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MWF07: Cory Doctorow and Charles Firth
Aug. 26th, 2007 08:50 amI'm writing up my Melbourne Writer's Festival sessions out of order. Forgive me.
SAT 25th: Free and Easy -- Cory Doctorow and Charles Firth
This was a debate, of sorts. The topic was can creators survive by giving their works away for free on the Internet?
I say "of sorts" because Doctorow was smart and articulate and knew his subject backwards, while Firth was vague and beligerant and never clearly expressed what it was he was trying to say.
Doctorow's argument: any business that depends restricting consumers' ability to copy information is going to fail, because copying information is just going to get easier.
Hard drives will get bigger, downloads will get faster, and search engines will get better at helping you find the pirate copies. As an author, Doctorow has decided to embrace that. He gives away digital copies of all of his novels for free from his website, essentially as samplers for the paper versions. And his books keeps selling.
Firth's arguments (as I understood them) were as follows:
1. The Doctorow Business Model's days are numbered. Devices like the Sony Reader will give a paperback-quality reading experience for digital files, and there goes the market for physical books.
2. Without sales of physical objects, creators will have to move to an advertising-driven business model. Advertisers will demand creators compromise their work so as not to offend (Firth cited examples from his time on Triple M and with his new newspaper, Maniac Times).
3. Increased bandwidth will produce a demand for internet content with higher production values, as happened with television and computer games. Higher production qualities cost money, so large media corporations will dominate the internet, driving out the indie creators.
At least, I think those were Firth's arguments. As I said, he didn't express his ideas and criticisms clearly, which meant the debate never really tackled the complexities of the topic. And I suspect Firth's heart wasn't really in his arguments anyway: he admitted that DVD sales of The Chaser have shot up once they started putting the videos on the ABC website for free.
Frankly, the whole "debate" aspect of this talk felt like a poorly thought out last minute addition. There was even a moderator, whose name I've deliberately forgotten, whose only contribution was to make an extremely long and gratingly unfunny introduction, thus robbing us of time with the person we had actually paid money to see.
I got to chart briefly with Doctorow at his book signing afterwards. He's not just smart and future-savvy, he's also really friendly.
SAT 25th: Free and Easy -- Cory Doctorow and Charles Firth
This was a debate, of sorts. The topic was can creators survive by giving their works away for free on the Internet?
I say "of sorts" because Doctorow was smart and articulate and knew his subject backwards, while Firth was vague and beligerant and never clearly expressed what it was he was trying to say.
Doctorow's argument: any business that depends restricting consumers' ability to copy information is going to fail, because copying information is just going to get easier.
Hard drives will get bigger, downloads will get faster, and search engines will get better at helping you find the pirate copies. As an author, Doctorow has decided to embrace that. He gives away digital copies of all of his novels for free from his website, essentially as samplers for the paper versions. And his books keeps selling.
Firth's arguments (as I understood them) were as follows:
1. The Doctorow Business Model's days are numbered. Devices like the Sony Reader will give a paperback-quality reading experience for digital files, and there goes the market for physical books.
2. Without sales of physical objects, creators will have to move to an advertising-driven business model. Advertisers will demand creators compromise their work so as not to offend (Firth cited examples from his time on Triple M and with his new newspaper, Maniac Times).
3. Increased bandwidth will produce a demand for internet content with higher production values, as happened with television and computer games. Higher production qualities cost money, so large media corporations will dominate the internet, driving out the indie creators.
At least, I think those were Firth's arguments. As I said, he didn't express his ideas and criticisms clearly, which meant the debate never really tackled the complexities of the topic. And I suspect Firth's heart wasn't really in his arguments anyway: he admitted that DVD sales of The Chaser have shot up once they started putting the videos on the ABC website for free.
Frankly, the whole "debate" aspect of this talk felt like a poorly thought out last minute addition. There was even a moderator, whose name I've deliberately forgotten, whose only contribution was to make an extremely long and gratingly unfunny introduction, thus robbing us of time with the person we had actually paid money to see.
I got to chart briefly with Doctorow at his book signing afterwards. He's not just smart and future-savvy, he's also really friendly.
