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Rep. Howard Berman and the RIAA/Hollywood crowd would do well to read a BusinessWeek article quoting the Business Software Alliance–hardly to be confused with the Free Software Foundation.

As BusinessWeek sees it, “Legislators shouldn’t be willing to consider something as outlandish as Berman’s bill until entertainment companies have proven first that they have exhausted the other legal avenues already available. Instead, the entertainment industry and Congress should take a look at the BSA’s most recent piracy report, which explains why the the BSA has been successful in the past, and why it now faces new problems.”

BusinessWeek goes on to say that “The chief reason for the lowering of piracy rates over time is simple, according to the BSA report. ‘As PC technology and the demand for software spread from the U.S. to other countries during the 1990s, there was, at times, a lag between the demand for software and the effective distribution of legal software…. The software industry has worked hard to have a legitimate sales presence in every country, making legal software sales and support easier to obtain.’

“As to the reason for a recent uptick in piracy, instead of pointing the finger at the Internet, the BSA explains that the increase is due to the economic downturn, with people in harder-hit countries turning back to pirating software.”

The TeleRead take: Needless to say, the same idea could apply to electronic books. TeleRead would allow libraries and commercial publishers to use a powerful distribution system and drive down product costs to a level that greatly reduced illegal copying. In fact, many thousands of books could be free in the Carnegnie vein and paid for via a national digital library fund. TeleRead-style library systems could exist in many countries, including the developing ones–an excellent way to grow the international book market and encourage local writers and publishers in the most unlikely places.

 
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