Quote:
Originally Posted by fbrII
Both Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope complained openly about the ethics of American Publishing houses who frequently published works by European without paying them anything in royalties. Trollope referred to American publishers as 'pirates' in his autobiography, harsh words indeed. My guess is publishing houses feel the need to use DRM in order to protect themselves from customers who share their same ethics.
|
There's a big difference between protecting your investments and business content from competitors, and "protecting" it from customers. One of my favorite quotes from Lessig's book,
The Public Domain:
Quote:
|
Imagine someone walking up to you in 1950, handing you a book or a record or a movie reel, and saying “Quick! Do something the law of intellectual property might forbid.” (This, I admit, is a scenario only likely to come to the mind of a person in my line of work.) You would have been hard-pressed to do so. Perhaps you could find a balky mimeograph machine, or press a reel-to-reel tape recorder into use. You might manage a single unauthorized showing of the movie—though to how many people? But triggering the law of intellectual property would be genuinely difficult. Like an antitank mine, it would not be triggered by the footsteps of individuals. It was reserved for bigger game.
|
Copyright law was never designed to go after individuals, and trying to apply it that way is creating both a chilling effect on creativity and a growing underground that perceives no difference between "Scan a chapter of an out-of-print textbook to email to a friend for research" and "place entire scanned PDFs of new textbooks on BigFileShare.com* for anyone to download"--because the publishers are screaming that those are the same kind of violation.
By not acknowledging the difference between casual sharing (a desirable thing, possibly the foundation of literary culture) and rampant unauthorized distribution, publishers convince a growing number of people that they are clueless about how books are normally used. Worse, by not spending resources prosecuting *actual for-profit violations*--like Amazon's unauthorized sales of 1984, caused by it not paying attention to its own cross-site settings--they convince the public that large publishing & distribution companies are in collusion *against* the people who pay them for content.
This is not a recipe for long-term financial success, in the era of instant global communication and easy data duplication. Attempting to create enforcement laws that evade prosecution requirements, and clickthrough agreements instead of actual license contracts, is not going to create a world in which content is only used they way they'd like it to be used.
*fictitious site name. Find your own file sharing sites. People who can't operate a Google search don't deserve pirated ebooks.**
**Which is not to say that other people do, just that if there are people who "deserve" pirated ebooks, they're not found among those who can't figure out the names of filesharing sites.