It seems like more and more people lately are coming to the same conclusion as Gabe Newell of Valve about piracy as a service problem. Paul Tassi has an op-ed on Forbes in which he points out that no matter what Hollywood and other media industries do, they will never manage to stomp out piracy through legislation. It’s already illegal in most of the world, but that hasn’t slowed it down much. Right now, Tassi writes, pirates have a big advantage over commercial interests in how easy it is to download and view their media. The editorial mostly applies...

Gizmodo reprints an article from Maximum PC about “seven ways to stop piracy without DRM”—aimed at computer game developers, but also mostly applicable to other media that are traditionally DRM’d, such as movies, music, or e-books. The suggestions combine the sorts of things that folks like Valve’s Gabe Newell have been saying for years with some other creative practices that game studios have been trying lately. The suggestions include things like built-in deterrents, waiting to release games until more bugs had been worked out, giving paying customers extra content, and engaging with the community. Some of these solutions...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting article about comic book piracy in France, focusing on a report by the Paris government’s “Le MOTif” book and writing “observatory”. The third in a series of reports on piracy that began in 2009, Le MOTif zoomed in on comics, as this is the category of books that is pirated the most in France. Comic books make up 10-14% of France’s global book market, but the availability of comics in e-book format does not meet the readers’ needs — resulting in organized teams of pirates (up to 100) that have...

FutureBook has a post looking at the relevance of Charles Dickens to present-day publishing. Dickens, Martyn Daniels writes, wrote and published many stories in installments in pamphlets prior to publishing them in completed form. The ad revenue from the installments helped to support him while he published the final version, and fueled interest in the final form. (Indeed, there’s a famous story about the ship carrying the next installment of one such work to America being mobbed by readers who wanted to learn if a certain character survived.) We find ourselves again asking why we are...

Dreamwidth blogger synecdochic has taken an in-depth look at the allegations against Megaupload and agrees with Ars that the prospects look dim for the company’s execs. The problem is not so much what Megaupload did—indeed, synecdochic suggests that a sufficiently skilled legal team would have had a decent chance to get the execs off the hook for a lot of it, except for the real problem. The real problem is that Megaupload’s employees regularly emailed each other to discuss how wicked they were—and the company kept email logs that the feds could—and did—subpoena, providing more than enough rope...

The Department of Justice has just shut down cyberlocker Megaupload, arrested a number of its executives including founder Kim “Dotcom” Schmitz, and seized $50 million in assets. Megaupload was in the news last month for its spat with Universal over an allegedly fraudulent DMCA takedown of a promotional music video. Now the DoJ has announced it has been investigating the company for two years, and finally decided to move. Ars Technica reports: The indictment charges that the "Mega conspiracy" has for more than five years operated websites that willfully distributed pirated movies, often before their theatrical...

Here’s some irony for you. TheNextWeb reports that a coalition of nine well-known Chinese writers is suing Apple for 11.91 million yuan (US$1.88 million) for selling illegal e-books of their works on its App Store. The writers have asked Apple provide copyright certification of all works being sold on the App Store, but Apple has declined to do so. China, of course, is infamous as a hotbed of pirated and counterfeited goods, though it has been trying to change that image lately. It would appear from this story that Apple has been a bit lax in verifying ownership of...

On FutureBook, Martyn Daniels looks at the question of piracy, summing up contributing factors and discussing why it is such a tricky problem. Calling it a social problem similar to drugs, gambling, drinking, and prostitution, he points out that it will probably never be eradicated. He points out that almost everybody has done it either intentionally or not, and that it is important not to alienate these people or set unrealistic goals in trying to fight it. The causes or contributing factors Daniels discusses include free digital content versus industry pricing (and taxes that target e-books while leaving p-books...

On Posterous, blogger Diego Basch writes about how the Amazon Kindle has changed his reading habits. It’s an interesting testimonial on how e-readers can change the way we interact with our books. As a result of having plenty of unread books on his Kindle, Basch now finds he doesn’t watch TV anymore—there isn’t ever a time when he no “next” book to keep him from watching something on the tube. He also finds that he goes through books a lot faster than he used to because he can also read them on the Kindle app on his computer or...

Piracy has been a constant in all media industries for the last few years, with trade organizations complaining that it’s been cutting into their revenue. Yet for the last few years until 2011, despite all the MPAA’s furor over piracy, the movie industry has been having record sales with each year being better than the last. Oddly enough, now that movie revenues have dropped a bit for 2011, analysts are not blaming piracy. A Chicago Tribune article sourced from CNN begins: The curtain is falling on the worst year for Hollywood in recent memory. ...

When you go DRM-free, sometimes you can be successful in ways you couldn’t have dreamed. A week ago I mentioned comedian Louis C.K.’s experiment in posting a comedy special DRM-free for $5 download or streaming. He’d made just over 110,000 sales in 4 days. Well, his sales rate has slowed a little, but he’s still surpassed $1 million in total sales in just twelve days, and has a PayPal screenshot to prove it. (Personally, I’d be really reluctant to leave a million dollars in their hands for any longer than I had to.) He’s going to use $250,000...

Pottermore has a 17-question survey for Harry Potter fans, asking about what Potter books they’ve read and own, what e-readers they use, and how interested they would be in buying Harry Potter e-books and audiobooks. As Laura Hazard Owen notes at PaidContent, one of the questions asks what could keep fans from buying the Potter books, and one of the choices is not having a credit or debit card. This suggests that Pottermore may come up with a way of letting parents add money to children’s accounts so they can buy the books they want. But I...