Orson Scott Card: MP3s are not the devil
Sci-fi novelist and copyright-holder Orson Scott Card recently expressed his thoughts on the morons at the RIAA:
It only gets stupider the more you think about it. The kids they’re trying to prosecute and punish are in exactly the demographic that advertisers are most eager to target, not because they have the most money–far from it, people my age have all the money–but because they’re “brandable.” They haven’t yet committed themselves to brand loyalty. They’re open to all kinds of possibilities. And advertisers want to get to them and imprint their brands so that they’ll own these consumers as they get older and start earning money.So just how smart is it to indelibly imprint on their young minds a link between your corporate brand and outrageous punishments for music-sharing?
Book publishers have much to learn from the debacles of the music industry, of course. They shouldn’t be smug just because e-books haven’t caught on due to Luddite stereotypes and other reasons. Sooner or later, millions will want the books, annual sales will be far more than the present $10 million a year, and then the piracy issue will haunt the industry for real
(Found via the Internet Scout Project Web Log.)
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