Chris Webb on Publishing, Media and Technology - Latest Comments in It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

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Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Sean Cranbury — Sat, 09 May 2009 11:56:24 -0000

Great site, great post, Chris.

This problem/opportunity of piracy is of great interest to me. You've got some great responses and embiggened the argument.

Thanks. Looking forward to reading your blog regularly.

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Corporate Gifts — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:39:27 -0000

Great post, I really enjoyed it. I will have to bookmark your site for later.

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

david valade — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:41:52 -0000

Chris, my assumptions on the outcome of a meaningful dialog focus on customer engagement and the identification of potentially viable business opportunities. Let's assume that a significant portion of piracy is born out of unfulfilled customer need, instead of deviance. In this optimal situation new opportunities for publishers would emerge from engaging the participants of piracy.

Let's take for example: MBUTTHA's self-republishing business on a new site called Issuu. http://issuu.com/mbhutta/docs. Here you will find over 250 books and magazines. Several of Wiley's own for dummies books are posted some with pub dates as recent as 2008. You'll also find O'Reilly, Elsevier, Thomson, Taylor & Francis, to name a few.

Even more curiously, this person's profile has a significant number of views, bookmarks and other social features that are part of the issuu platform. More so than most other "Publishers" on the site [as best as I can tell from brief research].

Ignoring the traffic and attraction of this person's profile, I'm attributing this mostly to the quality of the content found there. I think the important question is why did they go through this level of effort? What need where they fulfilling?

I think there is a lot more to discuss, so I'll stop here for brevity. One final comment: I was disappointed by issuu's lack of any feature where I might report this person. As a social netizen, one should be able to assist with the enforcement of owner's rights.

Perhaps another business opportunity?

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Chris — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:32:37 -0000

David, re: Warren's comment - so what does it mean to have a "meaningful dialog with those who prefer to pirate..."?

I'd be interested in your thoughts on how we identify, contact and engage them.

By the way, I am very interested in the services list on your blog. Ill contact you directly about that.

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

david valade — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:44:13 -0000

Warren has really hit on something with the positive side. Is piracy born out of an unfulfilled opportunity?

Restriction and arbitration have been the traditional tools for content owners. So it seems natural for them to pursue these options initially. While all subversion has a deviant element, I sometimes wonder if a meaningful dialog with those who prefer to pirate a feasible idea? How might it help publishers convert opportunities to $? Extend distribution channels? Reach new audiences?

Or perhaps, shall we bring our eye patches & sabers?

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Warren Whitlock — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:06:01 -0000

Great discussion here, and perhaps more to the point, it's a FREE discussion. The value here is not in who owns the ideas.

I'm not a lawyer, but my reading of the law says that no one owns an idea. Put the idea in words, you have copyright.

So while you are discussion the issue of piracy, writing a blog post, you are creating copyrighted material. And now my comment (hopefully) enhances the value of this material.. in real time.

Seem hopeless to think that the laws will ever catch up chasing this rainbow.

The world has changed. Stakeholder who did well under the old rules naturally want to hang on for as long a possible.

The positive side is that there is great power in the new way. Call it piracy, call it freedom.. who cares?

There is great opportunity in the new way.. glad to see you're here working on that.

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Chris — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:26:32 -0000

Thanks so much for your comment Kevin. You are absolutely right, and that was my point when I said

"I think that free content definitely has a place in our industry. I think we need to cast off old ways of thinking, and create new products and new business models in order to remain valid in the new media economy. I even think that seeding content via P2P for promotional purposes is an acceptable strategy. We are looking at Social DRM as a replacement for current technologies. We are taking steps (slowly) in the right direction here, but in these cases it is the intent of the content owners to do these things."

While consumers are absolutely right to point out our shortcomings when it comes to certain business models, I agree with you that arguments against a particular business model are not justification for stealing content.

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Kevin — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:34:13 -0000

One thing that sometimes gets lost in the debate is the creator/owner's right to decide how the content will be shared.

We can certainly argue the validity of the tradtional media distribution models and point out that word-of-mouth helps build audience share, but if the content owner/creator decides to go with a restrictive model we must honor that.

Content is property and (for the most part) we don't get to tell other people what to do with their property.

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Chris — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:21:39 -0000

Thanks for joining the conversation, Matt. Many publishers, including my employer Wiley, are looking at new ways to deliver value to consumers in a variety of ways - including subscription models.

I would be interested to hear what sorts of models would be of interest to you for books for example. Is Safari the right approach?

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Chris — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:53:06 -0000

Thanks Morgan, I look forward to your post.

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Guest — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:11:44 -0000

According to Karen Croxson, digital piracy may help companies.

I said the same thing last year. I might not give talks before the Royal Economic Society, but I definitely said what she said before she did! ;)

... then I have justified my stealing of the CD?

To you (and others), the issue is controversial because you see recognizing the positive aspects of piracy as an attempt to justify piracy. That's not the point at all.

I'll post something about this on my personal blog later today.

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Chris — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:59:08 -0000

Thanks for being a part of the conversation, SpaceMonkey. Your experience is my point exactly.

Re: It’s OK – We’re Good Pirates

Spacemonkey — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:23:25 -0000

I'm perhaps the freak of the bunch then, as these philosophies simply did not apply to me in my life.

EXAMPLE: I think waaaaaaay back to when I was new to the whole computer software thing, and only used legitimate software for everything I ever did. I remember when I relocated to Seattle, I made some friends and I learned that most of them NEVER paid for Photoshop but used it on a daily basis. The thinking from them was "hey those guys have been reaming me for years and I'm not going to be an enabler for them anymore." I felt under pressure to adopt the same viewpoint, even if it was subtle pressure.

Had I not been hanging around with someone that openly, blatantly used cracked copies of software I would not have come up with the idea on my own as I have other things to do.

The long-winded point though, is that to me and my experience at least, seeing someone else pirate software most definitely did not make me want to buy, but instilled acceptance of people who did follow the practice, as well as encourage similar behavior. That in turn can't possibly mean sales of more software, can it?