Bloggasm

When Nick Mamatas’s novel, Move Under Ground, was first published, he had the kind of publicity that most small press authors don’t get. A major men’s magazine printed the first chapter as an excerpt. He had positive reviews in The Village Voice, Booklist, and The Believer. He ran a semi-popular blog to give its release extra press. But despite all this, the book only sold moderately well, and when the trade paperback later came out from Prime Books, a major chain backed out of ordering any copies.

Mamatas knew he had to find another venue to spark sales. A month earlier, another author named Peter Watts was suffering from a similar predicament. His novel Blindsight wasn’t even going to make it past its first printing, and things were looking bleak. But then he decided to release it under a Creative Commons license, and after the popular blog boingboing linked to it, word spread until he had sold enough copies to push the book into its second printing.

Watts noticed that Bookscan numbers nearly tripled afterwards, and it was recently announced that the novel was nominated for a Hugo, something he said likely wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the CC release.

A Creative Commons (CC) license allows artists to release their works under less-restrictive guidelines than traditional copyright law. Though it has many different forms, a typical CC license permits users to distribute a piece of creative work freely as long as it’s not for commercial use.
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(Caption: Nick Mamatas)
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Mamatas was enrolled in an MFA class on technological and editorial processes, and he needed to complete a research project on this topic. With all these combined factors weighed in his mind– the mediocre sales, the success of Blindsight, the opportunity for a research topic– he eventually decided, like Watts, to release Move Under Ground under a Creative Commons license as well.

The response was immediate. John Scalzi’s popular blog The Whatever quickly linked to the online version, and within a month over 100 bloggers followed suit.

“We [had] about 2500 downloads [Editor's Note: That number is now 3,200],” he said in an email interview, “ranging from featurettes by John Scalzi and the publishing blog Galleycat, to people on Livejournal and myspace leaving comments saying ‘Check this out!’”

But in this case, one blog didn’t give him the link that he was hoping for: Boingboing. And both Watts and Mamatas agreed that the success of a book released under a CC license hinges off this crucial factor.

“The thing is, there’s a confound here,” Watts explained. “It wasn’t the CC release per se that gave me the boost; it was all the people talking about it. Boingboing doesn’t pimp every novel that comes down the pike. It has to be newsworthy in some way, and an author giving his work away is, for the time being, newsworthy. It attracts attention.”

In Watts’s case, Boingboing was the only blog he contacted after releasing the book online. After the site linked to him, it created a ripple effect and more bloggers piled on.

“Very, very few people came across the release by reading about it on my site,” he said. “Thousands upon thousands saw it on Cory’s, Kathryn‘s, and John’s. They gave Blindsight the kind of push money can’t buy (at least, not the money I had to spare)”
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(Caption: Peter Watts’s Blindsight)
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Sean Wallace is the editor and publisher for Prime Books, and he has been tracking Move Under Ground‘s sales closely through Bookscan. Mamatas owned the e-rights to his book, so he didn’t need his publisher’s permission–but Wallace quickly showed his approval and contributed the final text.

“The effects are largely reliant on how much word is gotten out, I think,” he said. When Wallace checked the Bookscan numbers after Mamatas released the CC novel, he saw that there was only a “minimal uptick.”

But direct book sales, he said, are only one factor to measure success. “There may be associated results,” Wallace explained “Like people buying other books by Mamatas.”

Though it’s hard to track those kinds of indirect effects, Mamatas agreed with this assessment.

“Anecdotally, a number of people have told me that they bought Under My Roof after reading Move Under Ground for free,” he said. “And a couple of newspapers have given Under My Roof some good ink, it seems after hearing about it through the publicity surrounding Move Under Ground.”

Most authors will tell you that it’s extremely difficult to measure how effective a particular form of marketing can be, and the authors I emailed who released their works under CC licenses were hard pressed to produce concrete numbers.

And though both authors reached relative success after they used the CC license, they were skeptical of its overall ability to sell books.

“So what happens when this catches on?” Watts said. “What happens when everybody releases their work through a Creative Commons licence? Then it’s no longer newsworthy, and while it will certainly continue to make my work more accessible to people who already know of my existence, it certainly won’t lure in any new readers the way the Blindsight campaign has done. It’s a niche strategy, in other words. It only works as long as most artists aren’t doing it– and as long as that’s the case, I’d certainly consider releasing my future books under a CC license.”

Over the past few years, publishers have become more willing to allow their authors to release their books this way. Watts’s publisher, Tor, printed several novels by Cory Doctorow, one of the early champions of less-restrictive copyright.

“Doctorow has set all of his stuff free with Tor’s blessing,” Watts said. “Granted, there had been some inconsistency in Tor’s perspective in the past– back when Cory was offering his first novel under a Creative Commons license, Tor was absolutely forbidding me to do the same thing– and in fact they even tried to stick a clause in my contract stipulating that I couldn’t even post excerpts on my website of more than 1700 words.”

But despite these early attempts he persisted until the restrictions were removed, and when Watts went to his editor for permission to release his book for free, he was told to wait a month and then to go ahead.

Mamatas and Watts agreed that there were few pitfalls to the CC license. Neither had any trouble selling foreign language rights to their books. Watts has offers from German and Spanish publishers, while Mamatas has had a German version of Move Under Ground published already.

Two months after Mamatas released his book for free, I asked him if there was a particular medium (other than books) more likely to benefit from the CC license.

“Well CC isn’t really for books,” he replied. “it works much better when the source being opened up is more easily adjustable, as software is. For books, stuff the nerd crowd likes: SF and fantasy, will work best. Also, various experimental texts may also work. I wonder if Douglas Rushkoff’s Exit Strategy, which involved reader-generated footnotes, would have been more successful had it been made totally open to remixing. Something short but very open-ended, a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book with an infinity of choices, would likely be very popular CCed.”

But in the end, despite their skepticism of the long-term benefits of the license, both said they’d likely try it again.

“I guess I’m in for the duration,” said Watts. “And when the novelty wears off I’ll just have to find some other way of getting attention. Perhaps I could get some fan to climb up a clock tower and start shooting random pedestrians, all the while shouting ‘Peter Watts’s Blindsight made me do this!’ I bet that would increase my sales even more than a CC release. And I wouldn’t have to give anything away.”

Keith Urban sues namesake over website:

Country singer Keith Urban has filed a lawsuit against a painter of the same name, claiming that the lesser known Keith Urban’s website infringes trademark and cyber-squatting laws.

Singer Urban filed the suit in US District Court in Nashville, Tennessee, last Friday against the New Jersey painter who uses the website address www.keithurban.com to advertise oil paintings for sale.

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Related posts: Myspace has terrible web design, The Music Copyright Void, McDonald’s loses a lawsuit in its battle to defend “Mc” prefix

Nick Mamatas–novelist, journalist, and short story writer– has released his first novel for free online under a Creative Commons lincense. You’ll find the first chapter below:

CHAPTER ONE

I was in Big Sur hiding from my public when I finally heard from Neal again. He had had problems of his own after the book came out and it started being carried around like a rosary by every scruffy party boy looking for a little cross-country hitchhiking adventure. They’d followed him around like they’d followed me, but Neal drank too deeply of the well at first, making girls left and right as usual, taking a few too many shots to the face, and eating out on the story of our travels maybe one too many times. Those boozy late-night dinners with crazy soulless characters whose jaws clacked like mandibles when they laughed are what got to him in the end, I’m sure. They were hungry for something. Not just the college boys and beautiful young things, but those haggard-looking veterans of Babylon who started shadowing Neal and me on every street corner and at every dawn-draped last call in roadside bars; they all wanted more than a taste of Neal’s divine spark, they wanted to extinguish it in their gullets. Neal was the perfect guy for them as he always walked on the edge, ever since the first shiv was held to his throat at reform school when he was a seven-year-old babe with a fat face and shiny teary cheeks. He wanted to eat up the whole world himself like they did, I knew from my adventures on the road with him, but I didn’t learn what was eating him ’til I got that letter that drove me to move under ground.

(more…)

by Simon Owens

Before Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban famously said that anyone who buys the online video giant is a “moron.” With almost daily lawsuits launched at websites for copyright infringements, there was no shortage of media analysts who agreed with him. It might seem odd, then, that a growing number of bloggers are not only getting away with posting copyrighted music online for free; they’re actually encouraged to do so by the musicians themselves.

Music blogs (also known as mp3 blogs) post song reviews similar to those written for any traditional magazine, with one key difference: after the reader finishes the review, he can then listen to the song. The blogger uploads a full mp3 onto his server and anyone with basic computer skills can right click on the link and save it to a hard-drive.

Matt Jordan is a 20-year-old journalism major who attends the University of Kentucky. In November of 2004 he started youaintnopicasso.com for an audience of “a few friends.” Two years later, the site now gets over 5,000 visitors a day and brings in a significant income from advertising sales.

Like other music bloggers, Jordan will often download tracks from the review copies he receives and give his readers a taste of the album. “About 15 to 20 percent of the stuff I review comes from CDs people send me,” he said. “And most of those come with a note saying I can either post specific tracks from the CD, or to feel free to post any tracks I want.” For the songs he wants to upload which don’t fall into this category, he often emails the musician to ask permission. Very few say no. “The only time I’ve ever been asked to take down a song was when there was a pre-release leaked to me, and against my better judgement I put the song up on my blog. The people were cool about it though, they just emailed me and asked me to take it down for now.” They then told Jordan that he could go ahead and post the song again once the album had been released.

This trend is consistent for Frank Yang as well. By day he’s a web developer for The Globe and Mail, but in his spare time he heads chromewaves.net, an indie rock blog that covers the Toronto scene. In 2006, Yang attended close to 80 shows, many of which he got into for free because of his site.

Chromewaves differs from other blogs of its kind because it’ll often feature several songs from an album rather than just one or two. “My site is 95 percent legal and approved,” Yang said in a phone interview. “Most labels send review copies that come with an authorized mp3 to post for free.” The reason he posts more than a few songs is because he’s “more of an album person,” while other bloggers like to focus on individual tracks. As for the five percent of the songs which aren’t technically posted legally, he removes them from the site after they’ve been up for a week. To date, Yang hasn’t had a single take-down notice from a music label.

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Caption: Frank Yang, blogger for Chromewaves

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Jasamine White-Gluz, lead singer and guitarist for a Montreal band called Bad Flirt, said that this is because the benefits of allowing free downloads outweigh the negatives. Her six-member band has been playing since 2002 and they’ve never minded when fans post their songs for free online.

White-Gluz is 24 years old and works as a casting agent, holding auditions for TV shows and talent agencies. “It’s cool to tell beautiful people that they’re not right for the part,” she replied when asked if she liked her job. “That’s what I always tell people.”

In addition to allowing bloggers to post their songs for free, Bad Flirt puts together pieces specifically for online promotion. They recently released an indie-pop dance collaboration with the band Hexes & Ohs and emailed it to dozens of sites. “When we had songs out on blogs,” White-Gluz explained, “the only results are more people at shows and more people buying albums and t-shirts.” She argued that because indie bands don’t normally get radio time, the blogs are able to step in and allow free samples of their music, since very few people are willing to buy an album without hearing the songs first.

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Caption: Bad Flirt

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Not all bands are so lax about the free music offers, however. Ryan Hancock and Andrew Prinz, both members of the Brooklyn band Mahogany, said that whether they allow a blog to post their work for free depends on a variety of factors. For one, they prefer that the person contacts them and asks permission; they’re not very comfortable with an anonymous blogger assuming that it’s absolutely fine to post whatever he wants. “I think it also depends on the music you’re doing,” said Prinz, a 32-year-old art director living in New York. “And I think it’s a decision everyone needs to make on an individual basis.” Generally, though, the band has given permission to bloggers who have emailed and asked for it.

“I think it’s a good idea to allow blogs to post our songs,” said Ryan Hancock, a civil rights lawyer who makes the trip from Philly to New York three times a week to practice with his band. “So far the music labels who produce our albums don’t mind either…it’s free promotion.”

But even with all the avenues that music blogs may open, very few have delusions of grandeur. Yang, the before-mentioned blogger for Chromwaves, asserted that in the end, his blog probably doesn’t result in many album sales. “I don’t think blogs make a huge impression,” he said. “All they can do is build buzz, create an echo chamber. And even though I get anecdotal evidence when readers tell me they bought an album after listening to a song on my blog, the sales aren’t measurable. I mean, my blog only gets 2,000 readers a day, and half of those come from Google hits, not daily readers.”

For Yang, it’s more of “an individual thing,” a grassroots promotion of his favorite bands. “If I can reach one person, and this person discovered a band he really likes, then that’s great,” he explained. “For me, that’s all that matters.”

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Gauti Sigthorsson’s Concept Bin points out that Blackboard has successfully patented the combination of a bunch of programs that have already been invented (email, message boards, chat, etc..), and have now issued a law suit against their nearest competitor:

Blackboard, the owner of WebCT, the cumbersome monolith of Learning Management Systems, has been granted a patent on the very idea of merging email, web, chat software and secure hierarchical access into a single enterprise system, for use in training or education. Having been granted the patent in the US, Blackboard promptly sued its rival Desire2Learn, claiming that the latter owes them royalties.

Surprise! Academics, including myself, are furious. ABC News has a good summary of the instant, hostile reaction by the academic community, an extensive Wikipedia entry has been assembled on the prior art of Virtual Learning Environments – arguing that key inventions in the field, including the development of the original Blackboard system at Cornell University, firmly belong to the intellectual commons and have been developed for decades in an environment fostered by public funding.

As Sigthorsson points out, this has caused a backlash against Blackboard, including one University that has stopped using it because of the lawsuit. I used Blackboard when I went to college, and though at first I didn’t like it, I came to eventually use it on a daily basis. In fact, it saved me a few times when there was an assignment due and I had lost my syllabus. But patents like this are incredibly harmful because they block people from doing common sense things, just because they didn’t patent it. If I were to create a site tomorrow that sells both dish rags and computer parts, should I be able to patent the joint sale of dish rags and computer parts so other webmasters can’t do the same thing? Of course not! The case is silly, and I would hope that any professors reading this will immediately stop using Blackboard and switch to their main competitor immediately.

It turns out that McDonald’s has trademarked the “Mc” prefix for any product or organization, and not only sues when a food company uses it (which is reasonable) but when non-food organizations use it as well (complete bullshit).

Malcolm McBratney was a rugby player who used the term “McBrat” on his team shorts, and for some reason McDonald’s decided they needed to sue for trademark infringement. They lost:

AN intellectual property lawyer has won a David and Goliath battle against fast food giant McDonald’s for the right to use the name McBrat on his rugby team’s shorts.

Malcolm McBratney, a partner in Brisbane legal firm McCullough Robertson, said McDonald’s, had been using “bully boy” tactics in seeking to prevent the Brisbane Irish team from using the name “McBrat”.

The ruling was mailed to Mr McBratney by the Australian Trademarks Office in Canberra, following a hearing in April this year when McDonald’s objected to the Brisbane lawyer’s trade mark application.

I understand that companies enforce their trademarks in the fear that they’ll become widely misused if they let a few cases go by unnoticed, but sueing a Rugby team in Australia for using a “Mc” prefix, especially when it’s obviously referencing one of the player’s names? C,mon.

This is nothing I really stopped to consider before. I knew that film-makers who make fictional films have to run the copyright loops from a variety of venues, considering that they’re dealing with things like ad-placement, movie-albums, etc…, but never did I realize that documentarians have to go through these same hurdles. There’s something about this that just makes you want to scream; the fact that those who have enlisted themselves to record history for us in visual form aren’t completely protected by fair-use laws. There’s a Wired article that interviews law professors who wrote a comic book about this subject: Battling the Copyright Monster.

At one point, it begins talking about how copyright has changed over the last 80 years, and how it has actually become an us-versus-them mentality for film-makers:

A fourth thing that cuts the other way is the fear-and-loathing syndrome. There’s a whole generation of filmmakers and digital creators whose only experience of copyright is as a hassle, as an obstruction, as a cease-and-desist letter preventing them from making or distributing their work. They see copyright as a pointless labyrinth they have to make their way through to make their art. We actually view ourselves as copyright defenders, showing how copyright is supposed to work. We’re saying this imbalance could cause us to lose the next generation of artists, if they think of copyright as worthless.

But perhaps the most shocking paragraph in the whole interview was this one:

First of all, documentaries are incredibly important records of our history and culture. They’re visual histories, and they’re increasingly based on copyrighted culture. Our book describes several instances in which the telling of that history has been thwarted by permissions issues. An example is Jon Else having to pay $10,000 for a four-and-a-half-second clip of The Simpsons playing in the background of his film (Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle). The makers of Mad Hot Ballroom had to pay that same amount to EMI because a cell phone rings in the background of one of the scenes, and the ringtone is the theme from Rocky. These examples really resonate with people. They understand that these are instances where copyright is not working the way it’s supposed to.

A massive amount of money for a Rocky ringtone that went off somewhere in the background? For a documentary? Something that usually isn’t expected to make much money anyway?

via IFC

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