Author? What's an Author?

This was written in the mid-1990s and except for a few dated references like CD-ROM, which I'm going to leave in for the fun of it, it seems to be completely relevant to what is happening in the media this very day.

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How can you possibly call yourself an author if you can't process digitized full-motion video signals on your computer, accelerate your image-compression manager to thirty frames per second, and enhance your video with full stereo sound?

The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works. As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century's definition of "author" will be as far from today's definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.

The evolution of authors from unimedium creators to multimedia producers has been gaining momentum since the replacement of manual typewriters with electric ones, a phenomenon that any living soul in his or her mid-thirties or older has witnessed. The addition of computerized memory converted these dumb and passive typing machines into utilities possessing the potential for genuine partnership with writers. Each refinement in memory capacity, miniaturization, automation, and audiovisual display exponentially accelerated the typewriter's curve away from mere laborsaving device and toward a purely organic extension of the writer's mind.

At this point in time, we are at a place on the curve where typewriting has been supplanted by word processing, and word processing, in turn, has advanced into desktop publishing. This means that writers are capable of assuming the role of publishers in every function except distribution of their works to the consumer, and even this condition is on the way to being satisfied with the ongoing creation of electronic networks delivering intellectual creations directly to users.

The closer writers come to realizing that potential, the greater will be the pressure on them to expand their skills beyond effectively delivering the written word in print mode. It will be incumbent on them to navigate, and enable computer users to navigate, through a world of sights, sounds, colors, action, information, and special effects. The introduction of the optical disk, with its almost unimaginable memory and versatility, into the writers repertoire, makes their ascent to the next rung of evolution a foregone conclusion. But what is that rung, and how many others loom above it?

In order to answer those questions, one must have some general understanding of the technological environment confronting today's authors. The current device of choice is the word-processing function of the computer. However, the definition of word processing has been pushed further and further with each improvement in our ability to store and manipulate text. Color monitors, for example, have replaced the early monochrome models, enabling us to employ an incredible array of graphics to supplement and illustrate text. With each refinement, writers have found themselves blessed with options that were almost inconceivable a decade ago.

Technological growth is seldom achieved without a price, however. The same refinements that liberated writers from some kinds of concerns have saddled them with others. Our relationship with text has become complicated, if not obscured, by our need to master new writing tools. More and more of our creative energy has become dedicated to the selection of hardware, software, peripherals, and options. Each improvement challenges us not to become better writers but to become better engineers.

The introduction of the optical disk has only accelerated our momentum in this direction. The vast amounts of information necessary to produce moving images and sound in a computer are digitally encoded by laser and compressed, just as purely audio data is captured on compact discs. The nearly miraculous storage capacity of computer hard drives, floppy disks, and CD-ROMs (compact disc read-only memory) has added to the writer's toolbox two options of staggering power and versatility: interactivity and multimedia capability. Personal computer owners now have the ability to produce not just text, or text accompanied by still graphics, but fully realized audiovisual works. And thanks to the interactive properties of computers, users may now journey through a variety of links that make them active participants in the audiovisual experience.

The problem is, you can't take those journeys with conventional word-processing hardware and software. You can only get there from here by using an "authoring system." An authoring system enables a computer operator to incorporate video and sound into the presentation of creative ideas. Such creations are interactive, allowing the user to cut (nonsequentially if so desired) back and forth from movie scenes to animated graphics to straight text to still graphics to excerpts from documentaries and back again, all accompanied by speech, music, or sound effects.

Authoring systems were created in response to the fiendishly difficult task of programming graphical interfaces into word-processing systems. "Without having to write a single line of computer code, a person can design an endless variety of relatively simple yet functional multimedia programs," says the head of a New York-based multimedia production company. "Technically, the task of designing a multimedia work can now be performed by the average computer operator with nearly as much ease as operating a desktop-publishing program. However, multimedia also offers up a new and unique set of design problems to contend with."

Using an authoring program, you can develop virtually any fully functional application you wish to create. As of this writing, you must still be somewhat computer literate to flesh out your prototype program, but as the systems evolve, using them will become easier and easier.
You'll notice that I am judiciously avoiding the use of the word "author" in referring to creators of such works. That is because the act of creating computerized, interactive, multimedia works is not a function that must of necessity be performed by an author. It's closer to what movie producers do, transforming a variety of media into an integrated audiovisual experience for the viewer. Notice, too, that I say "viewer" and not "reader." For the same reason, the relationship of a user to such works is no longer that of a reader, but is closer to that of a moviegoer, television watcher, or player of interactive video games. Yes, reading may be required when text is involved, but experiencing multimedia goes as far beyond reading text as three-dimensional chess goes beyond the game that is played on a conventional chessboard.

As I acclimate myself to the rich atmosphere of computer technology, I hear the word "author" used less and less and "producer" used more and more to describe those who assemble, integrate, and purvey multimedia software packages to consumers. As the trend toward multimedia accelerates, as I predict it will, the role of the author must, without question, become subordinated to that of the producer. Authors will become scenarists, creating story lines for or textual supplements to full-motion video films for personal computers. The real creative stars will be those who can produce brilliant and stimulating programs for display on home entertainment systems.

Perhaps such individuals should be called "auteurs," the term used for artistic filmmakers who involve themselves in all aspects of making their movies, including writing the scripts, casting talent, directing, and editing. Says one futurist I talked to, "Those who have the vision to incorporate all the elements, and the skill to blend them harmoniously, will be the creative forces in the coming generation of media products."

The application of modern technology to the traditional tools of authorship is going to alter the way fiction is written, and is eventually going to alter it radically. Indeed, one can visualize a day when the term "written" will no longer adequately express the act of creation that conveys an author's vision to the mind of a reader.

An "authoring system" is the generic term for the software used to render these compositions on computers. These systems tie story elements, text, sound, still pictures, moving pictures, animation, and other media elements into a single multimedia package, a piece of software called a "title." The story's scenes and episodes may be linked together in the form of ever-expanding branches, or woven together in something closer to a web. The elements may be mixed and matched, presented sequentially or nonsequentially, separately or simultaneously. Authors can build into the programs a multitude of options for the user to link the elements, alter sounds and graphics (or even create new ones), and influence the direction that the story takes.

The fluidity and spontaneity with which the user navigates around the program resembles the human thinking and decision-making process. For this reason, such programs are referred to as hypermedia rather than multimedia. The content on a movie reel is presented linearly; it can move only forward in time; the viewer's attention is guided by the creator, whose decisions about what happens next are arbitrary and unalterable. In a hypermedia program, the user can access the content in a nonlinear, random way. He can, in other words, elect to go forward, backward, or sideways in time and space, starting anywhere and voyaging as far in any direction or dimension as the imagination of the program's creator, or the technical limits of hardware and software, can take him.

If you're beginning to realize that this changes the relationship between reader and story, you're right. It alters it profoundly. Geri Gay of Cornell University, in an article in The Hypertext and Hypermedia Handbook, a McGraw-Hill book, points out that hypermedia "has the potential to allow the reader to become an author of an interactive story." In short, the time is coming when you will not merely "read" a fictional work in hypermedia form, you will be able to collaborate with the author in its creation.

There are a number of systems from which today's would-be hypermedia authors can choose. Because things are moving so fast that these systems may be obsolete by the time you read this, I thought I would create a composite to give you a general idea of how twenty-first-century authors will be telling stories.

Suppose you had an idea for a science fiction story; a tale of two lovers cruelly separated in time and space. Betty has been abducted by time-warp pirates called Zomboids, and her beloved Edward must search the past, present, and future universe to find her. When he finally gets there, he discovers she has been carried off again, and so on and so on.

The first thing you'll have to do is write a story treatment and screenplay. In fact, if your program is to be interactive, you'll have to write a multitude of scenes branching off from the main story. You'll then have to design settings and sketch visualizations of your characters. As Huk the Hostile, the Zomboid emperor, and his alien buddies are rather protoplasmic (looking like spotted, half-deflated beach balls), you'll use a draw-and-paint package to design them, then animation tools to bring them to life. If you'd like Betty and Edward to resemble your favorite movie stars, you will be able to re-create them identically and three-dimensionally to make it seem as if you captured living actors on film. Or you can film or videotape actual actors. And if, like Alfred Hitchcock, you want to play a bit part in your own movie, you can film or tape yourself, or your kids, or your mother-in-law. Using your movie "toolbox," you'll employ an image scanner to convert still photographs of scenery or interiors into backgrounds, and from your digitized video file you'll be able to splice in some footage from a documentary or feature film, so that it looks like Edward's quest for Betty takes him to third-century Rome, twentieth-century New York, or twenty-third-century Moonbase.

You'll have written some dialogue to depict the bad guys plotting their evil deeds. You'll now record it, using a synthesizer to alter the pitch and timbre of your voice for each character so that you can play all the parts. You can also synthesize the sound effects. The hum of the cruising spacecraft, the howl of entry into Earth's atmosphere, the explosions of warfare, all are reproducible on a synthesizer. Or you can integrate recordings of real sounds into your audio track. The same goes for music.

Although most of these tasks today must be performed on a computer keyboard, or with a mouse, or both, it won't be long before the entire process will be voice activated and you'll simply tell your computer what to do: "Yo, computer. Lights! Camera! Action!"

Now that you've got all your components together, it's just a matter of creating as many scenes as you wish of past or future, so that the user can branch out interactively as Edward chases Huk the Hostile and Betty from one time and place to another. Your program will be so flexible that the user may substitute his own face and voice for those of the characters or enter other elements to individualize the movie. John Markoff, in the New York Times, reported a demonstration of a set of Apple multimedia extensions to the Macintosh operating system, in which a user took a video of himself riding a bicycle, then edited it into the final sprint of the Tour de France. In his version, he won the race.

The current state of authoring system art is not as advanced as I have portrayed it. Take the inclusion of video, for instance. Aside from crude home videos, the incorporation of professional-looking video into a hypermedia program is beyond the skill level of today's authors. And even if the technology were closer at hand than it is, you would still need to assemble a movie crew to make a studio-quality video for your title. And the technology is still in a relatively primitive stage. Scientists and engineers have not yet overcome the difficulty of compressing onto disks the immense amount of information necessary to display an abundancy of visual images, especially moving ones. Thus, most hypermedia titles today are heavily text oriented, or "hypertext," to use the phrase coined by computer guru Ted Nelson. Animation is currently the "motion picture" of choice, as it is more manipulable than video for the purpose of interactivity. But extensive animation also requires a digital density that is, at present, beyond the reach of most home "auteurs."

You can see from this brief tour that there is practically no resemblance between the activities of conventional writers and those of the individuals producing works of hypermedia. Let's look at the distinctions a bit more closely.

As you begin to design your scenario and screenplay, you'll immediately be struck by a profound realization: you no longer need the narrative skills you depended on when you wrote books. Although the first crude CD-ROM adaptations of fiction were narrated stories illustrated with still pictures or short segments of video or animation, it was quickly realized that a new art form had been born. Because you are in effect making movies the descriptive powers you used to call upon to create vivid prose images for your readers are of practically no value at all. You have become a screenwriter: those vivid images will not be portrayed in words but in pictures. And because it's much harder for a viewer to juggle a lot of expository information than it is for a novel reader, the stories you develop for your hypermedia programs are probably not very elaborate or subtle.

It won't be long before you realize that your storytelling expertise is of far less importance than your engineering abilities. Good novelists often talk about the way their books play like movies in their heads, and how they construct their scenes in their novels the way screenwriters construct scenes in films. Well, now you novelists will have a golden opportunity to convert those mental images literally into motion pictures. But the technical challenge may be far beyond your capabilities. Even more importantly, it may be far beyond your interest. Many of you facing these options will say to yourselves, If I'd wanted to be a screenwriter, I'd have gone to Hollywood, or, If I'd wanted to be an engineer, I'd have gone to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. You wanted to be a novelist.

Many writers must be wondering if there will be any market for their skills in the hypermedia age. I believe there will be. Students of technology are fond of pointing out that the advent of movies didn't destroy our taste for reading, and the advent of television didn't destroy our taste for movies. The advent of hypermedia will not strike a fatal blow to conventional literature written and published in the conventional way. "The technology to create hypermedia is available to authors who want to use it," one multimedia producer said to me. "I don't, however, think that in the near future, someone lacking the skill to create hypermedia fiction is going to be out of work." However, future authors who are not hypermedia/multimedia literate may well be at a disadvantage.

The prospects for readers may be brighter than they are for writers. With information presented in such graphic, colorful, and entertaining forms, the rewards of reading for pleasure may well give way to the joys of navigating through a multimedia program, experiencing fantastic audiovisual effects that readers never got out of old-fashioned books or even old-fashioned movies. And scholarship has become more fun now that, instead of having to trudge to a library and drudge at a desk, the library can be summoned by the touch of one's finger on a key or mouse, or by voice command to one's computer. And all that scholarly information is being presented in ways that are a delight to the eye and ear.

The revolution will not stop with the eye and ear. In a more distant future, the development and refinement of virtual reality technology will eventually tie in with hypermedia, bathing all of our senses in experiences that are all but indistinguishable from reality. From there it is not inconceivable that we will tap directly into the human brain, realizing a vision long cherished—and dreaded—by science-fiction writers.

Returning from the sublime to the mundane, we realize that the advent of hypermedia presents some genuine challenges to the traditional ways that intellectual property has been protected. What, for instance, happens to your copyright when a computer user creates a new ending for your story? Does it become a new work? Is it possible that this new work could be copyrighted as a collaboration between yourself and the user? And remember how you used the faces of a pair of famous movie stars when you created Edward and Betty? Did you have the right to do that? Whose faces are they, anyway, the stars' or the re-creator's?

Clearly, copyright in the twenty-first century will be a minefield. Thus, for authors who fear being thrown out of work by the electronic publishing revolution, I have good news: there will be lots and lots of job opportunities in the field of copyright law. Although you will, of course, first have to get a law degree, I can guarantee no end of challenging cases, protracted litigation, and chances to write new law. The seven-league strides made by scientists and technologists in electronic information have left lawyers in their dust. If they don't catch up, the protection of intellectual property will be a shambles. It is already dangerously unstable.

Among other purposes, copyright law was designed to protect the creations generated by the minds of authors, at least for enough time so that they and their heirs may profit from its dissemination.

Until the 1960s, the device commonly used to reproduce those creations was the printing press. The printing press is a large, cumbersome, and expensive machine that is beyond the means of most people to own and operate, even if they were inclined to do so. But that is what you would have had to do if you wished to make a copy of a book or story instead of purchasing it in the marketplace. A pirate, such as a publisher in a foreign land that was not a signatory to various international copyright conventions, could profit from running off a lot of copies of someone's book, but it made no sense for private individuals to do so. Oh, there was the mimeograph, the poor man's version of the printing press, but it required you to retype the item you wanted to reproduce. If you actually wanted to copy a literary work or document, you had to take it to a photostat shop where it was photographed one page at a time. The resulting product was white type on a black background on shiny, stiff photographic paper. It was easier and cheaper just to go out and buy the book or magazine than to go to such enormous trouble. Either that or steal it from the library.

The advent of the photocopier changed all that, bringing the capability for private reproduction of literary work into every home. The first such machines, made by Xerox—I wish I'd saved mine as it will be a valuable collectible one day—were primitive variants on the photostat, using light-sensitive coated paper to reproduce a page placed over a lighted screen. Although it was too crude to run off reproductions of any quality, and too slow to run them off in any quantity, the machine did bring copiers into the home.

The rapid refinement of "xerography" created an industry of local photocopy shops that can run off infinite copies of literary works of a quality equal to that of the originals. Most customers did not realize there were laws protecting the works they brought to the copy shops, and if the operators of such shops were aware they might be violating copyright statutes, they certainly didn't take any measures to locate or compensate the copyright owners. They probably didn't think it was their responsibility. Publishers became more and more alarmed, however, as copy shops brazenly reproduced work that those publishers had licensed on an exclusive basis. Though they eventually succeeded in compelling the largest chain of copy shops to observe proper copyright clearance procedures, the ignoring of copyright law is still widespread in the copy shop industry.

I suppose it could be brought under control through more assiduous monitoring. But the copyright problems created by another technology, personal computers (PCs), make copy shop operators look like Talmudic scribes by comparison. This time, the perpetrators are you. If you own a computer, you may be breaking the law, perhaps flagrantly.

In a nutshell, the problem is that for a modest outlay of money, you can acquire the technological means to copy any image or text without permission of the creator or copyright owner. You may then alter it on your video display screen as if it were a work that you yourself had created. And you may then print, publish, broadcast, or otherwise disseminate it. And make money doing so.

Scanners, for instance, capture published text and transmit it digitally into the memory storage of your computer. Another invention, compact optical disks, enables you to edit, change, or otherwise manipulate that text. Other technologies exist for storing or generating pictorial material and for retouching it or blending it with other pictures into a composite, thus changing the meaning of the original. Advances in the compression of information on disks via lasers make it possible for you to stock your PC library with literature you did not get permission to copy, possibly making you a thief, and to make and sell copies of those works, possibly making you a pirate. You may transmit those works electronically across interstate and international telephone lines, possibly making you a larcenist.

Of course, we rebel against such characterizations. Why? Because the means to capture, store, and manipulate information electronically have become so easy for computer owners that it feels like a natural right, like the right to breathe air. And indeed, this sense of entitlement taps into another aspect of copyright law, the public's need for easy access to creative and intellectual works. Because the doctrine of "fair use" for educational and related purposes supports a degree of free access to otherwise protected texts, we feel few qualms about photocopying a copyrighted article, story, poem, or book excerpt at a copy shop, duplicating a movie on our home VCR, or taping a favorite tune and running off recordings for our friends.

Even those of us in the authoring, agenting, and publishing business who would howl if someone pirated our copyrighted text scarcely give a thought to the legal and moral implications of these deeds when we commit them ourselves. But many others have begun to think and talk about them, and to try to formulate rules and standards that reassert control over a body of statutes that grows more irrelevant with each day.

The heart of the problem is that, because of the difficulty of distinguishing between content and the modes of display, the media have become harder and harder to define. Are you stealing somebody's story by simply displaying it on the screen of your personal computer? Are you publishing that story by transmitting it over a computer network onto somebody else's screen? Do you become a co-author when you alter someone else's text?

The copyright law only confuses the issues further. A work of authorship is protected as long as it is "fixed" in a "tangible medium." A book is, of course, a tangible medium that is fixed on paper, but can we say the same about the image of a book on a computer monitor? And though the law states that a copyright owner has the exclusive right to "reproduce the work in copies," the law also makes it clear that displaying a work does not amount to reproducing it, even though it might well be said that the work is fixed in the program of your computer. In 1980, the Copyright Act was amended to make sure that we understand the difference, defining a computer program as "a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result." In other words, the medium is not the same as the message. Yet, the blurry line between the two is creating no end of vexations for those trying to apply old rules to unprecedented situations. This explains why legislation redefining copyright (as well as trademark) in the computer/Internet era has been stalled in Congress. And the explosive growth of the Internet combining a deluge of text with one-click copying and disseminating capabilities has made the problem absolutely nightmarish.

Private use of copyright information is one thing, but deliberate and methodical theft is another, and the impossibility of policing abuses has severely damaged the economic value of intellectual assets by as much $60 billion by some estimates. Illegal publication of books overseas, for instance, costs American publishers about $1 billion annually. Pirated videotapes of Hollywood films may be costing the movie industry as much as $6 billion a year. Because it is fruitless to go after individual users, particularly in light of allegations that some foreign perpetrators are protected by their governments, the burden of restriction has fallen on the manufacturers and distributors of hardware and software. This takes the form of antitheft devices built into computer hardware and antipiracy instructions programmed into software. The increased costs of such protection have been passed along to consumers.

The computer software industry has also called on patent law and trade secrecy statutes. The so-called shrink-wrap license treats software as a trade secret: the act of opening a package of software is supposed to legally commit you to maintaining the secrecy of the program. The literature that accompanies the package presumably binds you to a pledge not to "use, copy, modify, merge, translate, or transfer" the software without the express agreement of the manufacturer. These oaths are commonly ignored by most consumers and gleefully flouted by hackers.

Concerned observers have created organizations dedicated to addressing these issues and formulating new standards. New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (NYU/ITP), for instance, established a Division on Copyright and the New Technologies aimed at defining the problems and creating sensible and effective copyright policies that balance reward for creative work with the widest possible dissemination of these works.

Donna Demac, former director of the NYU/ITP division, wrote in its prospectus of her concern that we may soon be unable to differentiate between "impermissible clones and legitimate derivative works," and that "the issues of ownership and originality are pivotal to the future development and profitability of new services." But many, she warns, "believe the technology to be on the side of unbridled access."

A number of organizations are trying to address the concerns created by the new media, developing programs of research and education, producing archives in various media, and conducting workshops, seminars, and other forums for the airing of the issues, and bringing them to the attention of Congress, industry, schools, and other institutions. Hopefully, these efforts will result in a new set of standards that will restore our feet on firm ground in this exhilarating, awe-inspiring, frightening, new electronic world.

- Richard Curtis

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It's reprinted in This Business of Publishing: An Insider's View of Current Trends and Tactics Copyright © 1998 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.