Pirate Cinema

Today, October 2, 2012 is the hardest it will ever be to copy things. It will never get harder. It only gets easier from here. Our grandchildren will marvel at how hard copying was in 2012. "Tell me again, Grandpa, about the years 2012, when hard-drives with the capacity to hold all the music, movies, words, photos and games
ever
weren't three for a buck in the check-out aisle at the grocery store! Tell me again about when not everyone knew the magic trick of typing 'movie name' and 'bittorrent' into a search engine!"

I can't stop you from copying this book (even if I wanted to). I can't force you to buy it in order to read it (even if I wanted to). All I can do is ask you to consider purchasing it if you enjoyed it. There's links below for buying the book in print or ebook form. All the ebooks are DRM-free because they come from Tor Books, who, as of summer 2012, publish
all
of their books without DRM (this is one of the reasons I love them!).

If you don't want a print edition, and if you're happy with this ebook, you can still send some money my way by
donating a copy to a library or school
. This will also make you a class-A dude.

You don't have to buy the book from an online seller, either.
Here's a tool
that will find you independent stores in your area that have copies on their shelves.

USA:

Amazon Kindle
(DRM-free)
Barnes and Noble Nook
(DRM-free)
Google Books
(DRM-free)
Apple iBooks
(DRM-free)
Kobo
(DRM-free)
Amazon
Booksense
(will locate a store near you!)
Barnes and Noble
Powells
Booksamillion

Canada:

Amazon Kindle
(DRM-free)
Kobo
(DRM-free)
Chapters/Indigo
Amazon.ca

Audiobook:

DRM-free download

This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. That means:

You are free:

Under the following conditions:

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link ‹
http://craphound.com/pc
›

Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get our permission

More info here: ‹
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
›

See the end of this file for the complete legalese.

The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.

I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of this book (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for bovels), that's still only fifty or a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage.

I
hate
the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just
stupid
to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a
license
to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing.

Copyright laws are increasingly passed without democratic debate or scrutiny. In Great Britain, where I live, Parliament recently passed the Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law that allows corporate giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if anyone in the house is accused (without proof) of copyright infringement; it also creates a "Great Firewall of Britain" that is used to censor any site that record companies and movie studios don't like. This law was passed in 2010 without any serious public debate in Parliament, rushed through using a dirty process through which our elected representatives betrayed the public to give a huge, gift-wrapped present to their corporate pals.

It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like the US, the EU and Canada negotiated secret copyright treaties called "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) and "Trans-Pacific Partnership" (TPP) that have all the problems that the Digital Economy Act had and then some. The plan was to agree to them in secret, without public debate, and then force the world's poorest countries to sign up for it by refusing to allow them to sell goods to rich countries unless they do. In America, the plan was to pass it without Congressional debate, using the executive power of the President. ACTA began under Bush, but the Obama administration has pursued it with great enthusiasm, and presided over the creation of TPP. The secret part of the plan failed -- ACTA ran into heavy opposition in Congress and has been rejected by Mexico and the European Parliament -- but the treaty isn't dead yet, has supporters on both sides of the house who keep attempting to bring it back under a new name. This is a bipartisan lunacy.

So if you're not violating copyright law right now, you will be soon. And the penalties are about to get a lot worse. As someone who relies on copyright to earn my living, this makes me sick. If the big entertainment companies set out to destroy copyright's mission, they couldn't do any better than they're doing now.

So, basically,
screw that
. Or, as the singer and American folk hero Woody Guthrie so eloquently put it:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

Most of my previous books have been released under a slightly different Creative Commons license, one that allowed for derivative works (that is, new creative works based on this one). Keen observers will have already noticed that this book is licensed "NoDerivs" -- that is, you can't make remixes without permission.

A word of explanation for this shift is in order. When I first started publishing under Creative Commons licenses, I had to carefully explain this to my editor and publisher at Tor Books. They were incredibly forward-looking and gave me permission to release the first-ever novel licensed under CC -- my debut novel
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
(‹
http://craphound.com/down/)
›. This ground-breaking step was only possible because I was able to have intense, personal discussions with my publisher.

My foreign rights agents are the inestimable Danny and Heather Baror, and collectively they have sold my books into literally dozens of countries and languages, helping to bring my work to places I couldn't have dreamed of reaching on my own. They subcontract for my agent Russell Galen, another inestimable personage without whom I would not have attained anything like the dizzy heights that I enjoy today. They attend large book fairs in cities like Frankfurt and Bologna in order to sell the foreign rights to my books, often negotiating with one of a few English-speakers at a foreign press, who then goes back and justifies her or his decisions to the rest of the company.

The point is that this is nothing like my initial Creative Commons discussion with Tor. That was me sitting down and making the case to editors I've known for years (my editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, has known me since I was 17). My foreign rights are sold by a subcontractor of my representative to a representative of a press I've often never heard of, who then has to explain my publishing philosophy to people I've never met, using a language I don't speak.

This is hard.

Danny and Heather have asked -- not demanded, asked! -- that I consider publishing books under a NoDerivs license, so that I can consult with them before I authorize translations of my books. They want to be able to talk to potential foreign publishers about how this stuff works, to give me time to talk with them, to ease them into the idea, and to have the kind of extended conversation that helped me lead Tor into their decision all those years ago.

And I agreed. Free/open culture is something publishers need to be led to, not forced into. It's a long conversation that often runs contrary to their intuition and received wisdom. But no one gets into publishing to get rich. Working in the publishing industry is virtually a vow of poverty. The only reason to get into publishing is because you flat-out love books and want to make them happen. People work in publishing for the same reason writers write: they can't help themselves.

So I want to be able to have this conversation, personally, unhurriedly, one-to-one. I want to keep all the people involved in my books -- agents, subagents, foreign editors and their bosses -- in the loop on these discussions. I will always passionately advocate for CC licensing in
all
of my work. I promise you that if you write to me with a request for a noncommercial derivative use, that I will do everything in my power to see that it is authorized.

And in the meantime, I draw your attention to article 2 of all Creative Commons licenses:

Nothing in this License is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any uses free from copyright or rights arising from limitations or exceptions that are provided for in connection with the copyright protection under copyright law or other applicable laws.

Strip away the legalese and what that says is, "Copyright gives you, the public, rights. Fair use is real.
De minimus
exemptions to copyright are real. You have the right to make
all sorts of uses
of
all
copyrighted works,
without
permission,
without
Creative Commons licenses.

Rights are like muscles. When you don't exercise them, they get flabby. Stop asking for stuff you can take without permission. Please!