TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Of pirates, prosecutors and an illegal posting of the ‘If I did it’ O.J. Book—plus online donation rates vs. direct-mail response rates

By David Rothman

The Pirate Bay, the Swedish file-swapping site, faces legal challenges, as reported in the Wall Street Journal—from prosecutors seeking to shut it down or at least slow it down.

Interestingly, the Pirate may yet survive, given the eagerness of the Swedes for free content. Might DRM be a factor, too? I’m not justifying the existence of the Bay, but the harder you make it for people to own content legally, the wider the support for illegal sites.

Ebarez suit

Meanwhile the Bay has made enough waves on the ebarez scene—that’s Teleblogese for illegal e-books—for the Goldman family to sue it over pirated copies of the O.J. book If I Did It. Excerpt:

“There’s no doubt millions of people across the world turn to Pirate Bay whenever they want a free movie, game or piece of software. Its reach is so vast that the family of Ron Goldman has filed suit against the site, claiming in court documents to have lost at least $150,000 because of Pirate Bay. The Goldman family is supposed to receive the proceeds from O.J. Simpson’s book ‘If I Did It,’ but the text is available free using the directory at ThePirateBay.org.”

Wow. Does this mean someone actually sees big money in e-books at this point? Oh, well, lawyers can see big money in anything. The hardback edition ranks 1,995 at Amazon. I couldn’t find an E version at the Kindle Store or Fictionwise, at least.

BitTorerent issues

“The trial will probably grapple with complex technical issues,” says the Journal. “One question is the legality of BitTorrent, a computer program that breaks up large files like movies into small pieces so they can be transferred quickly over the Internet.

I’d side with the Swedish prosecutors, but I’d insist that they distinguish carefully between the legality of the Bay’s activities and the mere existence of tools to allow file-sharing. BitTorrent-style tech has terrific legal uses, too, and I don’t want the technology itself on trial.

Piracy and the anti-DRM cause

One way or another, however, this-here piracy hurts the anti-DRM cause. We’re not talking about casual swapping among friends. At the same time I’d love to see some kind of compromise so that the Bay could stay open—as a happy home for public domain books, Creative Commons books, ad-supported books and others whose biz models are within the law. And if the now-pirates can also sell the kinds of books that pay royalties to authors, then so much the better.

And speaking of biz models—and the possibility of voluntary contributions: Check out two posts from Mike Cane: Trent Reznor Meets Real Life and Weeps and The New School: Saul Williams vs. Trent Reznor. Trent was displeased with the $140K+ that his fans ponied up—this out of 154,000+ downloaders. That’s a 28 percent sell-through rate, dwarfing traditional mail-order response rates of a two or three percent or whatever.