So today’s meme-mandated topic is fanfic. I have nothing interesting or useful to say about fanfic – I haven’t read any in years. So I thought I’d talk about something that is at least slightly relevant to fanfic: copyright. Or rather, the history of copyright. I’m still working on what it turning out to be quite a long bit of writing about the Digital Economy Bill, and what I’m opening it with is a brief background on the history of copyright, which I thought might make good reading in any case…

Let’s start by admitting something: copyright is a good thing. That can get lost in all the shouting about piracy, and draconian measures and three strikes and creative commons and all the associated jargon. So it’s important to admit up front that copyright is a good thing, and the ideals it was created to protect are still good and valid today. We do need to provide a system to incentivise people to produce creative works, otherwise large parts of our culture will up and blow away. And it was in that spirit that copyright was first codified in England in 1709 by the Statute of Anne, or to give it it’s full title “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.” (Incidentally, in case anyone’s wondering what people did before copyright law was codified, then you’ll find that spending five minutes looking up the term “book curse” will pay interesting dividends.)

It gave creators rights over their work for 14 years after creation, and gave them the ability to extend those rights for another 14 years on application. It also expressly ensured that distributors retained no rights to control use of the material after first sale. If you bought a book, you were free to read it in public, sell it on, or use it as kindling if you so wished – so long as you didn’t make your own copies and distribute those, you were in the clear. But after that time was up, the works would pass into the public domain, for the common good.

I’m not going to bore you with the full history of copyright, I just wanted to bring up the full title of that 1709 act. The spirit in which copyright law was created was that of education, and of safeguarding the common good, to balance the rights of creators and of the public. The rights of distributors, however, were quite expressly limited.

But then, in 1709, there wasn’t a lot of demand for books. The person who printed the book was quite likely to also be the person who sold the book. And if someone in Edinburgh wanted a book that had been written in London, they either got a friend to in London to buy them a copy, or they wrote to the printer and asked them to post it. Distribution was not really something that people worried about.

But the world moved on, and a revolution or three later, people in Edinburgh expect to be able to buy not just books, but CDs and films made and published not just in London, but in New York, or Beijing or Sydney. And over the last hundred years or so, distribution has become very, very important. Entire industries have been founded on the fact that actually, the job of creating and printing something is the least difficult bit of the process, and that the hardest part was first making people aware of the product, and then getting the product into the hands of people who might want to buy it. And copyright law changed because it served the common good to ensure that the people who did the marketing and distribution were incentivised to do so.

And then we invented the internet. And now my friends can make films, and write books and record music in their own homes, and with a little effort, they can tell people all over the world about them, and they can sell them to anyone that’s interested. Suddenly, marketing and distribution are the easiest part of the process.

And that’s where things start to go wrong, because there are now entire industries that are rapidly becoming irrelevant who can only remain relevant by appointing themselves as gatekeepers of what can be done with created works. And that’s the background to the Digital Economy Bill.

Oh, all right, I’ll play along this time. We can’t all be expected to speak English good, and god knows I’ve made far more egregious typos in my time.

I havered about what to write about here, though. I probably own more non-fiction than fiction, as long as we discount the comics, and are a little generous with the classification of some of the more lunatic bits of occult reference I own. I’ve got journalism, I’ve got reference, I’ve got history, biography, travel, collection of opinion pieces and so on and so forth.

I could spout on about HST, I could bring up the perennial bleak favourite “Dark Heart” by Nick Davies, over a decade old now, and I don’t imagine the problems it’s talking about have magically gotten better, I could even talk about one of the cookbooks I own, and almost never use.

But honestly, the single aspect of my non-fiction collection that brings me the most pleasure is the shelf full of books about London. I know, I know. I think I’ve done pretty well, so far, not banging on about London, but I’ve just made my annual pilgrimage back to Northern Ireland, and after a couple of days in a place that’s at once home and Not London, London is on my mind.

Whenever I pop into my local book store, the first place I gravitate to is the London section. I had to flee the gift shop at The Museum of London, before I had a truly ruinous shopping accident.

What I love is the diversity of books on London. There are histories, both city wide, and localised. There are books charting some trend of other, or the development of some industry. There are guidebooks up guidebooks. There are maps, both ancient and modern, there are histories of maps, there are books about London’s place in some wider context, there are books of photography, poetry and fiction.

Yes, I know they could be found for any big city. Don’t care. London’s the one that’s caught my imagination, and I am delighted that it’s a place that seems to have caught the fascination of so many others, because it means I’m never short of some new non-fiction to read.

I’ll try and be a little less predictable tomorrow.

Note carefully: not a fiction book. A fictional book. So I’m going to talk about the Sigsand Manuscript.

The Sigsand Manuscript features in the stories of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson, one of a few works published roughly contemporarily with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes that I like almost as much.

The Sigsand MS, as it is generally referred to in the tales, is one of the devices that Hodgson uses to ground the tales in reality, which is sort of why I wanted to talk about it, because at first sight that sounds absurd – how can something fictional be used to ground something in reality?

Obviously, some of it is just that it’s part of the internal reality of the tales, but the greater part of its function rests in the way that it is referenced. Where Lovecraft and his inheritors tend to refer to their many, many fictional texts (and this was very nearly a piece on the cultural importance of the Necronomicon) in tones of hushed dread, as rare and special things whose secrets were enough drive men mad, Hodgson’s characters refer to the Sigsand MS as common knowledge, at least among themselves – talking of it’s contents like “The Saamaa ritual” as things that they are all familiar with the detail of. While it contains information that is obviously fantastic, information on how to deal with the supernatural, it is always referenced in terms that make it seem as if all the characters already know this information, and whenever Carnacki is called upon within the stories to draw on it’s contents, it is always in the sense of falling back on a familiar set of tools. Even in extremity, when Carnacki is in great peril, and an unknown agency recites the most secret of the lore in the MS “The unknown last line of the Saamaa ritual”, the description of the consequences given is:

“Instantly the thing happened that I have heard once before”

Even the ultimate secret is something Carnacki has felt before. This is a known, if impressive and fearsome quantity.

Further, its contents are not entirely presented as mystic, but as something that can be employed as reliably as any scientific method, and often within the trappings of science – Carnicki uses an electric pentagram, and develops a thing he calls “the spectrum defense” – bands of projected colour – as a means of combating the supernatural.

There are Carnacki stories in which his science fails him, but invariably in these stories he turns out not to be fighting the supernatural at all, but rather the monster or haunting turns out to be a hoax.

And so it grounds the works in a reality, where laws and the scientific method apply, and indeed triumph of legend, myth and the irrational. And in the process, Hodgson takes his place toward the head of an entire cannon of fantastic literature, where the fantastic is treated as just another science, with rules and principles that can be taken from one form, and reapplied in another – one can draw a line from the likes of Hodgson and Carnacki, right through to Mieville and the biothaumaturges and punishment factories of his fantasy world of Bas-Lag. And this is important, because it’s this willingness to treat the fantastic are very real, rather than a thing to wondered at in and of itself that allows for the better brand of fantasy that is used, like the best SF, as a tool to examine our present condition, as opposed to looking back, in the manner of Tolkien, or Lewis, at some pastoral idyll, or religious mythology.

Another “whatever takes my fancy” topic. I’m a fairly private sort of person – while my blogs talk about the things I’m interested in they don’t generally talk about me, and my private life very much. And on the back of Google’s COE saying some fairly idiotic and hypocritical things, well, the subject is on my mind.

Privacy is well on course to being the major social issue of the next decade on a number of levels. It’s being suggested that what we do on the internet should be constantly monitored, because we might be doing something illegal. And Eric Schmidt up there believes that if we’re doing something that would bother us if it became public, then we should not be doing that at all.

Any of you know someone who’s in the closet? Any of you know someone who is, at the least, not out to a certain group of their friends or acquaintances? Any of you have a fetish that you’d rather not admit to any of your friends? Any of you have a fetish you’d rather your work colleagues did not know about? Yeah, I know – there are none of us who could really withstand the level of public scrutiny that Mr Schmidt and our lawmakers think we should be able to endure.

Now, I’m sure there are people out there who might be thinking “if only people were more able to be open about sex – I do nothing I am ashamed of. I’m not even ashamed of the thing with the wetsuit, the goat and the tub of creme fraiche” and heralding the end of privacy as a sign of increasing social enlightenment – if everything is public, there’ll be no need to be ashamed, and so on.

Those people are wrong. Privacy is vital. I only used sex as an example there because it’s one everyone can relate on a very basic level, regardless of social, economic or technological status. I’m going to continue using it as an example, because I think everyone can relate to it, but the need for privacy could equally apply to health issues, money, politics, religion, or really, anything that is a common experience, but that could also be used to mark us out as different. But to return to my point: on a very basic level, we also need privacy, and I’m going to waffle on at length about why.

Human beings are social animals. It’s why we worry about things like “fitting in”. Fitting in, being part of the herd, has both evolutionary advantages and some serious drawbacks. Obviously, you get the bonus of strength in numbers, and readily available sexual partners, but the flip side is too much pressure to fit in has the unfortunate effect of stifling innovation. And so we’ve adapted – we do need to fit in, we need to affirm our place within society, and we also need “alone time”. As much as we need to fit in, we also space, both physical and cognitive, that is defined as our own, space away from the crowd.

One of the ways we secure that space, particularly cognitively, is by managing information according to a level of trust – we reveal what we are thinking only to those we trust, as a means of testing out our ideas, before bringing them into the wider social unit – to check that those ideas won’t have negative consequences for our place in the group dynamic. And depending on how important, how personal those issues are to us, we reveal them to fewer and fewer people.

To return to my earlier example I, personally, do not think anyone needs to know what I might enjoy getting up to in the bedroom, so I generally keep my mouth shut on the subject. My closer friends may have picked up some hints, here and there, but I doubt any of them could tell you in any detail about things I enjoy, or experiences I have had. Which is the way I want it – not because I am ashamed of it or uncomfortable with the topics, but simply because most people have no need to know. And if they don’t need to know, why would I tell them? Telling people things they don’t need to know isn’t “being open/liberated/free/honest/insert word that hippies like here”, at least not as far as I’m concerned. I file it under “being pointless”. It’s tipping the signal to noise ratio in favour of noise.

There’s also a broader social management going on in what we chose to reveal to who – it’s partly a combination of trust, and partly to do with the ways we categorise the people we know.

On the trust front, if someone else displays a willingness to be open and public with certain information about their life, then I am going to think twice before I share information about myself on related topics with them. Whether I can trust them or not is irrelevant – they clearly don’t accord it the same level of importance that I do, and might therefore share my confidence with someone else, without stopping to think about whether or not I would consider it appropriate. And I am likewise made uncomfortable when others share information with me that I would not share with them – to me it speaks of a level of closeness that I do not wish to have, or perhaps do not wish to have yet – they may not consider a certain level of detail to be an intimate confidence, but I do and it is the perceived imbalance that is the source of my discomfort, rather than the topics themselves – it is as if they are presuming a level of friendship without going through the steps that would normally build that same level, skipping the intermediate levels of confidence, proclaiming a level of trust in me that I feel unable to reciprocate.

But that’s all to do with levels of trust. But there’s also kinds of trust. My clients at work need to be able to trust that I will work hard on their behalf, with honesty and discretion. Which means, in fact, that if they learn about my personal life if I share to a level they consider inappropriate, then they’re going to doubt my discretion. And the same is true of my friends, who need to be able to trust in other things about me, so it’s appropriate to share different things with them, and the same is true of my family, or even just something as simple as the players in my roleplaying games, who may be my friends, but who also have to feel able trust in certain of my character traits, so I need to present myself in certain ways to them.

All of which will be undermined, if, as Mr Schmidt is suggesting, privacy goes the way of the dodo, because if I can nothing my clients won’t approve of, then I can’t do much that my friends will like, either.

Now, most of what I’ve talked about here goes on at a level below conscious thought. By the time we reach adulthood, it is learned, and long practiced social behaviour. We do it without thinking – I’m only spelling it out here because it’s relevant to the subject of privacy, because if we have no privacy, then we lack the means to manage our social bonds in the way we choose. Without privacy, you don’t get intimacy. If you share everything with everyone, willingly or otherwise, without thought for context, then what you share with your nearest or dearest is no longer special.

I have no idea if any of that was sensible, or even coherent. But I need got get this posted today, so that’s what you’ve got for now. I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s thoughts on the subject.

As I said the other day, I hate photos of myself, and I was going to dodge around this one by talking about something else entirely, but then I remembered that I do have a photo of me taken a bit over a month ago that I quite like. Yes, OK, I’m conveniently masked but it’s still me under the halloween costume. I was going as Auberon, aiming for a sort of ragged-king look, which Miranda was kind enough to put together for me. Unfortunately, I’m cunningly obscuring some of the costume’s better touches with my pose here, but you can’t have everything, I guess. So while the photo doesn’t show it off to best effect, I think it worked well enough that I’ve saved the costume to be used again in future, so this post probably qualifies as a spoiler for anyone that’s planning on playing in the LARP I’m running next year. It may not be Auberon that the costume gets used for, but I’m sure I can find a use for some strange sort of inhuman jester-king in something. You’ll all love it, I promise. Honest.

This one isn’t in-line with rest of the meme – it’s one of the days I’m opting out of, because I don’t have any photos of me that I like from 10 years ago on-line, or any practical means of getting them there. Instead, I’m doing a topic that Budgie asked for – what friendship means to me. There are a few more of these that I want to evade, so if there’s something you’d like me to waffle on about, do ask…

When I was younger, I was a boy scout. Stop laughing at the back – I looked good in a woggle. The scout master may have been a little archaicaly homophobic, but he ended every meeting with the words “You live as a result of your actions, and you are judged by the company you keep.” It’s something that still informs how I pick my friends.

So what does friendship means to me? Well, to state the obvious, every friendship is different. Some of my friends, I see once in a blue moon, and it’s like no time has passed – we fall easily back into our friendship, and the conversation flows freely. Other friends, I see regularly, and yet every time, there’s a certain hurdle of not really quite knowing how to start talking to be overcome – like we’re both looking for the level, and not quite sure where it is.

I’ve got friends where I feel like I put more effort into the friendship, and friends where I know they’re the one doing all the work (and I feel bad about that). There are people I’ve met in the last year who are close friends, and friends I’ve known for a very long time who I keep at arms length.

One of the ways people define friendship is how far you would put yourself out for another person. Like, I think, most people, I have a small group of people that could call me up at any time, and I’d drop whatever I was doing if they needed a hand. Except, well…

Everyone says things like that. The truth, I think, is more complex. Because it’s easy to drop things if they’re just things for me, but as soon as other people are involved, well, that changes the equation. And that’s where friendship comes into it. Because honestly, if any of my friends asked for my help, my time, and giving it wouldn’t interfere with any plans but my own, well, how could I refuse? But suppose that interferes with plans made with another friend? Or more complicated yet, what if it interferes with helping another friend. Or with plans with groups of friends?

It’s not just about how your prioritise your own time – it’s about how you prioritise other people’s time and needs. And honestly, that’s the measure I tend to use for friendship – I try to place the same importance on someone else’s time that they appear to place on mine. So that means there are people I see once in a blue moon who are still very close friends, because I know that while neither of us has lots of time to see the other, when we do make the time, it’ll be a solid priority for both of us, and if they called up needing a hand, I’d clear my calendar for them. And there are people I see regularly who clearly can’t be arsed to actually make time, who routinely show up late, or cancel at the last minute, and while they’re still my friends, they’re not people who I would cancel plans for except in direst need.

There’s a chance that that last line has stung a few people reading this. It’s happened to me a bit of late, friends not showing up when they said they would, so if you’re worrying that this bit was aimed at you, well, you’re wrong. It wasn’t aimed at all. I don’t like you any less, I’m not having a dig. I really am just answering a question, and explaining a bit about what friendship means to me. I am absolutely certain that I fall short of my own standards, and that I have friends who think that I’m unreliable, that I’m never around, or things like that, and I am sorry for that (but on the other hand – make actual in-the-diary plans with me, and you’ll probably find I show up). This is not about what anyone else does, it’s about what I try to live up to.

Ultimately, friendship means being someone that someone else can rely on. Common interests, a shared sense of humour, these are the things that start a friendship, and without them, there’s not likely to be one. But if I am to be judged by the company I keep, then I want the company I keep to be reliable. You don’t need to always be around, you don’t need to expend lots of effort keeping in touch, because god knows, I probably won’t. But you do need to be someone who can be relied on to hold your end up when it actually counts.

Yes, I know the first two were also photos that I took. This one, you can just think of as “A photo you’d like to post”. This one I’m not quite as happy with as I am the previous two – the picture is off enough in very small ways that it bugs me – the seagull, the lack of perfect alignment, the little toning dodges I’ve had to apply, and so on. But given that it was essentially a snap I managed to get on the off-chance, in a two second window before someone walking behind me came into shot, and spoiled the rest of the effect, I’m still happy enough with it. One day, I’ll get around to getting up at 6am on a Saturday, and getting up there before anyone else is around, so I can take my time over it, and retake the thing. But until then, this is the best version of the shot that I’ve got, and I for all it frustrates me, I’m very happy I managed to get it.

I did consider using some news photography here – a famous photo of some atrocity or other, something like that – and talking about how angry it makes me, and generally using to day to raise awareness of something, but to be quite honest with you, I’m just not in the mood to get that worked up at the moment about things I don’t have to.

So instead, here’s another old photo of mine. The photo doesn’t really make me sad in and of itself, but I think the narrative it suggests – someone stopping to reflect on a blue heart on a wall must have a reason to do so, surely – hints at a sadness. Again, I’m just generally happy with this shot – there’s not really much I would have changed or done differently now.

One of two of my own photos I have hanging in my office. I love this bit of sculpture, and when I bought my first DSLR, I knew this was a photo I wanted to take. So I went and took it. It’s not a flawless composition, but it reflects a lot about the way I see the world and I am as happy with the light, colours and treatment of the subject in this photo as I am in any photo I’ve taken, which, given that I took it nearly five years ago is astonishing – I usually can’t stand my work only a few days after taking the picture. That this one is still one I take pleasure in on a daily basis is something I am very happy about.

Well, today’s topic is “something that tickles your fancy”, and what tickles my fancy this morning is maps.

We’ll start with a quote that was very nearly the quote I used yesterday, and is something that I willl probably have tattooed on myself at some point in the not-too-distant future. “The map is not the territory”. That’s Robert Anton Wilson, talking there, and it’s a simple a pithy phrase that means in essence that just because we can model, explain, or illustrate something in a particular way right now, we should not confuse our current way of thinking with the truth. There is always more to learn, and if we accept that what we know now is that absolute truth, we run the risk of becoming dogmatic, and ignoring future discoveries.

Which is, of course, why fundamentalists always misunderstand science – they have confused their map with the territory, and have trouble the idea that the map science provides is subject to change – for them the very fact that it’s subject to change means that it cannot be true. So their faith tells them that X is true, while science asks them to give you the comfortable certainty of X for the more difficult uncertainty of any one of a number of other letters.

But I’m digressing. I don’t just like maps as metaphor. I like them as objects in an of themselves. The inamorata knocked it out of the park a couple of months ago, when she bought me a poster of an old tube map, from back before it was the tube, when there were only half a dozen short lines, and it was called “The London Electric Railway”. I went out and bought a frame for it the very next day, and it’s hanging in pride of place in my office. I think that anyone that knows me could instantly understand why it would.

I said a minute ago that I don’t just like maps as metaphor, and that’s true, but I think it’s more accurate to say that I love them because the are metaphors. Maps are a very human thing – a means to reframe the world in a different context, a means to make vast scopes smaller, and more comprehensible. I love them because they same territory can be mapped in hundreds of different ways, and each of them is true, and valid, and will show us something different about that space. Maps illuminate the real and the unreal with equal ease – chart territories both physical an imaginary, or, indeed, the intersection of the two in a marvellous manner.

Maps exist at the point where art and science touch, a space for design and culture. And they’re ever evolving – there is no such thing as a completely finished map, because by the time a map is done, the thing it is mapping will have changed.

One of my favourite ever maps, in fact, is visible incomplete. My Dad owns two volumes of a three volume set of the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. If he had all three, in the same nick that the two he has are in, they’d be worth a grand or two. As it is, they’re worth about 20 quid each. But their worth isn’t my point, except perhaps to illustrate why I was allowed to handle them as kid, and have therefore seen the map of the world contained therein.

The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in 1776. On the map of the world in contains, the coastline of Australia is incomplete, and it is not labelled as Australia, but rather “New Holland”. Absolutely bloody magic.