ARTS2090 Week 3

Week 3 Genres, Processes, Tools and Techniques of Publishing

       In order to publish a book, the writer must agree upon the conditions given by the publishing companies. Each companies has its own special rules or conditions that the writer must follow. The MIT press for example, have different requirements in different types of work. The publishing company Pan Macmillan allows writers to submit their works through the website. In order for their works to be reviewed, writers must follow the conditions the company set out, or else the submitted works will be deleted. It may be troublesome to follow the rules and condition, but in return, the writers or authors have the copyright of the materials they owned. Publishing both hard copies and electronic copies are also protected by the copyright. Entering the digital world, the Internet allows everyone to be a publisher. People are able to publish their own works online and share it with others. The problem is, people usually take other people's information for granted, therefore it was hard to trace where the original source of materials came from. This is where the copyright kicked in. Copyright is a complicated matter. Although there are laws to protect copyright materials, a lot of people still take online materials in as their own work. And to be honest it is hard to create something new when there are so many precedent prototypes out there already. People have no idea that they have committed copyright infringement until they were charged. 

       

It is interesting to take WikiLeaks as an agent to propose the information on the Internet serves equal to everyone. The United States has been one of the most powerful countries in the world, in order to maintain its supremacy, it constantly check the power balance between countries by any means necessary. Julian Assange, the founder of the organization WikiLeaks said "I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination." Julian Assange can be described as a publisher as well. He published the information to others in order for them to acknowledge it. As a publisher and a writer, Julian Assange was charged with several crime commitments. Was he right or wrong? This issue has been a controversial debate. It has generated several perspective viewpoints about publishing. Are writers subject to censorship? Are they free to publish whatever they want? If not, is the information still reliable and not biased?