Image credit: Flickr user TX Corporate Power Partnership

A United States trade agreement is being negotiated in secret that includes a set of copyright rules thought to be even more stringent than the defeated and much maligned bills SOPA and ACTA.

The reason I say “thought to be” is because no one knows for sure what’s on the table, except those international government representatives in the room.  No matter what your opinion of these issues, the fact that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is being negotiated behind closed doors, as Cory Doctorow reports on Boing Boing, must leave a bad taste.  Indeed, Doctorow details how the organizers of TPP ordered a hotel to cancel the reservation when protestors wanted to hold a parallel conference.

Maira Sutton writes on the Electronics Frontier Foundation‘s DeepLinks blog that,

“The TPP is a secretive plurilateral agreement that includes provisions dealing with intellectual property, including online copyright enforcement, anti-circumvention measures, and Internet intermediary liability. Due to the secrecy of the negotiations, we do not know what is in the current version of the TPP’s IP chapter; the general public has only seen a leaked February 2011 version of the U.S. IP chapter proposal. Based on the one-sided nature of the groups directly involved, and the content of what has already leaked, we should all be concerned about the prospect of the TPP including provisions that will harm online expression, privacy and innovation on the Internet.”

You can read a version of the treaty leaked in 2011 and most likely out of date, here.  According to Public Knowledge staff attorney Rashmi Rangnath the 2011 version contains provisions that “could easily send an individual who downloaded a few songs to jail.”

Elizabeth Wasserman at Politico calls the TPP “the mother of all free-trade agreements”.  According to Wasserman, although the IP component of the Pact is only one part,

“Intellectual property proponents are looking to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement talks opening this week to help thwart growing trade in counterfeit goods and content overseas — and to reclaim the messaging from protesters framing IP protection as a threat to Internet freedom.”

 TPP protestors scored some humorous wins, however, installing anti-TPP toilet paper in the hotel, as you can see above.  Also, the performance art protestors, the Yes Men, made a fool of U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, as Paul Bedard recounts in The Examiner.

“After Kirk finished speaking, an Occupy demonstrator and actor dressed in a suit went to the microphone to announce that Kirk’s team would be receiving the “2012 Corporate Power Tool Award.” He said, “The TPP agreement is shaping up to be a fantastic way for us to maximize profits regardless of what the public of this nation–or any nation–thinks is right.”

Minutes later, according to video posted on the web, Kirk appeared unaware he was being spoofed and moved to accept the award before security moved in to kick the 20 protesters out.”

Protestors are winning this PR war, mainly due to the perverse way this treaty is being negotiated.  Surely a public debate is the best way to foster a healthy content industry, while maintaining an open internet.

Judge Denise Cote

A federal judge late yesterday allowed a lawsuit against Apple and five major publishers filed by a Seattle law firm that has offices in the same building as Amazon.com to proceed. While the decision was — as a Publishers Weekly report notes — “largely expected,” what was not expected was the blistering language of U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote ruling against Apple, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Hachette.

As Larry Neumeister reports in an Associated Press wire story, Judge Cote “cited the confident voice of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs on Tuesday as she refused to toss out lawsuits alleging the company and various publishers conspired to drive up the price of electronic books. Cotes said “Jobs had made statements that agreements between the publishers and Apple Inc., based in Cupertino, Calif., would cause consumers to ‘pay a little more’ and that prices would ‘be the same’ at Apple and Amazon.com.”

Well, it was actually more damning than that. As Neumeister continues,

The judge rejected the argument that Apple and the publishers were merely improving the efficiencies of distribution, saying: “It has everything to do with coordinating a horizontal agreement among publishers to raise prices, and eliminating horizontal price competition among Apple’s competitors at the retail level.”

The judge noted that Jobs told the publishers that “the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway.”

… The judge wrote that Apple had a “strong incentive” to encourage publishers to agree together on the rules for e-book sales so that its iBookstore did not face stiff competition.

“With the fortuitous entry of Apple into the market for e-books, and the decision by Apple to join the price-fixing conspiracy, that horizontal conspiracy became a potent weapon for engineering a fundamental shift in an entire industry,” the judge said.

As Julie Bosman summarizes it in a story for the New York Times, Judge Cote said the lawsuit “plausibly alleges that these motives converged to cause the publishing defendants and Apple to join a single conspiracy to eliminate price competition at the retail level and raise the prices consumers would pay for e-books.”

As Bosman also noted, the attorney who filed the lawsuit, Steve Berman of Hagens Berman— whose offices, an earlier Times story noted, are “in a Seattle office building that also houses Amazon offices” — was delirious. “We thought that Judge Cote’s ruling was spot on, especially when she noted that we’ve gone above and beyond in illustrating the legitimacy of our case,” he tells Bosman. “We are eager to push forward with the case.”

It may not be quite so easy as he thinks, at least not in the case against Apple. As Jeff John Roberts notes in a story for paidContent, Apple seems unlikely to budge, in part because “in the past, Apple has been anything but shy about litigating,” and “in part because the pricing system it used with the publishers (in which [Apple] takes a 30 percent commission) is the same one it uses with providers of other types of content.”

For the publishers, on the other hand, things are different. “Cote’s strong language,” Roberts notes, “reinforces that … the publishers may be in a deep hole.” He continues,

Three of the publishers (Hachette, Harper Collins and Simon & Schuster) have already settled an antitrust lawsuit with the Department of Justice and agreed to change their pricing practices.

The three publishers are also in negotiations with state governments under which they are likely to pay tens of millions in consumer restitution. In plain English, this means that people who bought an e-book in the last few years may receive a small settlement payment.

The publishers appear to have entered negotiations with the states (led by Connecticut and Texas) in order to escape the clutches of the class action lawyers. Any settlement would largely excuse them from having to pay again in the class action suit.

That leaves two publishers — Penguin and Macmillan — as holdouts. Both Macmillan CEO John Sargent and Penguin CEO John Makinson have stated that their companies did nothing wrong.

Unfortunately, it seems they’re going to have to tell it to a judge that already doesn’t believe them.

Carlos Fuentes, 1928-2012

Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico’s most celebrated writer, died on Tuesday in Mexico City. He was 82.

Fuentes influence on Mexican literature was enormous, and along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar he brought South American literature to international acclaim in the 1960s and 70s.

Fuentes’ career was somewhat overshadowed by another leading Mexican writer, the poet Octavio Paz, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1990. The two writers had a very public rivalry that left both of their reputations diminished. From the New York Times obituary:

The two became friends in 1950, when Mr. Paz published his landmark work on Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude. They grew closer as they worked together on several literary projects, but by the mid-1980s their political opinions had started to differ. Mr. Fuentes supported the Sandinistas, the leftist rebel group in Nicaragua, but Mr. Paz, who had more conservative views, condemned them. Then, in 1988, the literary magazine Vuelta, which Mr. Paz directed, published an article that was fiercely critical of Mr. Fuentes, accusing him of lacking true Mexican identity. That set off a bitter and often public feud that lasted until Mr. Paz died in 1998.

Fuentes’ father, who was a diplomat, originally wanted his son to be a lawyer instead of a writer. He studied law in Switzerland and Mexico City, using his free time to write. In 1958, at the age of 29, he published his first novel Where The Air Is Clear to instant success and acclaim.

Always outspoken, Fuentes’ political beliefs caused him constant scandal. As a communist in he was banned from the United States until 1967. Afterwards he held numerous teaching positions at Ivy League institutions.

The lifting of the ban would not be his last political hurdle. As his politics became more moderate, he also served in Mexico’s foreign service, including a stint as ambassador to England. But Fuentes was not one to back down from a position, and he resigned from the foreign service more than once in political disputes. He refused awards and positions if they conflicted with his political beliefs. This of course led to conflict and in one case an extended ban on one of his best works. From the Los Angeles Times obituary:

Fuentes resigned from the foreign service again in 1977 when former President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz was appointed ambassador to Spain, saying he wouldn’t serve with the man who ordered the student massacre in Mexico City, which activists said killed up to 350 people.

A believer that literature allowed him to say what would be censored otherwise, Fuentes also was the subject of censorship.

His mystery novel Aura, which narrates a romantic encounter beneath a crucifix with a black Christ that some officials claimed was too racy, was banned from public high schools in Puerto Rico. It also sparked controversy in Mexico in 2001 when a former interior secretary asked the novel to be dropped from a suggested reading list at his daughter’s private junior high school.

Carlos Fuentes was a perennially on the list of contenders Nobel Prize for Literature but never received one, although he did win the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most prestigious award . He is survived by his daughter Cecilia Fuentes Macedo and wife Silvia Lemus. Fuentes never wrote a memoir because, as he said once in an interview: “One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.”

Specific mention was made of, among others, James Patterson, who as the piece notes produced twelve books last year and will publish thirteen this year. The NYTs mentions in passing that he is ‘aided on some titles by co-writers’.

A Forbes piece in response to the article goes into more detail, quoting an interview Patterson gave to CNN in March:

CNN: You work with a number of co-authors on some of your books. How do you divide the workload?

Patterson: We alternate words. Just kidding. Actually, I write an outline of about 50 to 60 pages that will lay out every chapter. I then ask the co-writer to contribute to the outline. I want their opinions, and I want them to feel they’re part of the process right from the get-go. Then they will write a draft.

[...] that’s the process. I do the outline, the co-writer does the first draft, and I’ll do subsequent drafts.

Forbes goes on to illustrate that this practice is nothing new. It’s depressing, though, that the kind of productivity it enables has become a stick with which to flog those lazy, no-good layabouts who currently produce, on their lonesome, a novel every year, and often work a day-job too. Suw Charman-Anderson, the author of the Forbes piece, concludes that even in the e-reader era, a book a year is plenty; I’m inclined to agree with John Self over at Asylum, who called it a breakneck pace.

One of the most interesting pieces of the NYT article quotes Lee Child fan Scott Schiefelbein. Writing an Amazon review of ‘Second Son’, a short story in the Reacher series, written by Child and sold at $1.60 for the Kindle edition, he says there is ‘no limit’ to the number of Child’s books he would buy:

I’ll give basically anything he writes a chance… With my favourite authors, I always want to read more from them.

The piece doesn’t quote any of the 32 fans who gave the book only one star, though. Some excerpts:

I’ve read every Reacher book out there, and eagerly await the next one. But give me a break! This was an insult to Lee Child’s many fans… To be honest, after reading this, I’m not sure I’ll continue the series.

This was a very disappointing short story and the author should be ashamed to have it published.

I was so sad after reading this short story. I could not believe the author could write such tripe.
Obviously the author felt the need to get a few more bucks from his series, and succeeded in getting mine. Not another penny.

Not always a foolproof plan, then. (And as an editor, I’m thankful that Schiefelbein’s ‘I’ll give basically anything he writes a chance’ doesn’t hold for everyone.) These reviews should be a lesson to us all that more, more, more is not always the way.

Brian Boyd remembers Dmitri Nabokov

UK authors are paid when libraries loan their print books, but not their ebooks

Survey: Teens don’t like ebooks

Britain catching up fast on e-reading

Gloria Steinem’s books are back … digitally

Connecticut Wants To Be Sure Elementary Students Learn To Pay Sales Tax On Books

British Library gets new head

Have we fallen out of love with John Updike?

Author of self-published book Shades of Gray overwhelmed by sudden attention

For two weeks, Longfellow had a ballot box at the front of the store open for nominations, the only criteria being that the book be a work of fiction by an American author, published in 2011. They also accepted submissions by email for people who couldn’t get to the store and didn’t mind giving up anonymity, and posted a list of suggestions online. Once the votes were tallied last week, Longfellow announced that Wallace’s unfinished novel had taken the prize and would be available at the store at a 25% discount. The Pale King had been one of the three nominees put forth to the Pulitzer board by the jury for fiction.

Henrik Kubel, A2/SW/HK

In the wake of the now infamous Mike Daisey incident on This American Life, other writers operating in the grey area between fact and fiction are finding their work under the magnifying glass. On the radio segment, Daisey recounted incidents drawn from his performance piece ”The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”, which detailed poor working conditions at Apple’s Chinese factories.  A great portion of the anecdotes he used are now  understood to have been false or exaggerated.

The work of another This American Life alum, David Sedaris, is being called into question.  In The Washington Post, Paul Farhi asks whether Sedaris’ stories, mostly personal skits about his upbringing and working life, deserve to be examined in the same way as Daisey.

“The immediate question is whether Sedaris’s stories are, strictly speaking, true — an important consideration for journalistic organizations such as NPR and programs such as “This American Life.” A secondary consideration is what, if any, kind of disclosure such programs owe their listeners when broadcasting Sedaris’s brand of humor.”

Sedaris clearly has a comedian’s style, but his stories are still meant to be about real people and real events. Ellen McDonnell, NPR’s executive editor of news programming says of Sedaris’ work “It was not a he said-she said, who-what-why story like Mike Daisey.”  And yet, as Farhi puts it,

“Unlike a stand-up comedian or a comic literary stylist such as James Thurber, who engaged in obviously implausible situations, Sedaris’s stories fall into a gray area. They are rooted in real events and populated by presumably real people, with their humor derived from Sedaris’s comic “voice.” These exaggerations and comic interjections are evident to a listener or reader, and Sedaris has attested that they are essentially autobiographical. His best-selling books, such as “Naked” and “Barrel Fever,” have been sold as nonfiction.”

One might defend Sedaris, given he is writing in a personal, anecdotal style and is not attempting to claim journalistic rigour, as Daisey did.  Still, he implies his memoirs are factual or “realish”, and they may hurt those they represent in an exaggerated or fabulist manner.  This concern was examined by Alex Heard in The New Republic, in an article called “This American Lie”, where he interviewed the friends and family who Sedaris often features in his work.

This American Life is considering how to approach the issue.

“The Daisey debacle has brought about a reassessment. [Ira] Glass said three responses are under discussion: fact-checking each of Sedaris’s stories to ensure their accuracy, labeling them to alert the audience that the stories contain “exaggerations” or doing nothing.”

Memoirs are an extremely popular genre these days and it is possible that non-fiction has greater “currency” than fiction.  Perhaps that is why producers and editors have been unwilling to label such writers correctly.

Further issues of “truthiness” are examined in the book The Lifespan of a Fact.   John D’Agata and Jim Fingal detail their exhanges, when as an intern, Fingal began fact checking D’Agata’s article about the suicide of a Las Vegas teenager.  D’Agata excused his errors and exaggerations by claiming that he was not a journalist but rather an essayist, without the same duty to truth, just as Daisey asserted that his segment for This American Life was simply a theatrical performance and not a piece of investigative journalism.

The problem with D’Agata’s claim was identified by Jennifer B. McDonald in a review of the book in The New York Times.

“His techniques look suspiciously like those of a reporter: he immersed himself in a place, got to know its people, consulted documents, recorded his impressions, turned his material into a narrative. Not only that, but he loaded his essay with factually verifiable detail — dates, times, dimensions, directions, statistics, names, quotations from actual journalistic sources. He declares that as an essayist he shouldn’t be held to the same standards of correctness as a journalist. So fine, he’s not a journalist. He’s a wolf in journalist’s clothing.”

Sedaris does not use detail in the same way as D’Agata or Daisey, but he does accumulate people and incidents to create humorous moments that are poignant because they are also meant to be true.  McDonald wrote, ”D’Agata uses “facts” that aren’t facts to make a statement about a “reality” that is real for no one but himself, and relies on “coincidences” that aren’t coincidences to reveal something “profound” about Las Vegas, or the cosmos, that is not profound but rather an accidental accumulation of detail and event.”

Sedaris might be accused of using the same technique, creating a mixture of profundity and hilarity by what he conveys as fact, which might be better called fiction.  But does it matter?

Penguin CEO David Shanks

Seventeen more states have joined the class-action lawsuit against the publishing industry over ebook pricing, and the release of the amended complaint has included some fascinating evidence previously redacted, including a detailed email from Steve Jobs about ebook pricing.

In a report from PaidContent, which broke the story, Laura Hazard Owen says the Jobs email was written “to an executive at the parent company” of one publisher who was hesitant about signing on with Apple under the agency model. Here’s Jobs’ email:

As I see it, [Conspiring Publisher] has the following choices:

1. Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.

2. Keep going with Amazon at $9.99. You will make a bit more money in the short term, but in the medium term Amazon will tell you they will be paying you 70% of $9.99. They have shareholders too.

3. Hold back your books from Amazon. Without a way for customers to buy your ebooks, they will steal them. This will be the start of piracy and once started, there will be no stopping it. Trust me, I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see any other alternatives. Do you?

Owen also cites material showing at least one of the publishers being sued, Penguin CEO David Shanks, was furious that Random House had decided not to join the other publishers by going to agency. Owen says the newly released evidence reveals that Shanks …

… sent Barnes & Noble‘s then-CEO Steve Riggio an e-mail reading in part, “Random House has chosen to stay on their current model and will allow retailers to sell at whatever price they wish…I would hope that [Barnes & Noble] would be equally brutal to Publishers who have thrown in with your competition with obvious disdain for your welfare…I hope you make Random House hurt like Amazon is doing to people who are looking out for the overall welfare of the publishing industry.” The state complaint additionally says that Shanks was trying to get Barnes & Noble to “stop any promotion or advertising of Random House titles,” and when Barnes & Noble continued to do so, “Shanks went back to Barnes & Noble again. Following this contact, Barnes & Noble’s management decided not to feature Random House in any future advertising.”

While fascinating and seemingly damning, Owen smartly points out the new material “does not prove the states’ claim that all five publishers acted against Random House, since only one publisher is mentioned.”

So far, neither Owen nor any of the other news outlets picking up the story — such as CNET News, which ran this story — has been able to get any of the parties mentioned above has responded to requests for comment.

Meanwhile, the class action lawsuit against publishers now totals 31 states.

While every American tourist knows about the historic Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop, owned by Sylvia Beach, publisher of James Joyce and harborer of many others. (Though few know the current shop on the Seine is not the original.) Fewer know that the real English-language shop for Parisian insiders is the Village Voice—a place where you could accidentally run over Susan Sontag on the way in, as my husband once did. For three decades the Village Voice has been the place for an incredibly distinguished roster of American and other English-speaking literary figures to rendezvous with readers.

Sadly, the reasons for the closing come as no surprise. In a letter to friends and patrons cited on the American Library in Paris website, bookshop founder and owner Odile Hellier explains that “on-line book retailers such as Amazon and the growing popularity of e-readers, among other market forces, are threatening independent bookstores all over the world,” and the Village Voice is no exception.

Back in 1982, when the bookshop first opened, its St. Germain quarter location was known as the “triangle d’or de l’edition” and was a funkier, less-expensive Parisian cultural hub. Now rents are prohibitive, and, Hellier laments, “the neighborhood has been overrun by fashionable boutiques and bars and lost its attractiveness to book browsers and buyers.”

If you are fortunate enough to be traveling to Paris before the end of July, be sure to stop in to this real historic literary landmark.

The Times article discusses a pair of scenarios concerning books after life. After giving Amazon two chances to answer the question of what happens to their eBooks after a person dies the reporter received the same answer twice. Shocking, we know.

So what did they find out? While you might have perished, your Amazon account will potentially live on forever (provided you keep it in good order and someone knows the log in password). In other words: The book as undead corporate animation. O joy!

The Times reports:

Why should this work? Because, dear readers, your Kindle e-books never die so long as you keep your account open. They are immortal. I have this from the e-book seller’s mouth, even though it came out sort of sideways at first.

To the question, “So what happens to all my Kindle e-books when I die?” Amazon replied, “I’m sorry; Kindle content can’t be resold or donated, or transferred between accounts. The purchase and download of digital content from Amazon.com, including content from the Kindle Store, is associated with the Amazon.com account used to make the original purchase. As a result, Kindle content can’t be transferred to another person.”

So, if I’m reading this right, I can’t give my e-books away before I go, not one of the entire 70 I’ve purchased so far. By the way, I appreciated the “I’m sorry,” which was comforting even though it did sound a bit like I had already passed away, something I don’t expect to do anytime soon.

But it got me to thinking: What if I asked Amazon the same question again, just to see what they say? Here’s what I got back: “Kindle content purchased on your account will remain attached to your account indefinitely until you chose to remove the content or close your account. If you’d like to give your Amazon.com account to somebody else, the content can be accessed by that person. However, Kindle content can’t be transferred between different accounts.”

Can you see it now? Sometime 100 years from now some descendant of yours will neurally flip through the family archives and stumble on your old Amazon Prime account information (thankfully you set up a trust to handle the annual payments) and they can explore the world of you .MOBI files. They’ll say to themselves, this DRM’d file used to belong, well not belong really, but used to be accessed by my long deceases relative.

It warms the heart, really.