Sunday 5 May 2002

Why I Don't Support Harlan Ellison's KICK Internet Piracy Lawsuit

by Philip Shropshire

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Let me state for the record that I'm a huge Harlan Ellison fan. I own a lot of Harlan's books; in fact, I probably own more of his books than I do of any single other writer.

In contrast, I am far from loved and revered down at Ellison Webderland ¹ — Harlan's somewhat official message board — where the good Webderlanders have, in no particular order, wished upon me leukemia, openly discussed barbecuing me alive, and vividly commented about the dearth of my mental capacity.

Their reactions are understandable (and predictable). For I have gone into the Webderland Den of Lions and openly questioned the merits of Harlan Ellison's quixotic, expensive, and I must say wrongheaded, KICK lawsuit. ²

To review the background: Ellison and his counsel filed suit against AOL, Remarq/Critical Path and Citizen 513 back in April of 2000, according to information at Ellison's own website.

"WE FILED A LAWSUIT AGAINST THE ABOVE PARTIES TO STOP THEM FROM POSTING MY WORKS ON THE INTERNET WITHOUT PERMISSION. THIS IS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. RAMPANT. OUT OF CONTROL. PANDEMIC.

AOL, REMARQ/CRITICAL PATH AND A HOST OF SELF-SERVING INDIVIDUALS SEEM TO THINK THAT THEY CAN ALLOW THE DISSEMINATION OF WRITERS' WORK ON THE INTERNET WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION, AND WITHOUT PAYMENT, UNDER THE BANNER OF "FAIR USE" OR THE IDIOT SLOGAN "INFORMATION MUST BE FREE."... WHAT WE'RE LOOKING AT IS THE DEATH OF THE PROFESSIONAL WRITER!" ³

As I've stated on Harlan's own message board, I'm quite confident that this lawsuit won't do a thing to stop Internet piracy, and that the Internet, far from being a creativity killer, has been a great boon to the creative artist. Harlan dismissed my arguments and others concerning this lawsuit with the remark: "Hell hath no fury like the uninvolved." In fact, I am not uninvolved with the Internet; I believe in the Internet strongly, in that it has allowed me to become my own publisher. I am now a working freelance writer because of this wonderful medium. I respect the Code Warriors and Techno Mages who have made the Internet the vibrant Science Fictional reality it is today. I also said that I would elaborate on my dissent in another venue, because these are important issues and they need to be addressed. So here we are.

My several concerns about the lawsuit have to do first, with the Dark Forces that Ellison finds himself aligned with, and second, with the impossibility of ever "winning".

These aren't small points to me.

Lawsuit Coincides with Dark Side Corporate Interests, or
Cheap Thrills On The Road To Hell

This lawsuit is not only futile but — and it pains me to say this — a tool of evil, because it would do much to further the interests of the Evil Corporations (and I do believe in them). Harlan, with typical bombast, frames the war as the Little Guy against the Multinational. But if he were to win his suit it would help AOL/Time Warner, which happens to be one of the largest content owners on the planet. I'm not sure if Harlan, who's seemingly proud of not having an email address, understands that AOL wins as a content producer even if it loses as a defendant. It also turns out that, according not only to his message board but to a piece that recently appeared in Pages Magazine, that the Internet's friend, Microsoft, is also interested in this case. Could their interest be in funding someone who's a thorn in AOL's side? Or is it a part of Microsoft's .net strategy, their mad scheme to make sure that every transaction on the net, be it micropayment or next month's mortgage fee, goes through a server in Redmond...?

Now, if you find troubling this possible alliance with Microsoft — not known as the friend of the Little Guy (and whose leader has been transparently cast as a Bond villain ⁴ in no less than three films that I've seen in the past five years) — you might be happy to know that Harlan is rooting for the RIAA in their case against Napster ⁵. I should point out that the recording and film industries ⁶ also aren't known for their love of the Little Guy or the rights of artists and writers. But quite frankly, Harlan is using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as is the RIAA ⁷, in their case against Napster. The DMCA has been largely criticized by the tech community as being a smokescreen protector for content producers — not the writers and artists themselves as Harlan is finding out — but the same rapacious corporations that give the working artist such a raw deal in the first place.

Both the DMCA and its horrendous Idiot Bastard Son the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) ⁸ — a proposal at this point — are nothing more than Nuremberg Laws ⁹ for computer intellectuals. Dmitry Skylarov ¹⁰ may as well have been prosecuted for Thought Crime. In fact, the DMCA has been responsible for a number of hideous outcomes that its aforementioned offspring would only further. These crimes include eroding the right to shift the use of products that we buy, the threat against libraries, the chilling of speech concerning intellectual and tech discussion, the erosion of privacy, the threat against electronic publishing, the threat against scientific inquiry, and it encodes a war against Open Source programming — the only thing that keeps Microsoft from owning the net infrastructure outright. ¹¹

The CBDTPA bill currently being proposed in Congress would extend the evil. It would, briefly, allow the entertainment lobby to run any new technology through a yearlong vetting process. It's monumental not only in its arrogance but its stupidity. These were the guys who fought tooth and nail against VCRs, only to find out that videotapes have become one of their biggest revenue sources. So — if someone invents compression code ¹² that allows T1 speeds over 56k modems, or holographic terabyte storage ¹³ in the palm of your hand, or business models that turn the underground wi fi movement into profit, well, forget about it. First, you'd have to deal with the entertainment lobby and their vassals on Capital Hill for at least a year, probably longer. This would strangle meaningful tech development ¹⁴ in the United States, just as the strangling of our biotech research has sent our best techs and researchers to Britain ¹⁵.

No sign of concern here from Harlan. No tears for Dmitry. In fact, it's quite clear that Harlan hates the Internet and probably wouldn't mind it going away. Read the statements on his board, or his Onion A.V. Club interview. If you follow the logic of his suit and his current alliance with the RIAA, you might conclude that he supports The CBDTPA. Of course, Harlan is a virtual co-plaintiff with the RIAA and even cites the recording industry's groundbreaking work in using the DCMA in shutting down Napster. Yet this is the "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" horror aspect to it all: every time Harlan gets a positive decision using the DCMA, it helps the recording industry, in a kind of a mutual precedent feedback loop of evil.

I see this lawsuit as ultimately damaging to Harlan Ellison's legacy. Frankly, I believe Harlan should know better. He should know better than to say that he's succeeded in policing the Internet because Critical Path allows him to access their servers ¹⁶ . No person would say that with a straight face who had any understanding of the principles behind the evolutionary net; Harlan's seat on the Critical Path servers has no effect on email attachments or peer to peer networking ¹⁷ (Harlan's going to police every computer on the net?), or Freenet ¹⁸, or kids running around with gig storage on their key chains. One of the galling aspects of Harlan's suit is how the artist formerly known as a science fiction writer could have so little basic understanding of where the Internet is going. It's moving into uncensored and untouchable Wi Fi networks ¹⁹ and encrypted router nexus points and vast anonymous intranets — not to mention what may happen when nan and laser storage and ultra wideband hit the scene. You think it's hard to find those John Does 1-10 ²⁰? — now wait until every Tom, Dick, and Harry has their own internet in a pocket. In other words, this lawsuit becomes more impractical by the moment as technology quickly leaps over the best intentioned of lawsuits — as the plaintiffs in the Microsoft antitrust case are discovering.

No Workable Remedies, or
Delusion For A Dragon Slayer

Now let's set motivations for the lawsuit aside. Let's imagine the best possible future for Harlan, that he wins the suit and gets a big settlement from AOL Time Warner. Does this mean the end of Internet Piracy, and does it ensure the rights of writers? Of course it doesn't. How do we know this? By looking at the wonderful success that the RIAA has had against Napster. True, they demolished Napster in the courts, but file sharing and file downloading is at an all time high ²¹. Why? Because there are dozens of replacements for Napster, including Fast Track, Kazaa, Music City, and Gnutella and many many more. As of December of last year, these file sharing companies exceeded the volume of downloading that Napster had at its peak.

They're also harder to sue and shut down because they rely on a concept known as peer to peer networking, or decentralized computing. The owners are sometimes abroad. There was an attempt to shut down Kazaa in Amsterdam but the Dutch court ruled against the plaintiffs ²². Who does Harlan sue now and how would he shut down the servers in Amsterdam? Or data-haven-in-making Sealand ²³? The answer is that he doesn't.

It hardly needs mentioning that the recording industry has tons more money and lawyers than Harlan could ever have access to — and they're losing. Oh, they won the battle against Napster, but they are decisively losing their war. So even if Harlan wins his suit, it's hard imagining that he could win his war. This is another reason why I can't support his lawsuit.

A Question of Values, or
The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge

You wouldn't know it from listening to Harlan, but he was recently dealt a blow in his case. "A federal judge has ruled that America Online is not liable for the unauthorized posting of some e-books on its Web servers", according to a story that appeared on CNET ²⁴. How Harlan thinks this is good news is truly bewildering. But there's actually something more disturbing than the judge's interpretation of how the DMCA affects Harlan, and that's how the DMCA was created to begin with. The bill wasn't designed to help writers and artists, the Ellisons of the world, but to protect big content producers like the RIAA and AOL; rich lobbyists for content producers helped craft the bill. The judge was simply reading back that portion of the bill that protects wealthy Internet Service Providers.

In fact, the Big Money lobbying that created the DMCA — and will probably make the CBDTPA law in the next year or two — is much more disturbing to me than whether or not somebody illegally trades "Jeffty is Five" over the Internet. The Internet represents a great opportunity for the public to create and control media institutions that aren't owned by multinationals, who through buy-off of the electoral process and top-down international trade agreements like the WTO and NAFTA that pits American workers against slave labor abroad, seem intent on turning the United States into a Third World country. Our current leadership, more appointed than elected, seems to be a kind of a junta, completely controlled by multinationals who have shown time and time again that they are not nationalistic.

So let's review: Harlan's lawsuit uses the equal of Modern Day Nuremberg Laws in pursuit of its objectives. Those objectives, even if the suit is successful, are impossible to achieve given the resilient morphing nature of the Internet. Finally, compared with other problems in this country and the world, these objectives aren't even noble, and in fact would strengthen the hand of the tyrannies that Harlan claims he's fighting against. Thus: the lawsuit is flawed, foolish, and even (as a friend of mine put it) petty for someone who claims that it's not about the money.

The Probably Fictional and Rosy Micropayment Future, or
Would You Do It For A Penny?

Whatever you may think of Andrew Sullivan, he's achieved something remarkable: his weblog is making a profit (which, as he so snidely notes, is something that Slate and Salon have yet to do). Another site (which I've reviewed), Cool Beans World, charges $2.95 a month for comics online, and it's growing. These are just two examples of a significant trend, and there are certainly many others that are maturing and growing on the net.

What is this trend? It's the growth of the much heralded micropayment movement. Comics theorist Scott McCloud ²⁵ has argued for years now that this is the future of online content, since it's the most practical way that the artist of the future can be compensated.

Harlan might rightly ask me, having savaged his lawsuit, what alternative I have that would protect the rights and livelihoods of artists. My answer is that artists and writers should use the net to build direct communication to their audience, without the help of the Microsofts, Time Warners and Sony Corps of this world. I think the future potential of the net not only outweighs negative factors such as theft, but offers greater opportunities than the present system. ²⁶

Where Harlan sees a generation of degenerate thieves who won't cough up the dough for Approaching Oblivion, I see an audience that would be open-minded about paying for content on the net and supporting artists directly. This would mean true independence for artists and writers.

In fact, I've urged Harlan to become a First Mover and offer his own content on the net (God knows he's produced enough for a small country). Do a free weblog (which would force Harlan to at least learn about the medium he's trying to destroy!) to suck folks in. There are lots of other bloggers out there, but while Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, and Virginia Postrel are nice people, Harlan Ellison would blow them all away.

Harlan could use this new weblog as a kind of entryway. Charge $3 a month, like Cool Beans Universe, and offer about a hundred pieces: short stories, essays, random rants and targeted tirades. Bring back the video essays, like those done for Galaxy Online. How about a library of Ellison's recorded works, in a MP3 format? Why not take some of the comics adaptations of Ellison's stories, converted into a Flash format? Too expensive? Then ask Stephen King exactly why he refused to chip in to this lawsuit ²⁸.

I would support Harlan creating content. I'd cough up my three bucks a month. Likewise, if this was 1959, I would encourage Harlan to write for television, not sue it on behalf of the radio and film industries. For the present, Harlan could easily proceed with both actions: he could sue and build at the same time. My dream would be that he builds, starts pulling in $10 grand a month, and asks "Why am I suing again?" and "What for?" Perhaps, in this dream of a Harlan Ellison future, he might make $10 million a year in online profits while losing another $10 million in theft — but that's $20 million that he wouldn't see without a free and vibrant net that's open to innovation. That's a drive "Along The Scenic Route" that I can believe in.

I might add, on a personal note to Harlan, that I find the idealism of your suit to be interesting and worthwhile. I just find it to be a bad idea in light of the times and your questionable allies. Good idea; questionable timing. The net is on the verge of becoming self sustaining and evolutionary. It's part of a communications revolution that's bigger and more important than file trading. Your suit positions you not only with the wrong allies, but on the wrong side of history. Consider this essay an honest rhetorical attempt to hold Bones back even as that truck crashes into your legal pursuits.

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1. Ellison Webderland
Harlan, arguably the greatest self-promoter in genre fiction and its greatest theatrical performer (those acting gigs aren't just good looks god knows), isn't a fan of the Internet as far as I can tell, but more on that later. But you can go talk to him down at his message board. I politely asked him to please make fun of my mental capacities and he and the other Webderlanders are always willing to oblige. So, on the Internet, you can go watch Harlan whine about how awful the Internet is. I guess he's too much of a smart business man to ignore cyberspace.

2. wrongheaded KICK lawsuit
This is just one page about the lawsuit. It's written by Harlan and associates so it reflects his point of view. There's also a somewhat poorly attended message board where the lawsuit can be debated but it hasn't really attracted a lot of visitors. One of the odd things about the lawsuit is why Harlan isn't making his motions and evidence available to the public. For example, the publishers of the magazine 2600 put all of their legal stuff on the net. But Harlan's message board did get an interesting visitor recently, a one Mr. Eric Flint, said in my best Rod Serling Twilight Zone voice. Mr. Flint offered an argument that giving away copies of his books, without encryption or the much vaunted Microsoft Digital Managment Rights Technology, actually improved his sales.

3. THE DEATH OF THE PROFESSIONAL WRITER!
Please read the Eric Flint article for a refutation of this point in footnote 2. But this isn't entirely a luddite position that the Internet would reduce or change the status of the professional writer. No less an authority than Esther Dyson has said the same thing. Her position is that writers won't be able to make a living selling books and their only fees would come from speaking fees. I should note that even if this worst case scenario came to be, Harlan, one of fandom's most entertaining and electrifying speakers, sure wouldn't go hungry. Neal Stephenson, a great writer who codes and truly understands the net, would probably starve. I say this because I saw Neal speak in Pittsburgh and he didn't look comfortable in public. I got the distinct feeling that someone had threatened his family with death and was poking a sharp stick into his back at all times...Yep. Neal would starve.

4. friend of the Little Guy and whose symbolic leader has been cast as a transparent Bond villain
You could argue that Microsoft is the most ruthless company that has ever graced the planet. It's not a good thing that they think that you're their kind of guy. But to be fair, the same arguments that Bill Gates makes about the free software movement kind of coincides with what Harlan is saying in his lawsuit, so there might be some common ground here. By the way, those Films include the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (which features a hideous Rupert Murdoch/Bill Gates combo), Anti Trust (hint hint), with Tim Robbins playing the transparent Gates lead, and The Sixth Day, with the head of the evil cloning company also portrayed by a Gates clone (the glasses are the giveaway...). I've probably missed or not seen other examples...

5. RIAA in their case against Napster
These are links that will give you a history of the dispute. Why do I think that Harlan roots for the RIAA? Because he tells you so on his site. I can cite Harlan's counsel on his own website: "Fortunately for Harlan Ellison, since this memo was first drafted on February 2, two important decisions have been handed down by the Fourth and Ninth Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal which vindicate virtually every argument we have made for the protection of copyrighted material online. The media have covered the Ninth Circuit Napster Decision extensively." Go RIAA. The people's champion. So, the next time your Celine Dion CD crashes your computer, remember to thank the RIAA and their virtual co-plaintiff Harlan Ellison. Remember: A victory for the RIAA is probably a victory for Harlan and probably vice versa.

6. recording and film industries
This links to a hilarious dissection of Jack Valenti's comments concerning the new and thoroughly horrific Hollings Bill. Ernest Miller gives us the annotated version: "I think [the technology community is] much more responsive [to the MPAA's concerns since the introduction of the CBTDPA] than they were. [Of course, that is one of the reasons for the CBTDPA - to scare Silicon Valley. The threat of legislative mandate will tend to do that.] I think they realize as I do that there are smart people inside each of these industries. [They probably also realize that there are really stupid people in the industries as well, i.e., the CueCat: and Resident Evil - the Movie] But as long as everyone is suspicious of each other, what we have to insert in these discussions is good faith. [Just how do you insert "good faith"? People either have honest intentions or they do not. If they don't trust each other, government won't make them do so. Government can simply force them to act in a certain way.]"

7. But quite frankly, Harlan is also using the DMCA as is the RIAA
This gives you a pretty good rundown on why the DMCA is evil. There's also a site called anti-dmca that outlines why the bill is bad.

8. the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA)
This leads to a dissent page about the Hollings bill in case you're curious about the complaints about this new proposed law. It looks dead for now, but the same forces that passed the DMCA could also pass this.

9. are nothing more than Nuremberg Laws
I don't state this lightly. I truly believe that these laws are aimed at the common everyday things that any decent curious hacker would usually do. That's a real good idea: Attack the Mentats. The guy who came up with the DECSS hack or the people who will probably crack any government sanctioned encryption in 24 hours or less will be the ones prosecuted and persecuted under these newly proposed laws.

10. Dmitry Skylarov
I'm assuming that everybody who reads Locus Online knows and understands who Dmitry is, everyone but Harlan that is. I'm still waiting for him to shed a tear for old Dmitry. I won't hold my breath. I guess the thing that offended me the most about his arrest--aside from the fact that what he was doing was legal in his own country of Russia and the fact that our laws seem to have the effect of only going after mentats or smart tech people--is that it truly undermines computer security to arrest people who publicly point out security flaws. The problem in computer circles is that crackers are a communal group so they move faster and they learn more, where the protectors of computer security aren't quite so talkative. So if you arrest a person who publicly tells you about a flaw in your software you're not really helping the goals of security.

11. the only thing that keeps Microsoft from owning the net infrastructure outright.
All of the several previous links come from a site that sprung up to counter the odious Hollings bill.

12. invents compression code
Someone already claims that they have. If the Hollings bill passes, then they'll be a minimum one year vetting process. I'm sure, knowing the swift pace of government action, that the year won't stretch into eons and then into eons of long, fruitless lawsuits. One of the scariest aspects in the Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley is that the entertainment moguls seem to be waging a war against technological growth itself.

13. holographic terabyte storage
This was demoed in early April by the way. In a world free of the Hollings bill we might actually get to see this tech in our lifetimes.

14. This would completely strangle meaningful tech development
An Intel exec, the only brave one at a hearing before Hollings, said the same thing in this story freely available online, something else that might change is certain plaintiffs get their way.

15. and researchers to Britain
This links to a story that details the great exodus of our biotech talent since we no longer apparently intend to lead in basic biotech research.

16. succeeded in policing the Internet because Critical Path allows him to access their servers
Harlan's exact quote from Pages was this: "We've done what everyone said was impossible: police the Internet." Two points here: first, and this has to go with the way that Harlan conducts his so-called righteous lawsuit compared to how the magazine 2600 conducts what I think is a legitimately righteous lawsuit. First, Harlan spun this as an incredible victory and I just don't see it. You want to find out about Critical Path? Go to www.fuckedcompany.com and you can learn all about them. They're probably dead meat. I mean, maybe Harlan will be lucky and AOL will buy them out and this triumphant legal pursuit will continue. But Harlan spun and promoted this as some kind of great and brilliant victory. When, as somebody more objective might note, it looks like he was dealing out the deadbeat plaintiffs who couldn't cover his costs even if he won. I believe only a juicy cash settlement from AOL will save him now. The other thing is that before Harlan "notified" all of us plebes about the great "victory" someone had posted a message saying that Critical Path had already posted the very same press release on their own website a full month before. What New thing will Harlan tell us next? Two planes hit the Trade Center Towers? Yankees lose World Series? And it all helps my case? I don't think that Harlan knew that Critical Path had already posted this exciting bit of info. It makes me think he just has a fundamental misunderstanding of this medium.

Two, Harlan's settlement doesn't really allow him to police the Internet. At least it didn't the last time I checked out one of those evil peer to peer networking services. Anybody with a modem could download Harlan reading a copy of Ben Bova's Mars. I'm sure Harlan's stamped that out with his new omniscient Internet censor, uh, policing powers. But I did email Charlie Stross, a Linux/Open Source Techno Mage, and I asked him to respond to Harlan's affirmation. Here's his response. "Speaking in my capacity as a computer journalist and sometime internet server developer, I can say with some assurance that I think Ellison is completely and utterly mistaken. All he's able to do is to scan a usenet feed for illegal postings -- and while he can make one ISP remove offending posts, usenet works on a flood-fill mechanism these days that means everything posted on it is replicated on tens of thousands of servers world-wide within a matter of minutes. It's almost impossible to police. Nor is he going to be able to do anything about private email, or p2p systems like Gnutella which is decentralized and cryptographically secured to make it impossible to delete files once they've been posted. Moreover, I have extreme misgivings about the wisdom of his actions; I believe that the presumption that readers are untrustworthy and need to be policed will backfire catastrophically on the entire media industry."

17. peer to peer networking
This links to a peer to peer story that argues that the new technology offers a number of business opportunities. I might note that Peer to Peer is looked at as the enemy if you go over to that KICK internet site of Harlan's. From what I can tell, they're looking to sue AOL for developing Gnutella in the first place. Well, if that's the case, then I'm sure that would show them, them being the tech innovators that are driving the engine of the economy that is. Thanks Harlan, no, really.

18. Freenet
This is an attempt to create an intranet that is completely impervious to censorship. I'm sure Harlan supports this, even as he singlehandedly polices the net. You know, the odd thing, this wonderful idea of policing the Internet is something that the Castros and Chinese governments and junta leaders of this world would also like to do, not that Harlan has actually done it. But Harlan is a smart man with smart lawyers, what if he figures out a way? Castro could use the method as well as the struggling artist who simply wants to protect his copyright or his legacy. The really scary thing about Harlan's suit is what happens if he's actually successful and does create a mechanism so that the Good Authority Figures can make sure that you're not looking at the "bad" content...There goes both of my sites...

19. Wi Fi networks
This is the next big thing by the way. The idea that the American public could create it's own broadband infrastructure, not entirely owned by Your Friendly Neighborhood Big Telco. If it actually rises, then I imagine that this would really really be impossible to monitor.

20. John Does 1-10
The John Does are the people who have allegedly posted illegal copies of Harlan's work online. They were also probably former fans who really liked Harlan's work.

21. file downloading is at an all time high
This article, one of zillions on the net, has shown that the new services have far outstripped Napster.

22. Dutch court ruled against the plaintiffs
The other problem with Harlan's lawsuit is that the suit only affects American companies and American cities. What happens if the Dutch court won't shut down the servers that you don't like? Probably nothing...

23. Sealand
Sealand is a data haven, oft written about in fiction by the hip Sterling/Stephenson duopoly of post cyberpunk, in making. They say that they won't do anything illegal but how do you know? They're located on a former military platform off of the coast of England and they've declared themselves as their own country. So Harlan can't sue them if they're storing an egregious copy of "At The Mouse Circus". I guess he could storm them in a morning raid (I can see him now in his commando gear) but they have colocated facilities, allegedly secret, all over the world. It probably won't work just like his suit won't work.

24. according to a story that appeared on CNET.
One of the problems with the lawsuit is that the DMCA was designed in order to prevent Harlan's suit. I've probably said that before. And I'll say it again.

25. Comics theorist Scott McCloud
Scott McCloud has been pushing Micropayments for years and he actually articulates his ideas in comics form, which you can find here.

26. more opportunity than the present system. This is another aspect of the McCloud argument and where I think his sometime critic Gary Groth gets it completely wrong. The one to one relationship between the artist and his audience would be a revolutionary and progressive one. It's also why I think HBO is able to create uncompromising programming because they serve their audience not the advertisers. In fact, I don't believe HBO receieves any advertising. I'm sure the Sopranos would look a lot different if the network did. Likewise, writers who sell their work directly to their fans can be free as well. On a personal note, I might note that I was out of writing for about several years until the Internet came along. I didn't have to go through some editor who didn't know what the word "grok" meant and try to sell him a column about comics and science fiction. I can't say tnat my sites are money makers but they've gotten me enough work so that I can write full time. I love this medium and I want it to remain open to the little guy, or guys like me.

27. Disney's horrendous Third World labor practices
This has to do with Harlan's great several minute video rants that he used to do back on the Sci Fi channel. I really used to enjoy them and I thought that one of his best pieces was an essay on collectibles that ended with him criticizing Disney for their slave labor practices abroad. I believe Harlan implored Disney to at least pay these guys a decent wage. Weeks later, it turned out that the science fiction channel wasn't going to renew their weekly news show. So the channel, which shows us mostly Quantum Leap dreck and those awful Land of the Giants shows no longer has a half hour show about what's happening in science fiction. Oh, they replaced the show briefly with something that was much weaker and much dumber and where I'm pretty sure the writers didn't know enough about the worlds around them to even comment on what Disney did abroad. And that was probably the point. Now, what if Harlan said those same things online? As a matter of fact, he has said equally controversial things. Has he been cancelled? Nope, and he probably won't ever be cancelled online. In the future, if he creates and grows his own audience the only thing that will stop Harlan from saying what he wants will be mortality.

28. who quite sensibly refused to chip in to your lawsuit
This was also revealed in Pages Magazine. It's actually not clear why King won't support Harlan's suit. He may have the same concerns that I have or he may have no interest in the subject. But I would hope that he would support his own or even Harlan's efforts to build self sustaining markets for science fiction, fantasy and horror writers.

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, Philip Shropshire used to make his living as a print reporter. He runs the websites www.threerivertechreview.com and www.majic12.com. For the record, he is a Harlan Ellison fan and counts The Deathbird Stories and Dangerous Visions as his favorite books. He also reviews comics occasionally for Locus Online.