Information in the Information Age

Writing about the people who rip off writers is an inherently delicate thing, and it’s easy for the product to sound like a disgruntled rant against the digital age. At least that’s the case for two new books, Greg Kot’s Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, and Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto, which each tackle the issue of how to monetize information in the Information Age. Kot thinks that peer-to-peer music sharing and downloading has been a good thing for music, and creates more platforms for musicians to be heard. Helprin, by contrast, argues that copyrights are the last thing left to protect individual voices. While both authors run countercurrent to each other, however, Michiko Kakutani says they both fail to acknowledge the other’s argument–or any ideas contrary to their own. Kot, she says, is nonchalant about the new financial model for recording artists, and Helprin, in his support of the protection of copyright, reverts to pure curmudgeon, using “snarky, ad hominem attacks that many of the bloggers he so detests like to use.”