Jackson Ossea's Experience With Cory Doctorow and Project Gutenberg

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           Most of the books I read on my e-reader are protected by some form of digital rights management (DRM). The e-books that I read which are borrowed from the Toronto Public Library are protected by DRM in a way which prevents my having access to them beyond the twenty-one day borrowing period.

            The DRM has always made it clear who owns the book that I am reading. The point is furthered when the 21 days are completed while I’m reading the book in question and my device automatically turns to the main menu - preventing me from completing the book.

            DRM ensured that I did not own the book in question. But the idea of e-book ownership significantly changed for me when I first came across Project Gutenberg, a unique kind of digital library. Their collection largely consists of thousands of e-books which have fallen out of copyright. It’s become a great resource for texts which are considered to be “classics” such as the entire bibliography of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aristotle, H.G. Wells, and Leo Tolstoy.

            But there is one notable exception. One of Project Gutenberg’s champions is critically acclaimed and currently living science-fiction author Cory Doctorow. Apart from his books, Doctorow has gained a reputation for his unique views on copyright – believing that intellectual property should not be monopolized and that copyright laws should be liberalized to the point where all digital media can be shared for free.

            Not wanting to look like a hypocrite, Doctorow has made many of his most famous and sought after books available for free on Gutenberg just like the other items available in their collection. They are some of the only items available in their collection which are currently protected by copyright, but which are made available through permission.

            Before discovering Project Gutenberg – or even the Internet Archive – my idea of ownership was that I had to physically go to Indigo or an online retailer in order for me to find the possibility of owning a copy of the book for myself. Gutenberg provided an outlet that resembled the way one would obtain a copy of a work through internet piracy but without any of the legal issues that come from using something like the Pirate Bay.

            The idea became even more strange when I discovered that Doctorow’s works, which remain in copyright, had the same availability through Gutenberg as the works of Plato or Shakespeare. Even for those of us who are familiar with his unusual views of copyright still find it strange that no financial transaction has to occur in order to obtain his most critically acclaimed work, Little Brother.

 It’s unreasonable to assume that all authors will make their best-known works available for free in their lifetime like Doctorow because they rely on royalty cheques to pay their bills. But it’s irrefutable that ideas which are similar to his, as well as the presence of digital libraries such as Project Gutenberg, has dramatically altered the way I can become the owner of a book.

Week 10 Response - Changing Ownership of the Mixtape

In tracing my experiences with the changing nature of ownership in a digital world, the Playlist feature within computer and music products today is a good example of how mixtapes have evolved. I could still remember as a teenager having the cassette player on the ready to record songs that I liked through the radio, which believe me was not easy. The use of CDs came not long after in terms of creating mixtapes, and cassette tapes were then put to the side. But back then obtaining music by radio through the cassette player was “free” whilst nowadays practically everything can and must be purchased online.

Although while I spend my time nowadays purchasing music through iTunes, cassette tapes are still currently in use, if not for nostalgic purposes, especially when it comes to the mixtape. I credit the Guardians of the Galaxy film in some ways reintroducing the fun it came to listening to a cassette mixtape. So much so that the mixtape seen and heard in the film was even released in cassette form, in addition to its CD and digital formats.

Therefore just as you can purchase contemporary music through vinyl, you can do so also on cassette tapes. This then begs the question, what forms of digital ownership has reverted or gone back to its analog counterpart? Thus, is there a distrust in digital ownership that leads people to purchase original print and analog forms? I myself still purchase CDs when I find that I like listening to most or all of the songs within an artist's album. Although I enjoy more of the flexibility and freedom that digital music has given in regards to picking and choosing the one or few particular songs, without having to purchase the entire album.

- Raquel

Image source:

Google Images. (2016). Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Awesome Mix Vol. 1. Retrieved from http://i.annihil.us/u/prod/marvel/i/mg/6/90/5447f2c0a199e/landscape_xlarge.jpg 

Hybrid Readers a solution to the endangered unique bond between book and reader

Hi everyone,
While researching resources for my essay for the course, I came across an 'illuminating' article that expands on the idea of ownership in a digital age and the "concrete relationship with the material". 

Though the article is 5 years old the content is still relevant today as it explores the ways in which 
publishing companies attempt to retain book readers through extra content in an attempt to add bells and whistles to the e-reading experience "in an age of flattened text". 

I appreciate the way Hybrid Readers is finding new and innovative ways to engage e-readers with physical print material.

Hope you're all having a wonderful long weekend!

~ Fareh

What about technological liberation and the pleasure of the text? The relationship between technology and materiality

This week's blog question to examine our digital ownership practices caused a moment of consternation, since I don't own an e-reader. Nor do I play video games or purchase music or movies on the internet. When I'm home, I listen to CD's, believe it or not, and if I want to watch a movie on the weekend, I either borrow a copy from the Media Commons on the 3rd floor of Robarts or if I'm in the mood for a new release, I rent one from Queen Video on Bloor Street. I have nothing to contribute to the blog this week. Will technological backwardness count as a valid argument for exemption from the assignment? Doubt that will cut it with Galey!

Is downloading digital academic material on my computer a sort of ownership, I wondered? If so, then I have something to say in my blog. As I began to consider the implications further, I realized with dismay that I'm really only 'borrowing' book chapters and articles, which doesn't count as ownership at all, since I acquire these materials through the university library. There is no outlay of money. I bring no weighty tome home in a crinkly plastic bag. Unwrapping the plastic shrink-wrap is not part of the experience of reading these school texts and I never have to make room on my book shelf for class readings; I just save them to my USB. Sunk again. I really have nothing to say in my blog entry. How annoying!

Sitting silently at my computer for a while, my hands not touching the keys, I began to think about terminology. Is 'borrowing' the correct term for my class-related reading? When I download the text from the catalogue, no receipt is generated on which is stamped a due-date by which I must return the borrowed materials. While I sometimes dump the said readings in my computer trash, I certainly never give them back to the library. PDF copies of born-digital texts are like photocopies of printed books or journal articles: no library would accept stacks of photocopies if a patron tried to return them at the end of semester. Can you imagine? "Here, this stack came from Robarts and that stack came from the Inforum. Oh, and can I have a refund for the photocopying fees, please?" -- As if!

Mind, I generally like keeping the scholarly readings from the various classes I've taken. In fact, if I really like an e-book chapter assigned as required reading for some class, I will download more of the book if the publisher's website will permit. Some of the major academic publishing houses, especially the British ones, actually allow download of complete books. Believing that functionality coincides with legality, it became a habit of mine over the course of the last year to download complete books whenever possible. At the time, I didn't know that this was actually illegal. Just checking the small-print copyright policy on the said academic publishers' websites I now realize that they actually prohibit downloading more than a chapter of any book: 

"Unless otherwise stated, users may make copies, printed or

otherwise, of one chapter or up to 5% of the pages from each title, 

whichever is the greater."

For a minute I tried to argue in my favour: I do nothing more than 'use' these copyrighted materials! The library purchases digital texts from publishers by means of subscriptions or flat out purchase. When I go into the library to sit and read a book, I am only using that book. How is that different from downloading a digital book to read? What about Paul Duguid's argument, which we read way back at the beginning of the semester? Technology is liberation: information just wants to be free! Back in the 1970's, Barthes distinguished "between the 'work', servant of one master, and the 'text', an item of pleasure for many." [Duguid, "Material matters: the past and futurology of the book," 75] Isn't a PDF visualized momentarily on a computer screen the very epitome of evanescent text? But then there is physical proof on my computer that they are not. And then it hit me: electronic texts are material! This is exactly what Galey had argued in his study of e-books of Joanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists (2010): e-texts are material artifacts. [Galey, The Enkindling Reciter, passim] 

I couldn't sit still then. I got up and paced around. Sat back down again. Materiality had come up in this week's reading as well, I thought. It was discussed in Yochai Benkler's introduction. Having only skimmed the piece previously, I read it through and realized that he was making much the same article as Duguid. Benkler's introduction was like a manifesto, in which he urged individuals to realize that the minority no longer controlled the material means of production, but that the material means of production of our current information age is found in networked computers, now more inexpensive than ever before and widely available around the globe. In his view, the internet revolution has endowed individuals with the power to shape our own lives, both singly and collectively. [Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, passim] Nowhere does Benkler mention the dark 'material' side of the internet revolution, e-waste. The controlled obsolescence of technology -- computers, phones, tablets and e-readers -- that creates mounds of technological garbage, which we don't see, because the crap is shipped overseas to countries willing to pollute their own soil, water and air to recycle such material in exchange for dumping fees. 

We are still mired in materiality. Large conglomerates continue to control the means of production. Electronic texts are still physical and legal entities. And the only free books I see are Benkler's pseudo-economic treatise and those forlorn titles sitting in the box on the corner of Bloor & Brunswick leftover when the street bookseller packs up and goes home. 

Best, Laura

The role of ethics in the acquisition of digital media

The blogging question for this week is extremely timely as it touches upon issues that are being discussed today in terms of ownership, copyright concerning print and digital resources.

What does it mean to own a resource? Beyond the physical.

Over 20 years ago (back in the days of VHS) when Beauty and the Beast came out, my parents bought a copy for me from the toy store. I watched it so many times that it physically hurt me to share it with my cousins who promised they would return it the next weekend. Not having the tape gave me separation anxiety (I really loved that cartoon, and still do. Belle had a deep appreciation for books that other female Disney protagonists lack).
Cut to present day where video files are easily shared amongst one another through usb flash drives and a VHS is an object from a vintage 90's past.
A video that could only be shared between one household at a time is now replaced by an mp4 file that can be copied and duplicated onto multiple platforms. One object is physical and the other is a computer file, which while physical, is not tangible.

My Dad and I got into a discussion on the imbalance of ownership when downloading available content online (ebooks, movies, music, etc.)
He said downloading illegal movies or streaming them online is akin to physically stealing movies from a store. When I argued (to play devil's advocate, disclaimer: I completely agree with him) that movies online aren't tangible physical objects in the way movies at the store are i.e. a physical DVD is different from a file that one can simply torrent without consequence. My dad pointed out it is the ethics of the situation that come into play regardless of the form of the object, whereby principles of theft and illegal access to content remain the same.


What are the ethical implications for password sharing on Netflix? Would you share your password with a friend if they didn't want to pay for an account? Is ownership transferrable multiple times?
I see less people borrowing DVDs from the library because they stream movies online and have started sharing Netflix passwords with others to cut down on gas costs to come to the library.

The ways in which people access media in 2016 and how it affects public libraries' digital collections is worthy of a research paper.

Is it fair and honest to download movies online and share them with friends on USB? Some people argue that if it's available online that it's a form of open access. Others adamantly refuse to watch anything online unless they provide some form of payment (those are the true Internet heroes) and another group of people wonder whether it is possible to moderate the Internet fairly (I fall into this category).


Do we normalize the way we download digital resources we don't pay for that aren't legally open access?
There are some people who dislike the hustle and bustle of movie theatres (isn't obnoxious popcorn munching part of the movie experience?) and wait until a decent copy of a film is available online for them to watch. It isn't legal and they save the $12.99 fee, but it's become such a normalized process where ownership changes hands so many times that everyone has a piece of the seemingly endless pie. And the trouble is that it's available online, all the time.

The true nature of owning a digital resource depends on
a) the resource itself
b) how one came to acquire it
c) how one chooses to use it
d) whether one chooses to share it

~ Fareh

Nostalgia and Digital Rights Managment

Image source

I fear my experience is bland and unoriginal, but it was new for me, once. I remember distinctly my first encounter with a computer game ownership mediated through a content provider/distributor software. It was back in the hazy days of the early millennium when computers game were still tangibly piratable by physically just burning a copy of the CD-ROM occasionally. I'd come to learn of a game, Counter-Strike that was supposedly something I might really enjoy and had inexplicable cultural value I wanted in on. I was very surprised to find how little anyone seemed to be able to pirate it. There's was no copies floating around, at least in my neck of the woods. Once I stumbled upon a download for an old demo of Counter-Strike 1.6 but when it asked to me to install some then unheard of additional program called "Steam" on top of the game itself, my sketch alarm went off and I just didn't bother with it.

Years later I would come to buy a corporeal box of "Steam" games that included counter-strike among others and I realized what "Steam" did. It was a content library system that you had to have an account for, and logging in was the only way to play the game. In exchange for this mild chaining of the game to your person (or your account) you got automatic updates and patches for all your games, had a chat function to talk to different Steam Members and all sorts of proto-social media attributes that have since grown substantially.

My steam account existed but half forgotten for a few years as I fell out of the gaming hobby, but many of my friends never quit. When finally some of the titles they were playing seemed really interesting somewhat recently, I was informed that Steam had developed a new kind of system where you could "share" your virtual copies (or really licenses) to play games, meaning that my friends could give me access to games they were no longer playing, and I could play them for free, so long as I wasn't on at the same time as them. Now while one might easily complain this is still a manufacturing of  an artificial scarcity ( *someone yelling "information, everywhere it is in chains!"*) the capacity to share actually brought me nostalgia to my old 1990s/early 2000s computer game days of mild piracy, where many of my friends would circulate copies of game titles that we liked amongst each other. There was a social element re-introduced into the virtual licensing, which I think is a very clever move by Steam, and not to sound too much like a corporate hack, I think this is why they don't get as much flak as Amazon Kindles or Netflix in regards to content controlling/dispensing services, they keep it playful and seemingly minimally legatious.

-Ben

The Waste Land App and Remediation

I felt quite inspired by our classes on e-books and particularly, the Waste Land App by Touchpress Limited. In my opinion, this app allows the poem to be experienced in an entirely innovative way. To summarize (or in case you weren't present) not only can one read the extensive notes simultaneously with the poem, they can actually watch video clips from expert critic interviews, or specially filmed dramatizations of the entire poem. A reader can also choose from 8 different voices (including Eliot’s) to recite the poem to them. Finally, there is the option to view digitized images of the original manuscript with hand written notes and changes made by Eliot. 

I will be looking at this app as a new medium of textual representation and applying Bolter and Grusin's theory of remediation. The concept of remediation is explained by the process of immediacy and hypermediacy. On the one hand, Immediacy is the ways in which the user forgets the medium in favor of the content or task, such as watching a movie that totally engrosses the person in the story telling that they ignore all editing and special effect processes. On the other hand, hypermediacy is the representation of multiple or concurrent mediums on a single digital plane. A couple of iconic examples are Michelangelo’s painting in the Sistine Chapel that depicts stories from the bible and the Windows environment that allows the user to open multiple tabs and pages with differing content. Media is constantly absorbed and repurposed into a different media formats, however, there is a constant motivation to erase traces of mediation. For example, web pages are hypermediated with illustrious photos and video streams. While the media facilitates a relationship between the viewer and the meaningful content, the viewer actually does not want to associate with it, and instead wants to achieve total immediacy. 

 I want to argue that The Waste Land App is hypermediated source demanding immediacy (Bolter and Grusin). It is not easy to forget that one is encountering this version of The Waste Land on a digital platform such as a touch screen phone, iPad, or tablet through a download application. The constant tapping and swiping motions make the hypermediated reality of the medium difficult to neglect, nevertheless, the immediacy present within the app allows what McLuhan describes (in Medium is the Massage) as the medium transforming into extension of our human senses.

I will use McLuhan’s, The Medium is the Massage, alongside the original print version T.S. Eliot’s, The Waste Land and will uncover the ways these texts have become modern and progressive by engaging in remediation. Together, the digital texts will demonstrate how the concept of digital literature and the condition of authorship of digital texts have created a paradigm where digital texts have succeeded in replacing the print-narrative form. In the case of Eliot's The Waste Land, the digital re-imagination has created an advantageous way of both following, understanding and experiencing the poem. The essay will prove that this digital text do not support the argument that remediated literature destroys user experience by overwhelming the reader’s senses. Instead, the app offer a more fruitful experience because the content and historical context is entirely accessible and existing within one space (as compared to reading a print version and pausing to research a definition or translation, flipping to end notes, constantly glaring down at the mini foot notes, missing critical author intended long pauses). 

Take a look for yourself: http://thewasteland.touchpress.com/

Madiha Zahra