’ve made your choices, you’ll receive the appropriate license expressed as a Commons Deed (a plain-language summary of the license), Legal Code (the fine print that you need to be sure the license will stand up in court) and Digital Code (a machine-readable translation of the license that helps search engines and other applications identify your work by its terms of use). Creative Commons is also working to develop systems based on their digital code to track the material they license to ensure that the terms of the license are being followed.

This article is itself licensed under a Creative Commons License. Why? Because I want as many people as possible to read this argument, and hopefully, to be swayed by it. Deep down in my black and seedy little heart, despite the hardships that the flagging Canadian print publishing industry has suffered, and despite the corporate greed that is threatening to snuff out everything that was liberating about the way that the internet was conceived, I still believe that we have an opportunity to leap through the horns of the print/digital dilemma without tearing too large a hole in our pants.

5. Coda

The future is unwritten. —The Clash

Imagine two kids, each with their own drink stands on a hot July day. One is selling distilled water in those tiny paper Dixie cups your dentist uses·for a buck a cup. That’s print publication; it ensures quality, but leaves too much control in the hands of the publisher and limits audience growth. The other kid will let you drink for free·full-blast from the nozzle of the firehose that she’s hauled out the window of the school next door. That’s unrestricted digital publication, which gives you more than you can possibly use, with no guarantee of quality and no obvious revenue stream.

For those committed to the idea of becoming—or remaining—a professional writer or publisher, the Creative Commons’ hybrid approach to publishing is the best compromise between two equally untenable approaches to handling content. What writers and publishers need to realize is that the internet isn’t a threat to or a substitute for print, but a complement to it. But in order to reap its rewards, everyone is going to have to unclench a little.

Professional authors know that reputation is everything. Most working writers don’t actually earn the majority of their income from their writing. A small royalty cheque is much less important than the benefits of reputation—a large audience, residencies, readings, teaching gigs, consultancies and so on—which actually translate into moneymaking opportunities. Where online publishing is concerned, payment is frequently in the coin of reputation, which we should be receiving as good news. I won’t deny that for some writers—those that, by choice or exclusion, publish solely online—reputation is going to have to be enough. But that’s nothing new; print publication isn’t a right.

However, it’s important to remember that print publishers aren’t the enemy. I can’t stress this point enough: print publishers aren’t the enemy. From my own editorial experience, I know that after paying the retailer, the wholesaler and the sales force, small Canadian publishers typically end up with about 25% of the cover price of the books they publish, which is rarely enough to cover printing and royalties, let alone prepress and editorial costs (for example, salaries·this is why the entire Canadian publishing industry would be dead in the water without government grants). But in the interest of selling more of those paper copies, those publishers without the resources to publish full content online will at least have to be willing to leave full digital rights in the hands of their authors so that they can place their work online themselves. Everyone is going to have to be a lot more flexible about the wording of contracts—and willing to fight for exciting new initiatives such as the Creative Commons licenses—as new paradigms and policies develop.

So: what do we stand to gain from a mixed approach to print and online publishing? We perpetuate the notion that an open approach to content—and its result, a rich corpus of circulating text and images—is crucial to the ongoing viability of the creative process. We have a chance to explore a vast, cheap new system of publicity generation that may well sell more paper books at a time when almost no one buys them. And everyone gains a larger readership.

Of course, you can choose to ignore all of the above. That would be the sensible thing to do. After all, the internet is the domain of frothing libertarians, pimply teenage music pirates, cutthroat techno-barons, spammers, clueless aol users, pornographers and dot-com has-beens, right? Sure, but they also have a collective name: the audience. The Creative Commons and similar initiatives are making great strides to provide the few professional writers with new ways to connect to that audience, ways that suggest to them that their readership is meaningful and valuable. Let’s not fuck it up.

** For the finger-pointers and Pharisees in the audience, yes, I’ve done the same. My two books of poetry are both available in full online, as is a large chunk of Commonspace, and I’m in the process of preparing FREE as in Speech and Beer for the Web. I don’t even own copyright on some of my early books, but when I have the right to do so, I put my work online.

This work is licensed under the Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California, 94305, USA.