Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto - Softcover

Helprin, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061733121 ISBN 13: 9780061733123

Publisher: Broadside Books, 2010

Synopsis

Mark Helprin anticipated that his 2007 New York Times op-ed piece about the extension of the term of copyright would be received quietly. instead, within a week, the article had generated 750,000 angry comments. shocked by his young critics’ breathtaking sense of entitlement and appalled by the breadth, speed, and illogic of their arguments, Helprin realized how drastically different this generation was from those before it. the Creative Commons movement and the copyright abolitionists have been educated with a modern bias toward collaboration, which has led them to denigrate individual efforts. Digital Barbarism is Helprin’s cogent, powerful, and passionate response to those whose selfish desire to “stick it” to the “greedy” corporate interests controlling the distribution of intellectual property undermines not just the possibility of an independent literary culture but threatens the future of civilization itself.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Helprin was educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford and served in the Israeli Army, Israeli Air Force, and British Merchant Navy. He is the author of, among other titles, A Dove of the East and Other Stories, Refiner’s Fire, Winter’s Tale, and A Soldier of the Great War. He lives in Virginia.

From Publishers Weekly:

Noted novelist and journalist Helprin (Winter's Tale) wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in 2007 arguing for an extension of the term of copyright. In response, he received 750,000 caustic, often vulgar e-mails from those he calls the anticopyright movement—a mostly vague cabal led, apparently, by law professor Lawrence Lessig, and whose house organ is the œChronicle of [Supposedly] Higher Education. Now Helprin gets his revenge with a splenetic riposte that veers from a passionate defense of authors' rights and the power of the individual voice to a misanthropic attack on a debased America populated by œSlurpee-sucking geeks, œbeer-drinking dufuses and œmouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down. We're treated to his views on everything from tax policy and airport security to the self-regard of academic literary critics. Drowning in this ocean of bile is a defense of authors' right to control their work and defend its integrity against appropriation and distortion by others, and an examination of the historical and legal basis of copyright offered in elegant prose and with a rapier-sharp wit. But Helprin's pugnacity may repel even those who agree that
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About this edition

• Publisher: Broadside Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0061733121
• ISBN 13: 9780061733123
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256