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The perils of building your business model around anti-consumer laws: Music biz lesson for e-book publishers
November 17, 2008 | 12:43 am
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By David Rothman
A Harvard law professor is arguing that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act isn’t constitutional. The reason? In effect, he says, the RIAA is enforcing criminal law.
Prof. Charles Nesson, who founded the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, is defending a Boston University student—one of tens of thousands of people whom the RIAA has accused of online song-sharing.
If Nesson succeeds, the RIAA will have one fewer tool to use against piracy.
No, I don’t think people should be able to share books with impunity via P2P, but the act is really over the top—with fines as high as $150K for just one violation. The e-book industry is asking for trouble if it relies on atrocities like this. Better business models would be far, far more effective and durable.
Related: Harvard Crimson article.
Also on the legal front: Local Wikipedia blocked by German MP, in OhmyNews. As much as I believe in well-stocked national digital libraries, I also believe in robust alternatives. This clip is a good illustration of the reasons why. (Thanks to Wiebe de Jager.)
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Comments:
> No, I don’t think people should be able to share
> books with impunity via P2P
So you want to criminalize millions upon millions of people who do that and see no problem with it?
A very large percentage of <40yo people today fileshare. That’s the reality. The only way to stop it is to give the government (or even worse, the entertainment mafia) the right to monitor all private communication and forbid encrypted communication that the monitors can’t decrypt. Not even the mob-like extortion conducted by the entertainment cartels have any significant effect. (And if it had, it would just be driving the operations to darknets, where it certainly couldn’t have any effect.)
So, on one hand we have government-sanctioned monopolies and on the other hand we have everyone’s right to communicate privately (with doctors, lovers, lawyers, family, etc.) Which one would YOU choose?
Big problem, Marcus. A relationship often does exist between payment and the quality or even availability of the best books. It’s true of both fiction and nonfiction, which at times can take years to research. P2P normally doesn’t provide for this compensation. Furthermore, there are millions of law-abiding people who are willing to pay for e-books.
That said, I certainly agree with you that the current copyright system is unfair. We need more balance between consumer and industry rights. One way would be what I’ve propoposed—a mix of the private sector and national digital libraries that provided fair compensation for writers, publishers and other content creators.
As for privacy and IP laws, there surely are less intrusive ways than the RIAA approach. I myself would like to see less fixation on going after individuals and more on shutting down the big pirates.
One other observation on privacy. If Big Bro wants to snoop on you here in the States at least, laws have proved pretty irrelevant at times. Pathetic, isn’t it? Maybe life will improve under Obama.
I doubt we’ll reconcile our views, but thanks as usual for speaking out.
David
I wasn’t speaking so much about what I think is fair, as about what is realistic. Being against non-commercial copyright-infringement is utterly futile in the days of the internet. The only way to make even a dent in the rising trend of mass copyright-infringement is to abolish privacy as we know it. You and I may not like it, but that’s the way it is. To pretend otherwise is silly (or just ignorant of the technologies we currently have).
> there are millions of law-abiding people who are willing to
> pay for e-books
Indeed there are, and I’m one of them. Here I’ve briefly outlined my vision of a system that I think would work fairly well:
http://www.teleread.com/blog/2007/03/24/living-on-the-long-tail-intellectual-property-and-the-e-publishers-world/#comment-279405
Thanks, Marcus, for reminding me of the old entry.
I’m in favor of all kinds of experimentation with different models, and I’ll be very interested if anyone wants to experiment with your proposal.
While wondering if the shareware approach can be scaled up, I do appreciate your interest in compensating creators.
And why not see what happens?
So is any writer or publisher game to give Marcus’s proposal a shot in real life?
David