From TorrentFreak.  More in the article. With their unconditional support for SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, Hollywood is pressing hard for new legislation to curb piracy. The studios want ‘rogue’ websites to be censored and are calling on Google and Internet providers to take responsibility. However, a new study reveals that movie industry itself has the key to decreasing piracy, without passing any news laws. In a paper titled ‘Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales’ researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College examine the link between BitTorrent piracy and box office returns. As hypothesized, they...

On a related note to the post about graphical e-book standards I made earlier today, TOC general manager (and sometime TeleRead contributor) Joe Wilkert has written an op-ed for Publishers Weekly decrying the fragmentation of the e-book market through platform lock-in and DRM. Wilkert suggests that EPUB could be a solution to this if Amazon could be convinced to adopt it and drop DRM. (Well, of course it could. Heck, pretty much any e-book format would work if Amazon dropped DRM, thanks to Calibre.) He reiterates the usual music-industry-based arguments for ditching DRM. Several...

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...

From boingboing: My latest Publishers Weekly column is "Digital Lysenkoism," a look at the bizarre internal forces that causes people who work at publishers to defend DRM, even though they know it doesn't work. I also recently chatted with a big-six digital strategist, who explained to me how his employer would soon be sending out all of its digital advanced reader copies (ARCs) as DRM-crippled PDFs. We shared a moment of incredulous silence at this. Most reviewers, after all, get hundreds of times more material than they can ever use. I literally get 100 books ...

From The Guardian: Rovio Mobile learned from the music industry's mistakes when deciding how to deal with piracy of its Angry Birds games and merchandise, chief executive Mikael Hed told the Midem conference in Cannes this morning. "We have some issues with piracy, not only in apps, but also especially in the consumer products. There is tons and tons of merchandise out there, especially in Asia, which is not officially licensed products," said Hed. "We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy." Hed explained that Rovio...

An interesting thing about the latest post from publishing-industry observer Mike Shatzkin, highlighting what he feels were the most important points from the Digital Book World conference he helped run: it largely focuses on DRM. Aside from Matteo Berlucchi’s call for publishers to drop DRM (which I covered here and here), Shatzkin also brings up a point about the relationship of DRM to sales at romance e-bookseller All Romance Ebooks. Shatzkin notes three interesting statistics that came up in All Romance’s presentation at DBW: Only 20% of All Romance’s readers strongly resist e-books with DRM....

Three articles have sparked my thinking on this post. The are: The Charlie Stross piece entitled Cutting their own throats, Joseph Esposito's insightful post on How B&N Can Take a Bite Out of Amazon, and The New York Times article, The Bookstore's Last Stand Stross talks about how the publishing industry has allowed Amazon to use DRM as a tool against itself. Esposito suggests "B&N needs an MCI solution" while the Times piece encourages B&N to have a sense of urgency in avoiding the same fate as Borders. Rolling all of these together I have a radical, three-step suggestion for William Lynch, CEO...

On FutureBook, Anobii CEO Matteo Berlucchi has posted an essay expanding on the points he made in the Digital Book World presentation I mentioned the other day. Berlucchi proposes that DRM is not helping the fight against piracy, and may even be driving people to piracy as they want to be able to do more with their e-books than publishers are willing to let them. However, the vendor lock-in promoted by DRM is giving additional power to e-tailers like Amazon, since customers are reluctant to switch away from the vendor who has sold them most of their e-books. Berlucchi...

Jeremy Greenfield reports on the Digital Book World site that Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of social e-tailer Anobii, is urging publishers to drop DRM restrictions on their e-books as a way to fight Amazon. In a DBW slideshow presentation, Berlucchi argues that the big e-vendors use device choice to lock in consumers, licensing rather than selling e-books and offering inferior functionality to that of paper books. Berlucchi calls attention to the actions of the music industry in recent years, eliminating DRM and permitting ownership of music—you can now even import songs bought on one platform into a competitor’s via cloud...

Since the beginning of the “modern” ebook era, when Amazon entered the marketplace with its Kindle, I’ve wondered why Amazon chose to follow its own path as regards format and DRM rather than adopting the ePub standard and a more benign or universal form of DRM. I’ve wondered because by choosing its own path, Amazon has decided that readers who are not Kindlers (by which I mean consumers who read on dedicated e-ink devices that are incompatible with Amazon and thus cannot buy ebooks at Amazon unless they are willing to strip the DRM and convert the file, which the majority are either unwilling or...

That's the title of an interesting article in [e-reads].  Here's the beginning: Simon van Meygaarden, a friend and correspondent based in the Netherlands, holds some views about illegal downloading that diverge from our own (including the term “illegal downloading”). In particular he believes that financial losses due to such downloads are an infinitesimal fraction of the potential legitimate revenues.  He has actually demonstrated mathematically that for every $1000 of potential to be made by an authorized content provider, only $1.40 ends up in the pocket of an unauthorized user. Read Simon’s calculations.  Then I’ll have a few of my own. Richard Curtis *********************************************** Illegal Downloads...

From TorrentFreak: In short, Doctorow argues that the copyright industry’s fight isn’t against copying, but against general-purpose computers. As more and more devices we buy are general-purpose hardware devices with custom software designed to make that hardware do certain things out of the box, that custom software that drives the device is also custom-izable software that lets the hardware be recoded and repurposed to do completely different things. Shortly, we’ll see basically every industry trying to crack down on the freedom to tinker, to keep the products they sold us in the same state as they were before we owned them. This...