Hey, Jessica – one of the main characters is a librarian. As he says, We did not purchase this book, or borrow it from a library or a friend. While programs like Limewire and Kaaza have traditionally been used This is, of course, different from projects like Project Gutenberg and Over the past several years the Dowbrigade has downloaded about 30 books, Although we understand the objections of this friend, who happens to First of all, Philip K. Dick has been dead for over 20 years. He But what about his family and heirs, my friend asked. Dick is Minority Report (2002, with Tom Cruise and based on a story by the same So I don’t think the estate needs by $7.98 for the paperback, if it The Philip K. Dick estate has no such problems. Isa and her older half-sister, As for film deals, the estate has become increasingly choosy. "We sort of Our other dinner companion, a librarian, asked by we didn’t borrow the Well, what about the publishing company. Aside from the fact that they Plus, these are the same companies that screwed Philip K. Dick during Finally, and in a related vein, we firmly believe that had Philip K. According to the Wired In most ways, they agree, he wouldn’t have changed. He wouldn’t have So there it is, dear readers, we are confessing our crime, and admitting Is this mere cynical rationalization, or yet another example of information Correction 1\/1\/04 – The Dowbrigade has been informed by a member of the Dick family that once an author sells the rights to a work he or his heirs have no right to subsequent resale or spinoffs of the original work. Therefore, the Dick family have not shared in the motion picture profits of the films mentioned. Our information was taken from the Wired Magazine article and reflected our ignorance of the publishing and film making industries.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Dowbrigade is currently reading "Counter-Clock World" by Philip K. Dick, a great piece of pretzel logic in which time has started running backwards. In the novel, written in 1967, a 1986 discovery called the ‘Hobart Phase’ has started time … Continue reading ![](\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/pkdcatg.jpg\")
The
\n Dowbrigade is currently reading "Counter-Clock World" by Philip
\n K. Dick<\/a>, a great piece of pretzel logic in which time
\n has started running backwards. In the novel, written in 1967, a
\n 1986 discovery called the ‘Hobart Phase’ has started time running in
\n reverse. People start conversations by saying "Goodbye" and end them
\n by saying "Hello". The characters get younger every day, regurgitate
\n and reconstitute their food, and eventually dwindle away into infancy
\n and
\n look for a convenient
\n womb to crawl back into.<\/p>\n
\n "Our job here at the Library is not to study and\/or memorize data; it
\n is to expunge it." <\/p>\n
\n Rather, we downloaded it, using Limewire, a shareware Peer-to-Peer post-Napster
\n file-sharing application for the Mac (which we also got for free). We
\n then printed it out on a laser printer at work during a weekend tutoring
\n session. <\/p>\n
\n to download music MP3s, and increasingly for TV shows and feature-length
\n movies, it seemed like a bibliophile’s bonanza to discover that if one
\n types "ebook" into the search window, the result is a list of anywhere
\n between several hundred and several thousand titles (depending on the time of day, your internet
\n connection, and luck) which can be downloaded with a click. Every time
\n you do this you will generate a different list, which leads us to conclude
\n that the universe of books floating around out there in digital form
\n is immense, many thousands strong.<\/p>\n
\n others of its ilk, which digitize and dish out classics and public domain
\n literature and reference books. The books I am talking about are
\n an eclectic mix of current and classic, basically whatever wired people
\n have taken the time and trouble to scan, OCR and edit (although some
\n are clearly straight-from-scan, containing numerous errors). The
\n list of titles leans heavily towards Science Fiction, with just about
\n everything ever penned by Ursula LeGuinn and Isaac Asamov, plus lots
\n of programming books like "Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide" and
\n just about the whole O’Reilly cannon, and the literary equivalent of
\n penis-patch spam – titles like "Sex Tips Manual:
\n How to
\n Make Your
\n Lover
\n Come Every
\n Time". Plus a "miscellaneous bin" containing cookbooks, spy novels,
\n the Pocket Guide to Kabala, all of Tolkein and Rowling, comic books,
\n atlases, dictionaries and several versions of the Kama Sutra. They are
\n illegal rips, like mp3’s, shared without permission of the author or
\n publisher.<\/p>\n
\n mostly novels, and has actually printed out and read maybe half of those.
\n When
\n the topic came up at an informal bloggers dinner recently, the Dowbrigade
\n was soundly castigated by a friend and colleague for this dastardly disrespect
\n of intellectual property rights.<\/p>\n
\n be a prodigious author of intellectual property in his own right, which
\n obviously gives him insights and perspectives on the topic beyond the
\n experience of the Dowbrigade, we feel that our position is defensible,
\n at least in this instance.<\/p>\n
\n wrote this novel 36 years ago, was paid a miserly sum for it by the publishing
\n company (less than $1,000), and died in abject poverty shortly before
\n Blade Runner, the first of his stories to be made into a major motion
\n picture (starring Harrison Ford) was released. He is certainly not losing
\n anything from my downloading habits.<\/p>\n
\n survived by three kids, who seem to be nice people and doing rather alright. After
\n the limited commercial but fanatical cult success of Blade Runner (based
\n on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), 1990 saw the release of Total
\n Recall (with Arnold Schwarzenegger and based on We Can Remember it For
\n You Wholesale) which cleared $118 million world wide, and the estate
\n was set for various lifetimes.<\/p>\n
\n name) cleared $132, and "Paycheck" to be released Thursday (Uma Thurman
\n and Ben Affleck) is sure to break all these records, and insure that
\n the Dick kids are multi-millionaires many times over. Since Dick
\n wrote 32 novels and over 150 stories, the surface has barely been scratched. <\/p>\n
\n could even be found. That’s another problem. Most of the Dick novels,
\n with the exception of the ones which have been made into successful films,
\n are out of print, and can only be found in remainder bins and used science
\n fiction
\n bookstores. Or
\n bought on e-Bay. Although still under copyright, they are effectively
\n unavailable. However, according to an
\n article in Wired Magazine<\/a>, they
\n are soon to be republished by Vintage:<\/p>\n\n
\n Laura Leslie, are upstanding Bay Area citizens, both intelligent and
\n obviously competent. Together with their younger half-brother, Chris,
\n who works as a martial arts instructor in Southern California, they control
\n their father’s legacy. Russell Galen advises them from New York. The
\n four take their stewardship seriously: They’re fine with repackaging
\n a novel to tie in with a movie, for example, but novelizations of short
\n stories are out. And thanks to Vintage Books, every word of his fiction
\n will soon be in print – as you’d expect for an author who’s now taught
\n in colleges and cited by the French post-structuralist philosopher Jean
\n Baudrillard.<\/p>\n
\n feel like we have to protect Philip K. Dick’s brand image," says Galen. "So
\n we set very, very high prices, and we’ll only do business with people who are
\n established."<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n book from a library instead of printing an illegal copy. We did
\n look at the university library where we work. They
\n had two Dick books, one a novel and the other a collection of short stories,
\n which we devoured, and which only whetted our appetite for more.<\/p>\n
\n are a major media corporation, they had nothing to do with the creative
\n or technological process that made these words available to me. They
\n bought the rights to something they probably didn’t even
\n read and wouldn’t understand or care about if they did, from another company, and now
\n they want to profit from repackaging, binding and marketing the content. Fine,
\n for them and for people who want to pay them for the convenience of
\n a back-pocket paperback. But do they have the right to say people
\n can’t access the words in other ways, from other sources.<\/p>\n
\n his entire creative life. Dick hated his publishers, even as he depended
\n on them. We owe them no moral obligation for making these words available.<\/p>\n
\n Dick been sitting with us at that Pizzeria Uno in Manchester, NH, he
\n would have given the Dowbrigade the thumbs up. He was an intensely paranoid
\n man, and distrustful of big business and especially government. He
\n took a lot of drugs, especially speed and psychedelics, never paid taxes,
\n and as mentioned had a deep distrust of publishing companies.<\/p>\n
\n article<\/a>, Dick was a painfully private man, and
\n so would probably not have joined us for dinner. Making the rather twisted
\n point that perhaps it was better he didn’t become rich and famous until
\n after his death, it speculates on how fame would have changed him:<\/p>\n\n
\n gotten health insurance. Instead of filing his income taxes, he’d have
\n continued to claim he was handing everything over to "Mrs. Frye" at
\n the IRS. (As far as the daughters know, Mrs. Frye never existed.) This
\n is a guy who had to have a friend take Isa to the toy store because he
\n couldn’t handle the anxiety. "The thought of the general public
\n knowing who he was," she says now – "he would have been out
\n of his mind."<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n to an almost complete lack of remorse. Actually, we feel more remorse for
\n the 168 sheets of copy paper and the toner we appropriated from the university
\n for the printout. But that is another strange and twisted relationship
\n altogether.<\/p>\n
\n yearning to be free? Should we be commended, or incarcerated?
\n In short, is the Dowbrigade a Dick Head or a dickhead? Or both<\/p>\n