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...

How are digital media changing our buying habits? They are changing them, there’s no question, but we often don’t think about how. But something that’s happened over the last few days has led me to think about it. Of all electronic forms of media, I think that computer games (and other software, true, but I’m focusing on games here) are one of the most closely related to e-books, though perhaps they’re a little closer to digital music. As with books and music, they used to come solely on physical media that we buy not for the physical medium...

Valve is one of the major players in the gaming arena: Valve: Piracy is a 'non-issue': "Managing director says piracy is a "service problem."Gabe Newell, Valve managing director, has claimed that software piracy is a "non issue" for the company's Steam gaming service. Instead, he said that the fundamental misconception about piracy is that it is motivated by price, when Value believes that its more down to problems with service."For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come...

I found a pair of unrelated stories concerning Russia and piracy today in my Google Reader trawl that make for an interesting juxtaposition. On Publishing Perspectives, Daniel Kalder interviews Sergey Anuriev, the CEO of Russian e-publisher Litres.ru. At the time the company was founded in 2007, there was no legitimate e-book business in Russia—it was “a 100% pirate market.” But at the time it launched, new legislation had founded new civil courts in Russia, which made it easier to fight piracy. At the moment, the Russian e-book market is still very small, and Anuriev estimates that still 90%...

The dichotomy between physical and electronic delivery of media doesn’t just strike the book world. As I’ve noted a few times in the past, computer games have also been moving to electronic delivery, most notably via Valve’s Steam system, but other companies such as GameStop have been trying to roll their own as well. Digital delivery of games can allow game publishers to do some interesting things. For instance, buying any Valve game box in the store includes a free Steam-based on-line version of it that players can download forever even if they lose the retail disks, Also,...

Even though this is an e-book blog, from time to time I poke my nose over into the world of computer gaming to point out some parallels. You could say that Internet game distribution is a sort of first cousin of the e-book, as they share a lot of commonalities. They’re both about telling stories—in books, you read the stories, but in games you experience them. More importantly, both started out as strictly physical means of media distribution—dead trees for books, dead dinosaur discs for games—but have moved into the digital forum where they’re more vulnerable to bit-copying...

Computer game DRM is one of the more pernicious sorts of DRM. Rather than just restricting what you can do with the content you purchase, computer game DRM can actually make your content harder to use at all, if not actively screw up your computer—making computer game piracy even more attractive than e-book DRM makes e-book piracy. Online retro game e-store Good Old Games has long recognized this; we mentioned their anti-DRM stance when they launched in 2008. Now they’ve spoken out again, in an interview with bit-tech.net. GOG’s PR and marketing manager, Lukasz Kukawski, had a few things...

Time for another one of those posts where I talk about the challenges facing other digital media in order to draw a comparison to e-books. In this case, I will be talking about the comparison of “pirate” media to commercial media, and the conundrum of competing on quality. It will take a little time to work around to how this relates to e-books, but bear with me. This weekend I was at VisionCon, the closest thing to a true SF convention that Springfield, Missouri has been able to host yet. Its guests this year included animé voice actors Richard...

E-books are not the only electronic medium attracting writers. The New York Observer has an article about journalists and novelists migrating to the video game field. Not that authors working in other media is necessarily new; prose writers have dabbled in theatre, movies, and television for as long as those media have been around. But the video game storytelling form brings new sets of challenges to writers—as well as new opportunities for creativity.. In addition to working on a project involving a major movie license, [journalist and fiction writer Tom] Bissell and his partner, Rob Auten—who,...

As the biggest digital outlet for a medium that used to be sold solely physically, Valve’s Steam game distribution, multiplayer-matchmaking, and instant-messaging portal is often useful for drawing parallels to other e-media distribution schemes, such as e-books. But sometimes the differences stand out more. Many games that are integrated with Steam, such as Call of Duty, Fallout, Left 4 Dead, and so on, are still sold in physical disc-in-box form in brick-and-mortar stores. Today MCV reports that two unnamed major British retail outlets are threatening to stop carrying Steam-enabled games unless the publishers remove Steam functionality from them. The...

Adrian Hon has a post on today’s Telegraph warning of trouble ahead for publishers. The recent wave of e-book readers has made e-book piracy easier and more tempting than ever. Hon writes about having bought the 627-page hardcover of the latest Iain Banks Culture novel, but not wanting to have to lug the hefty thing back to the office again—so he googled for an EPUB that he could download to his iPad. It only took him 60 seconds to download the file, and another five minutes or so to put it on his iPad and iPhone. While he...