On January 24, Senator Harry Reid will likely call for an up-or-down vote on considering the Protect IP Act (PIPA), the Senate’s companion bill to the House of Representative’s much maligned Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. This is a part of a process called “cloture” which enables the Senate to break filibusters and move a bill toward passage. If 60 votes are obtained from the 100 available, the bill is essentially fast-tracked toward approval.
PIPA and SOPA are most clearly associated with Hollywood interests, but a quick perusal of the list of supporters reveals that all of the large U.S. publishers, or their corporate parents, are lined up in favor of passage: Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins, MacMillian, Random House, and Simon & Schuster.
I will not analyze why almost everyone that understands the technical operations of the internet or cares about innovation is opposed to these bills. I am not going to debate that the bills are probably most effective against counterfeit, not pirate sites, and those are a fraction of the illegitimate business on the net, because the pirate sites will simply resurface. Nor will I go into the more learned analysis of leading legal scholars that suggest that PIPA and SOPA contravene First Amendment rights, which theoretically publishers hold dear.
Instead, I am going to take publishers at their face value: that they are genuinely concerned about piracy, and they want to shut down sites that distribute content under terms that rightsholders have not approved.
In 2002, almost 10 years ago, Tim O’Reilly penned a famous essay entitled “Piracy is Progressive Taxation” in which he discussed O’Reilly Media’s decision to release ebooks without DRM, and O’Reilly’s belief that piracy was not a significant threat to their sales or reputation. Tim ends the essay by quoting from Star Wars’ Hans Solo: “Give the wookie what he wants!” — in other words, by filling demand in as many places, and as many ways as possible, the incentive for e-book piracy is dramatically reduced. Whatever piracy remains is likely inevitable: hardcore users who will resist proffering any payment for content under any terms. The majority of readers seek an easy, straightforward means of purchasing what they want. In fact, by allowing “freeniks” to pirate, price setting can focus solely on customers from whom revenue is expected, generating higher income across the demand curve.
Such analyses appear not to matter to Big 6 publishing, which has endorsed on a draconian effort to control the access to their content on the network: a strategy that, as Cory Doctorow recently observed, is ultimately an attack on general purpose computing and networking:
[i]f you think of protocols and sites as features of the network, then saying “fix the Internet so that it doesn’t run BitTorrent”, or “fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resolves”, then it sounds a lot like “change the sound of busy signals”, or “take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network”, and not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking. …
[w]e don’t know how to build the general purpose computer that is capable of running any program we can compile except for some program that we don’t like, or that we prohibit by law, or that loses us money.
Instead of heeding Tim O’Reilly’s 10 year old lesson that making content available in desirable places under terms that users accept is the most profitable path, publishing has implicitly decided to attempt to control something they have no adequate understanding of, and can never really control: computing and the internet. They’ve shot themselves in the foot.
And what I find most darkly amusing is that they weren’t content to stop there. The one place in the book distribution ecosystem where piracy is most efficiently defeated, where users have access to content for free but under carefully controlled circumstances, have been libraries. Libraries have always been the best counter to piracy. And instead of cementing a relationship with libraries that works to the benefit of all parties, publishers have steadfastly withdrawn the ability of libraries to provide free content, even when it is available for only limited borrowing periods, or only a restricted number of titles, with severe constraints on sharing and copying. Instead, they have indicated an interest in the commercialization of libraries by encouraging rental models.
And so, having shot themselves in one foot by trying to control piracy through technically inappropriate means even though it is a manageable risk, they’ve looked around and noticed that books remain available for free at another location, libraries, and so they’ve taken aim and shot themselves in their other foot. Someone needs to buy them steel-toed boots before they decide to aim higher.
Your argument is not complete.
Publishers of fiction face very different challenges than publishers of non-fiction. You may be able to get away with free content for non-fiction because it’s likely to be updated and you can sell other products and services.
With fiction, you may spend years writing and editing one book, and that’s your product. Once a person reads it, they have little incentive to buy a hard copy. You may be able to give away a few chapters, but not the whole work. It would be like a musician giving away the whole album, not a song or two. Why would you buy it once you obtained it for free?
The library model in the U.S. has problems. Publishers do not restrict usage because they are mean or don’t understand their business: they are trying to keep control over the product. I believe the U.K. pays authors a small fee each time a work is checked out. Popular works receive more money; unpopular ones are available, but cheap for the library. In that system, more lending equals more money, and may encourage more generous lending practices.
The authors I know make about half their income on school visits, paid for by PTAs or grants. These monies are shrinking. If they lose what they make on royalties…then they will have to move on and stop writing or illustrating for books, except as a very time consuming hobby.
This bill is not perfect. Tweak it to solve the real problem–piracy of legitimate works–while protecting fair use.
“This bill is not perfect. Tweak it to solve the real problem–piracy of legitimate works–while protecting fair use.”
Good point. Piracy is bad. But some “cures” are worse than the disease. We must be wary of that kind of medicine.
peter-
do you think this is all some “accident”?
that they continue doing “the wrong thing”
– at every turn, _every_ one! — because
they’re just hopelessly clueless and stupid?
no sir. they’re greedy and ruthless, peter,
not stupid and clueless. you don’t become
rich companies by being clueless and stupid.
that thing you call “publishing” is actually
a tool of the corporate overlords, and they
are acting exactly like such overlords act…
you keep thinking “they don’t understand”.
but yes, they do understand, peter, they
understand _very_well_, and they grasp
that their power exists in the exercise of
their control, and thus they are trying to
ensure they retain it, meaning they are
acting to (pre)serve their own interests,
in a war they correctly think they’ll lose,
and they will continue to act in that way,
no matter how many blogs and tweets
you and brian write… don’t you get it?
no. quite obviously, you don’t. how sad.
anyway, i’m not gonna waste too much of
_my_ time in 2012 trying to educate _you_
in this matter, so let’s hope this comment
will resonate in your brain for a while…
-bowerbird
Paranoid much?
laer carroll said:
> Paranoid much?
um, do you even know
what “paranoia” means?
i am not afraid of those
paper tigers, not one bit.
i scoff at their impotence.
but i don’t waste any time
trying to figure out why they
don’t seem to “get it”, and
shoot themselves in the foot.
and i _do_ know who owns
those big publishing houses.
do you know?
-bowerbird
Publishers trying to limit the use of ebooks by libraries are missing a great opportunity to further their own interests. Which is to include links in the books to their own websites.
Many books include a printed Other Books By page. The ones in Nora Roberts’ books continues on a second page, she is so prolific. It is a simple matter in an ebook to make those list items “live” – web links to the book description on the publisher’s web site.
Many readers who discover a new favorite author use these lists to get other books by that author. So the OBB list serves as an advertisement, but not an offensive one because the reader can use or ignore the link.
Amazon has a variation on this. In the description of a book the author’s name is usually linked to an Author Page. Click on that link and you go to a list of that author’s books, a brief bio, and sometimes a link to the author’s blog where s/he gives updates on what s/he is writing or has recently written.
So why don’t publishers take advantage of the OBB opportunity? My guess is that most are so print-centric that they don’t even know this electronic option exists. And so they shoot themselves in the foot.