From the Student Research Fellows Blog: Perspectives on Digital Authorship

Comedy Central has done a great job of making shows like the Daily Show and Colbert Nation available online.  Recently on Colbert Nation, the winner of the National Book Award, Sherman Alexie, made some interesting points about digital culture and why his new book won’t be coming to a Kindle near you anytime soon.  Alexie’s focus on the dangers of piracy, privacy, and even the U.S. government’s desire to take from him as a Native American suggest a genuine but unfortunate disdain for e-books, which he later claims eliminate jobs.  Alexie doesn't want his books to suffer the fate of music online, and notes that “depending on the study… somewhere between seventy-five and ninety-five percent of music is pirated; nobody makes money off their music anymore, their CDs.  Everything is about the live show.”  That's quite a range, but still eye-popping if true on the low end.  Colbert rightly wonders why digital distribution would prevent Alexie from continuing his book tours.  If the demise of independent, and even chain, record store is any indication, there is something to be worried about.  Much digital ink has been spilled over the movement of such communities online, in addition to their potential for better aggregating groups in the real world (see, e.g. meetup.com).  In any event, Mr. Alexie's highly respectable desire for a personal connection with his fans is overshadowed by the broad brush with which he paints.

Mr. Alexie’s website is well-organized and informative, although some of the links to articles or to purchase physical copies of his books were broken at the time of this writing.  His impressive resume made his concerns about the power of technology seem perfectly reasonable until he said something that terrified Stephen Colbert: “with the open source culture on the internet, the idea of ownership, of artistic ownership goes away.”  In context this sounded like a call for some form of moral rights on the internet.  It is unfortunate that Mr. Alexie hasn’t fully explored the "open source culture of the internet” and the near-universal requirement of attribution in copyleft or Creative Commons-type licensing.  He noted he would eventually adapt to the opportunities available online, and Colbert does a great job, as always, of bringing out the tensions raised by Mr. Alexie’s arguments.  The bold statement to close the interview makes it well worth watching.

-Joe Merante

Comments

[Peter Gonczlik]

Joe,

Thanks for mentioning this topic and I think you bring up a good point. While Mr. Alexie is an accomplished artist whose work I have enjoyed he seems to have checked his objectivity at the door in this case. I can quickly think of a counterexample to Alexie's argument in the distribution model that Radiohead set up several years ago. Fans are allowed to pay whatever they want to download their albums. Perhaps Donald Rumsfeld was right when he said "You don't know what you don't know."

Pete Gonczlik, Technology Transfer Associate