Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is on the record with a comment over at GigaOM that password sharing among family members is not a big deal. I applaud him for his sensibility in recognizing this. I think too many content creators fail to make a distinction between casual sharing amongst members of a household, and uploading to a torrent for millions and millions of people to consume for free. I am delighted to see a big player like Hastings recognize this. He does concede that multiple users sharing an account is 'not ideal.' But he clarifies that what they are seeing is situations such...

* Editor's Note: The end of this post contains a minor House of Cards spoiler. Photographer Will Steacy has a photo essay on his online portfolio called 'Deadline;' I've seen it pop up on several blogs this past week. In the essay, Steacy memorializes the newsroom of the Philadelphia Inquirer, from their first buyout in 2009 through their move from the iconic 'Tower of Truth' office tower and into a single-floor office at the top of an old department store. Some of the photos, such as the before-and-after of the old newsroom—full of desks and phones and people, and then an empty shell—are...

  The image above (also linked to here) has been making the social media rounds lately. Not much to say about it other than "I agree." It reminds me of a documentary the Beloved and I have been watching on Netflix this week about a man who left the Neo-Nazi community and is trying to start his life over again. One of the things that disillusioned him about that community was the hypocrisy—the leaders would preach that they were doing whatever they did "for the children," but the rate of domestic violence in that community was staggeringly high. What this picture is...

Dan linked to a great article in today's Morning Links roundup about 'digital mooches,' aka the 20-somethings who may be leaving Mom and Dad's house in the coming years, yet seem to have no plans to leave their parents' cell phone contracts or Netflix subscriptions. I read this article with interest; I'd just read another about 'cord cutters,' aka the cable-free, and how the content industry is wringing their hands about what to do with these people. It seems these articles, read together, paint an ominous pattern: The kids aren't paying because they get it for 'free' at home. Then they turn...

One of the anti-DRM arguments people often make is that if you make it easy enough for people to buy content legitimately, they won't need to pirate anymore. Here is a case study in favor of that argument: Thorin Kiosowski over at Lifehacker has a great essay up about why he stopped pirating media and started paying for it legitimately. Kiosowski begins by explaining why he pirated to begin with, namely that at the time, 'legit' digital media was confusing, expensive and failed to provide a good experience. He then lists three things that changed his mind: • He stopped feeling the need to own...

Techdirt has a great write-up about a British children's author, Terry Deary, who is on a misguided campaign against libraries. Deary believes libraries are giving away entertainment for free; he also believes they are severely damaging the book publishing industry. Techdirt's Tim Cushing argues that, notwithstanding some of the fallacies the author is operating under, in fact, many forms of entertainment these days are indeed given away for free. And of course, many others are paid for... I decided to have a quick think about the 'entertainment' we consume in my own household. How much of it do we pay for? How...

Brett Sandusky at Digital Book World has an interesting write-up on digital subscriptions. He ruminates on the pros and cons of two different models: the 'modular' subscription, where customers subscribe to one thing at a time, as they wish, versus the bundle model, where customers pay a fixed amount for a package deal which includes the content they want, plus other stuff which they may or may not want (for instance, when you purchase phone service just to get a cheaper deal on the Internet and cable). Sandusky prefers the 'modular' model. He aims to treat his customers like grown-ups who know...

Goliath vs Goliath ... Amazon takes on Apple and Google (The Telegraph) Amazon to See a New Cloud Market in 2013 (The Street) Bookshops can't compete with Amazon on price. If they want to survive, they have to provide a personal touch (The Telegraph) Kindle Daily Deals: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach | Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Quirk Books) | and two other choices * * *    ...

From a Post on Digital Book World [Press Release] SkyInk Studios Launching E-Book Subscription Service; booxl Seeks To Be A Leading E-Book Subscription Provider  Washington D.C.- e-book and book app developer, SkyInk Studios, has announced a plan to launch a new e-book subscription service, booxl. The service will employ a model similar to both Netflix and Spotify. Customers will be able to download the booxl app to view e-books and book apps through their tablet and e-reader devices and also stream the content online. The company began developing the platform some months ago as a way to offer their own titles and those of partner...

When I was visiting relatives over the weekend, I had a fairly potent reminder of the enduring power of the public domain—and I finally succumbed to the inevitable realization, that in some cases, piracy is just too much work. On Saturday night of our stay, it turned out we didn’t have time to watch Marvel’s The Avengers as I’d hoped we could. So my sister-in-law instead introduced me to the first episode of an engrossing ABC television series called Once Upon a Time. The premise is that Snow White’s Wicked Queen worked a curse that trapped well-known fairy tale...

H.L. Mencken, the American iconoclast, depicted Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Could the same idea apply to the killjoys at Amazon who so cruelly made the $199 Amazon Kindle Fire HD less of an e-book machine and more of a billboard and cash register? Granted, many readers might not object because the Web has inured them to obnoxious huckstery of just the kind that H.L. hated. And they won’t miss the apps now AWOL from the Fire’s marketplace, such as the OverDrive software to read free e-books from libraries, because they never used them in the first place. But I myself do care. Unless the...

            >> Soon You'll be Able to Go to CVS and Print a Book (Paid Content) >> Hachette Increases Cost of Library Ebooks 220% (Good E-Reader) >> Author Invites World to Watch Her Write Novel Via Google Docs (The Digital Reader) >> Netflix Exec on Canada's Broadband Caps (GigaOM) >> Kindle Daily Deal: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (and) Savvy...