Who would think a motorized toothbrush head would generate a publishing controversy?
It started at the New York Toy Fair last week, when Scholastic’s Klutz division unveiled Invasion of the Bristlebots, a March 2009 book packaged with two tiny toothbrush robots. Bloggers at the fair noticed that the book failed to credit Lenore Edman and her husband, Windell Oskay, with popularizing and naming the Bristlebot. (Since December 2007, the couple’s “How to Make a Bristlebot” video on Youtube has been viewed more than two million times; many others have read the instructions on their Web site.
Immediately, bloggers and commenters from the so-called Maker and DIY (do-it-yourself) communities unleashed a flurry of posts. A typical comment, responding to a post at blog.makezine.com: “Sad to see something for fun take on evil overtones of corporate thought theft.” Others comments on the same site acknowledged the possibility of innocence: “Given how stressful publishing is these days, and how shoestring those types of projects can be, I wouldn’t be surprised that they were completely unconscious of the need to attribute.”
As a result of the brouhaha, on Friday evening Klutz editor Pat Murphy posted a message on a Scholastic blog. In it, she said that she and Edman spoke on Friday, and talked about “ways that Klutz could acknowledge the exceptional work that Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has done in Bristlebot research,” including acknowledgment in the next printing of the book and on Klutz’s Web site. Murphy said that her biggest regret “is that I missed the opportunity to work with the amazing and innovative folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.”
It’s not a legal issue. No one holds a patent or a license for a Bristlebot. “Using a motor to vibrate something to make it move is old,” says Edman, who has not yet seen the book. “It’s not a patentable idea.... It’s just a pager motor, a piece of tape, a battery and a toothbrush. It’s just a DIY instruction that we put out there.” But that doesn’t absolve Scholastic in the eyes of the Maker and DIY communities.
The issue, according to Edman, is “acknowledgment and awareness on the part of publishers. There’s a very strong need within the maker community to give credit where credit is due. If you build your project based on someone else’s project, you have to include that in your documentation.... We say if you use our project, you have to say where it came from. It’s really important in the community and in the rules of the community.”
Edman believes that traditional publishers need to figure out ways to work with the online community. “How do you move forward if you want to make a product from an idea you find online?” she asks. “Not necessarily legally, but ethically, what rules does the online community have that the publishing community needs to know about, even if they’re not laws?”
The episode illustrates the power of online communities to set and enforce their own rules, outside those recognized more formally. “The future of publishing will be companies like Scholastic and Klutz working with makers to bring their ideas and projects to larger markets,” says Phillip Torrone, senior editor of MAKE magazine. “I’m thrilled that the entire MAKE community rallied to support Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, and I’m glad to see Scholastic and Klutz decided to do the proper thing and credit. The next big idea isn’t going to be developed in secret. It’s going to spring from the DIY world, and I think Klutz is now well positioned to work with this fantastic community.”
“This was a common sense issue, and it was resolved once everyone saw how clear the origin of this specific invention and term was,” says Torrone. “Klutz and Scholastic will sell more books now because they’re working with the original makers. It’s win-win, as they say.”
Murphy, who has laryngitis, was unable to comment over the weekend. But she has strong defenders. “I definitely get the feeling she [Murphy] is trying to do the right thing,” says Christy Canida, Instructables.com’s community and marketing director, who is putting together a contest with Klutz. “Talking to Pat, I was really impressed with the way she’s trying to approach this, and it can just be hard. This is a learning experience for everyone.” One blogger, who said he knew Murphy, posted: “This doesn’t sound like something she’d be doing consciously and cold-bloodedly.”
Indeed, some bloggers seem ready to let toothbrush-gate rest. One post: “You’re seriously arguing about a used toothbrush head, battery and a motor?!” Another one: “This is a lot of hate for the simple crime of crediting ‘dedicated tinkerers on YouTube’ instead of EMS specifically by name.” (Klutz's book description says: “On YouTube, dedicated tinkerers show off motorized toothbrush heads that are pretty darned impressive.”)
The episode speaks to the growing power of online social communities. B.J. Fogg, director of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, says he tells students not to blog or record content from his classes. “If anybody in the class were to blog it or share it, the rest of the class would have censured them,” he says. “It is sufficient to let the community know the policies. If somebody violates it, the rest of the community is going to say, ‘what’s up with that?’ The other people will call them out.... I don’t need anything super legal or formal. It’s self-policing.”
