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By David Rothman

image Suppose we could reincarnate George Orwell/Eric Blair of 1984 fame—to write on Big Bro-ish copyright laws bought by Hollywood.

I can also see Orwell discoursing on spying on innocent American civilians, not to mention cooked-up wars. And imagine what he would have said on laptop seizures!

Orwell was a Brit, of course, not a Yank, but you get the idea.

Well, now Orwell is back, sort of, courtesy the new Orwell blog. Actually it will apparently focus on actual Orwellian commentary—Orwellian, in the good sense—on past events from 70 years ago.

If I ran the Orwell blog…

imageBut we can dream, right? If I ran the Orwell blog, it would have a sidebar commenting on current privacy breaches and other outrages. Alas, I doubt that’ll happen since the sponsors don’t strike me as the kind to do this thing. But here’s the idea in case anyone else is inclined.

Now that the Fake Steve Jobs has ridden into the sunset, it’s time for Fake Orwell, complete with references to past writings in modern contexts. An ACLU or Nation project, perhaps? Meanwhile thanks to Mike Cook, a Brit as I recall, for jogging me to follow up on the related Slashdot item.

Details on the first image: The Road to Wigan Pier isn’t a diary but rather a book on the bleak industrial towns of northern England—published the year before the blog commentary begins. Thanks to Hollywood, you can’t find Road on Project Gutenberg servers in the States. But public domain sites outside the U.S. carry the e-book file for legal downloading in countries with shorter copyright terms.

The copyright angle: A Orwell-style advocate of freedom and privacy would have been appalled by the RIAA’s intrusive campaign against Internet users.

Related: For those who want the details, O’Reilly’s Andy Oram explains among other things how U.S. copyright crimps freedom of expression.

Publishers Weekly as Big Bro: Oh, please, Publisher’s Weekly! No rats. But I remain both amused and horrified that PW could wipe out tens of thousands of uppity words from my E-Book Report blog despite its continued relevance in debates on eBabel, DRM and the like. PW also did a Big Bro act on the blog of the woman who hired me, as well as on the blog of PW’s former publisher. Who says the only censors draw government checks?

 
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