The Stupidity of Worrying About Piracy
By John DeNardo |
Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 at
9:38 am
SF author John Scalzi (Old Man’s War) talks about piracy at his blog in a post called “The Stupidity of Worrying About Piracy“. He’s generated some interesting discussion in the comments section of that post.
UPDATE #1: Tim O’Reilly has a related discussion on piracy (from 2002).
UPDATE #2: John Scalzi has a follow-on post regarding the subject of piracy.
Filed under: Books
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I think Scalzi’s view can be extended to cover all digital media. The point the media companies miss is that most of their customers aren’t pirates (arrrrr!) and just want to be able to read/listen/watch when, where and how they want. The ones who do illegally copy stuff are going to do so anyway, no matter how much DRM is used. At some point, you end you causing your customers so much grief they get @^#&#$& off and stop purchasing, thus decreasing future revenues. This is why I don’t buy music online, because, currently, I can’t listen to what I would purchase on any device I want (and most of the music today is crap).
Books are a bit different. I don’t purchase ebooks because I can’t stand to read book length material on a PDA or laptop screen. Now, when that electronic paper is available, that’s another story. As long as I can buy what I want and view it where I want, and pay a reasonable price, then I will be buying it. Otherwise, I’ll ba availing myself of John’s library.