Cory_Doctorow_-_Makers_Letter.pdf
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DOCTOROW/MAKERS/1
conferences—no one says, “License this book for
your Kindle” or “Total licenses of ebooks are up
from 0.00001% of all publishing to 0.0001% of all
publishing, a 100fold increase!”)
Makers
Cory Doctorow
I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it.
I believe in copyright law’s guarantee of
ownership in your books.
So you own this ebook. The license agreement
(see below), is from Creative Commons and it
gives you even
more
rights than you get to a
regular book. Every word of it is a gift, not a
confiscation. Enjoy.
What do I want from you in return? Read the
book. Tell your friends. Review it on Amazon or at
your local bookseller. Bring it to your bookclub.
Assign it to your students (older students, please—
that sex scene is a scorcher) (
now
I’ve got your
attention, don’t I?). As Woody Guthrie wrote:
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of
Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and
anybody caught singin’ it without our permission,
will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we
don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it.
Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we
wanted to do.”
Oh yeah. Also: if you like it,
buy it
(http://craphound.com/makers/buy) or
donate a
copy
(http://craphound.com/makers/donate) to a
worthy, cashstrapped institution.
Why am I doing this? Because my problem isn’t
piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks, @timoreilly for this
awesome aphorism). Because free ebooks sell
print books. Because I copied my ass off when I
was 17 and grew up to spend practically every
discretionary cent I have on books when I became
an adult. Because I can’t stop you from sharing it
(zeroes and ones aren’t ever going to get harder to
copy); and because readers have shared the books
they loved forever; so I might as well enlist you to
the cause.
doctorow@craphound.com
Tor Books: 9780765312792
HarperCollins UK/Voyager: 9780007325221
Last modified 29 Oct 2009
About this download
There’s a dangerous group of anticopyright
activists out there who pose a clear and present
danger to the future of authors and publishing.
They have no respect for property or laws. What’s
more, they’re powerful and organized, and have
the ears of lawmakers and the press.
I’m speaking, of course, of the legal departments
at ebook publishers.
These people don’t believe in copyright law.
Copyright law says that when you buy a book, you
own it. You can give it away, you can lend it, you
can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to
the local homeless shelter. Owning books has been
around for longer than publishing books has.
Copyright law has
always
recognized your right to
own your books. When copyright laws are made—
by elected officials, acting for the public good—
they always safeguard this right.
But ebook publishers don’t respect copyright law,
and they don’t believe in your right to own
property. Instead, they say that when you “buy” an
ebook, you’re really only
licensing
that book, and
that copyright law is superseded by the thousands
of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement
you click through on the way to sealing the deal.
(Of course, the button on their website says, “Buy
this book” and they talk about “Ebook sales” at
DOCTOROW/MAKERS/2
I have always dreamt of writing sf novels, since I
was six years old. Now I do it. It is a goddamned
dream come true, like growing up to be a cowboy
or an astronaut, except that you don’t get
oppressed by ranchers or stuck on the launchpad in
an adult diaper for 28 hours at a stretch. The idea
that I’d get dyspeptic over people—
readers
celebrating what I write is goddamned
bizarre
to a format that has a DRM option, make
sure it’s switched off.
A word to professors,
librarians, and people who
want to donate money to me
So, download this book.
Some rules of the road:
It’s kind of a tradition around here that my readers
convert my ebooks to their favorite formats and
send them to me here, and it’s one that I love! If
you’ve converted these files to another format,
send them to me (doctorow@craphound.com,
subject Makers Conversion) and I’ll host them, but
before you do, make sure you read the following:
Every time I put a book online for free, I get
emails from readers who want to send me
donations for the book. I appreciate their generous
spirit, but I’m not interested in cash donations,
because my publishers are really important to me.
They contribute immeasurably to the book,
improving it, introducing it to audience I could
never reach, helping me do more with my work. I
have no desire to cut them out of the loop.
But there has to be some good way to turn that
generosity to good use, and I think I’ve found it.
Here’s the deal: there are lots of professors and
librarians who’d love to get hardcopies of this
book into their students’ and patrons’ hands, but
don’t have the budget for it.
·
Only one conversion per format, first
come, first serve. That means that if
someone’s already converted the file to a
Femellhebber 3000 document, that’s the
one you’re going to find here. I just don’t
know enough about esoteric readers to
adjudicate disputes about what the ideal
format is for your favorite device.
There are generous people who want to send some
cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks.
·
Make sure include a link to the reader as
well. When you send me an ebook file,
make sure that you include a link to the
website for the reader technology as well
so that I can include it below.
I’m proposing that we put them together.
If you’re a prof or librarian and you want a free
copy of Makers, email freemakers@gmail.com
with your name and the name and address of your
school. It’ll be posted below by my fantastic
helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can
see it.
·
No cover art. The text of this book is freely
copyable, the cover, not so much. The
rights to it are controlled by my publisher,
so don’t include it with your file.
If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Makers
and you want to donate something to say thanks,
check below to find a teacher or librarian you want
to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your
favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to
the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt
·
No DRM. The Creative Commons license
prohibits sharing the file with “DRM”
(sometimes called “copyprotection”) on it,
and that’s fine by me. Don’t send me the
book with DRM on it. If you’re converting
DOCTOROW/MAKERS/3
(feel free to delete your address and other personal
info first!) to freemakers@gmail.com so that Olga
can mark that copy as sent. If you don’t want to be
publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us
know and we’ll keep you anonymous, otherwise
we’ll thank you on the donate page.
waived if you get permission from the copyright
holder. Other Rights — In no way are any of the
following rights affected by the license: Your fair
dealing or fair use rights; The author’s moral
rights; Rights other persons may have either in the
work itself or in how the work is used, such as
publicity or privacy rights. Notice — For any
reuse or distribution, you must make clear to
others the license terms of this work.
Check http://craphound.com/makers/donate for
profs, librarians and similar people seeking
donations.
Dedication:
This file is licensed under a
Creative Commons US
Attribution
NonCommercial
ShareAlike license:
For “the risktakers, the doers, the makers of
things.”
PART I
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/byncsa/3.0/
Suzanne Church almost never had to bother with
the blue blazer these days. Back at the height of
the dotboom, she’d put on her business journalist
drag—blazer, blue sailcloth shirt, khaki trousers,
loafers—just about every day, putting in her
obligatory appearances at splashy press
conferences for highflying IPOs and mergers.
These days, it was mostly work at home or one day
a week at the San Jose Mercury News’s office, in
comfortable light sweaters with loose necks and
loose cotton pants that she could wear straight to
yoga after shutting her computer’s lid.
Blue blazer today, and she wasn’t the only one.
There was Reedy from the NYT’s Silicon Valley
office, and Tribbey from the WSJ, and that
despicable rattoothed jumpedup gossip
columnist from one of the UK techrags, and many
others besides. Old home week, blue blazers fresh
from the drycleaning bags that had guarded them
since the last time the NASDAQ broke 5,000.
You are free:
to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the
work
to Remix — to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the
manner specified by the author or licensor (but not
in any way that suggests that they endorse you or
your use of the work).
Noncommercial — You may not use this work for
commercial purposes.
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build
upon this work, you may distribute the resulting
work only under the same or similar license to this
one.
With the understanding that:
Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be
The man of the hour was Landon Kettlewell—the
DOCTOROW/MAKERS/4
kind of outlandish prepschool name that always
seemed a little made up to her—the new CEO and
front for the majority owners of Kodak/Duracell.
The despicable Brit had already started calling
them Kodacell. Buying the company was pure
Kettlewell: shrewd, weird, and ethical in a twisted
way.
“Why the hell have you done this, Landon?”
Kettlewell asked himself into his tiemic. Ties and
suits for the new Kodacell execs in the room, like
surfers playing dressup. “Why buy two dinosaurs
and stick ’em together? Will they mate and give
birth to a new generation of lessendangered
dinosaurs?”
He shook his head and walked to a different part
of the stage, thumbing a PowerPoint remote that
advanced his slide on the jumbotron to a picture of
a couple of unhappy cartoon brontos staring
desolately at an empty nest. “Probably not. But
there is a good case for what we’ve just done, and
with your indulgence, I’m going to lay it out for
you now.”
subject of hers, which no doubt accounted for his
fellowfeeling), and it was also the crux of
Kettlewell’s schtick. The spectacle of an exec who
talked ethics enraged RatToothed more than the
vilest babykillers. He was the kind of
revolutionary who liked his firing squads arranged
in a circle.
“I’m not that dumb, folks,” Kettlewell said,
provoking a stagey laugh from Mr RatTooth.
“Here’s the thing: the market had valued these
companies at less than their cash on hand. They
have twenty billion in the bank and a 16 billion
dollar marketcap. We just made four billion
dollars, just by buying up the stock and taking
control of the company. We could shut the doors,
stick the money in our pockets, and retire.”
Suzanne took notes. She knew all this, but
Kettlewell gave good soundbite, and talked slow
in deference to the kind of reporter who preferred
a notebook to a recorder. “But we’re not gonna do
that.” He hunkered down on his haunches at the
edge of the stage, letting his tie dangle, staring
spacily at the journalists and analysts. “Kodacell is
bigger than that.” He’d read his email that morning
then, and seen RatToothed’s new moniker.
“Kodacell has goodwill. It has infrastructure.
Administrators. Physical plant. Supplier
relationships. Distribution and logistics. These
companies have a lot of useful plumbing and a lot
of priceless reputation.
“What we don’t have is a product. There aren’t
enough buyers for batteries or film—or any of the
other stuff we make—to occupy or support all that
infrastructure. These companies slept through the
dotboom and the dotbust, trundling along as
though none of it mattered. There are parts of
these businesses that haven’t changed since the
fifties.
“We’re not the only ones. Technology has
challenged and killed businesses from every
sector. Hell, IBM
doesn’t make computers
“Let’s hope he sticks to the cartoons,” RatToothed
hissed beside her. His breath smelled like he’d
been gargling turds. He had a notsosecret crush
on her and liked to demonstrate his alpha
maleness by making halfwitticisms into her ear.
“They’re about his speed.”
She twisted in her seat and pointedly hunched over
her computer’s screen, to which she’d taped a thin
sheet of polarized plastic that made it opaque to
anyone shouldersurfing her. Being a halfway
attractive woman in Silicon Valley was more of a
pain in the ass than she’d expected, back when
she’d been covering rustbelt shenanigans in
Detroit, back when there was an auto industry in
Detroit.
The worst part was that the Brit’s reportage was
just spleenfilled editorializing on the lack of
ethics in the valley’s boardrooms (a favorite
DOCTOROW/MAKERS/5
anymore
! The very idea of a travel agent is
inconceivably weird today! And the record labels,
oy, the poor, crazy, suicidal, stupid record labels.
Don’t get me started.
advantage of the company stockbuying plan
would find their pensions augmented by whatever
this new scheme could rake in. If it worked.
“Mr Kettlewell?” RatToothed had clambered to
his hind legs.
“Yes, Freddy?” Freddy was RatToothed’s given
name, though Suzanne was hard pressed to ever
retain it for more than a few minutes at a time.
Kettlewell knew every businessjournalist in the
Valley by name, though. It was a CEO thing.
“Where will you recruit this new workforce from?
And what kind of entrepreneurial things will they
be doing to ’exhaust the realm of commercial
activities’?”
“Freddy, we don’t have to recruit anyone. They’re
beating a path to our door.
This
is a nation of
manic entrepreneurs, the kind of people who’ve
been inventing businesses from video arcades to
photomats for centuries.” Freddy scowled
skeptically, his jumble of grey tombstone teeth
protruding. “Come on, Freddy, you ever hear of
the Grameen Bank?”
“Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and
when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes
everything. That’s not to say that there’s no money
out there to be had, but the money won’t come
from a single, monolithic product line. The days of
companies with names like ’General Electric’ and
’General Mills’ and ’General Motors’ are over.
The money on the table is like krill: a billion little
entrepreneurial opportunities that can be
discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.
“We will bruteforce the problemspace of
capitalism in the twenty first century. Our business
plan is simple: we will hire the smartest people we
can find and put them in small teams. They will go
into the field with funding and communications
infrastructure—all that stuff we have left over
from the era of batteries and film—behind them,
capitalized to find a place to live and work, and a
job to do. A business to start. Our company isn’t a
project that we pull together on, it’s a
network
of
likeminded, cooperating autonomous teams, all of
which are empowered to do whatever they want,
provided that it returns something to our coffers.
We will explore and exhaust the realm of
commercial opportunities, and seek constantly to
refine our tactics to mine those opportunities, and
fill our hungry belly. This company isn’t a
company anymore: this company is a network, an
approach, a sensibility.”
Freddy nodded slowly. “In India, right?”
“Bangladesh. Bankers travel from village to
village on foot and by bus, finding small coops
who need tiny amounts of credit to buy a
cellphone or a goat or a loom in order to grow. The
bankers make the loans and advise the
entrepreneurs, and the payback rate is fifty times
higher than the rate at a regular lending institution.
They don’t even have a written lending agreement:
entrepreneurs—real, hardworking entrepreneurs
—you can trust on a handshake.”
Suzanne’s fingers clattered over her keyboard. The
Brit chuckled nastily. “Nice talk, considering he
just made a hundred thousand people redundant,”
he said. Suzanne tried to shut him out: yes,
Kettlewell was firing a company’s worth of
people, but he was also saving the company itself.
The prospectus had a decent severance for all
those departing workers, and the ones who’d taken
“You’re going to help Americans who lost their
jobs in your factories buy goats and cellphones?”
“We’re going to give them loans and coordination
to start businesses that use information, materials
science, commodified software and hardware
designs, and creativity to wring a profit from the
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