You'd think that someone who's devoted his professional life to writing about "serious" literature would be immune to controversy. But then Sven Birkets, noted critic, author of the acclaimed book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, and self-appointed latter-day Luddite has an excuse--it's his editor's fault. Isn't it always.
Birkets's The Gutenberg Elegies is a wonderfully written, thought-provoking examination of the impact of digital technology on literature and reading. Presumably, it was the book--in particular the final chapter entitled "Coda: The Faustian Pact"--that led to Birkets's participation in an August 1995 Harper's Magazine forum dubbed "What Are We Doing On-line?". Along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Perry Barlow, Wired magazine's Kevin Kelly, and like-minded author Mark Slouka, Birkets debated in print the pros and cons of the "message of this new medium," the Internet. Birkets was the resident skeptic.
Still, nothing Birkets said in Harper's matched his "Coda" chapter, which ends with the exhortation "Refuse it." I'll let you guess (or at least read on your own) what he wants us to shy away from. Birkets may be on to something when he says, "my core fear is that we are...becoming shallower" and "our whole economic and technological obsession with getting on-line is leading us away...from the premise that individualism and circuited interconnection are, at a primary level, inimical notions." In any event, it is entirely proper to question basic premises as our online experience evolves.
Letters to the editor in subsequent Harper's were hot and heavy, with Birkets even having Rilke poems thrown back at him. It's doubtful that analyzing imagery in the works of Virginia Woolf ever created such a firestorm.
All of this led me to go hear Birkets when he showed up at a local bookstore. He agreed, for instance, that the "Coda" chapter was the most controversial--and newsworthy--part of the book. More interestingly, "Coda" wasn't part of the original manuscript--it was added when his editor sensed something was lacking. What the book needed, said the editor, was a more powerful ending. Birkets returned to his Smith-Corona (what else?) and wrote "Coda," launching him on to the literati equivalent of day-time talk shows.
While Birkets's editor is possibly an exception, sometimes we editors do end up eating crow. Not that I'd ever fess up to feasting on such foul fowl, but even editors can change their minds once in a while.
For instance, regular readers of this space (both of you) may recall that in the November 1995 issue, I made a smart-aleck remark about a University of California software patent covering embedded executable content ("applets") and the World Wide Web. Shortly thereafter, I heard from Michael Doyle, chairman of Eolas Technologies and co-inventor of the patented technique. Michael set me straight on the licensing terms of patent, pointing out that Eolas, which holds exclusive rights to the patent, is not asking programmers to pay royalties for developing software that runs applets. Instead, Eolas is only requiring that developers adhere to a standard API for Web development.
Michael gladly put his comments in writing, which we published in the January 1996 "Letters" column. For this issue, Michael--along with Eolas cofounders Cheong Ang and David Martin--wrote our lead article, which delves into the history and technical underpinnings of their work.
By using the patent as a carrot instead of a stick, Eolas has taken a step in helping programmers get on with the job of developing next-generation, interactive Web applications. Clearly, supporting a single standard API is better than tinkering with a dozen or so competing ones. (This problem of dealing with competing APIs is partly behind the current campaign to eradicate those annoying "enhanced for Netscape" tags.) The bottom line is that both developers and users want a standard.
This isn't to say that I've changed my mind about software patents. I've yet to see how they've helped the software industry move forward. On the surface, however, the Eolas proposal may be an exception. Of course, there's nothing to say that Eolas will be successful. In all likelihood, browser vendors will continue to plod along their proprietary paths, much like operating-system vendors of a decade ago (remember TRS-DOS?).
You don't have to agree or disagree with the concept of software patents to appreciate the spirit of Eolas's proposal. If nothing else, Doyle and crew should be commended for coming up with a creative approach to a thorny problem. Doyle's article--and the proposal it makes--is certainly one of the more controversial pieces we've recently published. I look forward to hearing from you about both the article and the proposal.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief