Earlier this week, Mark Helprin, the author of the book Digital Barbarians, posted a defense of his book on the National Review Online. Seeing as how I was among the sharp critics of the work, I felt it appropriate to respond.

Dear Mark Helprin,

I have to wonder what you would think of me if you met me. I’m a strong supporter of copyright. I operate a site called Plagiarism Today where I help small artists and Webmasters protect their creations and defend their works against plagiarists, spammers and others that would seek to misuse it. I also manage a company called CopyByte.com, which provides managed copyright solutions for small businesses.

However, I am also a member of what you would call the digerati. I blog, use wikis, have an iPhone and even place Creative Commons Licenses on my works. Though I believe copyright reform to be necessary, I also believe in the necessity of copyright very strongly and see reasonable reform as a way to rebalance the law to protect it for the future.

When I read your book, I felt I had no choice but to give it what can be politely called a scathing review. I didn’t like your book and I didn’t enjoy it and I don’t know of anyone who did. It’s that simple.

To be clear, it wasn’t your opinions that drove me away. I routinely enjoy books and other works I don’t agree with, your book just wasn’t one of them. I don’t agree with everything written by Lawrence Lessig, Bill Patry or even Ben Sheffner on his blog, but I read and enjoy of them. They are good writers with good arguments.

As I said in the closing of my review, “The novel-length copyright polemic is one that few authors can tackle. Helprin is not one of them. Though I think he is a very talented writer and may look up some of his other work, this is not the format for him.”

However, as a critic of your work I read with great interest your recent rebuttal to all of us. As I plowed through it, several things dawned on me that I feel should be put in plain English.

You Don’t Know Me

First, you say in your rebuttal that one of the critical responses to your book was that we, the critics, didn’t “understand” you. You may well be right about that. However, it is equally clear that you do not understand the groups you attack.

As I said in my review, you paint those who favor copyright reform with a combination of broad strokes and petty insults. In your view, those with CC licenses are raving anti-copyright lunatics Hell-bent on abolition, no matter what their actual views and intentions are. This alienates centrist figures such as myself and makes your arguments laughable to those further on the left.

Maybe we critics don’t understand you, but it definitely appears the feeling is mutual. However, we are not the ones writing a polemic about copyright and we are not the ones writing to convince an audience. The onus to both understand and be understood is on the author.

On that note, making yourself and your arguments understood is another failing of the book. You claim that your critics feel it “necessary to their physiology to think that I am for perpetual copyright,” and it is true many reviews made that claim. While you have stated repeatedly that you aren’t, you are also the one who has, both in the op-ed and the book, made favorable comparisons between intellectual property and physical property and based many of your arguments accordingly.

Doing so is a bit like saying you’re not in favor of longer prison sentences for inmates, but still wish that our system could be more like North Korea’s. It is a mixed message. However, how can we “digerati” hope to understand this message when even the headline writer at the New York Times missed it, giving your now-infamous op-ed the headline “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?”

You also complain that a particularly insulting paragraph, quoted in your rebuttal, made it into nearly every review. I have to plead guilty as I used snippets from it as well. But the reason is apparent. When you read it, it leaps off of the page and becomes a “Holy Cow! Did he just say that?” moment. When I read that paragraph, I heard the sound of a thousand page corners being turned down in my head.

I understand well what it is like to have a mob show up at your door over a misunderstanding or a single quote in a long work. It’s frustrating, especially when you feel you have valid points buried within. But as writers we both have to take responsibility for what we produce. You penned the paragraph, you chose the words, the fact it became a lightning rod for criticism should shock no one, the least of all you.

The results were, to say the least, predictable and the fact that it distracted from your was a misstep on your part. In the bid to make clear, easy-to-understand arguments, the author has to take the lead.

Still, you are right, we don’t understand you and it seems clear you don’t understand us. However, this is not a failing of those who read your book and posted critical reviews, it is your fault. It is a failing both in research and in writing that you failed to clearly grasp your audience and clearly state your arguments to them without distractions.

Who’s Book is it Anyway?

This failure is highlighted in your rebuttal. You complain that, “Nearly every publication, left, right, and center, assigned the book, with digital in its title, to a resident digeratus, a member of the very tribe I provoke….”

This would seem, to me at least, to be the exact group you would want reviewing your book. The goal of a polemic is not to hear oneself talk or preach to the choir, but to convince the other side of your truth and make them agree with you. Anyone else reviewing your book would be a poor test of its effectiveness.

This raises the question of “Who was this book for?” Given that your rebuttal also slams “the corporate defenders of intellectual property” as people who “sit inertially in their towers and forfeit the more general debate,” it seems as if the book was written almost solely for Mark Helprin.

You found yourself alone in your arguments not because there aren’t a few points where you have some merit and a defendable position, but because you have worked to alienate everyone who might have come to your aid.

Bottom Line

In the end, I agree with the reviewers who feel that you do not know what you are talking about. I don’t say this because you mentioned Slurpees and Hip Hop though they predated the digital age or that you cited Mozart and Raphael, both of whom worked without copyright protection.

Instead, I say confidently you don’t know what you’re talking about because you claim, with your op-ed, you were, “In complete innocence that I was parachuting into a holy war.”

Mr. Helprin, your op-ed was published in 2007. The DMCA was passed in 1998, Napster was shut down in 2000, the Grokster ruling was in 2005. If you had performed as much as a Google search on the topic, you would have seen the dangerous waters you were treading into. It is clear you “parachuted” blind and now take offense that people claim you don’t know what you’re talking about.

But even if I can forgive your ignorance in 2007, you showed a similar kind of ignorance in your book, as if the backlash to your op-ed and two years of writing had not lead to one ounce of new research. You knew almost nothing about your opponents other than they used technology and, at times at least, had very poor grammar. Thus, you argued the wrong points and presented a case so out of step with both the times and the actual arguments that almost no one could take you seriously.

The problem with Digital Barbarians is simple. It is a bad book. Rather than blaming your audience and your reviewers, there comes a time where you have to take blame for your own mistakes.

There is room for a good pro-copyright polemic out there, but this is not it. I admire your attempt but, in the end, I think your book did more harm than good to the causes you support.

If you are able to take the criticisms to heart and learn from your mistakes, you may be produce a really great work in this area. But if you can’t, then there is no hope.

But then again, what do I know, according to you I’m just a Slurpee-sucking geek who seldom sees daylight (though technically I prefer Icees).

Sincerely,

Jonathan Bailey

When I review books, or any other product, I feel that it is my duty to convey whether the book is worth the time and money to read. Since it is possible, maybe even easier, to enjoy and be provoked by a book that you have diverging opinions with, I would like to try and keep my opinions on copyright out of the work.

However, as was with the case with Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, the benefit of the book is greatly hindered by clearly erroneous and/or misguided arguments. As such, it is important to address both the book itself and the merits of the argument.

But, as I review Mark Helprin’s book Digital Barbarism, I am not going to turn my review into an assault on his positions. Many others, far more qualified than I, have done so already including the editors at Copysense and even Lawrence Lessig himself via his wiki.

So the goal of this review is not to refute or support Helprin, but to let you know whether or not you want to run to your bookstore and pick up a copy of the book.

Spoiler Alert: You won’t.

First Impressions

In the opening pages of the book, Helprin paints himself as a sympathetic character. We learn that the book is a response to a deluge of criticism that befell him after he penned a New York Times editorial about copyright entitled “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?“, which became the target for those wanting to argue against perpetual copyright.

But to hear Helprin tell the story, it was, in large part, a misunderstanding. The headline being the editor’s (poor) decision and much of the talk about perpetual copyright being a misunderstanding of his intentions.

As an author, I can understand and appreciate this. I know well what it is like to have the mob, with torches lit, come to your door over a misunderstanding. However, unlike Helprin, I realized that much of the fault was my own. After all, especially when writing in a journalistic setting, it is the writer’s responsibility to write so that they can not be misunderstood. Where I learned from my mistakes and moved on, Helprin wrote a book.

Helprin, however, walked into his column with a unique combination of arrogance and ignorance. When describing the decision to write on copyright, he says he asked himself, “Who thinks about copyrights other than the few who hold them?” and that his goal was to pick a topic so dull as to not attract any attention.

Not only does this show a great misrepresentation of the law, especially since nearly every human produces copyrightable works, but also of the current climate on the Web, where copyright is one of the most controversial topics. It was as if Helprin had slept through the entire Napster era, the 35,000 RIAA lawsuits and The Pirate Bay trial, all issues that brought copyright to the forefront of even most lay of laypeople.

However, for our copyright version of Rip Van Winkle, this book represented an opportunity. It was a chance to correct his mistakes and present either a modified argument or new support for his existing one.

That’s why it is a terrible shame he failed to do either.

The Meat of the Book

Helprin’s lack of understanding of the nature of copyright on the Web is understandable. By his own admission he is a man who spends as little time in front of a screen as possible and has an extreme love affair for more traditional means of communication. He drives the point home early by expressing preference for a fictional 1908 world versus an equally-fictional not-too-distant future one, even though the 1908 world required weeks for letters to be sent and received.

However, his decision to write a book entitled “Digital Barbarism” without a rudimentary study of the digital culture is rather striking. His first, and most critical, blunder was to lump all copyright reformists into one category. The Lessig’s of the world are no different than The Pirate Bay admins. All of them, in Helprin’s mind, are copyright abolitionists and need to be treated as such because any scaling back of rights or reform of copyright law (other than more extensions) is just a step down the road to abolition.

Of course, to read Lessig’s work and watch his lectures is to understand that he is very much a believer in copyright, Lessig does not wish to abolish copyright (without copyright Creative Commons would collapse) nor does he condone piracy, a point he makes repeatedly. His reforms, though still very sweeping, are targeted at re-balancing copyright law, not ending it.

But once Helprin lumps the commons into the abolitionist movement, he doesn’t stop. He plows forward with arguments against the abolition of copyright, many of which are very compelling and very correct, but are poorly targeted. It is like arguing against fascism to someone who just wishes to add a new tax. The “slippery slope” is neither slippery nor absolute. A movement in one direction does not always equal a revolutionary rush to the extreme on that side.

Yet, that’s how Helprin spends the book. Attacking shadows with arguments that don’t fit. Though at times the rocks he throws are well-aimed, the targets are a figment of his own imagination and a product of his own stereotyping.

Wasted Pages

Though the other reviews and even the big copyright symbol on the cover might lead many to believe that this is a book about copyright issues, much of it is not. Helprin makes much of his case against copyright abolition largely through anecdotes. But while personal stories are a natural addition to such books, both Lessig and Keen used them in theirs, Helprin’s anecdote/argument ratio is extremely high.

Helprin has led a very accomplished and exciting life, that much is clear from this book. I hope to have one half as exciting over the next thirty years or so. However “Barbarism” is not intended to be a memoir nor does it read like one.

The problem with “Barbarism” is that his stories, without any central plot or direction, tend to wonder aimlessly, often for pages at a time. When the word “copyright” is finally mentioned again, it feels as if it was the punchline to a very long, very bad joke. His stories are so tangential to the main issue that only one, the tale of him stealing an ear of corn from a farmer’s field, seemed to have any solid connection to the issue.

One example, he tells two stories about him fighting, or trying to fight, bulls. The first a bull in France that was rather tame and played nicely, the other one that had broken loose on his own property and nearly killed him. All of this was to explain that the response to his article was like a bull, specifically the second one. Many pages spent for an analogy that would have been just as effective with two lines.

In the end, much of the book felt like a stereotype portrayed by the character Abe (Grandpa) Simpson from The Simpsons. A teller of long, winding tales that go nowhere until the teller seems to fall asleep only to wake up back on topic.

Petty Insults

When Helprin isn’t telling stories that he tries to connect to copyright, he is insulting his perceived enemy. However, though he is at times a very witty author in this book, that edge seems to dissipate far too often and he uses words so blunt they could bludgeon someone to death.

For example, at one point, Helprin describes his opponents as “mouth breather”, “Slurpee-sucking geeks” “beer-drinking dufuses” and more (Thanks to the New York Times for pointing me to the quote I needed). Even the title of his book refers to his perceived opponents as “barbarians”, which in and of itself is a derogatory term.

For every valid point Helprin makes over the course of the book, his arguments are undermined endlessly by his pettiness and stereotyping. Since the targets of his insults are typically the younger generations, this also furthers the image of Helprin as an old man yelling at the “darn kids” even if the kids are twenty and thirty-somethings.

The result of Helprin’s painting with broad strokes is that even supporters of copyright, such as myself, find ourselves in his crosshairs, alienating the very people that may have been in the best position to rush to his defense.

Flawed Arguments

When you whittle away the personal asides and petty insults, you wind up with precious few pages that actually address the issues of copyright and offer any significant input on the issue.

On that front, I actually support some of Helprin’s founding principles, namely that no man should be entitled to the work of another for free without permission, that copyright has helped make possible the vast and diverse culture we have today, that artists create something well worth protecting and that copyright is, in large part, about protecting the investments of time, money and energy put into a work.

On that front, Helprin does a decent enough job defending the idea of copyright. In the third chapter, he has a fairly interesting discussion of the philosophies of Jefferson and Macaulay that, more than any other part of the book, actually provokes thought and makes a good case for copyright.

However, over the course of the book, he completely fails to answer to his detractors. While he cites thousands of nasty emails received, acknowledges the presence of Lessig’s wiki rebuttal to his Times column, he addresses the actual arguments of neither. He says they are there and moves on, only making fun of their grammar and/or the method with which they were delivered (Helprin really didn’t like that Wiki format Lessig used).

Worse still, he rehashes many of the same arguments form the column, only more fleshed out. For example, throughout the book he makes many (flawed) comparisons between intellectual property and real property. However, it was those arguments, in large part, that created the connection between his name and perpetual copyright, something he is now disavowing (though still favoring extensions).

In short, Helprin seems to have emerged from his ordeal with the Times none the wiser. He is repeating the same arguments like a failed General sticking to the same tactics. With no new arguments and a dismal failure at understanding what it is he is writing about, Helprin steps into the same tar pits again, just merely putting his foot down harder.

Helprin’s arguments fell flat in the 1000-word Times column and now fall equally flat over the course of a 220-page book.

The Devil Inside

However, perhaps Helprin’s greatest enemy is himself. Throughout the entire book he seems to contradict his own views and ideas. Though it may be an attempt to find balance within himself, it comes across as a see-saw back and forth between the extremes.

Where once he claims to hate the “infernal machines”, to prefer a circa-1900 life to a modern one and to spend as little time in front of a computer as possible, he also claims to own five computers, have come up with an idea for an eBook reader he proposed and even simply “loves” machines. (Note: He does say he is in favor of people using machiens but not machines using people. However, he fails to distinguish between our growing dependence on computers to, for example, our current dependence on cars.)

Where he claims to be against perpetual copyright due to the intent of the framers of the Constitution, he also bases many of his arguments on the ownership of physical property, which is perpetual.

Even the book itself is a contradiction, at the same time he cries out against iPhones and BlackBerries his book, most likely due to his publisher’s decision, is available on the Kindle and, thus, the iPhone, which is exactly how I read it.

But no matter the cause of the latter conflict, it is smacking to read an attack on iPhones and other smartphones that is being sold on the iPhone.

Sadly, of the three conflicts, it is the least confusing and the least troublesome.

Bottom Line

Helprin’s book is $25 dollars if you purchase the book in print or $10 if you purchase the Kindle version. However, it is not worth either. Though the Kindle version is the best way to read this book (I tried both), it is because it allows you to break the book up into much smaller sections than Helprin provides (Chapter 2 alone takes up almost half of the book) and makes it easier to go through Helprin’s rambling stories.

Though the book feels hefty when you pick it up at your bookstore, it is very thin on actual commentary and heavy with largely-unrelated stories, insults and stereotypes. There is little in this book that is not in his op-ed pieces and, I would argue, those pieces say it better. At least in those you do not have to sit through pages and pages of Helprin’s disjointed memories to reach a barely-tangential point about copyright.

Though Helprin is right when he says that this book is not a memoir, it is because a memoir would have an ongoing plot and a sense of direction. In truth, an actual memoir could have been a very good book, it is clear that Helprin is a talented author with a lot of great stories to tell, but this is not the format for them.

I would pass on this book and stick to his op-eds. The novel-length copyright polemic is one that few authors can tackle. Helprin is not one of them. Though I think he is a very talented writer and may look up some of his other work, this is not the format for him.

1: Hollywood in showdown over DVD ‘ripper’

First off today, RealDVD is getting its day in court. The product, which is produced by the company Real and allows users to backup their DVDs to their hard drives, had trial begin Friday.

Previously the judge in the case had issued a temporary order forbidding the sale of RealDVD, which allows users to break the CSS encryption on DVDs and copy them to their computers, saying that it appears to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. However, the judge, which is the same judge that shut down Napster in 2000, wanted to save the matter for a full trial so he could better understand the technology.

According to Real, the product is not a violation as it fills a legitimate need, to backup DVDs. RealDVD also does not allow users to make additional copies of their DVDs as the version on their hard drive is wrapped in its own version of DRM.

The trial is expected to last three days.

2: Rapidshare Shares Uploader Info with Rights Holders

Those who use Rapidshare to trade files illegally may want to be a bit more wary. A section of the law commonly used against traditional file sharers is also being used to compel RapidShare, which is hosted in Germany, to give up the IP address and other information of uploaders.

In one case, the police raided the house of an individual that uploaded Metallica’s new “Death Magnetic” album to the site.

Germany copyright law, unlike U.S. law, does not provide clear protections to Web hosts that host infringing material uploaded at the direction of their users, making them more likely to cooperate, especially with record labels and movie studios.

3: ‘Digital Barbarism’ Wages Online Copyright Battle

Finally today, a new book by author and novelist Mark Helprin challenges the notion of copyleft and makes his case for both a lengthier copyright term and stronger rights.

Without having read the book, there isn’t much to say, but there is a sample from the book in the article linked above as well as information to purchase your own copy. Obviously, I’ll have more on this in the coming weeks, after I’ve had a chance to buy and read the work.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.