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Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars
November 5, 2009 | 12:49 am
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By Chris Meadows
Ars Technica has a review of a book by a veteran copyright lawyer who accuses the content industry of provoking “moral panics” to strengthen copyright law.
According to Ars, William Patry’s Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars is a powerful screed by a copyright lawyer with 27 years of experience who is currently Senior Copyright Counsel at Google. “Patry wants to show that copyright owners use metaphors—especially that of the ‘pirate’ and the ‘thief’—in order to short-circuit critical thinking on copyright issues.”
To borrow a term from the Free Software vs. Microsoft wars, the book accuses copyright owners of using a classic FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) strategy to have their way with Congress. (Though as Ars points out, Patry flings enough scary metaphors himself that he could be considered to use this strategy as well.)
I have not read the book myself, but from the review it sounds like it might be worth a look.
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Comments:
Interesting that you came up with someone who has a review of a book. There is a new FTC rule which comes in effect in Dec about endorsements which includes book reviews.
Here’s the official announcement:http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm
The first change is a stiffening of the rules in regard to endorsements and disclosure. If you do any affiliate marketing you now need to let your customers know that you stand to possibly profit if the customer goes on to purchase an item that you are endorsing. This effects blogs, twitter, email, websites, book review articles, membership sites, EVERYTHING.
I wonder how this will affect the ads here which seem mostly directed to Amazon. They may (I don’t really know) that Ads by google, redirects to Sony etc.,etc. fit in this category. If someone clicks on one of these ads and buys something does teleread get a cut? If so, I would think that it would apply. I guess we will see how it all pans out.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or expert, just reporting what I read.
@Dave: So, you’re expecting TeleRead to add a disclaimer to this article, to the effect: “TeleRead may derive a monetary profit from any product we mention that you decide to buy through one of the ads a third party serves up on our site that is tagged to select ads according to site content.”
I rather think that this is considered a given, even for direct advertisements for a product specifically mentioned or displayed. But if the government insists, TR may as well add my above disclaimer to the bottom of every page… and law is satisfied.
Many thanks for your comments as an e-book seller, Dave.
Steve’s right. The FTC’s real interest is in sites serving as PR outlets in disguise.
Neither Ars nor TeleRead would qualify. Of course we will add disclosures in book reviews if need be (I really want to check with the FTC, though Court Merrigan is already doing this). Significantly, print pubs don’t have to.
As for Amazon, Paul swears by the Kindle, and I own one myself ($180 used via Craig’s List) and see many good traits, >em>but I’m constantly bashing the Kindle’s DRM and Amazon’s focus on its proprietary format.
Amazon has never even sent us a loaner Kindle even though it at one point was giving them to print publications. We just might be a little too feisty.
Perhaps you instead should be asking the FTC to be more aggressive about the positioning of DRMed e-books as purchases rather than as rentals.
Thanks,
David
Addenum: LaurieJBooks.com is a nice little site. Planning to add nonDRMed ePub books?
A copyright lawyer who works for Google writing a book on the evils of copyright is about as unbiased and accurate as a scientist working for a tobacco company who tells you cigarettes don’t cause cancer.
The publishing industry has been fighting Google’s attempts at grabbing copyright for their own profit for years.
Mr Rothman,
Planning to add nonDRMed ePub books? Yes.
We did have about 6 months ago an author signup. Due to lack of interest we took it down. In the year that it was up we only had 5 authors sign up. I thought we paid good 50% of retail, but I guess it wasn’t good enough. The problem we’ve had lately is finding epubs to upload, preferably in bulk. We can take epub, pdf, lit and prc. To put it all back in place we would have to do a little additional programming. When we changed hosts we didn’t reactivate it and therefore the programming isn’t current for authors. It would need tweaking.
We did sign up for an affiliate program through Smashwords, but listing one at a time is too time consuming, that and I didn’t get an answer back from them about bulk downloads for me to upload. Other than that I got a “sorry charlie” from Overdrive, and Ingram wanted $10,000 for access to their database.
I just need a reliable source for nonDRM epubs etc. and will begin in earnest. Also may have to do a little tweaking on the programming here also.
We have no dedicated readers here and have no interest in them. Our Blackberry Storms work just fine as a pda, phone and ereader and fits in my shirt pocket. I don’t know what else I could ask for.
Appreciated the update, Dave. Best of luck re nonDRMed ePubs. David