Python obfuscation

[Alex Martelli]

Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:

> "The Eternal Squire" <eternalsquire at comcast.net> writes:
> > Without copyright, how could one possibly earn a living writing a
> > novel?  
> 
> This guy seems to be doing ok:  http://craphound.com
> His publishers are the only ones allowed to sell his novels commercially,
> but you can download them all and print them out noncommercially for
> your own personal enjoyment or to share with your friends.  No obfuscation
> is needed.

One might also quip (not truthfully in Cory's specific case, I hasten to
add!-) that many of today's novels are intrinsically obfuscated enough
to need no further technological help on that front;-).

Quips aside, the question is a sensible one to ask -- not as a
rhetorical question, as TES apparently intended, of course, and not just
about novels (many different creative endeavours may require different
answers).  The "novel" as a specific literary form is not that old, just
a few centuries, but the issues were not very different for many other
literary forms over the ages and cultures, and many different answers
have been given or attempted.

For example, Virgil was writing poems (epic and otherwise), not novels,
but that's not very relevant to the question of how he made a living;
the classic solution, in his case, was to find rich patrons willing to
pay him to do so.  Of course, there are obvious problems with this
model... for example, Virgil was paid to write the Aeneid because his
patrons liked its patriotism (as well as its towering artistic
qualities), but a work with equally good art but an anti-patriotic
ideology would have been much harder to monetize at that time (and also
risked landing the author in the soup, as Ovid found out, but that's
another issue, quite unrelated to monetization).

Zooming forwards a couple of millennia, we see the model of
"serialization" -- having the novel published in periodic installments
by a magazine.  Avid readers, we're told, crowded the piers of New York
waiting for ship to land which carried the magazine with the latest
installment of some Dickens novel -- and Dumas and Sue, in France, had
fully comparable success in similar ways.  At that time, copyright
existed, in theory, but practically wasn't very well enforced (most
particularly, I believe, in the USA, where the probability of a British
publisher of actually enforcing a copyright was laughably low...) --
nevertheless, the reasonable cheapness of magazines coupled with the
readers' urgency for the next installment let these authors earn a
comfortable living anyway.  Here, the problem is presumably that you
need VERY popular novels for this to work -- but then, a tiny fraction
of novelists actually make a comfortable living from just their novels,
even with today's monetization approaches.

Modern equivalent of serialization (publishing one chapter at a time on
the web, the next chapter to come only if the author receives enough
payment for the previous one) have been attempted, but without much
success so far; however, the holy grail of "micropayments" might yet
afford a rebirth for such a model -- if paying for a chapter was
extremely convenient and cheap, enough people might choose to do so
rather than risk the next chapter never appearing.  Remember that, by
totally disintermediating publishers and bookstores, a novelist may
require maybe 1/10th of what the book would need to gross in stores, in
order to end up with the same amount of cash in his or her pockets.

One could go on for a long time, but the key point is that there may or
may not exist viable monetization models for all sorts of endeavours,
including the writing of novels, depending on a lot of other issues of
social as well as legal structures.  Let's not be blinded by one model
that has worked sort of decently for a small time in certain sets of
conditions, into believing that model is the only workable one today or
tomorrow, with conditions that may be in fact very different.


Alex