TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home
News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics
How Todd Jonz and wife protect their iLiads (Part II)
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
This photo follows up on an earlier item telling how Todd Jones and wife protect their iLiads from spills off the bed.
Sez Todd: "Note the little balls at the bottom, which contain some sort of friction lock that allows her to adjust the tension of the ribbons that hold the device in place. Not only does this arrangement protect the reader, it’s also far more comfortable to use than holding the device in one’s hand."
Something to use if that Mac tablet materializes?
The fallacy of ‘Piracy is killing us’: Infoseek founder Todd Jonz speaks out on copyright, DRM lockups and more
Monday, March 24th, 2008By Todd Jonz, a co-founder of InfoSeek
Moderator: Infoseek co-founder Todd Jonz, our newest TeleBlog contributor, continues our copyright debate. See his bio at the end. Welcome, Todd! - D.R.
Rob Preece’s thoughts about copyright and DRM are certainly rich in altruism, but I’m not sure I understand the economic analysis behind them. Here’s how I see the economics of intellectual property and DRM in the entertainment industry.
Content owners view intellectual property in terms of its value, which they wish to maximize and monetize in any way possible. Consumers view intellectual property in terms of its cost, which they wish to drive as low as they can, to zero if possible.
Content owners justified DRM for years by arguing that rampant piracy was killing their business. As the movie industry comes off a year of record-setting profits and the recording companies virtually trip over one another in their race to liberate the music they sell online from the shackles of DRM, we can pretty well conclude that the piracy argument was so much smoke and mirrors.
Pirates vs. other customers: Can you really tell ‘em apart?
Yes, piracy exists; it always has, and it always will. But study after study has shown that the vast majority of consumers, certainly enough to sustain a healthy market, will pay a fair price for digital content if it is made available to them in the unencumbered formats they desire. It’s also difficult sometimes to differentiate pirates from customers; multiple studies have disclosed that people in the coveted 18-to-34 demographic who share music on P2P networks also spend more each year on CDs than their non-file-sharing brethren. So much for the “piracy is killing us” assertion.
