Yes, it sounds ironic – but if you read the book you’ll understand the point here. I wrote Starving the Artist. It is mine. I alone have the right to determine how much it should cost. And now, with all the back-and-forth over property rights, I’ve decided it’s more important for people to read my book and gain some perspective than it is to try to convince them to pay for it. After all, the book is not meant to preach to the choir. It is meant to be a thoughtful conversation on the value of intellectual property and how property rights encourage quality creative works to continue to be created.

Anyway, just go download your free copy here.

Just promise you’ll actually read it.

I’ve read SOPA, and agree that there are some areas where it definitely needs work (in particular the forced removal or addition of words and links from privately owned web sites), but it is also my firm belief that there is a need for improved methods of piracy enforcement on the web.

Above all, however, I believe that the work of creators has value, and is their own property to do with as they wish. Illegal downloading of pirated material, as well as the sale of counterfeit goods, is harmful not only to our economy – but to the future of high-quality creative works.

So, today, I’m setting the price of my 2010 book, Starving the Artist: How the Internet Culture of “Free” Threatens to Exterminate the Creative Class and What Can Be Done to Save It to FREE for the PDF over at Lulu.com.

It’s a fairly quick read (less than 100 pages), and it will give you something to do while Wikipedia’s down.

(And of course, I’d really appreciate it if you’d buy a copy in book or Kindle format over at Amazon… but that’s up to you.)

Here’s the quick synopsis:

For a lot of people, creation is their livelihood. For others, it’s where their livelihood ought to be. As Richard Florida wrote in his 2004 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, “Stimulating and glamorous as it may sometimes be, creativity is in fact work…The creative ethos is built on discipline and focus, sweat and blood.” All music, art, movies, writings and games were brought into being by their creators – and for these creators to have created them, there was some underlying motivation to do so. Without their creators and their motivations, creative works simply would not be. Why then, in today’s Internet culture, is all creative work expected to be free? Why is it that some individuals feel it is their right to take things that do not belong to them, without receiving any permission to do so? Why, in the Internet culture of “free,” are those creations we enjoy and value most the ones that we are most likely to simply take?

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go so well for the musician.

It started when I tried searching for songs I’ve cowritten. Amazingly, I found almost every song I’ve ever released – even songs in Swedish. Now, to clarify, Grooveshark does not have a licence to feature any of these songs, and they don’t pay me anything. It’s essentially a filesharing site, with users uploading music libraries to be streamed by other users. Much like YouTube, Grooveshark says its service is legal as they have a DMCA takedown procedure in place.

via Behind the music: Why won’t Grooveshark remove my music? | Music | guardian.co.uk.

Judging from internal emails, Grooveshark opted for forgiveness. In a April 27, 2010 email to Sina Simantob, a Escape Media Group director, Andrew B. Lipsher, then a partner at private equity firm Greycroft Partners, explained that he understands "the ask forgiveness and not permission strategy. It is a hard one to swallow as an investor knowing what I know, but the labels have been so horrible and naïve that I think it is the only one that makes sense."

via Internal Emails in Grooveshark/Universal Case Show Grooveshark Opted to Post First, Ask for Permission Later | Billboard.biz.

Apologies for the lower-quality photo. Taken with my phone and not my “nice” camera.

If you’re unfamiliar with my work, Starving the Artist: How the Internet Culture of Free Threatens to Exterminate the Creative Class and What Can Be Done to Save It is about 100 pages on the value of creative works and how that fits in with today’s online culture (based primarily on my experiences from working in the online music industry.)

The Trouble With Being God is a fictional thriller / murder mystery with a healthy heaping of gory bits in there. My first book, written in my early-to-mid-twenties. has gotten decent reviews, although it seems to be more of a love it/hate it kind of thing for most people.

So yeah, they’re both just $2.99 each on Kindle. Enjoy.

Here’s a reality check: Groupon lost $456.3 million in 2010. It lost $146.5 million in Q1 2011. Sounds like a winner, huh?

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Groupon has all the classic hallmarks of the 90′s era dot-com failure. Big new idea: check. Media hype: check. “Too good to be true” come-on to consumers: check. Endless need to expand into new markets/acquire new customers or perish: check. One-trick pony: check.

Read the full article here.‘Hot’ Doesn’t Equal ‘Profitable’ | ClickZ.

And for some really good meaty bits, be sure to read the “new lessons to learn if we want to avoid the mistakes of the past” at the end of the article. I’m shocked at how many people never learned these lessons.

Fantastic book about the basics of liberty and what it is to be free. Anyone voting in the upcoming Presidential election should absolutely read this – especially if they are going to be voting in the Republican Primaries. Ron Paul writes eloquently, and his intelligence and well-thought arguments come through quite clearly here – much more so than when in an on-stage debate.



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Obviously I was determined to find the culprit. I had a feeling it could be raccoons, but I’d never know for certain until I had proof.

So, one day I decided to set up some night time video surveillance.

I set the video to record all night long at the lowest possible quality, so I wouldn’t run out of space on the memory stick,  turned on night vision, and started it up.  What follows is a true account of what happened at roughly 1:15 a.m. the night of May 19, 2011.  Note, the footage contains graphic imagery of an actual robbery in progress and is not for the squeamish.

All you have to do is put the book in In-App Purchase. Sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? But do you know how you do that? You go onto iTunes Connect, OK? And then you press some buttons and you get to a page that lets you create a new In-App Purchase item. You sit there and type in all the information, this description of the product and whatnot so Apple can presumably use that description to decide whether to approve it or not. There is no way to bulk load this. You can’t just copy your database in there. You have to do this all manually. We have access to 250,000 titles, not counting public-domain titles. We’re supposed to enter them all in manually?

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What people don’t understand is that if you’re selling an app on iOS, Apple hosts that app on their server. You upload it, the customer downloads it, it gets downloaded from their servers. OK. With In-App Purchase it doesn’t work that way. You host everything. You ship it directly to the customer. All Apple does in the process is collect the money and basically give you a token that says it was collected and you do everything else. It’s essentially doing exactly the same thing as a credit-card processing company for this 30 percent. Nothing more.