The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen

Author:Andrew Keen [Keen, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385523011
Published: 2007-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

5

the day the music died [side b]

By the time Charles Dickens came to North America on a reading tour in 1842, hundreds of thousands of copies of his books—including Sketches by Boz, Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers, and Oliver Twist—had been published in the United States. But Dickens “never derive(d) sixpence,”1 because at the time, there was no copyright protection for works created in Britain and sold in the United States (and vice versa); U.S. publishers could copy British books without paying a dime in royalties.

Dickens and other authors with followings on opposite sides of the Atlantic—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—were the early victims of intellectual piracy. By the 1840s, though a household name, Dickens was facing debtor’s prison. Sir Walter Scott nearly went bankrupt in the middle of his career, and is said to have died at age sixty-one, “broken in body and mind by years of financial difficulties.” And Harriet Beecher Stowe, an American, was estimated to have lost $200,000 (millions in today’s currency) rightfully due her for European sales of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.2

But, of course, had Dickens’ rich character portraits or Longfellow’s evocative poems never reached the opposite shores, the greater victims of piracy would have been readers. In any profession, when there is no monetary incentive or reward, creative work stalls. As Dickens, one of the first to actively lobby Congress for copyright protection, aptly noted, American literature could only flourish if American publishers were compelled by law to pay writers their due; allowing publishers to print the works of foreign authors for free would only discourage literary production.

Yet on the Web 2.0 such indiscriminate piracy is becoming the norm. “Booksellers, defend your lonely forts!” John Updike roused the book-loving audience at Book Expo America in late May 2006. Seventy-four-year-old Updike was in a feisty mood that day, shouting with the force and vigor of a man half his age. The object of his rage was Kevin Kelly, the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine who, earlier that month, had published his manifesto in the New York Times Magazine in support of the “universal book.”

Kevin Kelly claims that the technology to digitize and infinitely copy texts will inevitably overthrow hundreds of years of copyright protection. According to Kelly, we can no longer protect intellectual property from piracy, so all texts should be available for free. It is a bit like saying that because our car might get stolen, we should leave it unlocked with the keys in the ignition and the driver’s-side door open, to usher would-be thieves on their way.

In Kelly’s view (who, it doesn’t hurt to note, has published several books for which he has received substantial advances), the value of the book lies not in the professional author’s achievement in creating something true out of empty air and a blank page, but in the myriad ways the cult of the amateur can recall, annotate, tag, link, “personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer and engage a work.” According to Kelly,

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