Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffcobb
It is amusing to watch the RIAA (for example) going after the leaves of the piracy tree and missing the trunk entirely when if they were even a little smart they could take out a handful of servers and cripple the system for a long time.
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I don't pretend to know anything other than what I read (and I practise a healthy scepticism about that) about 'the scene'. However, these organisations do use the police in an attempt to do just this every once in a while. This was the last time they did so:
http://torrentfreak.com/the-signific...-raids-100917/
What effect has this had on piracy? Nothing that the smallest consumers at the end of the chain would notice. Perhaps a handful of films might not be released for pirating
before their cinema release - but that's essentially all that has been achieved. This by a massively expensive operation funded by taxpayers' money in the employ of private corporations. It's not the case that these organisations fail to effectively discourage piracy because they conduct their operations in an inept way. There simply exists no kill-switch for internet piracy.
It came to light recently that a state-sponsored university in Iran was
seeding Microsoft and Adobe software to P2P networks (
http://torrentfreak.com/iranian-gove...server-100824/ ). How can piracy be stopped, as long as many countries in the world take such an attitude to copyright, without completely closing down the internet?
Other than that, I think your comment is a very good analysis of how piracy affects economic systems involving easily copiable media.
I do think that, where ebooks are concerned, the model is going to differ somewhat from how the music and film industries were affected by piracy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffcobb
These people tend to share the greed/never purchase traits with the first group but are little more than button-pushers and frankly get caught easily because their greed makes them try to get every imaginable thing/title out there and share it with the world but unlike the first group are sloppy about it and are swept up in the periodic (yet embarrassingly inept) sweeps by the RIAA/MPAA/BSA etc. Note that these folks are another dimension of the Darwinism I was speaking of; since they get caught and taken out of the system. Case in point: Jammie Thomas.
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I don't think this check will exist in the case of books. Ebooks are much smaller files than films and even MP3s; the publishing industry has far less money to make use of institutions such as the RIAA, and I suspect that the publishing industry is smart enough to realise that suing either your own customers, or people who would never have bought anything anyway, constitutes poor Public Relations.
Ereading devices are about to go mainstream. All of the people getting their new readers will be looking at the prices and availabilty of books online, as well as reading about the disadvantages of DRM employed by the online retailers. These people constitute the majority of the most serious readers in the relatively wealthy parts of the world.
Book publishing and retailing have to engage with ebooks quickly and seriously, deploying fair pricing-structures and getting rid of their DRM. If they don't, the only books they'll be making a profit on will be Christmas coffee-table books and YA / children's fiction. Of course, there will still be a living for writers who reach out to their readership and directly cultivate a relationship with them.
This shift will happen much, much faster than it did for the music industry, and we're on the tipping point right at this moment.