Copyright and Fixing File Sharing

As I'm a writer, I have an interest in strong copyright protection, and understand why the music labels and others dependant on content for income object to passing files around. It would be as though a farmer grew corn and then someone could magically make copies of the corn, complete in every detail, which elminates most of the potential revenue. The market is discounting the value of all the risks the farmer makes and decides that no one should have to pay. Evne if you sell a few ears, that doesn't help when most of the market becomes closed to you and others essentially profit from your work by not having to pay for it.

But why do we have to look at file sharing as the inevitable multiplication of copies? What if there were a system in which people could register copies that they had bought or otherwise legally had and then trade them with others for some period of time. While you swapped, you could enjoy the other person's music or writing or video or what have you, but you'd surrender the copy you originally had. And then, when you were tired of the deal, it could revert.

This obviously isn't a perfect solution, but I think it offers an interesting approach to comehow reducing the draconian approaches taken by so many in the creative industries while protecting legitimate interests. If you and I buy CDs, we can legally swap them, whether temporarily or permanently. No music label can preven that because they are our property. Couldn't there be a way to enforce the same sort of activity over the Internet? Sure, I could have made a tape of teh CD, or a photocopy of the book or what have you. There will be some people who figure out how to abuse the system. But I wonder if many more wouldn't stick with the deal, because they want the freedom to listen to new things and let their friends listen/read/view what they have. The online distributors could possibly act as referees and facilitators for the process, which would only reinforce the vendor-customer relationship and improve their businesses in the long run.

More on the Radiohead "Set Your Own Price" Experiment

There's a bit more information now - of varying quality - on Radiohead's experiment in letting people set their own price for the group's new album. Anyone in the information business - and that's content of any type - has to be keeping a close on on this story. It could offer some insights into how to make the Internet work as a commercial distribution mechanism.

According to a Forbes article, many people are still pirating the new Radiohead album, even though they could go to the site and get a legitimate copy for free if they wanted to:

On the first day that Radiohead's latest became available, around 240,000 users downloaded the album from copyright-infringing peer-to-peer BitTorrent sources, according to Big Champagne, a Los-Angeles-based company that tracks illegal downloading on the Internet. Over the following days, the file was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day—adding up to more than 500,000 total illegal downloads.

That's less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported by the British Web site Gigwise.com. But Eric Garland, Big Champagne's chief executive, says illegal file-sharing is likely to overtake legal downloads in the coming weeks, given that many of those 1.2 million legitimate sales were pre-orders taken during the 10 days between when the band announced the album and its actual release last Thursday.

Garland suggests that the real culprit is habit - they go to their favorite BitTorrent sites and download in the way they're used to doing.

However, even with lots of pirating, consider the economics. According to a London Times article (and we'll get to the main part of the article in a minute), an Internet survey of about 3,000 people who bought the Radiohead album suggested that most paid an average of £4. Although this won't be particularly accurate, it's the best numbers possible: a rough total of £4.8 million on the album, all going to the band. Given the economics of regular record deals and distribution, I think they made a whole lot more this way.

The real test will be whether they do the same on their next album. I also wonder whether a variation on the approach might have worked even better: pay money to get the album, or pay nothing and get some audio ads thrown in, like the free online music streaming sites. That would have increased the perceived value of the paid version and also increased revenue for the group.

Book Publishers to Let Public Vote on Title Ideas

There's a piece in the New YorkTimes about a fascinating situation in the book publishing business - letting the public pick winners before they're published. A virtual market called Media Predict will give people fantasy cash and let them vote with their pseudo-dollars on what book proposals will sell. Simon & Schuster "teamed up with Gather.com, a social networking site, to run an “American Idol”-style contest in which voters pick a manuscript for Simon & Schuster to publish."

It's interesting, but I think it also underscores how little understanding book publishers have of their most fundamental task: choosing what to send into print. This experiment smacks of desperation. But after so many years of effectively playing Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Moe, I can see how they might feel a bit anxious.