Copyleft

Today's free TOR book is "Farthing." Go, click on that link and sign up and get a copy right now. You won't regret it. It's a great book.
I read it about 10 months ago at the recommendation of Boing Boing.
It's an alternative history story wherein peaceful terms between Hitler and Great Brittan were agreed-- but it's way sexier than that. It was one of those books where I ended up staying up to 3 a.m. reading so I could finish the night before I had to return it to the library. It's that good.

Anyway, TOR's free books thing is really cool. It's aways nice to get a copy of a free, DRM free book to have a look at and play with, however, Patrick Nielson Hayden pulled back hard on the emergency lever of the speculation train that Tor might be releasing it's whole catalog as such.

... the munificence of this offer (Slashdotted twice on its first weekend), combined with our vagueness in describing the actual site for which the offer is merely a build-up, has caused a lot of people to jump to the conclusion that the new site will be all about selling and/or giving away digital books. This isn’t the case... "

Frankly, this stinks of the kind of PR Blunder the likes of Harley Davidson's Secret 100th anniversary headliner.

Oh, ok. Maybe not that bad. But still bad. Look, Tor, you can't put the Genie back in the bottle. You've given us a taste of free, awesome, award winning books. Don't stop. Keep it going. Make it bigger. Offer your free, awesome award winning books under more and better terms. Add a creative-commons blessing. Let your fans enjoy your work. There is evidence that authors can make careers out of giving away free books. I believe publishers can to.

So, Nine Inch Nails is getting all the love these days. Nine Inch Nails offers it's latest album, Ghosts I-IV, under a Creative Commons license. The media reported, servers crashed, lavish "collector" copies of the album were scooped up by people with far too much disposable cash. NIN's site claims that the download is 36 tracks, but I only got 9. BoingBoing's; coverage suggests that all 36 tracks are available as remixes, and maybe they are, but not by clicking on "downloads" at NIN's site.

This is being heralded as a victory for "free music;" the mainstream media is glomming on to the idea that you can make a profit from giving your content away. JoCo would be turning over in his grave, only he's not dead. And Trent's not giving his content away. If you want to hear Ghosts II-IV, you've got to buy them. Or download them from someone else. But given the morose instrumental nature of Ghosts I (one BoingBoing commenter called it 'edgy elevator music'), why bother?

There are basically two things wrong with the Ghosts I-IV story. First, The nine tracks I've downloaded are only marginally ok at best, and if NIN were really embrasing the copyleft, why not make the entirety of the NIN catalog available? I could get into a free copy of Pretty Hate Machine. It's not like I didn't buy it once already anyway.
And secondly, by releasing Ghosts I-IV as CC-redistributable music, but not making himself the distributor (although there is evidence that NIN seeded the torrent themselves), people are going to be confused about the legality of grabbing a copy of the 36-track complete work off the torrents.

I'm happy for the increase in CC-awareness amongst Rock and Roll superstars, and, even though I've outgrown Nine Inch Nails, I want this venture to be successful for them.