Do publishers even fact-check anymore?

It's happened again: another fake memoir has come to light.

This author invented her involvement in a gang and falsified her ethnicity and background. The "memoir," Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones, had received really great critical acclaim and seemed destined to become another one of those great memoirs when her sister saw an article about it and realized that the woman in the photo was not who she claimed to be and called Margaret out.

The publisher, Penguin Group USA, has recalled all copies of the book and canceled her author tour. This came after they had sunk "less than $100,000" into a deal with Jones (whose real name is Margaret Seltzer). (The editor who originally gave Seltzer/Jones the deal actually started out at Simon and Schuster and moved the contract over with her when she went to Riverhead.)

I can't help but think that these publishers and editors would have saved themselves a lot of grief, embarrassment, work hours, and, um, money, had they only had someone verify the stories in the Seltzer/Jones story.

The story details why the author made up the story, but I just can't understand why people think that making up a story and passing it off as true is right. If you create composite characters and base a story off things that happen in real life, it's no longer nonfiction and cannot be passed off as such.

Interestingly enough, I just checked on Amazon.com and the book is still available for purchase. There are numerous angry one-star reviews, most posted within the last 12 hours, calling for the book to be removed from the site. I'll be interested to see if and when the site removes the book from its listings.

Debut novel Beautiful Children released for free, sans DRM

There's a new book that was recently released called Beautiful Children by Charles Bock. I found out about it through one of my classes because it's this ridiculously hyped book, receiving the kind of hype from the publisher (Random House) you don't really see these days. We were mostly looking at it to examine its website, which is really flashy and splashy and visual but overall hard to get around. But today we started talking about it again because Random House is allowing people to download the book for free, from today through Friday, from their website as a PDF. (You can access the download site from the site I just linked above.)

The most interesting thing about the fact that the book is available for download without any sort of DRM (digital rights management) on it, so once it's downloaded, users could ostensibly do whatever they want with it. Of course Random House makes you click this little box on their site saying "Copyright: This book is protected by copyright and is reproduced here by permission of the author and Random House. I read/understand the above copyright." But I'm sure many of the people clicking on that box don't actually understand what they're clicking into at all, since Random House provides no further explanation anywhere on the site. My instructor showed us how he was easily able to convert the PDF of the book into a text file. This means the file can now be manipulated any way the user wants, which violates the brief, vague copyright agreement downloaders opted into by checking the box.

I wonder why Random House chose to do this; perhaps they're riding on the coat tails of the recent success of the Oprah website offering a free limited-time PDF download of Suze Orman's latest book. Beautiful Children has hit number 14 on the New York Times Bestseller List, so perhaps RH just sees this as one further step in promoting the book to new readers. Plus, it's a long book and people aren't yet accustomed to reading long texts on the screen, and not that many of us own electronic readers. Perhaps RH is banking on the PDF being a teaser to lead people into purchasing a print copy of the book.

I did download the PDF, which took only seconds to do, but I have no immediate plans to read it. I really had no desire to read the print version of the book, after looking at the obnoxious website, and I downloaded the book mostly out of curiosity. I'll probably page (cyber-page, rather) through it at some point, but I'm in no hurry. We'll see if I actually delve into it deeply.

I just wonder what will happen now that there will be all these free, downloaded, non-DRM-ed PDFs of the book floating around in the ether. Not that there's a great deal of value in pirating something that's already available for free, but still. Time will tell.

What do people think? Are free electronic versions of print books a good idea? Are they a good way to promote an author and boost his or her print sales, or are they just paving the way for people to pirate?

The Pirate's Dilemma: A Look at How to Work with, Not Against, Media "Pirates"

I've got good reason to start blogging on this site again regularly, because this semester, I'm enrolled in a class at Emerson called "Know Your Rights" that covers contracts, rights, permissions, copyright, and all things intellectual property. This means I'll be finding juicy stories once again as well as having fun and fab and just plain bizarre factoids to wax poetic about.

Tonight in class we watched a great slideshow presentation called "The Pirate's Dilemma" that talked about how digital media is changing the way people consume media in general and why the law should work with these "pirates" instead of against them. Granted, the slideshow is ultimately an advertisement for the creator's book, but it's enjoyable to watch and quite informative. I tend to agree with a lot of what he says. And who am I to criticize someone for marketing his book using the internets?

Check it out here or watch below.

| View | Upload your own

Ah, it feels good to be back in the CopyRighteous blogosphere!

UPDATE: I just spent over an hour going through previous entries and tagging them to hopefully make it easier to find information on my blog. My sudden desire to tag was brought on because I am also taking an Electronic Publishing course this semester, and I'm giving metadata a nod. Plus, I love being organized. When I originally created this blog, I didn't really understand what tags were. But now.... oh, the wonders of the internet!

Great Videos on the Writers' Strike

I have dropped off the circuit for most of the semester, due to... well, the semester's existence. However, a friend did share this gem with me.



This video about the writers' strike is funny, and fitting. I hope I am not infringing copyright by sharing it with y'all.

Find the original page here.

Here's a video explaining why the WGA is on strike.



Find the original on this page.

For more information on the writers' strike, visit the WGA website, United Hollywood, and check out this site made by fans to support the strike too.

I miss the Daily Show.

Napster All Over Again

A recent story in the local Boston paper Boston Now about students at MIT illegally downloading and sharing music caught my interest, partly because of the copyright infringement aspect and partly because of the fact that this behavior seems to be so widespread because people just don't think it's wrong.

The story says how students at Boston college and universities (MIT is the main focus of the story) are being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for copyright infringement. The students are downloading music files using peer-to-peer file sharing networks like LimeWire. I'm not talking about things like iTunes, where you have to pay to download tracks; in the eyes of the RIAA, those sites are totally legit. I'm talking about the types of sites that are the children and grandchildren of the original downloading site, Napster. Some students who have been sued are settling with the RIAA and paying about $3,000 in settlement, while others are paying a lot more in attorney's fees to fight these lawsuits.

You can see the pre-lawsuit letter from the RIAA to targeted college campuses here.

The way in which the RIAA is going after the students, however, is considered suspect. Their method for gathering evidence against the students consists of an investigator downloading a user's song at random from one of the peer-to-peer networks and listening to it. And apparently by listening to it, the investigator can determine if it was illegally downloaded or not.

Huh?

Okay, so I'm not sold on this methodology; how would just listening to a song determine if it's illegally downloaded or not? Do these songs sound different in some way? It seems suspect to me. But I feel like the real issue here is the copyright infringement issue.

Yes, it's legally wrong for a person to download, use, and share copyright-protected music without paying for it. Despite its creative, somewhat intangible nature, a song is a consumer product, and thus by its very nature it needs to be paid for. Unless an artist or band decides to make its songs available for free download and distribution (which some upstart bands do in order to promote awareness about their music), it is illegal to distribute and acquire their music without paying for it. Obviously people who make their livelihoods from producing these creative products find it grossly unfair for others to, in essence, steal their work (stealing is, by definition, "to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force" [dictionary.com]). But the people doing the stealing (in this case, downloading and sharing music files) don't usually consider what they're doing illegal or wrong.

I think this is because of the very nature of the internet. On the internet, millions of users worldwide exchange and access such a breadth of information for free already that it almost seems logical for these people to do the same thing with music files, or with things like the texts of books or copies of digital images for instance. The internet's very nature makes it difficult, though not impossible, to police its millions of users as well as what they're using and how they're using it.

And the fact that the RIAA is going after people, many of them college students who don't fully understand the nature or repercussions of their actions, makes a lot of people really angry. It pits these people against the RIAA. And because of this, it actually makes people more prone to engaging in the very behaviors (illegal file sharing) that the RIAA is trying to discourage and put an end to.

The problem isn't going to go away, especially as increasingly more parts of our lives become digitized: cell phones, laptops, MP3 players, and more. A quick look around the RIAA website shows that they're continuing to go about this in a dissuade people from downloading illegally and going after those who do kind of way. I'm not sure that this is necessarily a good solution, or a solution at all, but I can't really think of any other solution, to be perfectly honest. How can you stop all people everywhere from doing what they're doing? I acknowledge that illegally downloading and sharing music is wrong, but I also admit that I myself used to do so many years ago in college (and by "many" I mean "five," back in the days when Napster was still a newborn and still free). I can see both sides of the coin here.

What do people think? Is there a better way to police the use of music? Is there really anything the RIAA can or should do after a CD is off the store shelves and in a consumer's hands? Technically a person can make a copy of a CD onto a personal computer or MP3 player for personal use, but they can't distribute it--such as making it available on the internet for others to download or giving the copied CD to a friend. But is this preventing people from hearing new music? For instance, I've just asked a friend to copy an album for me that I already own but have lost the disc of and which I didn't have any other copy of. I already paid the band, many moons ago, for the disc; I already know the songs. I miss them. I want to listen to them again. But I am annoyed at the thought of repurchasing the CD because as soon as I do so I'm sure I'll find it somewhere. So I asked my friend to make a copy of her copy of the CD for me. Is that a horrible thing? Does that make me a criminal? I admit that I no longer use peer-to-peer networks to download music; in fact, I haven't downloaded music using a peer-to-peer network since I graduated college in 2002, just as the Napster issue was starting to come to a head. The only music I've downloaded since then are songs written by a friend of mine who allowed me to download them for my own use and songs that were available for free download as part of some sort of band promotion. While this keeps me from discovering new music (my musical tastes and collection halt abruptly in 2002), it just doesn't seem worth the risk to engage in peer-to-peer file sharing, because I don't want to get sued.

Should the RIAA just leave people alone? Is downloading really hurting the music industry? What do people think? Are downloaders criminals or just doing what comes naturally when you use the internet? Leave me your thoughts.

Check out the RIAA website here.

When Your Writing Goes Amok

Now I'm no expert on this because I've never killed anyone, but it seems to me that if someone commits a murder, he will do everything in his power to keep his crime a secret and to keep himself from getting caught.

Not so for this Polish author.

Now keep all those Polish jokes to yourself. Anyone could have honestly made this mistake--confessing to a murder he committed in a novel he wrote. Right?

Right?

The novelist, Krystian Bala, wrote in his 2003 novel about a man being found drowned with his hands tied behind his back and attached to a noose tied around his neck. Interestingly enough, three years prior, this is exactly how Dariusz Janiszewski's murdered body was found.

After an investigation, Bala was tried and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for initiating and planning the murder.

Jokes aside (go ahead and make them, I can hear you laughing), this raises the interesting question about basing fiction on real life. Although there is some safety in writing fiction ("Hey, I made it up!"), it's not failproof. There's still the danger that someone will look at your fiction and recognize a person or situation. Many fiction writers find themselves basing their characters or the situations they're in at least on some portion of real life--be it an idiosyncrasy of their mother's, their best friend's house, their brother's weird dental problems. It's natural for fiction writers to draw inspiration from the world around them, especially those parts of it they are most intimately connected to. But fiction writers must realize that with the great power of the fictional pen comes great responsibility--especially if they have appropriated something that belongs to someone else (personality trait or characteristic or whatever) to use in their own creation.

It just goes to show: put your secrets in a diary and keep the diary under your mattress instead of in a novel meant for public consumption.

Of course, this entry doesn't address what happens in nonfiction (especially the creative forms of it), which is something we're talking about in my ethics class currently, as we're talking about New Journalism and the subject-writer relationship. That's a whole other can of worms that I have a lot to say about but this isn't quite the time or place just yet. But soon.

Also, I was recently asked in a comment a question about copyright infringement when a book is out of print and what a person's rights are in that situation. I will attempt to address this soon, in a future entry. It was an excellent question, so thank you!

Never having to say you're sorry

While we may be skeptical of how sincere politicians are when they publicly apologize for their wrong-doings, we don't generally tend to question the origin of their words. We tend to assume that even if the politician sounds insincere reciting a contrived speech, the politician's words are at least his own insincere, contrived musings. But now, thanks to a disgraced (or, as you'll soon see, twice-disgraced) official in China, we can't even trust that our politicians' speeches of apology are their own words (or their speechwriters' own words).

Zhang Shaocang, a Chinese official, was on trial for corruption and seemed so heartily sorry as he read a lengthy letter aplogizing for his wrongs that he wept. His tears, however, veiled the fact that his apology letter was a nearly perfect duplicate of one previously written by another disgraced official, Zhu Fuzhong. So in addition to the wrong-doing that led to his corruption trial, he added insult to injury by then stealing another person's apology letter and passing it off as his own expression of remorse.

China already has a rather shoddy record when it comes to copyright infringement issues, so this isn't necessarily rosy news for the nation. It's bad enough that officials make insincere public apologies; copying someone else's apology just doubles the insincerity and calls the person's integrity seriously into question.

In cases like this, insincerity means never having to say you're sorry. Please.