Way to go, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America—doing an RIAA act on your members’ fans!
I won’t repeat the details from Chris Meadows, except to say I wouldn’t want to ride a rocket with fuel mixed up by Andrew Burt, the culprit within the SFWA.
RIAA’s blow-up
Here’s another example of the perils of copyright zealotry.
While lawsuits may deter some from copying, even a well-financed outfit like the RIAA can barely make a little ripple in the sea—while CD sales continue to drop, harmed in part by some fans’ hatred of the big studios, not just the switch to digital technology.
As a villain, RIAA is inept. It apparently can sue just 6,000 people a year, even while using an approach that often can be as sloppy as Burt’s; and evil fans can normally slash the risk by avoiding a FastTrack client in the style of Kazaa‘s.
The number 6,000 comes from a punk copyright lawyer named Nilay Patel, writing in Engadget. He goes on to say that “generally” the victims “have been unknowingly sharing files,” and that the 6K is “a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated nine million people who use P2P software every month.”
Pitfalls of a hawkish approach
Talk about the pitfalls of the hawkish approach!
For e-books, then, the solution in many cases could be social DRM (fostering ease of use) along with epub logos that truly signify compatibility (another way to promote convenience), rather than a hawkish DCMA-oriented approach.
The easier it is for readers to rely on legal books, the less of a chance they’ll go illegal.
If DRM is to be used, and I hope not, it needs to be genuinely interoperable.
Rx: More trust, fewer threats
Perhaps just as importantly if not more, publishers and writers should try to get closer to readers, though interactive e-books and otherwise.
If you make a community out of a book, piracy will become farther outside the accepted norms among fans. Moreover, it will be less cool than ever to post copyrighted content on many file-sharing sites, which themselves often reflect norms.
No strategy is perfect; there will still be much more leakage with a trust-oriented approach. But guess what? Sales and profits will be higher as well.
Encouraging stats so far from unscientific TeleRead poll
In that vein, check out the results of our small, unscientific poll that asked, “Will you buy a p-edition of a free Creative Commons book you love?”
So far, about half the respondents say they would probably pay for a p-book version of an e-book which they loved.
That’s far more than I’d have expected, even allowing for the high caliber of the typical TeleBlog reader and even considering that people would be getting a paper book in return.
If a larger poll can replicate our tiny numbers, this will be good news for those of us who believe in social DRM and other strategies based on goodwill rather than the use of Dobermanish lawyers.
Such results could be even better news for Creative Commons. I hope that Creative Commons can finance a similar poll that uses rigorous scientific methodology. The same poll could explore ways to use the CC model even when e-book technology improves.
I have a novel that can end without an epilogue but is much better with it. What if the free version excluded the epilogue but the paid edition included it?
