TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘piracy’ Category

By Paul Biba

At the O’Reilly conference Kirk Biglione of Medialoper presented a very lively seminar on DRM. He started out by discussing what he felt were the music industry’s mistakes in their own approach to DRM. I thought they were interesting enough to share with you. The following are the 6 major mistakes Kirk felt that the music industry made:

1. Caught by surprise: the industry had no idea that file sharing would become an issue and had no plans to deal with it when it appeared:

2. Mistook consumer demand for piracy: The developement of MP3 resulted in the greatly enhanced ability of the consumer to listen to music in all sorts of different environments. This generated a huge new demand for music and resulted in the rise of file sharing networks and the creation of a new kind of pirate - one whose motive was not profit, but was social in nature, that is the sharing of files conferred status. The industry failed to realize this and reacted as if the file sharers were purely out to make, or save a buck. (more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]

By Branko Collin

Illustration: the scarecrow of Ralph Hodgon’s poem The Late, Last Rook, published presumably before 1918; artist unknown.

In a recent Mobileread article that appears to generate plenty of heat itself, regular contributor Bob Russell suggests that ““Friction” is why e-books adoption is slow.” Friction occurs when publishers and distributors put in all kinds of small hindrances to the book-buying process that viewed separately may make good sense, but that added up form an unsurmountable block to members of the buying public. Russell borrows the term “friction” from “Michal Hyatt, President and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, [who] has written in his blog about reducing “friction” as one way for bookstores to increase their sales,” and sees it equally applicable to e-book merchants.

Now Chris Meadows reports that distributing e-books can get you in conflict with the law: Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) has filed a so-called DMCA take-down notice against document sharing site Scribd for distributing e-books without the required permission. Thing is, some of the books that the SFWA wants taken down are distributed with the permission of the copyright holders. As a result, the SFWA take-down notice serves not only to protect the interests of authors whose copyrights have been infringed, but also as a threat to those, authors and site owners alike, who wish to distribute e-books for free.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

By Chris Meadows

A few weeks ago, a DMCA takedown notice was issued by Andrew Burt in his capacity as Vice President of SFWA, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Association. The notice concerned many documents on Scribd.com, a site where people can post documents much as they might post photographs to Flickr. The notice alleged broad infringement of copyrights, and resulted in the standard 10-day takedown mandated by the pertinent provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The DMCA’s takedown provision protects Internet service providers such as websites from being sued for copyright violation provided that they act right away to remove infringing material when it is called to their attention with a notice. This means that websites do not have to check everything that is uploaded to make sure it does not violate copyright, which in turn means that infringing material (such as a scanned copy of an Isaac Asimov novel, for instance) could easily be uploaded there. In this case, removing the material is certainly warranted.

The problem is that the notice resulted in the removal of many works that were uploaded by their own authors, such as bibliographies and works of criticism that only mentioned Isaac Asimov books, and the electronic edition of an SF magazine called Ray Gun Revival—and Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which was released under a Creative Commons license that expressly permitted such distribution. It also targeted many works allegedly by authors whom SFWA had no authority to represent.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

By Branko Collin

Arthur Conan Doyle, the spiritual father of Sherlock Holmes, died in 1930, having published most of the stories about his sleuthing hero before 1923. That effectively makes Sherlock Holmes part of the public domain in by far the largest part of the planet, and if you want to rewrite Sherlock Holmes stories where the great detective wears a leotard and recites Keats all day, you can. That is what it means when a work is in the public domain.

Except you cannot; the estate of Conan Doyle has trademarked the character of Sherlock Holmes and many of the other recurring characters from the series. This week the Financial Times explores the trademarking of literary characters and worlds in a Danuta Kean article pithily titled Posthumous publishers who refuse to live and let die (may or may not be behind a pay wall).

Without naming any actual figures, Kean reports that the “resurrection trade […] has made literary estates some of the most powerful in the media.” What this means for the owners of the works, the public? Reports Kean:

For dead authors who are still in copyright, trademarking may help estates keep control after the [copyright] term ends, says intellectual property lawyer Laurence Kaye. “If you intend to republish a book that has gone out of copyright, you would have to do it in a way that did not infringe any trademarks.”

Copyright law enshrines a deal in which the public stimulates artists to give away their works in exchange for a limited control over the distribution of these works. News stories these days often revolve around pirates: those members of the public that do not seem to be willing to keep their end of the copyright deal. Yet when you look closer, you see that neither side is willing to do so. It makes one wonder whether perhaps a new deal should be inked.

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Robert Nagle

Patrick Rijnders (aka Scribbleking) reveals the ending of the downloaded Harry Potter ebook:

Here’s a huge & hilarious archive page to his comics/light-hearted movie reviews. (Wouldn’t that make a great ebook?) See my previous post about ScribbleKing.

Gee, I wonder why there isn’t a multipart standard for encapsulating ebooks from websites.

Popularity: 2% [?]