Found via BoingBoing: In the Huffington Post, Lawrence Lessig reviews novelist Mark Helprin’s new non-fiction book, Digital Barbarism. Helprin posted an editorial in the New York Times in 2007, calling for perpetual copyright, and was roundly denounced by contributors to Lessig’s wiki. As Cory Doctorow writes on BoingBoing, “The essay was so ham-fisted and odd that a lot of people assumed that it was a joke,” and judging from Lessig’s review the book suffers from the same problem, only more so. Lessig proceeds to demolish Digital Barbarism at great length, in terms of both argument and writing style....

The New York Times has noticed that e-book piracy seems to be picking up along with e-book popularity, and has interviewed a number of authors, publishers, and other personalities about it. Some of the authors and publishers, such as Harlan Ellison, are very energetic in their pursuit of pirates. The irascible Ellison, who famously filed the first major lawsuit against unauthorized Internet posting of his work and has pursued 240 cases of unauthorized posting since then, is quoted as saying, “If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump.” ...

In a new column he has penned for the Guardian, Cory Doctorow suggests that the Authors Guild has “lost the plot” in their fight against the Kindle’s text-to-speech function. After laying out why that function is not an infringement, or even if it is Amazon is the wrong one to complain about, Doctorow explains that the legality of read-aloud is irrelevant and what authors should be worrying about is Amazon’s ability to turn off features in the Kindle (that is, changing their mind and allowing publishers to choose to disable read-aloud for their books) after it has been...

The FTC was not the only three-letter acronym to address its fellow three-letter acronym, DRM, today. NPR’s All Things Considered weighed in with a four-minute audio report and accompanying text news story on e-book DRM. Laura Sydell interviewed Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire books, on her travails buying a DRM’d Isaac Asimov novel, and her concerns that her fans might not be able to make full fair use of her own novels because of DRM. Sydell also spoke to Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press and Ian Freed, the vice president of Amazon Kindle, both of...

TeleRead, MobileRead, and other e-book advocacy sites and blogs have complained about Kindle’s format lock-in for a long time. Sometimes it seems as if no one has been listening, as other complaints such as the brouhaha over text-to-speech take center field. However, Chris Snyder at Wired’s “Epicenter” blog has taken notice with an excellent article examining the issue from all sides. The issue isn't about DRM protections on the books themselves, but on Amazon's decision to create — and now perpetuate — a non-portable format that a) denies readers the ability to read e-books they...

We’ve been talking about the possible extinction of newspapers in a number of TeleRead articles lately, and many e-book readers have long been yearning for the day that e-books “replace” printed books. In a column on internetevolution.com, Cory Doctorow takes a look at the possible fates of newspapers, big-budget movies, music, and books. Doctorow actually does not have much to say on newspapers. He ties their survival to advertising, looks at the factors tying into the price of an ad…and then does not draw much of a conclusion beyond that, yes, newspapers are probably going to go away. He does...

Some catchup from the Tools of Change conference. Lexcycle licenses Adobe PDF, ePub, & DRM technologies First of all, Lexcycle has announced another coup for Stanza: they have licensed Adobe's PDF and ePub rendering technologies and DRM, and Stanza will be able to read DRM-locked e-books from any retailer or library that uses Adobe Content Server 4. While many of us would much rather have no DRM at all, this is good news for all the iPhone/iPod Touch users who have felt locked out of digital libraries that only dealt in locked PDFs. How well...

"rise of the ebook session ... hopefully this turns out better for us than rise of the terminators" —@trovebooks on Twitter A full report on the Tools of Change conference will likely have to wait until Paul Biba and David Rothman get back to their computers. But here are a few tidbits I picked up from following #TOC on Twitter: Andrew Savikas (pictured at left, photo by James Duncan Davidson) revealed that the Bookworm on-line ePub reader is now part of O'Reilly Labs. According to Tim O'Reilly, an informal audience poll in the Jeff Jarvis panel indicated that about 10% of the...

"#toc Cory "Doctorow's Law:" if somebody puts a lock on something you own and doesn't give you the key, it's not to your benefit" —@joebachana on Twitter One nice thing about a widely-attended technology event these days is enough people tweet about enough points of what was said and done that it is possible to get a pretty good idea of what went on just by following the Twitter stream.. "Fireworks at Doctorow's DRM show at TOC. Audible walks out." —@mageier on Twitter [Note: This tweet later proved to be based on a misunderstanding of a joke.] According to the stream, Cory Doctorow has...

Over at Boing Boing, Cory has posted his fiction picks today. A fair number of them are available as e-books, so if you don't mind the DRM you might want to go and see what he is suggesting. I added Charles Stross's Halting State and Saturn's Children and Neal Stephenson's Interface to my Kindle, based on his recommendation. His choices contain a number of young adult books and his previous picks for kids are available here. By the way, while I was doing that I added another book to my Kindle that I've wanted to read...

The following little article by Cory Doctorow was published on boingboing today. I guess that by re-publishing it here I am just making Cory's point: My latest Locus column, "Why I Copyfight," was published a couple weeks back while I was on honeymoon and made quite a stir. It's intended as a concise answer to the question, "Why should we care about the copyright wars, anyway?" The Internet is a system for efficiently making copies between computers. Whereas a conversation in your kitchen involves mere perturbations of air by noise, the same conversation...

About a month ago, Cory Doctorow released the text of his latest book, Content, on-line for free, as he usually does. Unlike prior books, this is a nonfiction collection, gathering together the text of speeches, presentations, and essays he has written, as well as all of his Forbes and other magazine articles. Most of them will already be familiar to those who follow Doctorow's on-line writings, but it is nice to have them collected in one place. The book makes a nice collection of essays, arranged by thematic content rather than date. They are interesting articles written in Doctorow's usual...