Every once in a while I run across someone very smart who has become completely lost by intellectualizing out of all proportion to the issue at hand. In some cases this is intentional: the objective is to display dizzying mental agility, then perform some sleight of logical mind that allows the smart person to convince others that up is down. At other times the smart person has actually deceived themselves, losing the forest of reality for a theoretical tree that some other intellectual lifted a leg on.

I don’t think there’s anybody who has a higher ratio of smarts to brain cramps than Christopher Hitchens. I could read Hitchens all day, just to enjoy the flow of his language and the logic of his ideas, even as he launches many of those diatribes from premises I consider invalid, destined for conclusions I deem absurd. In the more duplicitous camp I think of none other than George Will, the humorless columnist who enjoys nothing more than turning his megawatt mind to the subjects of both politics and baseball, with equally dubious results.

I mention all this as preface to a post* a couple of days ago by Matthew Yglesias, who is a smart person. Regarding the effect of free (stolen/pirated) content on the record industry, Yeglesias writes:

But under conditions of perfect competition, the price of a song ought to be equal to the marginal cost of distributing a new copy of a song. Which is to say that the marginal cost ought to be $0.

It’s of course amazing to me that someone could write something like that and not recognize the obvious problem, which is that this paradigm allows for no costs associated with the creation of the music that is being distributed, nor any opportunity to recoup those costs — let alone turn a profit. Then again, this is what happens when smart people talk about things like intellectual property as if it simply exists inside the walls of a black corporate castle, rather than as something that someone — an artist or craftsperson — makes.

Obliquely recognizing the potential problem, Yglesias adds:

It is, of course, possible that at some point the digital music situation will start imperiling the ability of consumers to enjoy music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to prevent that from happening, and if it does come to pass we’ll need to think seriously about rejiggering things.

In reply, Sonny Bunch makes the obvious point in a post titled Piracy. Is. Stealing.:

No! False! The purpose of intellectual property law has very little to do with Matt Yglesias being able to enjoy a wide variety of new music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the intellectual property created by artists so they are rewarded for their efforts. The purpose of intellectual property law is to punish people who steal that which isn’t theirs.

Yglesias, in his reply to Bunch, again ignores the question of authorship, or even the existence of the artists and craftspeople who create content:

He’s being sarcastic, but that is, in fact, an absolutely insane idea. The point of intellectual property law is to benefit consumers, not producers.

Note that last word: “producers”. That’s not the same as: artists.

To the Matthew Yglesias’ of the world, no human being with a passion or a vision actually makes music or tells stories that they hope to sell as a product. That’s all done by corporations and copyright holders, who are just looking to make a buck. Admitting as much, Yglesias reaches for an analogy and comes up with…the pharmaceutical industry.

Does Bunch think it’s a terrible affront to the moral rights of pharma researchers that there are generically available drugs? Does he want to see ibuprofen and penicillin and measles vaccines taken off the market? That’s crazy.

The only thing crazy here is the inability of a very smart person like Matt Yglesias to wrap his mind around the idea that without copyright protection, there exists no object — no ibuprofen pill — for artists to sell. That’s how complicated it isn’t.

*Links from Andrew Sullivan’s blog yesterday. Additional comments today from Sulivan’s readers here. The Ditchwalk take on this issue, also posted three days ago, and reader comments, here.

– Mark Barrett

In late summer I noted that Andrew Sullivan was preparing to release a book via print-on-demand (POD). That day is now here:

The Dish is very psyched to announce that the first edition of “The View From Your Window” is now available for purchase. You can preview the book here at Blurb.com, the print-on-demand company that is publishing the book. It’s 200 pages of window views, selected from all the submissions sent in over the past three years, with the front image and the back one picked by you, the readers of the Dish.

If that’s not smart enough, Sullivan and his team are leveraging Sullivan’s platform (his built-in audience and online presence) to improve things for his customers. This is not simply another retail opportunity, it is a community gathering and co-operative effort:

$29.95 is not a bad price for a 200 page, four-color coffee table book/toilet-browser. But new technology can bring this price down. Here’s how:

If we order a mass offset printing, each unit costs a lot less (just like in old-style publishing). It will take a little longer than ordering the book yourself right now, but the savings could be considerable. The Dish is not looking to make money off this – we’ve decided to forgo any profit to get you the book you created at the cheapest price possible. So if 1,000 of you pledge to order the book, we can slash the price; if 2,000 do so, we can slash it some more. The goal is to bring the price of the book to under $20. Perhaps well under.

A few years ago, this book would have been published by a traditional publisher, on the publisher’s terms, or it would not have been published at all. Today Sullivan’s team is determined to push the envelope:

No old-media publishing house would give you those options. The combination of a blog and print-on-demand publishing can. And if this model works, it could help launch a whole new wave of books created with user-generated content and priced with crowd-sourcing efficiencies. We hope the Dish will help pioneer this, and help do to the book publishing industry what blogs have helped do to MSM establishment journalism. A four-color 200 page book is an ambitious place to start, but, as always at the Dish, our attitude is: why the hell not?

Why the hell not, indeed. We all profit by watching how this project unfolds. Whether you want to buy a copy of the book or not, take note of what’s happening here.

This is what you find when you walk a ditch.

– Mark Barrett

One of the nice things about the web is that you never know what you’ll run across when you start poking around with a search engine. While doing a search for POD (print-on-demand) resources I ran across a rant on the Daily Dish site that contained this quote:

[Publishing] is an industry where agents only get work from editors, and editors only get work from agents. Where the writers are taken out of the process entirely in order to “protect” them.

I have to say, on those occasions when I actually tried to penetrate the book world that’s very much the feeling that I came away with. It really didn’t matter how good your writing was or how much of yourself you put into it — it only mattered if you would sell. And that would be fine if that’s the way they played it, but it’s not.   Read more