Digital Barbarism
A Writer's Manifesto
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
“A strange, wondrous, challenging, enriching book….Beautiful and powerful…you will not encounter another book like it.”
—National Review online
In Digital Barbarism, bestselling novelist Mark Helprin (Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War) offers a ringing Jeffersonian defense of private property in the age of digital culture, with its degradation of thought and language and collectivist bias against the rights of individual creators. A timely, cogent, and important attack on the popular Creative Commons movement, Digital Barbarism provides rational, witty, and supremely wise support for the individual voice and its hard-won legal protections.
In this forceful defense of civilization itself, Helprin dissects the modern assault on creative work and reveals:
A Defense of Copyright: An unflinching argument for the legal protections that shield authors, artists, and innovators from the collectivist forces of the digital age.The Critique of Digital Barbarism: An incisive look at how the degradation of language and thought in our modern technological era threatens the foundations of culture.Property as Liberty: A reclamation of Jeffersonian principles, exploring why the right to private property—including intellectual property—is an indispensable pillar of freedom.The Case Against "Creative Commons": A rational and witty counter-argument to the popular movement that seeks to dismantle the hard-won rights of the individual creator.
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 "Chronicle of 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 "Slurpee-sucking geeks," "beer-drinking dufuses" and "mouth-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 copyright is a "bulwark of civilization."
