It has been proven to us (members of the general populace) time and again that we're not actually "buying" and we don't "own" digital media: whether ebooks, digital movies, music, or games. We are licensing or renting them. And apparently the terms of the license often include altering the contents or removing access (e.g. the Kindle 1984 fiasco) at the whim of the licensor. To be honest, I'm not really sure if the license explicitly allows that or not -- I'm not reading multi-page terms and conditions every time I make a digital purchase, even though I know I should -- but it has certainly happened on multiple occasions.
It's odd to me that we've accepted this for digital purchases. Can you imagine checking out at a grocery store and being presented with a hundred page amalgamation of terms of use for every item you're buying?
I know government regulation is a non-starter for many, but I personally would not mind if the government established some sort of digital version of the first sale doctrine and stopped businesses from using terms like "buy", "purchase", or "own" for practices that did not meet those criteria. Sure, let Amazon license you ebooks that can be edited or revoked at the whim of Amazon or the publisher, but let's "call a fig a fig and a trough a trough".
A company that owns the work of another is not a creator. The moral rights (droits moraux), which include the right of attribution, sit with the creator and are not transferable.
It depends. But usually smaller musical labels, or smaller publishing houses, or even large Hollywood studios directly relate to the creators, and share profits with them.
Buying directly from creators is great when available, and usually the resulting file is unencumbered enough so that pirating it just makes no sense. (This is why most money I spent on music pass through Bandcamp.)
That’s a lot of trouble, more than straight piracy and more than straight commercial “purchase”. That seems an unreasonable burden to impose on normal people.
This is after they announced a separate release of non-bowdlerized versions. So extant purchasers who wish to have e-book versions of the original need to buy them a second time. Had they just released the modified versions as a separate edition this would have been unnecessary. In view of this timeline of events, increasing revenue seems to be the motive here, and the publishers seem to now be implicated in some kind of deceptive business practice such as bait and switch or worse.
No, the motive is ideology, not money. This way ensures almost universal replacement.
The default user action is null. If they had the new one released separately, nobody would have purchased it. By replacing the old one, few will buy the original.
The bleaching will be much more complete this way.
>If they had the new one released separately, nobody would have purchased it.
This is true, and they wouldn't have wanted to do that, not least because it would reflect poorly on the changes, but this would have been an alternative honest way to have released the new editions had they wished to, in contrast to what they actually did.
It's a grift, the Sensitivity readers whip up backlash to anything remotely offensive and then sell the "Cure" to any company Stupid enough to listen to a loud minority on twitter.
Everyone knows demand For his books was going nowhere, the only change is these new people pretending they're the arbiters of everything proper and polite. Wasn't a fan of churchy nobodies telling me what media I shouldn't consume, nor will I kowtow to a bunch of Otherwise irrelevant art graduates.
The True Believers of Wokeness^tm are now completely sidelined and we're in the feeding frenzy stage of the fad. Wizards of the Coast cash grab for D&D was the first time that I was someone _completely_ transparently trying to fleece their customers while being draped in a rainbow.
They were, but it's now hip to blame 'wokeness' for the horse bolting out the barndoor, the milk going bad, and other similar calamities, like rains of frogs, poor stock performance relative to the S&P500, and so on, and so forth.
>When we initially conceived of revising the OGL, it was with three major goals in mind. First, we wanted the ability to prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products. Second, we wanted to address those attempting to use D&D in web3, blockchain games, and NFTs by making clear that OGL content is limited to tabletop roleplaying content like campaigns, modules, and supplements. And third, we wanted to ensure that the OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players, and the community—not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose.
I'm not sure that link says what you think it does.
The very first sentence in the 'what's next' part of that post starts out, "The next OGL will contain the provisions that allow us to protect and cultivate the inclusive environment we are trying to build"
So sounds to me like they're doubling down on the ideology while relaxing (at least some of) the licensing terms.
Unless you shorten it to low single digits (which would be nice, but so are unicorns) you'd still want a way to make things available that the original author no longer has a commercial interest in. It doesn't benefit society to make things unvailable, even if it is "only" for 10 or 20 years.
>No, the motive is ideology, not money. This way ensures almost universal replacement.
It isn't an either/or situation. Seems likely they are motivated by both money and ideology. If it was purely money they could retroactively censor existing books without offering the original version at all (which would cost them money).
>That doesn't make sense, how would that make them money?
They are retroactively altering/censoring the books that people have already purchased, and offering the original uncensored version as a new purchase.
>Secondly, as these are e-books, how would releasing copies of the originals cost them money?
They are not "releasing" copies of the originals, they are selling them for money. People who bought these books as originally written are now going to be forced to pay more money in order to revert their purchases to the original, uncorrupted version.
> They are retroactively altering/censoring the books that people have already purchased, and offering the original uncensored version as a new purchase.
But that wasn't what was said, unless it was a typo.
> > If it was purely money they could retroactively censor existing books without offering the original version at all
Implying that they wouldn't offer the originals if it was all about money. That was what I meant by "that doesn't make sense". It sounds like you agree so it was just miscommunication.
> People who bought these books as originally written are now going to be forced to pay more money in order to revert their purchases to the original, uncorrupted version.
You originally said it would cost the publishers money, which is what I questioned. But again, I think we agree and this is just a language barrier.
What they have done is stupid and bad. But reducing it to "money or ideology" is a false dichotomy, there are other reasons that may have motivated their stupid choice, and it is probably a mix of all those.
If it is ideology, how do you explain that they changed a reference of Conrad to Austen?
A third option is that they acted clumsily in good faith by trying to keep the book up-to-date with the new generation. The fact that some people are offended and want so much believe into a culture war move tells more about these persons than the publishers.
But they did not replace other reference to a male character by a female one. In particular, in the same paragraph, they did not replace Hemingway and Kipling (who are way worst in the "woke circle").
I feel that this is a good example that everything can be shoe-horned into a "woke agenda". They would have replaced Austen by Conrad and some people would have said "these woke had to switch to an anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist".
If you read everything with the idea that there is a woke agenda, you will always find "reason" why what you observed is secretly part of the woke conspiracy.
The reference to Kipling was replaced by one to John Steinbeck, I assume because Steinbeck was a leftist, and Kipling is perceived to have been politically on the right (certainly he is relative to contemporary standards).
That's exactly what I'm saying: you are _assuming_ because you want to find a "woke agenda". On the other hand, Steinbeck is also an author that a contemporary Mathilda-like kid would read, while they would not read Kipling.
This is the problem here: it really looks like that the equivalently probable hypothesis that it's not a woke conspiracy is totally impossible to imagine for some people, and this is a problem: they are deep in their paranoia.
I don't know if the reason is that Steinbeck is leftist or not. It is even possible that it is a woke agenda reason. What is worrying is that some people are just wanting sooo much for it to be a woke agenda, and the problem is that you can always turn everything into a woke agenda. If they would have replaced Steinbeck by Kipling, you would have said "it's because Kipling's books are talking about other cultures and Steinbeck talks about America, and for the wokes, it's bad to talk about America".
That being said, maybe I'm a bit biased, because so far, in a lot of cases, those moral panics turn out to be blown out of proportion: the "bad wokes threatening freedom" turn out to not defend the ideological position they are told they have. It may be the case here too: all this story may be just idiots who clumsily tried to keep the book relevant for what they think was the new taste.
they did not replaced Hemingway and Kipling BY A WOMAN. Sorry, I should have been clearer, but this sentence was completing the previous sentence.
At the end, it's basically what I'm saying: they replace Conrad by Austen, and one says "it's woke because they replace men by women", but they replace Kipling by Steinbeck, and one says "it's woke because they replace a man with a right ideology with a man with a left ideology". They would have replaced Austen by Conrad and one would have said "it's woke because Conrad was anti-imperialist". They would have replaced Steinbeck by Kipling and one would have said "it's woke because Kipling is more multicultural than america-centered Steinbeck".
Not just that. Conrad is pretty controversial these days in certain circles. Many people consider "Heart of Darkness" to be racist. I think another male author would have been passed over without remark.
But why did they choose the replace Conrad by Austen instead of replacing Hemingway or Kipling. Both Hemingway and Kipling are more controversial in certain circles (for Hemingway, cf. the Ken Burns' documentary, for Kipling, he is a jingo imperialist). As far as I know, critiques of Conrad were done in the 80's and never really stuck.
So, no, it does not make sense: if they wanted to remove someone controversial, they would have started with Kipling, then Hemingway, then Conrad.
>This is after they announced a separate release of non-bowdlerized versions.
That's not clear. The person quoted as having it happen to them posted that it happened the same day as the announcement of the non-bowdlerized versions, and the linked article was also published that day.
Yes? The publisher's intent changed when they decided to publish both copies. If they are unwilling to revert the change they pushed out, the op's claim of it being a money grab might be accurate.
Its actually must worse, that's a very surface view. This is subversive political warfare.
They are retroactively editing history, and no copyright grant should ever allow you to do that or to damage property that you have already legitimately paid for, especially without consent.
Its a violent subversive attack on ideological aspects of people's culture, lives, and property rights.
Honestly, they should have the copyright immediately revoked if they start pushing ideological or subversive edits into classic works. Make a clear statement that you only get these granted protections if you play by the cultures rules, and corruptive behavior will not be tolerated.
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a clever counter point because no one was happy with that either.
But at least it was the creator themselves editing their own works. And Lucas didn’t reach into your DVD collection and stop you watching the originals. It was just a new edition.
> But at least it was the creator themselves editing their own works
Original author vs rights holder, doesn't matter to me. Once art is released, it belongs to the public. The rights holders are entitled to make money from it at least.
> It was just a new edition.
Considering that the best quality release of the non-special editions is a Laserdisc, it's basically as good as deleting the originals from history.
That’s a bit entitled. If I make something, I get to modifying it as much as I like as the creator, if I change my mind. Maybe my changes suck. But that’s not my problem as the creator.
Complaining about format is also a bit silly. No one has to continuously release things you like in the format you choose. Loads of things are out of print. That’s just the nature of technology. And in this day and age, there’s a torrent.
Calling it violent is a poor way to get people to see your side. Makes me want to disagree with you when I agree with everything else you've said. I question if you've ever seen real violence if you're willing to write that
> Calling it violent is a poor way to get people to see your side.
We will have to disagree. I call it like I see it. Its an insidious but violent attack on shared cultural experiences.
You either defend your culture and way of life or you don't, and recognition of the attack for what it is, is absolutely necessary to come to that understanding. Some of us operate on a larger world view and time horizon and know just how much darkness is out there, and the insidious ways it creeps in.
Moreso than others who would snipe at word usage for something as serious as this.
Let me ask you, do you think these changes will impact you personally if you are late in your adult life? No?
Who do you think they will impact the most and how?
Who is the target audience of those books... its children who have no previous experience of the stories, or world experience to compare against, who often read these books prior to the age of reason or shortly after.
Children who through social intelligence absorb what they read and experience like a sponge, and then imitate.
In other words they read these at the point before or at which they can only just begin to biologically think critically, and tell and detect lies.
So why would you go through the expense of doing these things, it certainly isn't to align with a minority groups temporary message that will burn out in a few years.
So why would you do this... nothing productive or good comes to mind except to alter a future generations ideology for some intended private purpose. Its taking classic works, changing them to a slightly different message, and then calling them the same thing (when the original message is lost). Its a fundamental act of corruption of a shared cultural medium, which when internalized and permanent becomes a part of people's identity, or if it constantly changes does not.
What could they gain from indoctrinating millions of children who might even be required to read these books in their public education classes at an age where they can't recognize the harms of internalizing aspects?
What happens to people psychologically when you have no shared cultural mores or folkways. Do you think they develop to become well adjusted individuals? or does the civilization inevitably start to tear itself apart, jumping at shadows and perceived slights.
I can't think of a more serious matter with the stakes higher. If you aren't willing to defend what's important (i.e. your future) it calls into question deep issues of why you do anything, or shouldn't do anything. You might end up with something like Brave New World, if we survive at all.
Businesses have no right to interfere with children's development, and this change would do just that in a un-quantifiable way. Its an unprofitable choice, so there's clearly some alternative motive to justify the cost.
The firm should only have profit motive, what profit motive could justify the expenses for these changes.
What sort of indoctrination are children going to go through by reading that a character is "enormous", instead of reading that the same character is "enormously fat"? Did you even see the list of changes?
You're proposing a conspiratorial idea to a scenario that has a way easier explanation.
First of all, you neglect to realize that what you say is just the first round of changes. Once you allow it, it doesn't stop, ever.
First its enormous, then its tiny, then its something else. Before you know it, there's no relevance and its discarded as no longer culturally significant, and that's just the cultural identity portion of it (a shared mooring being removed).
Second, its not conspiratorial at all, there's actually a large body of vetted documentation in terms of the threats of political warfare dating back to the 1950s, and the more recent psychological blindspot research and manipulation which many of those threats and material choose to apply/target in some form to bypass critical thinking. This is what we are talking about when it comes to allowing an avenue for subversion and indoctrination into culturally significant works read primarily by children who have no defenses.
You have no idea how happy I would be to be wrong about this, but this is the real world, and letting these things happen is a recipe for disaster and an abandonment of generational contract responsibilities we have for our children.
Well , let's pretend for a moment that we're not all highly focused children's book authors.
* I don't know what those changes in the book will cause, I'm not the author who carefully and selectively chose his words -- neither are the people that have decided to change the selection. *
At least they could explain this one away with "it's just a copyright issue, we're not censoring anything". Here it's plain and open censorship, initiated by the publisher.
Replacing one copy with another in your own device is a fairly intrusive act.
We don't have a word for it yet, given that classical censorship developed in the era of printed books, when such activities were technologically impossible. But I would say that it falls under penumbra of censorship because of the intent. And the intent is to remove certain speech from average reader's view without the reader's consent.
Censorship does not have to be total in order to be censorship. Even in authoritarian states, small oppositional media outlets may be tolerated, so that foreign accusations of media control can be rebuked: "Hey, look at Radio X, we are definitely not censoring them." But their reach is carefully kept limited.
You didn’t buy a book. You bought a license for the content that can be revoked at any time. You also licensed the ebook provider to remove or alter the content as they see fit.
Don’t want changing books? Pirate your ebook or buy a paper book.
Books have been around for centuries. You can't redefine the term because lawyers. If anything, that kind of ninja editing of intellectual history is fraud on a civilizational scale.
Doesn't mean you can sell license subscriptions or whatnot, but what you sell has to match up with what the buyer thinks they're purchasing.
> You didn’t buy a book. You bought a license for the content that can be revoked at any time.
Odd, when I look at a Kindle book on Amazon it shows a button to "Buy now".
> You also licensed the ebook provider to remove or alter the content as they see fit.
It is good that at least the EU has started to recognize the concept of informed consent. Clicking agree on a multi-page contract when that is the only way to access content that you (or someone else) have already paid for is not it.
> Don’t want changing books? Pirate your ebook or buy a paper book.
Those are the immediately available options, but that doesn't mean we have to just accept digital "purchases" being whatever the seller wants them to be while still trying to lure in people by making it seem they are buying something.
You have to understand, LGBT-friendly today means that there are forced diversity inclusions at every corner so noone can possibly not see the progressiveness.
(But having once reviewed a swath of inclusiveness edits via side by side comparisons first hand out of intellectual curiosity about what is going on, it was kinda a nothingburger was my takeaway.)
Not "freely", as it is under copyright. The copyright holders may allow you to access the unbowdlerized version, at additional effort with separate payment. Or they may one day decide otherwise and your access is instantly gone. Unless of course you go to samizdat...
Thanks. I always forget about graphic novels. I should buy more.
Last one I bought was years ago, about Jimi Hendrix. Still available but I don't know if you get the audio CD with it containing his solo acoustic home recordings. Very nicely illustrated:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42100.Voodoo_Child
Seems like a good place to chime in with my personal anxiety about AI: that each citizen will have an AI assigned to spy on them full time.
So they already have all the data, but nobody is looking at it. But soon (or perhaps already) we'd have (the functional equivalent of) a conscious being paying 100% attention to your every act.
> Seems like a good place to chime in with my personal anxiety about AI: that each citizen will have an AI assigned to spy on them full time.
Reminds me of the Culture novels by Iain M Banks. They use AI drones to prevent criminals from reoffending by constant monitoring.
> The Culture doesn't actually have laws; there are, of course, agreed-on forms of behaviour; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing that we would recognise as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not being invited to parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and stories about yourself in the information network; these are the normal forms of manner-enforcement in the Culture. The very worst crime (to use our terminology), of course, is murder (defined as irretrievable brain-death, or total personality loss in the case of an AI). The result - punishment, if you will - is the offer of treatment, and what is known as a slap-drone. All a slap-drone does is follow the murderer around for the rest of their life to make sure they never murder again. There are less severe variations on this theme to deal with people who are simply violent.
I think that was part of DARPA's 2001 Total Information Awareness progam. For 330 million American citizens, let's see, that's about a $100,000 upfront investment each at todays's prices? So um, 33 trillion dollars? Add in economies of scale, maybe 3-4 trillion dollars? About half the cost of the Iraq War and Afghan War combined?
Who needs infrastructure, education, public health, etc. when your primary concern is spying on your own population? The STASI and Gestapo - and their clients - would have understood.
Oh it will get better, sure there will be your government issued spy watching you, but there will also be you Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft issued spies which will also harass you hyper-targeted personalized ads. walk past animated ad it uses deepfakes to put you and your family in a auto insurance ad, go farther down the street you see your family in another ad for a realtor and your family smiling as they move into a new home, which is a real home in your area for sale happens to be for sale for just slightly more than your willing to pay but you son look so happy in the ad. as you keep walking eye tracking software keeps note of how long your yes linger and where. Did you eyes rest on that women's breast a half second longer than the algorithm expected well now your getting ads for Viagra and condoms with her in them the next day. That's where we are headed
And then the police are allowed to use that data through dragnets. Wrong time wrong place? Enjoy the police coaxing everything they want out of the AI about you.
I fully support this but at the same time there's something wrong with how technologists use more technology whenever technology goes bad.
Like if you're not a computer person how are you supposed to use any of this stuff without being bombarded with ads or getting fleeced by dark patterns.
> if you're not a computer person how are you supposed to use any of this stuff
You're not.
It's perfectly fine if only we get access to this stuff. We warned them. We all warned them about DRM, computer freedom, corporate exploitation. They didn't understand, they didn't care. Leave them to it. Would be nice if we could save everyone but we're all better off trying to secure our own freedoms.
What would you propose doing instead? I don't see any other effective method of handling it (and no, I don't count "whine to a nameless underpaid drone working for a named overpaid drone that was assigned by one of the mega-parties to oversee your territory" as an effective option).
For those who aren’t aware what you’re referring to: in 2021, after the Dr. Seuss estate decided to stop publishing several books due to of‐their‐time stereotypes, eBay chose to also prohibit sales of those books on its platform.
Can we get a link or two? It's not that I doubt your words, but I'd like to forward this to a couple of friends whom I have been discussing the Dahl's story with.
And in the future, don’t buy customer‐hostile, DRM‐encumbered media. Use your money to support those publishers who sell DRM‐free ebooks instead, so that you can preserve multiple revisions of the digital books you pay for without the need for arcane technical tools.
That will diminish the number of books one gets to read though, personally I'd rather rip a drm-ed ebook than not reading it at all out of ideological reasons.
But since books are not fungible, it might still reduce the quality of the books you read. There is almost always a real cost boycotting something, otherwise you would not have considered it in the first place. It's fine to decide that that cost is worth paying.
I read 27 books last year, mostly relatively short novels. At that speed, I’m not going to work through my backlog of public domain classics before I'm dead in a few decades. Particularly since copyrights have started expiring in the US again at a rate of one year’s worth per year.
Yes, I mentioned DRM‐free publishers for that reason. Tor, for example, has a no‐DRM policy and remains a big player in [copyrighted] fantasy.
Some people will still want to read ebooks that aren’t available DRM‐free from anywhere. I don’t expect to convert everyone to my way of thinking. But by advocating DRM‐free media, especially in scenarios like this where publishers use their power in ways people don’t like, I hope to convince some people who wouldn’t have thought about it otherwise.
And, too, it’s like free software. People can benefit greatly from using some free software some of the time, even if they never desire to use all free software all of the time. People who purchase some of their books DRM‐free improve the state of the industry even if they don’t have 100% devotion to DRM‐free media.
For years they didn’t seem to care that the DRM was broken. These days though, they’ve stepped up and the latest version hasn’t been broken yet. There are some less than idea workarounds (like getting books in older versions with crappier typography). I periodically check in on the DeDRM tools hoping that KFX has been totally broken, but that hasn’t happened yet.
When I first read this, I was furious with the publisher. While I'm still disgusted by the behavior I am under the impression that the Dahl estate supports the historical revisions.
So what response should the company receive? Boycott? Hacktivism? Flagrant piracy? Perhaps not. Should we lobby to limit the rights of an estate edit posthumously? Should a blurb indicating the edit be required on the cover of the book?
Instead, I think a more grassroots effort is desperately needed. We need something akin to a software license that an individual author can include in their contracts with publishers and in their estate planning. It should be entirely frictionless and unambiguous. It should be the easiest path for an author to take.
I propose that a small foundation be created for the purpose of its creation and dissemination; and that a public website / petition exist so that any author publishing today can see that the idea is endorsed by the very people who inspired them to become writers.
There's a legal+technical+cultural problem where people aren't purchasing immutable copies of books or other media anymore, instead they're purchasing a complicated license that grants access to whatever they say the thing is at the time you request it. That problem can have a legal solution, or a technical+culutural solution (the technical solution alone is insufficient since there's still the cultural issue that most people don't care most of the time).
But there's also a separate purely cultural problem, which is that people felt like these changes to these books were a good idea in the first place. To me that's at least as concerning as the first problem. The sorts of changes made here--e.g. expunging usages of the word "fat"--are totally disrespectful to the author and the readership. There is already an established pattern for making material changes to a book for the sake of young and/or sensitive readers: Publish an abridged version. Make it clear that it is abridged, and sell it as a separate product. I remember reading a handful of classics as a very young kid in a format like this, which I'm sure I couldn't have managed at that age otherwise.
That second problem is emphatically not a legal problem, or even a much of a moral problem. Nobody should be prevented from behaving this way. But it's still evidence of a cultural problem. You don't make material modifications to a wildly-successful author's books and publish them like it's just another printing. That wasn't the way things were done two decades ago, and it's starting to be the way things are done now. Not illegal, and maybe not even morally wrong, just... not good.
"Publish an abridged version. Make it clear that it is abridged, and sell it as a separate product."
I recall when I was at school decades ago at a time when the use of certain words in public was much less acceptable than now that our Shakespeare texts had certain words expunged from them as they had been deemed unacceptable for our 'delicate' ears.
We highschool students were completely oblivious of the fact until to save costs I found a copy of my father's Shakespeare text which he had kept from his schooldays and used it as my textbook. When following its text in class I found my copy contained a paragraph that had been omitted from the authorized school edition.
Suffice to say, my edition became a sensation amongst the kids, everyone wanted to read the 'naughty' bit. It's so long ago that I can't remember chapter and verse but the word we delicate little flowers weren't supposed to see was bastard. Big deal!
What was immediately obvious to me even at that young age was that bannings, prohibition and censorship is counterproductive and it's much more likely to have the opposite effect of what's intended.
Around that time there was much controversy over the publication of D. H. Lawrence's† Lady Chatterley's Lover which was deemed by the Wowser Brigade as obscene. This only had the effect of multiple 'clandestine' copies turning up in the school playground with us boys huddled in small groups reading the 'naughty' parts.
Several years later a similar controversy erupted over Philip Roth' Portnoy's Complaint, and even later I came across that strange and most peculiar of works W.S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch at a secondhand book sale which shocked even my somewhat blunt sensibilities (its controversy was somewhat before my time but its notoriety still lingers even now).
It is almost certain that I would never have come across any of these works let alone bothered to have read them UNLESS public attention had made them notorious—the fact is I just don't read this sort of stuff unless controversy has first thrust it into the public limelight. There's a lesson here to be learned with respect to this Dahl affair.
Methinks there may be somewhat more to this controversy than just protecting young minds. There's nothing like a controversal beat-up to improve sales.
I'm almost certain that our censored Shakespeare texts had no impact on our morals whatsoever, if anything it made us kids more worldly and less naïve after we'd found out that we'd been censored.
We adults underestimate both the intelligence and resilience of kids, they know and don't forget when we've been hoodwinking them. No doubt, kids definitely need protection but overprotection can ill-equip them for the realities of a harsh world.
_
† Incidentally, in hindsight, it's interesting to note the double standard that applied when I was at school. On the one hand, our Shakespeare was censored over a nonsensically trivial matter, at the same time we had to study and be examined upon controversial novelist D.H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers.
Whilst Sons and Lovers was a slightly saucy novel for that time it was somewhat of a joke that we kids had to study it around the time that the publication of Lawrence's more notorious novel was the subject of court action—that is, it was in the news for all the 'wrong' reasons. The dichotomy was damned obvious, even to us kids.
Many European countries have this notion of moral rights of an author that persist even if she sells the copyright, including the right not to have their work altered. The problem here is the estate who represent the author after death are doing the altering, in defiance of Dahl’s explicit wishes when he was still alive. Authors should definitely put clauses in their wills to prevent this in the future and possibly legislation passed to make this the default.
I think framing this in terms of the author is the wrong way. Dahl doesn't care that his wishes are not being respected, because he's dead. It's society at large that is being damaged by these changes. Really, rewriting old copyright works while removing access to the old versions (wether approved by the original author or not) goes against the copryight deal: to incentivize creation by granting a limited time monopoly. If that monopoly is used to remove a work or version of it then that's a break of that contract and we should legally recognize such breaches by removing absolving the other side of the monopoly. Remember that once shared, creative works are not the property of the author alone but of everyone.
Yes and no. It would create some... unfortunate incentives.
Take Harry Potter, for example, or Star Wars. End copyright at death of creator might give people some ideas on how to deal with ideas of canon.
Or take JK Rowling right when HP started to be popular. Who'd profit if she died then? Probably the publishers that are already having the books set, printing and deals with bookstore chains already signed. I don't think "sudden death" should be something that ever enters a business strategy meeting.
Or just natural death at that moment would leave her family just as poor, quite obviously contrary to her wishes.
> End copyright at death of creator might give people some ideas on how to deal with ideas of canon.
Problems with canon are possible regardless of copyright, and changing copyright durations does not add or remove these problems.
If it is made clear that any changes or new works made due to modified canon are not the work of the original (now dead) author, then this may mitigate some of these problems somewhat.
Abolishing copyright makes it easier to improve too, since then if someone thinks they have a better idea (which might or might not be true, but it can be judged by people after it is done, and it is OK if people do not all agree) then they can do it without a lawsuit. (Just, you will have to be clear than these are now new works rather than the original works. The original canon is not to be changed, but you can make up new ones which are based on them.)
I'm not sure that death should matter (or if it did at least the copyright shouldn't end immediately on death), copyright terms should just be much shorter than they currently are.
Imagine a fairly young but successful author dying suddenly. If their family was relying on them for income their exclusive rights to sell their books shouldn't just end immediately on their death - that could really screw people over. Making things unpredictable should be avoided.
Imagine a fairly young but successful plumber dying suddenly. If their family was relying on them for income their exclusive rights to sell their labor shouldn't just end immediately on their death - that could really screw people over.
And it does. To migitate that and other similar circumstances this we have social safety nets. What is it with this expectations that not just authors of creative works but also their descendants should have this special ability to profit from their labor long after it was performed.
Meanwhile every company "selling" digital content wants that content to be bound to a single living person and go poof once that person does.
I agree with you, but I think it's easier to assist individuals in being proactive than it is to lobby for impactful legal change across multiple continents.
I think Keanu Reeve's approach in restricting digital edits to his acting via contracts is the best interim solution until the world converges on something.
> Should we lobby to limit the rights of an estate edit posthumously?
Maybe a law that requires the old version be made available for free with the digital purchases. This way people can choose which version they want to read. It cost publishers and distributors next to nothing - you can have all the versions within the same "file" so there is no increase in distribution overhead apart from a minor increase in file size.
Combined. If you want to sell a new modified version, you can, but the original goes into the library of congress and into the public domain.
Also what does this do to citations?
If we want to say that copyright also includes editright (does it? I would never have said so), and so the current owner of a copyright also has the right to edit, well ok but then is the new text still attributed to the original author?
If you put words into someone else's mouth, what does it mean anymore to quote from a book and cite the author, but the author didn't actually say that?
Somehow the new work should be divorced from the original author, except, the bulk is valued and that came from the original author, which should not be stolen from them.
It's almost like it doesn't matter if you like it or not, what an author wrote is what they wrote. Editing it to taste is nothing but an absolute lack of integrity.
This always seems to be the case with things like this.
The person who owns the intellectual property rights for the book is publishing a modified version of the book. Absolutely be mad about your already purchased copy being changed under your nose - that probably should be illegal.
But it's not really clear whether there's anything sensible that can be done past that without ironically violating the freedom of speech of the person publishing the book. (I would definitely support much shorter copyright terms though. An author who died 30 years ago doesn't need encouragement to produce more works anymore, which is supposed to be what copyright is for)
Well, corporations need separate financial and legal “lives” or else there’s no point to them.
There’s also always a person behind it, no matter how many corporations deep you go into the ownership structure.
But this Kindle censorship stuff is the fault of the woke scolds. Their spirit could be found in a society of superstitious cavemen, among the religious nuts of the 1600’s, and now this.
In the forward march of humanism, this particular fight is a social and legal one.
> But it's not really clear whether there's anything sensible that can be done past that without ironically violating the freedom of speech of the person publishing the book.
There is a simple solution. Require continued distribution for continued copyright protection - for every single version individually.
While I agree with you and support the same views personally, we, collectively, should better and fight against the censoring ideology from ground up instead of using (potentially illegal) workarounds like piracy.
Having said that, I'd happily pirate any content that someone censors, and not give any single penny to any censoring authority (for other non-censored content too) and wouldn't feel any guilt doing it.
You and koolba are seriously overestimating the number of children (and adults...) who are willing to read a book voluntarily. Teaching people to get books off of libgen is never going to be high impact, because very few people want any books.
You should go to your local school board and demand they pass a resolution forbidding the library from having copies of the new version generally available. They can keep the new version behind the desk, only available after the student proves to the librarian they understand this is a non original and lacks the literary value of the original.
Do the same with public libraries, except the new version is kept next to the almost porn books.
> Do the same with public libraries, except the new version is kept next to the almost porn books.
I haven't actually checked, but I would expect e.g. Naked Came the Stranger, Lolita, and Lady Chatterley's Lover to just be filed under "fiction". I'm not aware of a separate category for "fiction that some people do or once did consider scandalously erotic".
There is a category for actually-porn books, "romance", but you can't make any case for putting an edition of Roald Dahl there.
It should be noted that the Dahl estate is not his descendants, or lawyers that get paid to preserve his vision. It's Netflix, who bought the entire thing.
An author, and by extension the vehicle that they choose to shepherd their work after death, should have full rights to do whatever with their work.
Having said that, I can speculate that an author could stipulate that no changes may be made but I can also imagine that many may choose to allow flexibility.
The publisher should definitely be able to choose what they wanna sell, and issue new revisions as they see fit. Going into my house and rewriting instances of the work that I already own is insane. This is just as ridiculous as if Amazon were to delete ebooks you've purchased for your Kindle.
> The publisher should definitely be able to choose what they wanna sell, and issue new revisions as they see fit.
I agree with the first half of your sentence, but not the second. If an author finalizes their work, then that's it. The publisher can choose to publish or not publish it, but they do not own the copyright on the work, and are not permitted to make modifications and then distribute what can only be considered an unauthorized derived work.
Granted, copyright holders may of course contractually allow publishers to do this. I can only assume this is the case for Dahl's works, as I'd be surprised if a major book publisher did something that would infringe on an author's (estate's) copyright. But I don't think this should be the default, and I'd hope and expect copyright law agrees with me.
Netflix owns the rights. This isn't the author's family or anyone else. Just a dumb bunch of soulless LA based execs virtue signaling/moralizing in between their coke/hooker binges.
Netflix owns RDSC. RDSC had to authorize changes by Penguin. I'm sure you're excited about the new version, given your confident denunciation that was dead wrong.
> An author, and by extension the vehicle that they choose to shepherd their work after death, should have full rights to do whatever with their work.
Nope, not with the sold copies. Not to mention copyright terms in the US are ridiculously overextended by congressmen comfortably sitting in Disney's pocket. So no argument about "extension" plays anymore - they overplayed their hand so hard there it is not even close to something natural, it's purely "the law is what I can buy" now.
I think they choose the simplest path that sounds reasonable. Who would have anticipated edits like these? All I'm suggesting to provide an easy alternative. The simplest path for me is throwing an MIT or GPL snippet in my root folder. A copy/paste clause on a static website should be sufficient.
This is always the only correct answer to copyright insanity.
Information wants to be free.
Copyright is just a game. You participate mostly voluntarily. You can opt out of playing it at any time. Let them figure out how to bring you back into the game if they can.
I didn't see this book edit as the main issue at play here at all. I'm not that furious with the edited book, even if I may disagree with it. It just shows the importance of having full control of your own devices. My ereaders are not connected to the internet, and all ebooks are sideloaded.
We invented an amazing technology for sharing at near-zero cost.
IMO, ideally, authors should offer digital copies of their books gratis-with-the-option-of-paying. Obviously, these copies shouldn't come with restrictions.
The upside of truly free books for everyone is so great that any alternative seems terrible.
> IMO, ideally, authors should offer digital copies of their books gratis-with-the-option-of-paying. Obviously, these copies shouldn't come with restrictions.
I agree. However, authors should not be required to do such a thing, but nobody should be prohibited from freely making copies (and modified versions, as long as they are not claimed to be the original version, and not replacing a copy that someone else has already made that does not want their copy replaced), even if the author does not do it by themself. If copyright laws are abolished, then this will be legally possible.
> Should we lobby to limit the rights of an estate edit posthumously?
No, except perhaps that they should not be permitted to sell versions that are modified if they claim to be the original work by the original author; if they do not claim such a thing, then it should be permitted. (However, the original version should still be made available too. If it was not copyright then anyone could do so if they want to do.)
However, they should not remotely change ebooks automatically in this way. This is independent of whether or not they are allowed to make modified versions (which should be allowed).
> Should a blurb indicating the edit be required on the cover of the book?
Yes. There are a few ways to do such a thing; one way would be to write "abridged" like another comment in this thread suggests. But it should be marked so it is clear that it is different from the original work.
1. Shouldn’t it be possible to argue that consumers specifically bought a particular revision of a book and don’t want any new revision?
2. Better yet, shouldn’t we just have a system where consumers have access to all revisions of a book? We’re talking about digital records, not physical books that need to be printed and shipped, after all.
> Shouldn’t it be possible to argue that consumers specifically bought a particular revision
Except they didn't. They licensed a copy of the book, and that license was revocable or changeable at any time. It's all there in the 175 page agreement they were forced to sign before the purchase went through.
Consumers lost the digital ownership battle a long time ago.
Funny that I can get a paper copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for which I own all the rights, in perpetuity, and can resell or gift it as I wish, for $5.94, but a digital "license", which gives me no rights and can disappear at any moment, and I can not do anything with it, costs $7.99, or 35% more. You literally are paying for your rights to be taken away, isn't it marvelous?
Oh yes, and if I'm ok with a used copy, it's $2.15. Would I shame anyone (including myself) if somehow, by an unexplained miracle of nature, it happens that a DRM-less digital copy of the same book appears on their hard drive? No, I won't.
No they didn’t. You don’t need a license for using a legally acquired copy. The copyright act already grants you that right. Please stop repeating this lie created by publishers’ lawyers.
I'm pretty sure that with careful prompting we can use LLMs to regenerate the text of the book (that is, "a close approximation in the style of the author") and escape copyright entirely.
It's all perfectly possible but it offends the copyright monopolists who want total and absolute control over everything so anyone "purchasing" books is stuck in this "you own nothing" hellscape.
A privilege to temporarily view the content on devices that the seller approves, as long as they approve. This privilege can be revoked at any time, including for reasons having nothing to do with you (such as the seller having a fight with the copyright holder), and the content can be modified or removed at any moment. And you pay for that more than for the paper copy, because it sucks to be a sucker.
Nothing. Or perhaps "buying the ability to access the book, where the provider can alter/censor/revoke any time without prior notice" if we really want to use the word "buy".
> a system where consumers have access to all revisions of a book
A key component of censorship or falsification is hiding the fact that it even takes place. They are tools of deception, and if you tell people exactly how you are deceiving them, it is no longer effective.
This is nothing. In a few years kids and their parents won't even think to ask if their book is legit, let alone know that it isn't. Most people don't even know it right now. By the numbers, essentially no one even knows this just happend. Go ask the next 100 people you see.
Now, yes, but if some other tech giant like Google decides to remove all mentions of the incident from their search engine, most people in 2040 will no longer know that something like that happened.
Look no further than China and their systematic scrubbing of the Tien-an-men massacre from history.
True. Whatever disagreement people may have with his free software movement, it's undeniable that the man saw far into the future. His "Right to Read" story always hits hard:
That wouldn't be much of a curse. If you get to make whatever future you want, who cares whether anyone believes you in advance?
Cassandra was just able to see the future (and no one would believe her).
Tangentially, I think it's interesting that Greek mythology takes such a clear stand on the nature of time travel: it's possible, but history (past, present, or future) can't be altered.
That is one of a couple of rival models in modern science fiction, and generally not a particularly popular one.
This change I feel is one of the least objectionable, IMHO. The point of the paragraph seems to be that Mathilda read kind of stuffy old books, and fed her imagination with them. If the namedropped authors aren't well known by today's children, why not adjust them? It doesn't much change the tone and it's not really relevant to the plot.
I do think there's something a bit off in selecting an American writer instead of a Brit though. That and replacing ladies and gentlemen specifically with folks removes some of the Britishness and offends me as an American.
At the same time, these edits feel substantial and I don't think they should be pushed without consent of the purchaser. Otoh, I would love for ebooks to magically get mistakes fixed (and even more so, if I could report mistakes, so they could get fixed).
> This change I feel is one of the least objectionable, IMHO. The point of the paragraph seems to be that Mathilda read kind of stuffy old books, and fed her imagination with them. If the namedropped authors aren't well known by today's children, why not adjust them?
Do you remember analyzing books in school? One of the things we were taught to keep in mind as a lens of analysis was the author as a person, and why they might have written what they wrote. I think this is a great example: Why did Dahl choose the authors he chose to mention? In Matilda, in many cases, I believe he did it to tacitly recommend those books and authors to his readers. To the age group that makes up Dahl's readership, most of them probably weren't well known even at the peak of their popularity. That's sort of the point: Dahl's saying--possibly--"go check this out, my young readers".
So yeah, I think it's pretty crass to just change it to a different author. Dahl is an author calling out fellow authors in his book. It happens in movies a lot, too, where filmmakers will put subtle (or not-so-subtle) nods to their peers and forebears and inspirations in their work. I think, as a rule, if the audience notices it, it was probably intentional. Most authors and filmmakers care about other authors and filmmakers a lot more than we do. None of them would be okay with somebody in the future mucking with their references because people aren't immediately getting the reference. They'd be like... "No! The whole point was to immortalize that person or work further by mentioning it in my work!"
Dahl didn't write that. So selling that under Dahl's name, as if it were the works by Dahl, is a fraud. Just as selling a bean patty and claiming it's meat, and then saying "well, it's actually is much healthier than meat!". Maybe so, maybe not, but whatever it is, it can't be called "meat" if it's not "meat", and it can't be called Dahl's book if Dahl didn't write it but some PC corporate asshole did. If I want to read a book by a PC corporate asshole, let them publish their book and I'll read it under their name.
I think the prior paragraph connoted "adventurous, swashbuckling globe-trotter—a page at a time" and the new one connotes "likes to read classics", as far as how they contribute to characterization. Pretty different.
>If the namedropped authors aren't well known by today's children, why not adjust them? It doesn't much change the tone and it's not really relevant to the plot.
Do you think children in 1988 had a better understanding of who Joseph Conrad was than kids today? Maybe slightly, as I'm sure some parents bought Heart of Darkness after Apocalypse Now came out, but I certainly had no idea who he was at the age I read Dahl books.
These days nearly all ebooks I read are copyright‐free editions from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg, precisely because I can (and do) fix typos and make other improvements, freely shareable with no restriction.
Replaced in what? I don't necessarily care what spider-man's regular person name is, as long as Sony releases a movie every 3 years. Losing alliteration is a bad move though.
But, these changes aren't anywhere near changing the name of a main character. The author references are a tiny tiny part of a large work that never comes up again. It's not at all like when Wally was renamed Waldo, or when Wilma was replaced with Wenda.
Okay, in the next installment you would be fine to watch "Amazing Huggy Wuggy against Teletubbies". Because you know, spiders are scary and gremlins/mob bosses/mad scientists are scary too.
> Really does feel orwellian to change the authors being referenced.
> This change I feel is one of the least objectionable, IMHO.
I think it's one of the most objectionable changes. Removing authors whose politics have gone out of style, and replacing them with more palatable ones, reminds me of Party members airbrushed out of photos with Stalin.
That it's done in a children's book is that much worse - a middle-man censor posing as Dahl and recommending what books to read, and presenting a false consensus on which authors were popular.
There should be a law preventing any publisher from censoring or revoking access to the people who have already access to some content. (Other than extreme cases that put people in physical danger)
If you can read it today, you can (should be) read it 50 years from now, the exact same unaltered book.
If someone can access a version of the content, they should always be able to. Revoking access to future versions with updates? Fine, that's fair. But revoking access retroactively? Nope. This should be illegal by the law, otherwise licensors will keep doing this out of control.
I think this goes too far. It would mean, for example, that subscribing to Netflix means I will always have access to all films and TV series currently available. That strikes me as unreasonable: it's pretty clear to everyone that the deal is you pay a certain amount of month to be able to temporarily access the films and series they offer at any particular time.
It's really a matter of communication; what do you actually get when you pay $X for something? Right now this is too often unclear, hidden in the ToS or some such. If you want to sell access to Roald Dahl's books for only a week then I don't see anything wrong with that: as long as it's communicated clearly up-front, so I know what exactly I'm getting and can make an informed purchase decision. This is kind of how libraries work, right? It's not a problem because the deal is clear to customers up front.
So in short, I'd be in favour of laws that mandate clearer communication of the conditions, rather than laws that forces anyone to adopt a particular way of selling stuff or access to stuff.
I don't think subscribing to a library service is the same as buying a digital copy of an item.
Someone subscribing to Kindle Plus (or whatever) might not expect to have a permanent copy of each book, but someone who pays for a digital copy definitely does.
Because it's harmful to society as a whole. Many things that are overtly harmful to society, we have enacted laws against. This is no different.
Licensing vs. Ownership.
Licensing is predatory behavior aimed at deceiving, manipulating, and fleecing the populace. It's easily proven with math and economic studies already done and published.
Why are you in favor of an overtly predatory policy, @arp242?
I don't think it's predatory at all as long as the terms are clear up front. I know I keep repeating myself, but I really think that's the problem here. The predatory part is that consumers think they are paying for A while in fact they are paying for B. This doesn't mean there is anything inherently wrong with B though.
That you don't like this model is fair and reasonable. But that doesn't mean we should ban it. I certainly don't see how it's "harmful to a society as a whole"; the only truly harmful part I see is the deception (as well as the overly long copyright duration in general, but that's a bit of a different issue and reducing copyright to a more reasonable term won't mean the death of Kindle or these kind of business models).
All of this is true for any purchase you make, and why there are clear laws in the EU for example which state that the full price must be shown up-front, with a breakdown of the cost. So this applies to more than just e-books. These laws should be expanded.
I'm not sure if you're really disagreeing. The fundamental principle is that if you characterize it as a purchase the license has to be irrevocable. I can't really speak for anyone else, but for me, I don't think it should be legal to advertise a license for sale that is revocable. If the license is revocable then you must explicitly use language like "rent" or "license" but never "buy" or "purchase."
Sorry, all books must be available in perpetuity in exact original form. If edits are required, a permission slip must be filed with the appropriate bureau, and a letter sent to each ebook purchaser informing them of intent to publish a typographical error correction. Upon unanimous consent from all ebook purchasers, only then may a new version of the book be made available with a large disclaimer that the new copy of the book has changes.
Or that’s what most people in this thread would probably want.
My bad. I was refering to "buying" digital copies, not libraries like Netflix.
For libraries though, I think a similar law should force any provider to notice X months in advance (like 3 months) before some content will be pulled, and prevent them from pulling any earlier, giving enough time for subscribers to access/watch uncensored/original content.
Basic consumer protection laws such as that sound reasonable to me; perhaps some more might be a good idea as well. You can argue a bit over the details, but in principle I'm all in favour of that. That's a lot less strong than what you suggested in your previous comment though.
It's a double edged sword. I don't think it governments should have right to control anything like this but since they do already, at least they can be helpful on the other end of the spectrum.
laws aren't good enough; we need machines and math to prevent publishers from censoring or revoking access, which need to be running free software, so it is under the control of the user and not software owners who become single points of failure for this kind of censorship
of course machines and math aren't enough; sufficiently repressive laws could eliminate such machines, or limit access to them to an infinitesimal group, or prevent people from learning about them. but machines and math can offer enormous leverage to such book-burnings, as amazon swindle does, or instead offer enormous leverage to those who want to resist them
no, most authors clearly don't want drm or they wouldn't upload their work to dreamwidth, an archive of our own, hacker news, the internet archive, youtube, mastodon, facebook, twitter, etc.
but even if they did, the interest of this narrow special interest group in not having their works get pirated is clearly less important than the public interest in having reliable access to honest knowledge about the past
So here we are in the dystopia predicted 20 years ago. How are we going to trust historical records when they can be changed on the fly to support whatever is en vogue?
> How are we going to trust historical records when they can be changed on the fly to support whatever is en vogue?
This is a good question, and more practical than it might look like: there have been instances of major media outlets being caught quietly editing their "early" covid reporting from spring 2020 later in the pandemic, to better match the changes in the narrative.
I deeply regret not bookmarking some of the examples: this is now ungooglable, and not having a prooflink makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist.
We've been in that dystopia for some time now already. Take a look at the history of temperature records for one example that's much more serious than Roald Dahl. In the 60s there were newspaper articles, conference reports, pop sci magazine articles, at least one TV documentary and letters from scientists to the US President all about global cooling. It was in the news because temperatures had been falling for decades (since the end of ww2 approximately). Climatologists predicted the trend would continue. Several explanations were presented by scientists including the emission of particulate matter by power stations that dimmed the sun. Graphs of average temperatures over time showed a clear cooling trend.
In the mid seventies this trend reversed and temperatures started going up. The new explanation became different emissions from power stations. By the end of the 80s climatologists were warning about global warming but they faced the issue of why it didn't happen between the 40s and mid 70s. By the turn of the millennium they'd started replacing historical data with recalculated values that reduced the extent of the mid century cooling, and once they crossed that Rubicon new versions of old data started being released regularly. There was always a new reason being found why people couldn't accurately read thermometers back in the day. New historical data smoothly and silently replaced old data on government websites. By the 2010s global cooling had vanished from the record entirely and temperature graphs showed a flat trend during that era.
Of course censorship isn't complete without denial it ever happened. Hence if you look for global cooling today, our glorious tech firm overlords will direct you to denials it ever existed at all. You have to know where to look to see the old newspaper clippings, the videos of Leonard Nimoy telling his viewers about the coming ice age, screenshots of old graphs, scans of the letter to the president etc.
And finally, because erasing all the old copies of documents is so hard, no historical editing regime can survive without training the population not to look. The above information is verboten in polite society, the media won't touch it along with many other things. All respectable people know never to question The Science lest they be immediately fired from their job or worse. There are people in this thread gamely saying they will just read pirate versions of these books to their kids, but that's not how it works. Give it ten years and reading the old editions of Dahl will be considered a firing offense and your kids will be trained by their teachers to disown you, if they catch you with such copies. Because that's already happened for issues the leftists care about more.
"I've warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!
...
When I am gone, if that happens, then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks very hard on their heads with his Mjolnir. Or I will send along the 'enormous crocodile' to gobble them up."
Obviously this is just a coincidence but it is amusing that he has been pretty much removed from public view right around the time most of the stuff he warned about finally came true.
He has been ranting on about ebooks since they were invented. But it took over a decade for the “technically they could do this” to become “they are doing this”
It would be, if he ever said that, but it's a lie.
What he said was "the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates."
He has also stated that Epstein should be considered a serial rapist.
That sounds like Boris Johnson's defense (about the partygate) "yes, the investigation shown that people were hugging and partying right in front of my eyes, but you have no proof that my brain recorded these information, so you have no proof I've lied when I've said I did not notice".
Presenting herself as entirely willing does not mean that suddenly the person who is "consuming" is not participating to a sexual assault when this person is conveniently closing a blind eye on either or not she has been coerced: Epstein already had a bad reputation and was a registered sex offended at the time, including for coercing minor to have sex. It is just bs to play coy and say "weeeell, maybe he did not know", and just show the person saying that is going out of their way in semantic to reshape the discourse into victim blaming.
From the perspective of someone left-leaning, it’s an illiberal faction of the left that has very specific beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality that not everyone agrees on, and an extreme but unsubstantiated set of explanations for them and how to resolve them. They’re very good at baiting and switching too, using language that we agree to be good and can get behind, but don’t mean what we think it means. Because of this sophistry, it’s easy for them to denounce their opponents as morally bad people for rejecting their views, when their views weren’t the good things we thought it meant in the first place. This moving of goal posts is precisely what you’re doing right now.
So from this definition, Richard Stallman is woke.
Because his views on sexuality are the ones that are unusual, and when the debate arose, the people criticizing Stallman were denounced as morally bad people for "being against freedom of speech", when this view (saying that everyone who debate is a bad person because they cannot disagree because freedom of speech) wasn't the good thing we thought it meant in the first place.
I think it's the trick with the "woke" definition: people who think it's a good definition always end up given a definition which describe them very well or describe the group that they are claiming is the victim of the big bad wokes.
The best definition that exists is "woke are people that defend a view point I don't like. I'm using the same strategy as them to defend my own view point, but because I like my views, I think my views are reasonable, and because I don't like their views, I think their views are unreasonable"
Maybe I should have been clearer and used "particular", "flavour", or "brand" in place of "very specific" to describe the kind of beliefs they hold. In other words, I'm not using "very specific" to denote any arbitrary beliefs that are unusual in general. Rather, I'm referring to a set of beliefs that are more or less distinct (which is elaborated clearly in the link I referenced in my original post). In case I wasn't clear, a corollary of my clarification is that your example isn't relevant.
This shouldn't come as a surprise really, certain words have been in vogue in the last few years (i.e. "systemic", "white supremacy", "inequities", ...), and they all share a common theme/premise about race, sexuality, and gender. Associated with these beliefs are people who use these beliefs to justify illiberal behaviour. Is it then unreasonable to denote this observable phenomena with a term, which just so happens to be called "woke"? This is the same line of reasoning which has led to the (rightful) creation of terms like "right-wingers" to denote illiberal people on the political right, and their associated beliefs. There's nothing here that's partisan or conspiratorial. So what's your deal with describing observable phenomena with some word?
Perhaps you should consider that your final paragraph more aptly describes your position than it does mine.
That's a ridiculous mischaracterisation of what he said and you know it.
He said some vaguely questionable thing about the definition of the word assault and people sought to interpret that in the absolute worst way possible.
He's a weirdo, and he says some stuff that clearly indicates there's some social stuff he just doesn't quite understand. Like the fact that "assault" or "rape" doesn't necessarily mean an outright violent physical assault.
I mean who the hell expects RMS to have a nuanced understanding of interpersonal relationships?
Or do buy ebooks for stuff that you’re ok losing and the convenience is worth the extra cost over a cheap paperback copy. Buy physical books for stuff that you care about changing.
I have no problem buying ebooks, because I know the deal.
Jesus people, stop buying from this DRM-ed cloud crap. The only acceptable formats for ebooks are LOCALLY INSTALLED PDF and epub. Steal them if you have to!
I’ve always loved physical books, and the serendipitous discoverability of volumes on a shelf can’t be beat.
That said, ebooks provide worthwhile benefits in their own right. Fulltext search, text‐to‐speech, changing fonts and font sizes, small physical size convenient for travel… other times I come up with some operation I want to perform on a particular book, like counting how often a particular phrase is used, or comparing certain passages side by side, where having an ebook copy would be useful.
So for these reasons, I often buy the ebook edition of my hardcopy books, if I can find it DRM‐free. Similarly, after reading a good ebook I’ll often get a physical copy to stash on my shelf. (In any case, though, DRM‐encumbered ebooks are off the table, at least for me!)
Makes me wish for a well‐made book scanner and OCR package, so I can format shift all those physical books I can’t find acceptable ebooks of.
For me it's the absence of an affordable automated page turner that makes this conversion difficult. I have an Auramate from Czur (https://www.czur.com/) which does a pretty good job of the scanning and OCR (about 2 sec per page or double page) and corrects for curvature at the spine. However I have zero experience with other equivalent machines which are undoubtedly available.
If I bought physical books of everything I read I would run out of space in my apartment. I already have so many books, so I started only buying physical books if I felt like they contain a lot of pictures or are pleasing physical objects. For general reading kindle books being available on demand without going to a bookshop or waiting on postage, that my partner can read the same book at the same time, and it being lightweight for commuting are all also nice perks but the space saving is the key element for me
Once censorship becomes permissive, it becomes pervasive.
Once censorship becomes pervasive, it becomes overwhelming.
Once censorship becomes overwhelming, we lose our sense of truth.
They're printing his name on it like he's the author, but they've gone way beyond mere editing. Wouldn't putting his name on it alone be some kind of misrepresentation.
I know it works like that with ghost writers, but those are ostensibly approved by the author. There is no such thing here.
I know that for my own works, I don't care if someone wants to remove attribution, but if someone modifies it, then I do not want them to keep the attribution to me unless they also include a notice about the modification (but no such notice is needed if the attribution is also removed). (However, I am unaware of any licenses that work like this, as far as I know.)
My parents' house has a series of Shakespeare which has the bard's works in modern English. It still says "Shakespeare" across the cover because it is, primarily, the works of Shakespeare. Does a great deal of interpretation not go into these works? Is it therefore dishonest to sell them as Shakespeare?
Shakespeare predates the modern concept (and cult) of the author. This means that you are comparing two entities that are different in important ways (an Elizabethan playwright and a 20th Century author).
Shakespeare feels more like it's due to language drift and the changes are necessary to make it accessible.
The Roald Dahl fiasco feels more like editors out of 1984 making edits to control thoughts.
Or, without reading conspiracy into it, it feels like some current "writers" using someone else's name to push their views on how things should be. Whatever is going on they seem to be changing the story itself. I don't think language drift can be blamed, because it is an active, intentional act to change our language.
Or maybe it's just a bubble wrap the children issue.
This is why we each choose a book to memorize, just in case.
The whole idea of renting books rather then owning them is gross, and I deeply regret purchasing a Kindle.
But I don't understand the hand wringing about the publisher changing newer editions of the book. All media either changes with the times to find a new audience, or faces obsolescence. My generation grew up watching Romeo + Juliet and 10 Things I Hate About You, rather than pouring over the original Shakespearean plays.
The changes in Roald Dahl's books are limited to asides about characters or superfluous details that are archaic. We are not loosing a literary gem by dropping the cheap "Wong number" joke from the Great Glass Elevator.
It's not like this is some new thing, either. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was edited after publishing by Roald Dahl himself, because having Oompa Loompas be enslaved pygmies from deepest darkest Africa is kinda shitty.
> My generation grew up watching Romeo + Juliet and 10 Things I Hate About You, rather than pouring over the original Shakespearean plays.
Umm, im pretty sure im the same generation and we were required to pour over those in school.
If you mean the average person isn't reading Shakespeare for fun, i think you would have to go back many many generations. For that matter, he was probably never "read" for fun by the average person (his plays were of course watched by the average person once upon a time)
And if Roald Dahl was ever assigned in schools in sure they'd read the original, much as I'm sure they wouldn't assign it unless you're taking like, children's media studies in uni, because it's a fun children's book meant to be read for fun. It's fine that they're changing them slightly to make them less hairy for a new audience idk.
This is better described as a new edition of the book rather than a "reprint" that corrects minor typographical errors. I can understand why someone who purchased the old edition would be upset.
The rewrite of the Oompa Loompas is different for two reasons: it was Dahl’s own rewrite, not performed by a soulless corporation; and it made the text better, not worse.
Even an author’s own revisions can be heavily criticized when they diminish the quality of the original work. Witness the Star Wars special editions, which aside from making questionable edits to dialogue and pacing, also jammed in incongruous CGI effects that stick out like a sore thumb, making the films feel inconsistent, and though perhaps the CGI was cutting edge for its time, in retrospect those effects have not aged nearly as well as the original effects, which were cutting edge for their time.
The Puffin changes are similar in kind. Roald Dahl as an author is known for his dark humor and misanthropic themes. Throwing in a moralizing sermonette in The Witches (whose eponymous witches are bald) that “there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that” is unnecessary and inconsistent with the tone of the original work. Meanwhile, Dahl’s own moral points are obfuscated or eliminated. Dialing down Augustus Gloop’s obesity interferes with his purpose as a lesson on gluttony; cutting out Mike Teevee’s obsession with guns dampens the consequences of his obsession with television. George Kranky’s grandmother was such an unpleasant person that she was never really missed after he murdered her—well, that point’s not made anymore.
Then there are more minor changes, unremarkable physical descriptions that are apparently no longer acceptable coming from a mainstream publisher. Describing Miss Spider’s black head, or Earthworm’s lovely pink skin. Scared people who are white as a sheet. Tall skinny Bean and dwarfish pot‐bellied Bunce. What once were colorful descriptions (often literally) are replaced with bland unremarkable alternatives, not because anyone of consequence took offense, but because whatever company the publishers contracted this “modernization” task to wanted to justify its paycheck.
And the worst of it is that the rightsholders are the ones doing it. The Bowlders who first Bowlderized Shakespeare were resoundly made fun of for their delicate sensibilities, but I don’t really take issue with them, because they were just a family sharing with others how Shakespeare could look according to their tastes. No adult was deprived of Shakespeare by the Bowlders.
The situation is different here because had it not been for the vociferous outcry you complain about, the originals would no longer be available to anybody. Due to the public response, now they’ve said they’ll continue providing uncensored versions (whether they’ll keep that promise remains to be seen). Had readers shrugged and moved on, the censors would have won, and we would see these changes more and more throughout the publishing industry. But now maybe there’s a chance that this trend will change direction: that the industry will regain its faith in normal people to read books from another era without having to be coddled.
I’ve bought and read thousands - I don’t often reread them. Maybe a couple dozen I’ve reread in the last 25 years. So the convenience more than makes up for the lack of ownership.
That's not really relevant to the point being made: you've decided that the trade off is worth it for you, and that's truly fine. But I would wager that most people think that they "own" their Kindle purchases in the same way that they'd own a physical book they'd bought.
Some people do read books more than once. There are a few books I enjoy enough that I've read them quite a few times over the past 25 years or so. I've lost, sold, or given away the physical copies of nearly all of them, and have replaced them with ebooks. I would be very upset if those ebooks just disappeared someday.
(I don't have to worry, as I've de-DRMed and backed up all the books I've purchased. But I don't expect most Kindle owners to know how to do that, or even know that they need to do that to be safe.)
The Roald Dahl Story Company owns the rights, and authorized Penguins changes. They are owned by Netflix. So no, this isn't disinformation you censorious hall monitors.
Am I naive for wondering why Amazon would allow this? What's in it for them? It hurts the customer, it hurts their brand, it breaks the illusion that you own the book, it breaks trust in buying books on Kindle. If I were above the Kindle division on the org chart I would be furious.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon's majority shareholder and owner of The Washington Post is strongly aligned with with the culture behind this revisionism. We are living in Orwell's imagined future dystopia where history is fluid.
I think that they shouldn't remotely update ebooks, regardless of their content. (For this and other reasons, I don't really like ebooks, and I like to have a printed copy.) (It can make sense to publish errata if there are mistakes (e.g. a word is missing or misspelled, or a number is wrong), but even then you should not automatically remotely update them, and they should keep track of the changes. A public version control system would help in this case.)
I think that the original versions should be preserved, but that they can make modified versions too if they want to do; however, the modified versions should not be called Roald Dahl's original versions, and should not be claimed to be them; they should be something else. (Fortunately, this seems to be what they are doing, in this case, so that is good, but it does not justify remotely updating the ebooks.) (Copyright often makes both such things difficult though if you do not hold the copyright, but copyright is bad and should be abolished, and then you can both preserve original versions and make modified versions.)
This isn't that surprising. Kindle has a feature called "Automatic Book Update" and when a publisher releases a new version it will update your book automatically...
Usually the changes are pretty minor, fixed typos, maybe a movie cover or a new introduction. You can turn it off although I don't think you can roll back versions?
If the UX for the updates is to ask for confirmation for each update, along with a decent summary changelog, that's fine. Am I wrong in assuming the UX is not this, but something much more automatic?
It's automatic. Some titles it doesn't seem to work for and you have to update manually but for those that do there's no changelog or confirmation and the update happens when you sync.
Right, it's automatic. There's no confirmation, and no changelog. I have it enabled, but stuff like this makes me consider disabling it. I'd be fine if there was a way to limit the updates to typo and grammar fixes, and reject content changes, but of course Amazon isn't going to implement a feature like that without something like a government telling it to do so.
(I do back up my ebooks right after purchasing, though, so at least I have "originals".)
Yes, I've just checked my old paper copies and these too have been updated!! /s
But seriously, this is the major risk with 'everything online' our just electronic media is general. It really is possible to change history at the press of a button. Cut and paste history.
And how would anyone even know this has happened? No one is paying attention. If someone did spot some history editing, why would that get any traction? Who alert the world to it?
And with ai to generate reams of bullcrap... my my, most people are going to be in trouble! A connection to truth will become hard to find.
There is an answer - and that is to recognise what you know (in a strong sense) from what you believe on account of something you were told or saw on a screen. You only know what you have personally - the rest is hypothetical.
I have a technical question. If the original version copyright expires, will the updated versions have a new copyright, starting now? Will the updated version have the original copyright that will expire at the original date?
I think it would depend on whether or not the new and changed content qualifies as copyrightable on its own. A lawyer could probably advise someone whether or not that's the case here, but ultimately it'd be up to a court to decide, if anyone wanted to force the issue.
I do seem to recall noting that books that get updated with new editions often do sport a new copyright date. Not sure if the changes made here would qualify, though.
Yikes. I’m all for people being held accountable for their words and actions, but this is not that.
If an author wants to release a new edition of a book because they themselves have evolved in their thinking, great.
If an author wants to stop publication of the original work, fine.
But a publisher revising a work on behalf of an author is not fine. It’s legal, they own the rights, but it’s not okay.
Hopefully this changes the dynamics of rights agreements for works of art and creators can bar opt rights holders for unilaterally revising a creative work.
This seems more like a legal issue rather than a culture issue.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
I'm not usually a fan of slippery slope arguments but it's still worth asking: at what point do you decide it has truly become dangerously Orwellian and worth protesting against?
Certainly it does strike me there's a certain disregard for consumers here. Imagine if your electronic copy of your favourite music that you listened to regularly was altered in some way by the publisher that you felt destroyed your enjoyment of it? It's actually one reason I'm not a fan of streaming services and only buy music I can keep copies of the files for - so I can be certain it will always be available in exactly the form I want it no matter what the publisher/ service provider does (including going broke or deciding to remove certain music from their catalogues etc.).
Absent from your question is the author [1]. The owners may have the legal right to edit and distribute the text, but by passing it off as Roald Dahl's words, they are perpetrating fraud against their readers.
And even if it were the author doing it, it would be dishonest to have multiple versions under the same title, unless there was a note at least briefly mentioning alterations.
Can I rewrite any book as I want and for any cries just say "Hey! I printed an original version! The whole 10 copies! Locked in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of The Leopard'?
Actually, your comment sparked a new thought for me. What if this (two concurrently published versions of the books) is purely an emergent property of our increasingly bifurcating society?
I thought the Orwellian changing of the text was repulsive enough, but this is truly bad. They could have simply sold the new, sanitized versions going forward instead of vandalizing the property of paying customers. This is one of many reasons I physically purchase all my books no matter how much room they take up.
The article is paywalled, can anyone confirm that this is actually remote updates? If so, what's the text that shows that?
The only part I can read is the sub-heading, which says "Puffin announces plans to publish a classic collection as it emerges online libraries are being automatically updated with sensitivity changes."
This is not the same as remotely updating a version that you have on your Kindle. Rather, it would be like a library receiving an updated version of the book, which you then check out -- which could totally happen in the physical world as well.
> can anyone confirm that this is actually remote updates?
No need to read an article for that; if you dig through the settings on a Kindle, there's an option to allow automatic book updates (probably enabled by default).
The updates happen automatically, in the background, when the device syncs, without confirmation or presenting a list of changes.
Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.
Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.
[..]
Clarissa Aykroyd, 43, who works in children’s publishing, reported on social media that ebooks she bought before 2020 had been changed. She told The Times: “It feels Orwellian that we are having the updated versions forced upon us and has made me weary of ebooks. “I assumed that because the changes to the work were so big that I would be given the option of whether to download it.”
From the sound of it, someone had bought the book, didn't have it downloaded anymore, downloaded it and it was the old version. They then deleted it and downloaded it again and it was the new version. So not really remotely updated.
The edits are so dumb my conspiracy theorist brain wonders if they are doing this to pump sales. They are certainly getting headlines. Headlines mean money!
I sometimes look at left-leaning websites (other than HN) to get a broader view of the world, and the support for the bowdlerization of Dahl seems near 100 percent among our more righteous, liberal, blue-stockinged thinkers.
I hate myself for knowing this, but there is such a thing as resistance marketing. In a sense, it is a way to get automatic contrarians, because some will go to support whatever is forbidden or has the appearance of being so. I would not be that surprised if what you said was an actual marketing campaign depending on fake controversy.
The metafilter comments seem to blanket-approve edits. No room left to discuss the edits themselves.
Consider the Magic Faraway Tree edits. The children no longer go on adventures without adult supervision. Never mind that venturing out and exploring is a fundamental curiosity for children - it's inherently risky and potentially dangerous, and that's the point.
Other edits include new characters and lands introduced. Lessons on gender quality in response to someone asking for help with chores.
It's creative contamination. Heavy-handed tonal modification of the story, disrespects the author efforts to create a specific atmosphere and world, and have that maintained for the life of the art work.
Along comes Netflix or whoever the estate owner is, and sets the 'Sensitivity Enforcement Team on the task. Words and ideas go flying in a bizarre censorship frenzy.
If you get caught willfully "stealing" from a copyright holder, don't you have to pay up to $250,000 per offense? I wish it worked in the other direction too, so that Penguin Random House would have to pay $250,000 per copy of eBook that it did this too.
This is on top of them releasing "new" editions that do not feature the censorship changes, which they will gladly sell to you for full price. If you pay retail price again, we'll let you have the book you already purchased.
What are the rules in the US about, sharing books that are no longer in sale?
In the back of my mind I remember you can legal share things no body is selling anymore.
Maybe I misremember.
You misremember. Barring legal exceptions like fair use and secondhand sales, the copyright holder has exclusive control over reproduction of a work for the full duration of the copyright term. That doesn’t change if the work becomes commercially unavailable.
If I buy or license something in good faith and the seller or licensee changes it after the contract is set or done is not the way business is normally conducted. It's a breach of contract.
Here, the publisher has altered the contract without my permission or knowledge. I no longer have what I paid for.
As far as I'm concerned the publisher has not only deceived me but also has committed fraud.
_
Edit: here's an analogy: I license Windows in perpetuity on my computer (which is the usual arrangement), and unbeknownst to me Microsoft has placed a timer within the code to disable the O/S after say 18 months then all hell would break loose. This is effectively what the publisher has done here (the contractual mechanism is the same).
IANAL, but i feel this argument would fail since the change wasn't really material. If they cut half the book that would be one thing, but a paragraph changed is a pretty different matter (in the windows example - a kill switch would be obviously bad, some random changes in the interface after an update would be business as usual). Plus there is probably some shrink wrap agreement with the kindle saying that amazon could do this (which if true) would make it hard to argue you were decieved.
in this case the change was so material that it has made national news in dozens of articles and both the prime minister and the queen have criticized it
This is the obvious way to do what they did without drawing this much ire. Release a "Roald Dahl 2023 collection" which is explicitly marketed as a modernization. It would still get people fuming because culture war bullshit, but it would pass so much quicker.
The problem is that we even give oxygen to these so-called “sensitivity readers.” But there are plenty of Diversity and Inclusion consultants that are actually taken seriously when they should be laughed out of the room.
I am not surprise there will be concerted movement to pirate these woke original non-censored books to hit the publishers pocket very hard. Used to see parents in my area strongly encourage buying books even if e-version. Now they actively recommend pirated way....down to which sites and how to best display with best format. They are the tech boom generations and they even actively teaching older boomers to do so. Publishers have no idea what hits them for going woke.
What they were always saying about "communist" and/or "authoritarian" regimes, e.g. in «1984», they were actually saying about themselves. It's becoming obvious more and more every day.
Excerpt: Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.
> Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.
I like HN because we make an effort to elevate the conversation, ask interesting questions, and gain insights from each other. But in this case, these people are just assholes.
Fine, I'll bait. How are they assholes? If I buy a book[0], I expect to be able to read it as such, and not read a re-edition of it.
[0] Although I understand that in most ebook stores, you're buying a license to the book, and not the book itself. This may be true and legally sound, but as an end consumer it still bothers me.
I think the person you're replying to was saying that the book publishers were assholes for changing the books and automatically updating existing customer copies. Not that the article author is an asshole for being upset about this practice.
(I agree that the wording of their comment is somewhat ambiguous.)
ITT: People upset that people did something they said they were going to do. People are also upset that the company had consent to do the thing they said they were going to do.
Also, apparently getting consent to do something, and than doing it, is a "violent" attack.
Time for everyone to overreact and let the culture war theatrics disguise politicians' dismal care for the systems they're actually supposed to be running. If you're finding yourself enraged over this, you need to question your priorities and if the people driving this content have your interests at heart. Spoilers; they don't.
Not enraged. More a feeling of “huh, maybe those free software extremists might have had a point after all.”
Stallman has been warning us about the theoretical risks of ebooks for a long time. But it’s taken so long to actually see the possibilities become realities.
