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On the consequences of digital locks

In 1998, we passed this law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the DMCA, and what it says is that it is against the law to remove a lock even if you own the copyright to the work the copyright is protecting. So one of the publishers right now has said they've always insisted on digital locks on their e-books, and they're in a pricing dispute with Amazon who wants to take more of the money that they are generating through their books.

Under normal circumstances, if Amazon decided not to sell Hachette's books, you would expect Hachette to say to all the people who want to read J.K Rowling or Amanda Palmer's new book, "Here's a tool that lets you convert your e-books to run on iBooks or on Google Play or on Kobo or on Nook. Go ahead and just switch to someone else's store, and buy your books there." But because only Amazon is allowed to unlock Hachette's books, even though Hachette controls the copyright, Amazon controls the lock. Amazon now runs that negotiation. They have all the negotiating leverage, and what happens is the rightful share of the investor is expropriated by the platform.

On digital copyright law reform

We can easily see how you would make a digital locks rule that didn't do this crazy thing. What you would say is that "it's against the law to break a digital lock if you're violating copyright, and if you're not violating copyright, it's not against the law to break a digital lock." And that would solve the problem pretty handily because then we could make tools that let people do things that are illegal, but that the manufacturer doesn't want them to do, which is a time-honored tradition whether that's plugging things into your cigarette lighter in the car that the manufacturer never intended for you to do or using your blender to mix paint. You know what we do with our stuff is our own business, and if we break the law then maybe we get punished, but just using a product in an unintended way shouldn't be a felony.

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Once we give up on the idea of applying copyright to normal people and we limit it to the industry, we know how to regulate the industry because we know where they all live. Historically, the way we have managed contexts in which it no longer became possible to control individual uses was to just let people pay once to use everything and then use statistical analysis to figure out who the money went to. So if you're at a radio station, you drop the needle, you don't call the record label to find out how much it's gonna cost you to play a song. You just pay a single fee, and then you figure out statistically at the end of the quarter whose music was played, and the money is dispersed that way. And the important thing is [that] as imperfect as this solution is, it's way more perfect than adding censorship and surveillance to the Internet in the name of making sure that people listen to music the right way.

Read an excerpt of Information Doesn't Want to Be Free

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

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In the latest bids for states to compel companies to label foods that contain genetically modified ingredients, Colorado voters decided the issue in their state today.

Proposition 105, was defeated by a roughly 2-1 margin Tuesday.

Oregon voters also considered a measure, but it is still too close to call — the no vote leading the yes vote by two percentage points with more than 80 percent of the vote counted.

The issue has been both contentious and expensive. Last week, Oregon Live reported:

"The measure has already made history, becoming the costliest ballot measure fight in Oregon history. Opponents have raised just over $16 million — also a record for one side — and backers have raised nearly $7 million."

While more than half of U.S. states have contemplated similar GMO legislation, the only one that has come close to requiring a label is Vermont. The state's law, approved this year, still faces legal challenges, and it's not slated to take effect until 2016.

In Hawaii, Maui County voters considered an initiative that went far beyond labeling. By a slim margin, voters decided to temporarily ban genetically engineered crops.

"The county's first-ever ballot initiative targeting global agriculture companies Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences attracted nearly $8 million from opponents," Honolulu Civil Beat reports, "making it the most expensive campaign in Hawaii's history."

That the expense equates to "more than $75 per registered voter in Maui County, which has a population of just around 160,000."

GMO labeling

There are people who have no idea what they would do with themselves if they had a little under two weeks with no commitments, a car, a duffel bag, and a series of motel reservations making a loop around New England with a spur up into Maine.

I am not one of those people.

A cove ... somewhere. Near Camden? Probably near Camden. Linda Holmes/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Linda Holmes/NPR

On my Late Fall Foliage Solo Tour, of all the anxieties that occasionally gripped me, not knowing what to do with myself — by myself — was not among them. I examined racks of jewelry and adjusted room thermostats and had chocolate chip ice cream at a place my family used to go when I was a young teenager. (It's the same, except that now it's next to an enormous Walmart.) I read books. I had clam chowder four times and had breakfast at a little place right by Amherst populated by students, and I eavesdropped on a Rocklandite in a laundromat explaining that he'd gone mudding that weekend and needed a story to give his girlfriend about why the truck was all scuffed up. I walked a trail at Wolfe's Neck Woods State Park near Freeport and heard total, hum-less, fan-less silence, which I rarely do. I visited a cemetery where some of my relatives are buried. I dropped the valve cap into the wheel of my car while putting air in my tires, got distracted enough battling the air hose that I forgot to dig it back out, and happily found it peacefully hanging out inside the wheel cover many, many miles later when I remembered.

I spent Halloween on Cape Cod, where behind me, the door to wandering tourists was swinging shut for the season. I spent an evening in a Ramada with the power out, and I chatted with the Banana Man at the Kennebunk service plaza, and I managed to keep my composure and not crack up when I overheard a discussion at a Rockport Denny's in which a woman said, with a certain guilty, gossipy glee, "She worries so much about havin' lines on her face, but what about that mouth full of choppers? That's all I could see." ("Choppers," of course, was "chaw-pahs.") I walked down a steep trail at a botanical garden where, at the bottom, a nice lady comes and picks you up in a golf cart to haul you back up the hill. I tipped 50 percent to servers to whom I said "Just me!" when I asked for a table, who filled my coffee over and over because they had plenty of tables and it was foggy and gray outside. I took a picture of a butterfly I suspect has been photographed by thousands of tourists before me.

A butterfly takes it easy on some daisies at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Linda Holmes/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Linda Holmes/NPR

We have a certain cultural mistrust of solitude, I think. It is for weirdos and lost souls, spinsters and misfits. But in truth, I can't tell you what a luxury I think it is to be entitled to it. Most of the time, I want good company, like most people do. But the experience of earned, voluntary aloneness is, among other things, instructive. I don't think you can really understand how accustomed you are to being scheduled and operating off an internal to-do list at almost all times until you think to yourself, "My goal will be to get to Providence by 4," and then you think, "Why is there a goal?"

And then it begins to make you internally rebellious: What if I drove with no goal? What if I had nowhere to be all day until it was time to sleep and I discussed with no one where to stop and take a picture, where to have lunch, what shop to go in, or which way to turn on the trail? What would I do if I could do anything — in this micro-environment, in this moment, at the point of this particular pause, what is my wish?

Wolfe's Neck Woods State Park. Linda Holmes/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Linda Holmes/NPR

Because the experience of good company is in part the experience of matching your wishes to someone else's; that's part of what makes it great. You build a common wish with another person: to go somewhere, to meet, to have sushi instead of steak. And those shared wishes are profound.

But if you collaborate constantly, both professionally and personally, it's easy to forget what undiluted self-determination feels like, and there's something to be said for remembering.

While I was staying in Freeport, I realized that the clouds and rain that had accompanied the first few days on the road had broken, and I started to wonder if I could see stars. I don't see a lot of stars in my day-to-day; there's an awful lot of light pollution in my section of the East Coast, and if I'm being honest, I doubt I'd take the time to stare at them anyway. But on this particular night, I went out and waited for my eyes to adjust, and when they did, there were many, many, many stars. I decided to try to take a picture.

I am a casual hobbyist at best when it comes to complicated pictures of any kind. I play around — enough that I had a tripod and a remote shutter release in the car — but I didn't really have the right lens for this, and I wasn't really in the best place (hunkered down between two big evergreens in the darkest corner of the motel parking lot). I just wanted to see if I could do it. Had I had to explain it to someone else how long I was out there fiddling and turning dials and pushing buttons and counting seconds in my head, I would have felt silly. There is a diabolical internal voice that feels external and belongs to no one that says, in moments like this, "What are you doing? You are bent over a camera on a tripod in the dark, and you're all in black, meaning you really, really do appear to be skulking around like a crazy person, and this picture is going to have power lines in it anyway, and it won't be in focus because that's the part you haven't figured out, so it's not going to be a good picture anyway, so what are you doing?"

The luxury of solitude lies in hearing that, and training it to settle down. "I am taking a picture of these stars, and it's going to take me a bunch of tries, but eventually, I'm going to make it work because I have absolutely no responsibilities on this particular evening and I can stay out here until 3 in the morning if I feel like it."

It did not take until 3 in the morning. And it's not a good picture, but when I look at it, I remember in my fingers the precise temperature of the air, dropping the lens cap in the grass and feeling around for it, and wondering whether people in passing cars thought I was crazy. "Just me," I would have said with a wave.

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Stars in Freeport. Linda Holmes/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Linda Holmes/NPR

Stars in Freeport.

Linda Holmes/NPR

When I sat down with Benedict Cumberbatch to talk about Sherlock, the first thing on his mind wasn't exactly the show.

"I'm really worried about those Sherlock fans, because they have been here, probably, for a while," Cumberbatch says to his assistants, asking them to tell a small clutch of fans waiting outside the hotel where we were meeting that he would stop by to see them soon.

This attention to fans seems a natural reflex for Cumberbatch, but it's also a key to the show's success. Producers have earned a massive audience by shaping Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes into a compelling character for modern viewers.

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Benedict Cumberbatch, right, and Martin Freeman star as Sherlock Holmes and John Watson on the BBC's crime drama Sherlock. Robert Viglasky/© Hartswood Films hide caption

itoggle caption Robert Viglasky/© Hartswood Films

Benedict Cumberbatch, right, and Martin Freeman star as Sherlock Holmes and John Watson on the BBC's crime drama Sherlock.

Robert Viglasky/© Hartswood Films

That's why, even as fans resign themselves to waiting more than a year for a new episode of the show, it makes sense that the BBC would release a new box set to tide them over until then.

On Tuesday, fans get first crack at a DVD and Blu-ray set containing all three seasons of Sherlock, with outtakes, interviews, new commentaries and even collectible resin mini-busts, depicting the show's two leading men.

Once fans devour this material, they'll discover Sherlock's last season gave more information than ever about the mysterious detective's history — details Cumberbatch recites in our interview with the rapid-fire cadence from one of Sherlock's famous speeches filled with deductions.

"You find out about Sherlock's background," the actor says. "You find out that he comes from a truly stable home. It was a gesture in the first episode, but you see that in practice in the third. You see that, as a boy he was deeply insecure — it begins as a taunt [from his older brother, Mycroft] ... and that comes back to haunt him and he feels like a child. He's reduced to feeling like a child."

Cumberbatch suspected those storylines came from conversations early in the first season's production with one of the show's producers, Steven Moffat.

"Immediately as an actor I wanted to understand who [Sherlock] was, what his parents were," he adds. "These were questions I asked ... I wanted to understand. [Moffat] was just talking about, 'Can't this guy just be good at what he does and he's your age and he looks like you and he's doing his thing?' And I went, 'No, no Steven, there's a process I've got to go through. I've got to understand how I became this person.' "

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He didn't necessarily expect those answers to be revealed to viewers, Cumberbatch points out now. "I can't just sort of float onto set with a whole bunch of mannerisms and hope it sort of comes off," he says. "You have to ground it in some sort of reality, otherwise you get found out as things sort of evolve."

One other thing Cumberbatch insisted on was creating a weakness for Sherlock — his inability to connect with people — another idea Moffatt resisted.

"And [Moffat] said, 'But can't he just be really good? Can't he just be good at it? Why does he have to have flaw or an Achilles heel?'" the actor says. "Because I said, you know, 'Where's his weakness?' Because no human being doesn't [have one]. And however much [Sherlock] tries to convince himself he's not human, he is."

Cumberbatch says those early conversations seemed to spark ideas that fully developed in the show's third season, featuring a look at Sherlock's parents — played by the star's real mother and father — and his unique personality, revealed in a climactic scene with the episode's villain that ends with a the detective declaring himself "a high functioning sociopath" before letting off a gunshot

(For the sake of those who may not yet have seen the show, I won't say what Sherlock shoots or why.)

"What he's resorting to at the end is violence," Cumberbatch says "It's the weakest, weakest thing to do. So, to me, I think that exposes more about Sherlock ... I think you get under the skin of every character with this last season ... This is a really Freudian drama."

The new box set offers even more goodies for fans, including an interview where Moffat explains Sherlock Holmes' endless appeal.

"He's got the one explainable superpower that's out there; he deduces things," Moffatt says at one point. "He actually goes to the trouble to explain it. Superman never tells you how he flies. But Sherlock Holmes tells you how the trick is done."

The trick for producers of Sherlock will be using events like this new box set to keep fans excited until a new episode appears — more than a year from now.