In Freeloading, Chris outlines the inherent tension between digital technologies and content in a very tight-yet-entertainingly storied set of three parts. The personal saga outlines the journalist’s intention to wade into the moral and financial dilemma. The book outlines the entire history of the rise and fall of music and business during the past 25 years, to set the stage. But the problems of battling the near-inherent mindset of internet culture are now like battling internet (or any other) bullying: When people have to defend an essentially indefensible position, they resort to pulling the rug out from under any argument by simply saying it’s “whiny” or “lame” and hive mind follows suit. Lars Ulrich was actually on the right side all along, folks, despite his clueless way of trying to deal with it.

Read the full review at MAGNET Magazine.

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism is launching the CUNY Publishing Institute in June, a five-day intensive course on book publishing led by prominent digital and print publishing professionals.

John Oakes, a veteran of traditional publishing and cofounder of the Internet-based OR Books, will direct the Institute. Other headliners include Jane Friedman, CEO, Open Road Media, and Larry Kirshbaum, president of Amazon Publishing.

Read the full article at Publishers Weekly.

I can tell by the sound of your voice that you are famously handsome.

What?

Your voice — it sounds famously handsome.

To me it’s just nasal.

Fascinating. So, how was your recent sold out event at the New York Public Library with David Byrne?

Great! My head didn’t explode, which was a plus. There will be video of the event online soon. I’ll post it via one of my many online presences-es.

And just how did that come about?

My publisher sent out an early proof for Byrne to possibly blurb; that was sometime last summer. I was just excited to know he might read it. Even if he’d hated it, was still cool to think about on a certain level. Then, last October—I was planning an event where I read the entirety of Freeloading in one day at WORD, a bookstore in Brooklyn.

Read the full self-interview at the Nervous Breakdown.

Gore Vidal, who died last summer at the age of 86, was both eloquent and caustic (he once said the Kennedy family, except for Jack, had “all the charm of two tons of condemned veal”). The four interviews with history professor Jon Wiener that make up I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics (OR) encompass a broad sweep of American history. But Vidal can never be serious for too long so the interviews are leavened with bits of gossip and personal revelations, like the remark that may send readers off in search of the pulpy mysteries he wrote under the pseudonym Edgar Box.

Read the full review in the Boston Globe.

For me, it all started with a phone call.

It was way back in September 2010, when I got a phone call from my friend Peter.

“Aaron,” he said. “There’s an amazing bill you have to take a look at.”

“What is it?” I said.

“It’s called COICA. The Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act.”

“Oh, Peter,” I said. “I don’t care about copyright law. Maybe you’re right, maybe Hollywood is right, but either way is it really such a big deal? I’m not going to waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. Health care. Financial reform. Those are the sorts of issues I work on. Not something obscure like copyright.”

Read the full excerpt at Buzzfeed.

THE FIRST drone strike authorized by President Barack Obama took place in Pakistan just three days after his 2009 inauguration. Though the supposed target was a Taliban safe house, the missile discharged by remote control from one of the 60 American drone command centers dotting the globe landed on the home of Malik Gulistan Khan, a tribal elder who belonged to a pro-government peace committee. The bomb killed Khan and four of his family members.

Three years later, as the U.S. struggled to contain the fallout from a conventional airstrike that killed 26 Pakistani soldiers, Obama asserted in an online town hall meeting that a war-weary public had nothing to fear from “collateral damage” caused by drones. “Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” said Obama. “For the most part, they have been precision strikes on al-Qaeda and their affiliates. It is important to understand that this thing is being kept on a very tight leash.”

Read the full article at Socialistworker.org.

But among many liberal and protest groups that sort of sentiment is rare. “I am just astounded at the general acceptance of this nomination,” said Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of protest group Code Pink and author of a book on drones called Drone Warfare. Benjamin has spent time in Pakistan examining the impact of the strikes on the local population, and said that the programme’s biggest problem was not that it was illegal or immoral but that it was also ineffective in protecting American interests. “It is the best recruiting tool for al-Qaida and the Taliban. The hatred for it is visceral there,” she said.

Read the full article in the Guardian.

Over the summer and fall of 2011, DW Gibson followed Terkel’s model — he went around the country, recording the voices of those in the wake of the Great Recession.

Not Working: People Talk About Losing A Job and Finding Their Way in Today’s Changing Economy reveals something Americans only talk about in numbers. The unemployment rate is shared every month, but how much (or how little) we are actually making is usually not. And how Americans feel about being out of work is not a topic most want to discuss.

Read the review at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Like many young people, Chris Ruen downloaded music illegally without much thought until he learned many of his favorite “successful” indie artists were making less than he did working as a barista. That simple insight eventually led Ruen to this book, which makes a compelling case for a revived debate that moves past old arguments about Metallica and RIAA lawsuits. Unlike some leading pro-IP writers, Ruen takes a moderate, pragmatic approach, favoring shorter copyright terms, and acknowledging the many flaws of SOPA. Most crucially, Ruen devotes the middle third of his book talking to people whose voices have been all too absent from these debates: working musicians, independent labels and DIY promoters. Freeloading provides a thoughtful, important counterargument to thinkers like Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow who espouse ideals of openness but perhaps haven’t fully reckoned with the financial impacts on working artists.

See the full guide at futureofmusic.org.

Today we would like to recommend an interesting book by Chris Ruen, titled “Freeloading: How our insatiable hunger for free content starves creativity”.

Mr. Ruen provides a compelling background story on the strike movement against the American proposals for internet legislation against intellectual property infringement in the online world that were so controversial last year. The SOPA and PIPA proposals met with great criticism from activists and Internet freedom proponents, arguing that SOPA and PIPA would restrict the freedom of speech online.

Read the full article on Future of Copyright‘s website

On a January morning in 2010, nervous congregants gathered in a San Francisco auditorium. They awaited revelation, if not rapture. Silicon Valley’s far-flung diaspora joined the revival from afar, holding virtual vigil. With bent backs and glazed eyes, they stared at the live video feed streaming across their computer screens. Soon, the prophet of the information age would reward his followers and offer a new vision unto the people.

Inside the auditorium, eager eyes darted back and forth across the stage, straining to see their digital media savior. There he was! Applause thundered: dressed in his uniform of black turtleneck and blue jeans, Steve Jobs finally entered from stage left.

Read the full excerpt on The Nervous Breakdown

Another society grappling with the contradictions of great change is present-day China. BBC journalist Paul Mason’s Rare Earth is a stereotype-junking headlong rush into farcical realism, augmenting the issues facing the development of the country’s social market economy and its attendant corruption, dynamism and worker resistance.

Read the full list at Morning Star

Today is 12-21-12: Doomsday, the end of the world. That is, according to some interpretations of the Mayan calendar. Others say it’s the beginning of a new era. However, one doesn’t need to look at the Mayan calendar, the words of Nostradamus, the prophetic dreams of Daniel or the revelation made to John to see the world is in dire straits. The sky may not be falling in, but it sure felt like it to the victims of Superstorm Sandy. Along with climate change, gun violence, drones, warfare and other henchmen on the horizon, it’s easy to see why some may think the apocalypse is fast approaching. The word “apocalypse” originated from the Greek term “apocalypsis,” which literally means “uncovering,” in the sense of revealing something previously hidden. Someone known for pulling the covers off is activist and performance artist Reverend Billy, who is holding his “The End of the World” ritual in New York City’s Times Square tonight. Along with his Church of Stop Shopping, he has long preached fiery sermons against recreational consumerism and climate disaster. He is urging people to turn away from corporate commodities and fossil fuels. “I’m just inviting all of us to be creative, to give meaning to our lives right now,” Reverend Billy says.

Watch the interview at Democracy Now!

To many people around the world, today, December 21st, 2012, marks the day the world is expected to end. According to Wikipedia, the “2012 Phenomenon” as it’s called, “is regarded as the end-date of a 5125-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. Various astronomical alignments and numerological formulae have been proposed as pertaining to this date, though none has been accepted by mainstream scholarship.”

The widely held belief is that the world will end today according to Mayan prophesy. However, scholars of Mayan history and culture and representatives of Mayan communities themselves made it clear that such a belief is a misrepresentation of their calendar.

Whether or not the world will end within the next 15 hours, what most scientists agree on is that for as long as humanity remains on our current course of over-consumption and rapacious exploitation of the earth’s resources, global extinction of our species is a near-certainty in the coming years.

Read the full article at Uprising Radio

In Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity, Chris Ruen — who previously offered a two part excerpt on this site — recounts his conversion experience from filesharing. While others writing on the subject have approached it from a legal or business perspective, Ruen takes a moral approach, critically examining the effects that everything for free without consequence has had on creativity and culture. But this should not be confused with moralizing, lest you think the book is 255 pages about how unauthorized downloading “is bad, mmkay.” Instead, Ruen explores the nuances of “freeloading” — his term for unauthorized downloading — in the broader context of an age where our real lives increasingly merge with our online selves in the same vein as media critics like Marshall McLuhan and Jaron Lanier.

Read the full review on Copyhype

There are essentially three ways of getting music on the Internet: steal it, pay for it, or get it for free (and, often, suffer through ads). The latter two often pay musicians fractions of pennies for every stream and transaction. The former pays musicians nothing. The latter are considered by many industry voices as the beginning stages of a new, sustainable business model. The former has consumed half of the recorded-music business. Guess which of these drew the most heat from artists in 2012?

Read the full article on Seattle Weekly

Watch the video on YouTube

A great piece went up on Stereogum last week by Chris Ruen that responds to some of the chatter around the controversial Internet Radio Fairness Act. Among other great points Ruen made, [the] ending in particularly sharp:

Read the excerpt in Seattle Weekly

WHY HE DIDN’T COME: Writer Gore Vidal, who died last July, managed to become a “gentleman bitch,” as he called himself, without the ordeal of going to college. I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics, published in November by OR Books, is a collection of interviews of Vidal by historian and radio host Jon Wiener, Ph.D. ’72. Wiener asked Vidal why he didn’t go to college.

Read the full article in Harvard Magazine