O'Reilly Javascript Book Author on Piracy

[kjk]

http://www.davidflanagan.com/2011/04...ipt-the-1.html

I'm well-aware of Tim O'Reilly's public statements about piracy. And I agree with some of them. Obscurity is a worse problem than piracy, for example. And I know that some authors have been successful at selling books even while making them free (and legal) for download. I know that some genre fiction authors have been successful by self-publishing ebooks for 99¢. (I don't know that world well enough to link to any of those authors, though.) For most of these authors, however, "success" means "I'm making more money selling books for 99¢ than I did when I sold them for $3.99".

I know that electronic piracy cannot be defeated. And I don't think we should (or can) lock everything down with draconian DRM. But I also think that a laissez-faire attitude toward piracy ("well, it is better than obscurity" or "its going to be pirated anyway, so you might as well just make it free") is the wrong answer.

Tough position to be in.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Not much of a response to the problem, either. His suggestions seem to center around forcing Google to somehow filter out pirate content; a useless gesture, since there's no way for Google to be able to recognize pirated content from legitimate content. That shouldn't be Google's job.

And, of course, there are other search engines, bookmarks can be emailed, etc... giving Google that job will only send pirate content searchers to another engine, or to ask their friends.

[bhartman36]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

And, of course, there are other search engines, bookmarks can be emailed, etc... giving Google that job will only send pirate content searchers to another engine, or to ask their friends.

I agree with a lot of what you said, but this strikes me as missing the point. Material is found and disseminated much more widely with Google than with e-mail or bookmarks. Other search engines would obviously be analogous, but AFAIK, Google has, by far, the largest share of search engine traffic.

[mr ploppy]

Google removes links to unauthorised content on request. There's a list of such requests here:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/notice.cgi

[Sydney's Mom]

OMG, look at the software takedown notice. It would take someone an entire day to send notices on all those sites. Is it even worth it? Cause you know they will just pop back up.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Sydney's Mom

OMG, look at the software takedown notice. It would take someone an entire day to send notices on all those sites. Is it even worth it? Cause you know they will just pop back up.

http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/job/42903...-immediately-/

I wouldn't mind a job like that myself

[Hellmark]

And the thing is, where most stuff start and stop, piracy wise, they're completely hidden from google and the like. They don't want the attention of John Q Public.

[Penforhire]

And I want my search engines to be more, um, agnostic. I don't want them filtering more than absolutely necessary. They have less value to me if they are heavily filtered. And what do they filter next (slippery slope)?