Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
On the web as it is designed today, users can (mostly) establish anonymity, so they can steal and have no fear of being identified and caught. This creates more of a casually dishonest atmosphere on the web, and changes the business dynamic radically. Losses (not price, the proportion of stolen goods to sold goods) are higher, and a business must decide whether it needs to take steps to mitigate the larger amount of loss.
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On the other hand, the potential market is also larger. If the overall revenues are higher, should the business really spend time worrying about a slightly higher pilferage rate? Particularly when the copy being "stolen" has not cost the business anything to manufacture and does not prevent a future sale to a paying customer?
I'm not saying the electronic file has no
value, only that an individual electronic file, if reproduced and served by a third party, has no
cost to the legitimate content owner.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
But, with respect, if they hold the rights to the material, that is their choice to make, just as paper books frequently go out of print when the publisher decides that sales have fallen to a level at which a new print run in uneconomic. If the author is still alive, and feels that there is still money to be made from a book, they would probably, in that circumstance, request that the rights to the book revert to them, and make new publishing arrangements.
We have to accept that books are commercial property, and rights to them can be bought and sold. They aren't something that we have some "divine right" to.
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Well, no. We don't have to accept this. This is something that has been argued at many points in history, and as we've discussed many times, the granting of a limited monopoly by the Statute of Anne and later legislation was intended to stimulate production as a
public good, not because it was felt that authors or publishers had some inherent right to control their works.
Books and other creative content become part of the culture they are published in, and after a period of time (and we can debate just how long that time is, but copyrights do expire), they belong to the public. So we can see that they do not continue to be commercial property, with rights bought and sold, unlike, for example, real estate, which can be passed down to heirs. Our legal system has placed creative works in an interesting, separate category from physical property (which can be bought and sold in perpetuity) and services (which are paid for once per instance). Comparisons between creative works and these other categories are limited at best.
Ultimately, I think the Kindle system will only succeed so long as there is not another major platform that people want to use, i.e. Amazon achieves an effective monopoly on ebook readers and content. Otherwise, customer pressure will result in forcing Amazon to drop the restrictive DRM on content just as that pressure has forced Apple into dropping DRM on iTunes content.