Life as a Beta Geek

There’s been lots of coverage of copyright infringement around ebooks in the mainstream media recently, such as these examples from The Times (in which I’m quoted briefly) and CNN. It’s a topic that I’ve touched on at several conferences recently, though I don’t pretend to have an answer. Still catching up on feeds and email from the festive backlog, I came across three quite interesting perspectives on the subject.

Writing for The Times, David Hutchinson argued that “multinational media companies simply can’t get their heads around the idea that the monumental profits of the previous 20 years just aren’t possible any more. Pushing vastly overpriced content is only going to encourage more people to abandon ship and take up a life of virtual swarthy swashbuckling instead.”

What I find interesting is not so much the article itself, but the frankly rather benign final sentence, which highlights an interesting point about nomenclature. As a smart colleague of mine observed recently: “Piracy immediately conjures up images of Johnny Depp in dreadlocks and jolly-faced rum-swiggers singing sea shanties and going “aaaaarrrrrrr!!” a lot. Pirates are cool and funny, so ‘piracy’ is never going to be taken seriously.”

Author David Hewson gave his view here. He doesn’t use the P word to describe the problem: for him it is straightforward theft. “There is a real danger that we’re sliding towards a cultural shift which divides creative writers from their work, where copyright itself is somehow seen as theft, a conspiracy against a public that has a ‘right’ to take what it wants from the web for nothing. If that happens we’re headed for fewer professionally published books, a poorer range of literature, and the dumbing down of mainstream publishing to a handful of established genres and big-time authors.” Hewson went on to discuss some of the specific issues in a follow-up post, debunked the idea that pricing is a factor in copyright infringement, looked at why he believes DRM does not work, and concluded his series of articles with a look at how copyright infringement could be reduced. Both the articles and their robust comment threads are well worth a look.

Finally, via Tim O’Reilly on Twitter, I came across this example from another industry on copyright infringement and Apple’s app store, which looks at the percentage of users of a given game using paid-for and infringing versions, examines the excuse given that infringement is in effect just a form of sampling, and concludes: “Having seen our data . . . these arguments all sound a bit delusional to me. It seems like an attempt at trying to be legitimate while hiding the real reason. They should just. . . say: ‘We pirate because we can’. That seems to be a much more honest statement based on the data we’ve seen.” (The data in this piece is well worth a look).