Swiss decide downloading boosts sales
Yet more evidence that ferocious attacks on piracy do more harm than good.
The Swiss Government has refused to legally ban the downloading of digital content after a study showed that downloaders are also prominent purchasers of content.
Here's a good summary of the report on Teleread:
The independent study concluded that downloaders use the money they spend to buy more legitimate entertainment products. So they’ve concluded to maintain Switzerland’s extant copyright law, which makes downloading for personal use legal. It’s a rare victory for evidence-based policy in a world dominated by shrill assertions of lost jobs and revenue, backed by funny-number “statistics” from industry-commissioned researchers.
I honestly think that much of the ferocity from the distributors of paid content is simple moral outrage rather than being based on any firm studies of lost revenue.
Yo Ho Ho and a… chest full of books?
In complete contrast to Ewan Morrison's recent jeremiad, Paul Carr came out today on the TechCrunch site with some very sensible thoughts about the piracy of e-books. I agree with him that it's a greatly overblown issue.
Cancel the funeral, books are not dead!
The other day Scottish writer Ewan Morrison gave what I think was a profoundly mistaken speech at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, as reported by the Guardian newspaper. It was titled "Are books dead, and can authors survive?".
Morrison pessimistically declares outright that the answers are yes, books are dead, and no, authors can't survive. It's easy, I think, to show that he's wrong on both counts. In fact, he's wrong on so many counts that his speech is infuriating.
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Why dropping DRM would benefit publishers
Fighting the Pirates - a futile cause?
Following on from my earlier post about digital book ownership, here's an interesting study which shows that digital rights management (DRM) is counter-productive and decreases, not increases, legitimate sales while not deterring piracy in the least. The study is from Duke and Rice University, and looks very credible.