Tim O'Reilly clears the air on piracy (and quotes me).
1) Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy,
(2) Piracy is progressive taxation;
(3) Customers want to do the right thing, if they can;
A similar data point comes from Jon Schull, the former CTO of Softlock, the company that worked with Stephen King on his eBook experiment, "Riding the Bullet". Softlock, which used a strong DRM scheme, was relying on "superdistribution" to reduce the costs of hosting the content--the idea that customers would redistribute their copies to friends, who would then simply need to download a key to unlock said copy. But most of the copies were downloaded anyway and very few were passed along. Softlock ran a customer survey to find out why there was so little "pass-along" activity. The answer, surprisingly, was that customers didn't understand that redistribution was desired. They didn't do it because they "thought it was wrong."
(4)Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy;
(5) File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers;
(6)"Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service;
(7)There's more than one way to do it. "
Tim summarises the study well and truly, but I have to say...it ought to be done again (and again). The world changes and the insights that can come from a systematic study of "passalong" are economically important and scientifically deep. Please contact me if you have vision and a venue.
8:52:57 AM 
|
