and this is just rad:

]]> http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/24/wednesday-links-2-24-10/feed/ 0 http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/18/j-k-rowling-sued-again-other-news/ http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/18/j-k-rowling-sued-again-other-news/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:07:45 +0000 Nico Vreeland http://chamberfour.com/?p=6385

J.K. Rowling

Not really a full links post, but a few things caught my eye this morning. So here we go.

First of all, J.K. Rowling has been sued for plagiarism, again, hilariously. This time the plaintiff is the estate of a writer who died thirteen years ago. They claim she stole from a 36-page pamphlet called “The Adventures of Willy the Wizard.”

The entire case rests not on copied passages, but on the fact that “both Willy and Harry [are] required to solve a task as part of a contest, which they achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers.”

So, your case rests on the word “bathroom.” Good luck.

My other favorite line from that story is the estate’s PR guy (not lawyer) saying: “‘All of Willy the Wizard is in the Goblet of Fire.’” That’s a joke, right? Because “Willy” is only 36 pages long? Right?

And there’s a lot of other funny stuff in the Guardian piece. In other news:

• In doom-of-literature news, James Cameron wants to write a novel based on Avatar, presumably to create a special effect where the universe folds back on itself and creates a black hole of mediocrity. Maybe George Lucas can consult. Wait, he’s busy panicking about being a terrible filmmaker. (If you haven’t seen the 70-minute YouTube review of The Phantom Menace, I recommend it.)

• Engadget reports the new iRex ereader is finally coming out, only four months late. This new model, the cutely named DR800SG, is notable because it costs less than $800, and it gives Engadget a chance to backhand the stupid Nook by calling the iRex “Barnes & Noble’s first big play in the space.” Since it has a stylus-driven touchscreen, file it under Y for Yet another reason not to get a QUE.

• TeleRead reports that the new agency pricing model for ebooks might not mean all that big a change for readers. That’s good, because raising prices makes for fewer sales, which could stifle ebooks (the best thing to happen to the publishing industry since, well, J.K. Rowling) before they fully get off the ground. And, for the record, publishing needs to stop listening to the music industry. Piracy is not the main reason for their decline, never has been, and does not discourage people from creating. So embrace ebooks and take the DRM off them, huh?

• And, finally, The Rapture, one of my favorite bands, says this about their upcoming release:

“Our new album’s gonna be fucking 100 times better than the iPad,” [band member Gabe Andruzzi] jokes. “With this record you’re going to be interfacing with your soul in ways that have never happened before.”

So we’ve got that going for us. Which is nice.

He does a little defense of piracy, which I’ll leave alone in this post, and he also has a few interesting things to say about DRM. Most importantly, he says he would pay more for an ebook without DRM and, when asked what would make him stop pirating books, he says:

I guess if every book was available in electronic format with no DRM for reasonable prices ($10 max for new/bestseller/omnibus, scaling downwards for popularity and value) it just wouldn’t be worth the time, effort, and risk to find, download, convert and load the book when the same thing could be accomplished with a single click on your Kindle.

Caterpillar also lays out the excruciating process he goes through to upload a single book, a process that involves scanning a hard copy page by page, and then proofing the scan by hand, which can take “5 to 40 hours.” Damn.

So, for pirates like Caterpillar, DRM has no stopping effect on their piracy (Caterpillar started years ago, when he couldn’t find digital copies of the books he wanted, so he’s used to scanning), and instead it’s actually a reason to keep doing it, because publishers still don’t offer “clean” copies.

And Caterpillar isn’t the only one who scans. In this summary of a panel at Digital Book World, Peter Balis says the majority of pirated ebooks are scanned galleys, manuscripts, or hard copies. This means DRM is powerless to stop widespread piracy.

From other corners, there have come cries of falling sky, from Macmillan president Brian Napack (and we all know Macmillan isn’t afraid to go to the mattresses), and from music industry group IFPI, whose latest report claims “95% of music is pirated.” That’s a grossly misleading stat, since IFPI also says that the industry has shrunk by only 30% since 2004. Evidently IFPI means 95% of albums are pirated by at least one person—and they don’t seem to know how much revenue loss piracy actually causes. Ars Technica does a pretty thorough examination/dehyperbolizing of the report here.

Still, piracy is a problem. So stipulated. But, as I’ve said for a long time, DRM is not a solution, and providing media in DRM-free formats is actually an incentive to buy it and not pirate it. The argument against DRM-free is that piracy will be easier and more widespread since pirates won’t even have to scan the books. That may be, or it may not (it didn’t happen with DRM-free music). But one thing’s for sure: DRM does not help paying customers in any way. With the iPad coming out soon—along with a whole new slew of DRM headaches—it’s a good time to remember that lesson.

If publishers (and content distributors) continue to fear a potential future threat more than they care about their present, spending, legal customers, I’m afraid I’m not going to shed many tears when major houses tell sob stories about lost revenue.

i Music

I recently got an Android phone; among the apps I’ve discovered are two content providers that have radically different (but equally flawed) philosophies on distribution.

One (i Music) lets you download mp3s for free, the other (TV.com) lets you watch really bad CBS shows, but not the good ones…

So what does TV.com get wrong? What’s the catch with i Music? What are these content providers doing wrong, and how are they actually encouraging piracy? How does all this apply to books and what’s a simple, one-step solution to it? All that and more, after the jump.

Part I: A Tale of Two Android Apps

Questionable at best

Let’s give away mp3s?

So i Music is a thinly-veiled graphical front-end for pirating music. It’s only lasted this long because of Android’s open app store policy, and because i Music doesn’t host any mp3s on its own server.

i Music’s EULA is a poorly worded disclaimer, full all caps and red fonts, clearly trying to protect i Music’s coders from legal retribution. (Not only are there ads in the app, there’s also a paid version, and I’m guessing i Music doesn’t pay royalties.)

Points 4 through 6 of the EULA explain how they rationalize allowing users to freely download copyrighted mp3s: you have to delete them after you listen to them. That’s it. It’s more another legal smokescreen than it is a viable way to distribute content.

I’m not sure who checks on whether people delete their songs, or how they check, or if, but I am sure that i Music won’t be around for long. It’s been here for three months already, and I’m surprised it’s lasted this long.

No, thank you

No, let’s give away the crap we don’t care about

TV.com takes the opposite approach. It claims that it “brings personal TV to your phone,” but that’s not exactly the case. Mostly, it brings advertising for TV shows to your phone. The list of shows that offer full episodes is artificially inflated by archives of old shows like Dynasty, Beauty and the Beast, and Family Ties. From the current CBS shows available in full episodes, notably missing are good and/or popular shows.

I’ve been known to guiltily watch an episode of The Mentalist or even How I Met Your Mother, but I’m not touching CSI:Miami with a pole. Guess which one of those three shows has full episodes available through TV.com?

CBS does offer a couple of big-ticket shows, notably Survivor and CSI (regular), but there’s no Cold Case, no Criminal Minds, no Two and a Half Men. The CW and Showtime are even worse, offering precisely zero full episodes. That makes sense for Showtime, a pay-to-play network, but the CW? Surely another way to watch Gossip Girl wouldn’t hurt them.

On CBS.com, you can watch full episodes of How I Met Your Mother, but not any of the others missing from TV.com.

What gives? There are ads on the online versions of these shows, so they’re making money off them. And I actually watch the ads, since I can’t change channels. The only thing I can think of is that CBS makes more money off people watching the shows on the actual TV channel.

This is very, very dumb on CBS’s part.

Isn’t there a middle ground?

i Music is doomed. Sorry, but they’re going to go down and go down hard. Relying on the goodwill (and non-laziness) of people will fail.

On the other hand, the big lesson that CBS (and other content providers, including Amazon) needs to learn is this: exclusivity doesn’t benefit customers. If we have to tune in a specific channel at a specific time to see a show, maybe you’ll create more demand, but you’ll damn sure lose a lot of customers on the way.

People like me are much more likely to miss your stupid “appointment viewing” and watch something else on Hulu, or download your shows from Bittorrent without any commercials at all. If, on the other hand, you make your shows EASY to watch, you’ll get more viewers.

Two things to learn from all this (and for other media providers). One: people are lazy. Two: if you make things easy for them, while still maintaining some control, you’ll get more customers. Your first priority should be to make and keep customers, not to make money. Once you commit to your customers, the money will come.

Part II: Piracy is a Reflection of Customer Dissatisfaction

Let’s bring in the issue of piracy.

In my eyes, piracy is largely the result of customers not only being dissatisfied with media companies, but also feeling like those companies couldn’t care less about them, the customers.

How does this manifest? How can media companies treat their customers well (and make more money in the process)? And how does this relate to books and DRM? All that and a simple one-step fix for all this, just ahead

If you don’t give customers what they want, pirates will steal it

If I want to watch an episode of The Mentalist, CBS only gives me one option (and a half): I have to tune in at whatever time it’s on, or TiVo it (in which case, I won’t watch any commercials). If I miss an episode on the TV, I’m SOL until the DVDs come out. There’s no way to watch it online.

The other option, of course, is to Bittorrent the show and watch it with no commercials and no income for CBS. That’s not a cost issue (at least with TV); it’s merely about convenience. So the appointment-TV idea is losing CBS money or fans, or probably both. The weirdest thing is, online TV is a very good deal for advertisers and networks, since there aren’t any other channels to flip to during commercials; personally, I watch many more commercials online than on a regular TV.

Piracy in other media

For movies and music, the equation is a bit different. People have the sense that media companies are out to take their money, because they’re often fooled into buying crappy media that was mismarketed. The last movie I saw was Sherlock Holmes. Decent action movie, but more of a Da Vinci Code with fistfights than anything approaching a Sherlock Holmes story.

That feeling, that I’ve been duped, is exactly why I don’t pay for many movies anymore. It’s also the reason I don’t buy as many albums as I used to. With Pandora and online radio, it doesn’t make much sense to pay for albums that you might hate.

People don’t pirate as many books, they just don’t read them

The reason the publishing industry is dying is because they chronically mismarket books in order to sell more copies. How many times have you read an unfunny piece of garbage that was touted as “hilarious” or “dazzling”?

Since books take a much longer commitment than music or movies or TV shows, the real cost of bad books is wasted time. Publishers sell a lot of really bad books and they lie to customers to get us to buy them. That means readers can’t trust publishers at their word, and so finding a good book to read becomes a torturous slog through acres of mismarketed trash.

Why is James Patterson a bestseller? Because he’s safe. His books are known quantities. You might not (you definitely won’t) get the mind-bending, soul-crushing pathos of a great classic, but neither will you get a $25 paperweight that wastes twelve hours of your life.

Pretty much the entire publishing industry is built on such known quantities, and yet they refuse to extrapolate that idea and make sure customers are satisfied with the books they buy. If you knew that you’d love every book you bought, you’d read twice as many.

I often dread starting books, especially hyped ones, because I know with near certainty that I’ll be let down. If publishers set out to make sure I loved every book I paid for, they’d be making fans by the truckload.

There’s a way to do that, and it doesn’t even require that publishers stop lying.

A simple one-step DRM solution for all media

OK, not quite all. The Hulu model solved TV; why CBS doesn’t get on board is beyond me. But for everything else, here’s a solution.

It’s very simple: you institute trial periods. You buy a book, you get 48 hours to try it out. DRM is stringent, and only lets you keep the book (or album, or movie) on whatever device you downloaded it on. If you delete in those first 48 hours, you get your money back. If you keep it, the DRM comes off and you pay for it. You can only delete a given book once; the second time you can’t get a refund.

This isn’t my idea, this is how the Android app store works: automatic refunds for apps you don’t want. And it works very, very well because it takes the sting out of buyer’s remorse.

This wouldn’t require publishers to honestly market books (and hence uproot the entire industry), it wouldn’t require people to prove they didn’t like something, and it would lead to many, many more books sold. It’s a simple, technological solution to a complex problem.

In fact, it’s so simple and easy, I doubt publishers will ever get on board. Just like CBS rejecting online TV distribution, publishers are prioritizing short-term returns over the long-term health of their industry, and that’s a recipe for a slow death every time.

1. It’s easier for the government to spy on you when all your books are in one place.
2. The music industry doesn’t make any money because “somewhere between 75 and 95% of music is pirated.” (Airtight.)
3. Books will be easily pirated once digital. The industry will then fail and (he intimates) there will be no more books.
4. The Internet makes it so there’s no intellectual property and no “artistic ownership.”
5. Stephen King and James Patterson should especially be worried. (I would be petrified if I were either of them. I’m not sure … exactly what I’d be scared of … but I’d be petrified.)
6. If authors did more readings, that would fix everything—but they can’t.

So basically the same ol’ stuff with an extra dose of paranoia.

Look, I get it: it’s fun and easy to be scared of digitization. But to say that 95% of music is pirated and that books are dying because not enough authors are “storytellers”… that’s a stretch. Books are dying because we publish 400,000 a year in the U.S. alone—99.9% of which are complete garbage—and even an avid reader can only read 50 of those. What you got there is a three-legged goat.

[UPDATE: I think Alexie was talking about this report that likes to throw around the stat that "95% of music is pirated." What they mean by it, however, is tough to decipher. They don't mean that their sales are down 95%, which their phrasing implies. Instead, they apparently mean that 95% of albums and song are pirated by at least one person. Which is a stat that means nothing to anyone. Except, evidently, Sherman Alexie.]

Also, while we’re on the subject, if you’re popular enough to be pirated, you’re probably making a decent living. If you embrace as wide an audience as possible, you will become more popular and more wealthy. That’s the way it is.

Also… not selling your books on Kindle isn’t going to “save white culture.” Just to clarify.

Anyway, enough of me—here’s the video:

Copyright law is dastardly business, with more nickel-and-diming and squabbling over percentages than most people probably gather. The music and film industries have gone batshit with copyright law since the rise of the internet, as evidenced by all the tricky take down notices and bogus fair use violation actions taken against YouTubers and bloggers every day.

Imagine if everyone who contributed to the ingredients of a can of soup had a different stake in the overall profit of the can, then on top of that, the percentages paid out to the pea farmers and noodle makers changed depending on what side of the ocean the soup was purchased on. Same farmer; same soup. Once the soup gets old, and the farmers are dead no one can really claim the money anymore (unless they stick a new label on it and add a dash of salt). Books, more so than canned goods, have a tremendous shelf life.

I do not have Disney's permission to post this image.

Like with the music industry, the publishing industry is going crazy on trying to tighten up their copyright protections as they march timidly and reluctantly into a digital model. Also like the music industry, their main purpose of copyright is to retain as much money as possible for themselves at the expense (literally, and understandably) of their customers. The knee jerk reaction to this statement is “but the artists deserve to be paid for their work.” And indeed they do.

Authors make money from royalties on sales, say 5-10% per book for the average author. They get a (usually pretty meager unless your Stephen King) advance, and don’t collect on the royalties until their advance is covered. Once the book makes the transition from hardcover run to paperback, the author’s earnings drop significantly. (The Dear Author blog has a nice breakdown of how this works in a digital setting.) It’s an undertandable reaction to think that the rise of ebooks might cut into print runs and hurt authors, especially when companies like Amazon take a ridiculously large cut of the pie. But as we’ve mentioned so often on this site (and pulled straight from like minded thinkers) free ebooks and even internet piracy can help authors, perhaps more than it can hurt them. Many people, myself included, buy the stuff they want, and download a whole lot of stuff they wouldn’t otherwise pay for. I’ve discovered a lot of good artists, authors, musicians, and movies this way, and many of them have made money from me since. Expanded exposure can be invaluable, especially when compared to a $.32 (yes, cent) cut of a paperback novel.

This is why I find ebook DRM so silly. I want to own my books, I want to draw in their margins (or save my note files to them, whatever), to share them with my friends. Buying a DRMed book is like buying a book that self destructs if you take it off of your bookshelf and lend it to a friend. Read it and then it more or less has to sit out of sight. Books are meant to be shared. And while I’m on the subject, if authors are really that concerned about ebooks killing their royalties, why didn’t the Authors’ Guild sic their attack dogs on all those damn libraries that dare share books with the public for free?

This photograph of this girl's cool carp tattoo is licensed under Creative Commons.

Books are more important than just means of profits for authors and publishers. They are important to readers, they mean something to us. As does all art. This is why fair use is important for books as well as other media. Art remains an evolving concept, where each generation builds off (or builds against) what came before. There is, of course, a fine line between homage and plagiarism, and that’s were Creative Commons is stepping in and trying to evolve our notions of copyright and sharing.

A Creative Commons license allows an author or artist to decide the parameters of how his or her work is shared. Will you allow your song to be remixed, your book to be copied for free in writing classes, will you modify your license to require a percentage of the profits from anything that borrows from your work? It is flexible, and it makes sense, and it leaves the power in the hands of those who created the work, rather than those with the most lawyers on retainer.

Their mission is simple and straightforward:

Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

[emphasis theirs]

In a mere 8 years they’ve already licensed over 120 million works, under the four main headings of Attribution, Share-alike, Noncommercial, and No Derivative Works. The license names are rather self explanatory, but you can read more here. This is building the internet into a broadening public domain, where art as business and art as a social right can coexist peacefully and without passwords. It’s not just for small fries either, with heavy hitters like Nine Inch Nails and writers such as Cory Doctorow seeing much success with these licenses. And it’s best for readers and users, who have un- or lightly fettered access to a wide variety of culture and art on the internet (not unlike visiting a library rather than a Borders).

This was the part where I was going to break down the basic differences between Creative Commons and copyright, but I then I came across this excellent example, so in the interest of sharing work, I’m going to point you directly their show at the end of this paragraph. Unfortunately, I can’t embed it (it’s a flickr slideshow-book-thing), but I’m going to have the link open in this window in order for the show to get full attention.

Watch the slideshow here: A Tale of Two Fish by Yiibu.

I think this is excellent. This model was very successful with Radiohead’s album, but BitTorrent fearmongers like to say that Radiohead only succeeded with that model because they already had a wide, die-hard fan base. You certainly can’t say that about Ben Wilson; I’m sure he’s great, but how many historians have die-hard fan bases?

The problem with a lot of the downloading/piracy debate is that there isn’t really much data to back up one side or the other, so a lot of it becomes shouting in the dark. This one experiment certainly won’t solve that lack of data, but hopefully experimentation with different digital distribution models will continue to expand.

I predict that this will work quite well for this book. Free digital downloads will hook people into getting this book, and then guilt or well-meaning will get a good price out of most of them. If people are treated nicely, they tend to reciprocate; most humans learn this by adulthood, the record companies, though, don’t quite seem to grasp it.

But if this scheme works, the anti-DRM, pro-digital format crowd shouldn’t pat themselves on the back too hard. The fact that it’s pay-what-you-like will act as its own piece of publicity, and that will drive sales in and of itself. This model won’t work–at least not this well–forever. Radiohead already abandoned it, and Trent Reznor says they half-assed it anyway.

Still, any step toward proving BitTorrent is not the fourth horseman of the new media apocalypse is a good step in my book.

[via Guardian and GalleyCat]

People laugh at this not just because it’s a greedy and stupid thing to say, but because it’s so baldly, obviously wrong, and so out of touch with the mindsets of his customers, that it creates cognitive dissonance, which we deal with by laughing.

However, the exec isn’t completely wrong. He’s talking about people who know what they’re downloading: they’re fans of a band downloading the new record. The record companies do lose money on that, and it happens a fair amount.

But by assuming that’s the only kind of downloading, he’s missing the other massive facet of downloading, though, which is experimental downloading: people trying something they’ve never heard of before, and wouldn’t have paid for if they couldn’t download it for free.

Here’s an entirely hypothetical example: say I hear about a self-titled album by a band called The Pains of Being Pure at Heart from Pitchfork.com, and I download it. If BitTorrent didn’t exist, I would not buy it, I simply wouldn’t be able to listen at all. However, if I do listen to it, I might very well buy this band’s next album, go to their shows, etc. The band and the label might get money from me thanks to downloading, without downloading they definitely would not get a penny from me.

In this way downloading helps listeners find new music, and definitely helps bands widen their audience. As Neil Gaiman says, most artists suffer more from being ignored than from being pirated.

From the record companies’ perspective, this makes downloads, to a certain extent, function like loss leaders. Loss leaders are generally retail items that stores advertise and sell for a loss, in order to get customers into their store and thinking about their brand.

Downloading, despite what this exec says, does not cost record companies money the way loss leaders do. It just doesn’t make them any money, although there’s no doubt that it raises awareness of new bands and expands fan bases. While it might look like losing money to an accountant with a focus on the bottom line, it’s a legitimate sales technique.

The problem record companies have with this, I think, is that they can’t control it. If it was their idea, and their plan—and more importantly, if they knew they could shut off the tap at any point—I think they’d find it a lot more agreeable.

I don’t think they can afford to do nothing about downloading, the stigma surrounding it is one of the forces keeping it in check. So how’s this for a compromise: you keep running your ads calling us criminals, but you stop taking people to court.

I find the Harry Potter ebook fiasco pretty hilarious, because, Harry Potter being perhaps the most popular book series on earth, bootlegged ebooks are readily available. Here are LRFs of the whole series, and if you can’t read LRFs, Calibre can convert them to ePubs for you. I had the whole series within a few hours of getting my Sony, and I’m not even particularly a fan of Harry Potter.

The bootleg ebooks are not good. There are a lot of missing spaces between words, and no paragraph breaks (although it is DRM-free, of course, that being one of the top benefits of piracy). I would predict that, if a legit digital version were made available, it would sell approximately a bajillion copies instantaneously. And yet, a fear of it getting pirated is literally forcing anyone who wants an ebook version to pirate it.

It’s as if J.K. Rowling’s internal metaphor alarm went off, and she realized that the world needed a microcosmic example of the heavy price media enterprises pay when they allow themselves to be paralyzed by fear. If that was the goal, well done.

Essentially, the record companies are complaining that music sales have dropped 40% since 2001. We all know that the only thing that’s happened since then is the advent of Bittorrent. Well, that and dropping record prices, the RIAA treating customers like criminals, and fundamental changes in the way music is distributed (with major labels dragging their feet the whole way).

Clearly, I’m a bit biased. Here are some (slightly) more objective links:

• Catch up on, or follow, the trial with Mp3newswire’s dispatches, or Torrentfreak’s, or Idolator’s. Spectrial is TPB’s own coverage. Here’s a brief summary. Here are some numbers. And here’s the Dallas Observer on the economist at the center of the prosecution’s case.

• Tidbits: Andrew Brown in the Guardian on ethics and economics; some laughs at an exec’s expense; and an Irish ISP which is refusing to block TPB.

• From the “if we don’t learn our history” department: isoHunt.com, a torrent search engine, went through a similar ordeal a few years ago when the MPAA threatened them and then sued them. The idea, presumably was to shut them down, but isoHunt refused to shut down. Instead they eventually moved to Canada, and continue to fight.

• You can also support The Pirate Bay by buying a T-shirt from Bytelove. I did this, and felt a lot better about it before I found out that one of the founders is a Nazi.