a serious thread...
I recently came across an article by the very respected Tim O'Reilly called
"Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution". Provocative title, to say the least. Although it was written in 2002, it's amazingly pertinent to the debate which continues to rage on the topic today.
Quote:
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The continuing controversy over online file sharing sparks me to offer a few thoughts as an author and publisher. To be sure, I write and publish neither movies nor music, but books. But I think that some of the lessons of my experience still apply.
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Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
In 7 "Lessons" O'Reilly turns conventional "wisdom" about piracy being the death of creative endeavour and whole industries (music, film, publishing...) on its head :
Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service
We've heard many of the same arguments here in various discussions but the article is well worth a read. long, but very very interesting.
Read the whole thing
here.
thanks to Ralph Sir Edward's
thread about copyright reform for reminding me.
So, thoughts ? is piracy actually a positive vector in the digital age ?
NB this article was linked in an article in french called "Portrait of the pirate as library curator" which i mentioned
here. If you read in french or want to try out
google's translation tools, it's also an excellent read.