Rights

Like everyone, I’ve been reading a lot about piracy lately.
In fact, I’ve been reading a lot about piracy in the last, let’s say, 15 years, being your usual geek in love with videogames, music, movies and so on and having had a computer since I was 5 (oh, the glory days of the Vic 20!)
I’ve listened to any kind of talk about piracy, I saw piracy evolve, and of course I used piracy more than you want to know. And still do and will continue to, like millions of people.

Every once in a while voices spring up against the dangers of digital piracy. Lately I’ve heard for example some talking about “piracy is what troubles me most with this digital thing”, and seminars are coming up among publishers to face it and fight it.

Well, isn’t it a flawed view?

Reality check: piracy exists.
Oops, I stand corrected: piracy exists and is here to stay.

The problem is not how to fight piracy (what will the correct way be, for example, MacMillan’s legalistic approach? Using DRM? Oh, Lord…), the problem is go around it, trying to make it less attractive to the consumer, because it has been proved that the consumer is willing to pay for what he perceives has value.
So the problem is creating a consumer marketplace and giving value to the content you’re selling, not protect it from reality.
It’s ok to enforce the copyright, it’s foolish to do it blindly while the world happens.

The funny thing actually is that, right now, piracy may well be a good thing, in order to spread as many e-books as possible and maybe make people used to them – it’s a sort of publicity, in some way, and maybe nothing completely new to the field: a good read on the subject is Bob’s post (and its comments) at the 26th Story.
It usually happens that “big” music albums, for example, get leaked a few days before the official release on the internet – does it actually harm sales?

As per DRM, among a wealth of examples I kindly recall the story of Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations 2, a strategy videogame that got raving reviews a few years ago: a great game that appealed to a niche of gamers. Fact is it was sold without DRM. Was it really harmed from piracy? On the contrary, it became a bestseller. Now, I don’t know if people decided to “award” Stardock’s well-marketed choice of avoiding DRM or what, but that simply is a fact. As it is a fact that a wealth of people in forums all over the world claim “oh, is [game name] protected with [DRM system name]? I will never buy it, then, I’ll download the pirated copy”.
I almost forgot: DRM does not protect from piracy, in the best scenery it just delays it – of a few minutes, usually. I’ve recently been to an interesting meeting at Apogeo publisher in Italy, where it was clearly claimed that the only one that is harmed from DRM is the consumer – in this case, the reader. If there is a closed content that I may use a few times with selected devices, and the same content that happens to be open, which one will I choose?

And this is the key of it: publishers must worry less on protection, and more on the reader.
He has the keys, he has the power.
Luckily.

(On a sidenote, I believe that more than looking at other markets, people should look a bit at the videogame market to find some viable solutions for a consumer model able to go around piracy without constraining the user with DRM, but this will be the topic of another post).