| << Motivation | 2004 > August | Another day, another pot >> |
Tuesday, 3 August 2004
Piracy and "Economic National Security" ::
[Piracy] isn’t going to affect the most popular musician. It’s going to affect the people who help make the music—lawyers, accountants, and the people who actually ship the music. Those are the people we’re talking about.
- David Israelite, deputy chief of staff and counselor to Attorney General John Ashcroft; Business Week, 2 Aug. 2004 (via Boing Boing)
Nice of him to think of those poor lawyers first!
Q: You’ve said that the theft of intellectual property is a national security problem. Why?
A: First of all, we talk about it being an issue of economic national security. Our economy is so based on intellectual property ideas that, unless we can protect them, we’re really looking at a situation where it’s going to hurt our ability to survive as a country.
Secondly, so much of what we do now involves computers, whether it be with software or other types of communication lines. Often, intellectual property is a key component to the things we do to protect ourselves as a country.
According to the principle that “national security issues” tend to get pursued way beyond the boundaries of reason and justice, I predict that this line of thinking will ultimately lead to Amazon.com being sued by the book publishing industry, for hurting sales of new books by making it so easy to buy a used copy instead. Just before reading this I added All the President’s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media and the Truth to my Amazon wish list. I noticed my friend Keith Snyder’s The Night Men available new for $24.95 or used for $3.49. Do I support the author (especially because he’s my friend) or save $20?
References:
Locking Ourselves In (29 September 2004)
| << Motivation | 2004 > August | Another day, another pot >> |
2 comments
Yeah, Amazon’s a problem.
In the past, you could find used books easily enough, by going to a used book store, and nobody minded (much). There’d be some grumbling from some authors, since we don’t get royalties on sales subsequent to the initial one, but it didn’t have a huge effect on anybody.
The current problem is related to music piracy and movie piracy in that it springs from the recent divorcing of information from traditional (i.e. non-electronic) media. Music is easy to copy and distribute because it doesn’t need tape or a disk; used books are easy to hawk and distribute alongside new ones because they don’t need a store.
A simple fix would be royalties for each sale, both initial and subsequent. However, that can’t happen until information is entirely divorced from non-electronic media, at which time the file formats themselves can support some kind of revenue stream to the copyright holder. If the file finds itself in unfamiliar territory, it won’t open unless somebody sends the author a few pennies.
So it’ll probably even out once we’re all using e-books and iPods. But until then, I don’t get the two bucks I’d like from sales of THE NIGHT MEN. I mean, $3.49? I’d go for that.
– Keith, Sunday, 22 August 2004, 06:48 PDT
I responded to this here.
– Doug, Wednesday, 29 September 2004, 01:40 PDT
This discussion has been closed. Thanks to those who participated.