The Double-Edged Sword

By Tony C. Caputo

I’ve had the privilege of spending some time and working with a world-renowned author named Harlan Ellison. If you don’t recognize the name he’s written over 60 books including Angry Candy and the upcoming paperback version of Deathbird Stories and dozens of screenplays and teleplays for film and television, including the award-winning classic episodes of the original Star Trek and Outer Limits series.

In my dealings with hundreds of creative people, Harlan is by far the most colorful and I feel honored that he calls me friend. He’s a great guy and an extraordinary talent.

He’s in the news these days, because of the Internet and intellectual property rights. Unfortunately, it’s specifically about his intellectual property rights. Stephen Robertson, a 40-year-old motel manager in California, was caught uploading several of Harlan’s short stories to alt.binaries.e-book, where hundreds of unauthorized digitized books and stories are posted for free. He’s settled with Robertson, but is in a legal war with Internet provider RemarQ and America Online, for allegedly allowing the posting of his works. Unlike the rest of my world who has embraced computers and the Internet as the answer to all things, Harlan still uses a typewriter as his tool of trade, but he is aware of the thirty some web sites devoted to his talent (www.harlanellison.com).

I agree with Harlan’s frustrations about Internet piracy, as I’ve been pirated, too, but this has also confirmed in my mind, that the world is indeed changing. Many prolific and talented authors are lost in a publishing world turned inside out by the advent of technology and ever-shrinking sales and quality. It really started before the Internet or even the computer, as we began to witness these changes with the innovation of electronic information dissemination. First, there was the radio, then television, cable, video, CD-ROM and the list goes on to include the Internet, which by far is the most dangerous of them all.

This danger lies in its link to everyone; networked media and today and tomorrow’s generations, who believe the hype and that everything [information] is free. They are so bombarded by media, living in an MTV-like world, where the once-clear boundaries between entertainment (edutainment), information and a commercial (or infomercial) for goods or services can be negligible. Lee Upland, the former vice-president of Polygram Records called MTV “the most powerful selling tool we’ve ever had.”¹ I didn’t realize that MTV was a selling tool. I had always considered it visual entertainment; an advertisement was clearly an advertisement and not an “advertorial.” Is it any wonder that our kids are so confused about the content available to them?

¹ Gender Politics and MTV, Lisa A. Lewis, Philadelphia Temple University Press, 1990

We can’t blame the children. Just think about it; all you need to do is go to Yahoo, type in what you’re looking for and you get your every desire delivered to you in a few seconds, legal or not (do you Yahoo?).

It’s like something out of Star Trek. It’s magic. “You want me to wait how long for the next [issue - episode - song - book]?”

What does a child or teenager care about the legal ramifications of taking what they want? It was “handed” to them. It’s not on a store shelf with a blatant price tag on it. It’s not expected that you leave a bookstore, video or music store without paying for the intellectual property, but on the Internet, anything posted is up for grabs.

I myself am in a quandary. As a published writer and artist, I am against the blatant misuse of intellectual property. However, I’ve seen the effects of harnessing the power of the Internet, where epidemics can spread like wild fire, and see myself as an Internet evangelist, preaching about the brave new world ahead of us. Baen Books’ online librarian Eric Flint believes that piracy is not the author’s worst enemy; its obscurity. The Internet provides a point-to-point contact with a worldwide audience to expedite successes, with two-thirds of the e-mail correspondences from Baen Book’s online patrons actually going out to buy the book. I suppose if these people (including myself) had a brilliant portfolio as vibrate as Harlan’s, there would be less preach and more naysay.

The bottom line is control. The control of use and compensation of said works. Once the government relinquished the Internet for commercial use in 1991, it was like everything began to spin out-of-control. As if a killer virus was set free on us unsuspecting citizens. We are all driving forward to desperately save the world as we know it today, but no matter what we do, it continues to infect everything and everybody.

I wonder if somewhere deep in the recesses of a dark government office there’s a mad computer scientist who must still be laughing, today.

I know my friend Harlan isn’t.

Tony Caputo is a freelance writer and the E-Commerce Solution Strategist for Sentinel Technologies in Downers Grove, IL, 312-769-4358. He can be reached by e-mail at tonycaputo@earthlink.net.