There's something to be said for not having to chase after people to keep them from ripping you off, though.
Agreed. But The Geek Atlas was ripped off within hours of it becoming available as a PDF and it appeared in a variety of seedy places on the net which would have been near impossible to actually shutdown.
The only real solution is to target the major providers because they'll be the major conduit for bad copies. That's why it was important to go after Scribd quickly.
What can be done is have publishers work with people like Scribd to preemptively upload ways of identifying copyrighted works so that individual authors don't have to police the Internet.
I agree with that. Which makes it something of a vexing question.
I'm not sure it's even a question. People are going to rip off my book and I cannot prevent all infringement. I have to do two things:
1. Concentrate on other streams of revenue around the book (this is vital anyway since I'm not going to make a fortune with it even if there was no infringement at all).
2. Make sure that major infringements are dealt with quickly.
Of course, I hope you'll go out and buy it, or the e-version, or read it on Safari, but there will be some people who decide to download it from some bad site. Now, I wonder what percentage of those people actually read it.
The 'vexing question' is how to appropriately balance things so that people still have an incentive to create content.
BTW, I'd be happier to buy a copy myself if there were more sites in Italy. Between da Vinci, Galileo and so on and so forth (and don't forget the Greeks in Sicily or the Romans) there are quite a few interesting places to visit!
Comments
There's something to be said for not having to chase after people to keep them from ripping you off, though.
Agreed. But The Geek Atlas was ripped off within hours of it becoming available as a PDF and it appeared in a variety of seedy places on the net which would have been near impossible to actually shutdown.
The only real solution is to target the major providers because they'll be the major conduit for bad copies. That's why it was important to go after Scribd quickly.
What can be done is have publishers work with people like Scribd to preemptively upload ways of identifying copyrighted works so that individual authors don't have to police the Internet.
I agree with that. Which makes it something of a vexing question.
I'm not sure it's even a question. People are going to rip off my book and I cannot prevent all infringement. I have to do two things:
1. Concentrate on other streams of revenue around the book (this is vital anyway since I'm not going to make a fortune with it even if there was no infringement at all).
2. Make sure that major infringements are dealt with quickly.
Of course, I hope you'll go out and buy it, or the e-version, or read it on Safari, but there will be some people who decide to download it from some bad site. Now, I wonder what percentage of those people actually read it.
The 'vexing question' is how to appropriately balance things so that people still have an incentive to create content.
BTW, I'd be happier to buy a copy myself if there were more sites in Italy. Between da Vinci, Galileo and so on and so forth (and don't forget the Greeks in Sicily or the Romans) there are quite a few interesting places to visit!
Well, some people seem to think that content isn't worth anything and people won't pay for it:
http://paulgraham.com/publishing.html