“…the TV, movie and record companies’ problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can’t even see why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be everybody. What will happen then?” – David Pogue, New York Times.
The TeleRead take: Pogue based his thoughts on an informal poll of students. Time for book publishers, too, not just Hollywood, to get their heads out of the sand and look around? Moralistic copyright “education” won’t work. What might could be a community-oriented approach to draw people closer to author and publishers—and experimentation with, say, social DRM.
As Rob Preece observed, people don’t go out of their way to share extra copies from news racks. The other thing to keep in mind is that, yes, some leakage is inevitable, including, say, the sharing of books within families or maybe between close friends. But that’s happening anyway with paper books, and the cost will still be much lower than in sales lost due to the hassles of DRM.
What I keep coming back to is the reality that this is a consumer-driven economy: if people don’t want to buy it, they won’t buy it, and you have to either sell them what they do want to buy, or go out of business. Look what happened with JK Rowling: she was opposed to ebooks, but people wanted them, so they begged and pleaded for a legal version they could buy. She said no. Pirated versions showed up on-line within days. Might that have happened inevitably? Yes. But there were a lot of people who would have paid real money for a legal digital copy should it have been made available. Her loss!
The “Big Media” can say whatever they want to about time-shifting, or region-blocking or whatever, but the reality is, they can either give people what they want in a way that is easy and affordable and relatively barrier-free (see: itunes business model)or they can lose customers and go out of business.
I wonder if print-publishers will learn from the backlash from the RIAA/MPAA thugs. We buy artifacts of value (books, DVDs, CDs) and even pay for digital copies (music on iTunes). The media sub-geniuses have hoped for a magic law that forces us to pay for whatever claptrap they produce. They need to learn to produce products we’ll pay for, willingly.
It’s pretty simple, really. Suing people singing in showers or telling each other TV show plot lines is a losing proposition.
The real problem is that by not providing realistic legal alternatives publishers/authors almost forces potential buyers to educate themselves in how to obtain the goods illegally. Huge underground channels and “markets” where things cost only time and effort (of which authors/publishers get nothing) are evolved, and the more popular they get the more difficult it will be to get people back from them.