« Study: Consumers won't pay $500 for iPhone | Main | World's oldest newspaper now exists only online »

Summary: Good Free vs. Bad Free

In this article David Rothman talks about a social site with book sharing services for sharing on phones and where the readers can comment, vote on the most popular titles and more. However, this certain site was caught with two copyrighted copies of a full text best seller and a full text novel. He then talks about how free copyrighted e-books are great, IF they help promote the paper titles. He also says that the "e-bookers" should respect the authors and publishers who use conventional methods and they should respect their intellectual property rights. According to the article, the site owners to could make the case that the problem is with the uploaders, not the site owners themselves. However, Rothman sees this as a site that is looking to be taken out by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. On a final note, Rothman makes a quick memo to publishers. He says, "The tougher you make DRM and the fewer best-sellers you get into e-book format, the more piracy you'll see. Meanwhile remember the limits of DRM. It can't protect against scans of paper books." I think this is a powerful and very true statement.

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on February 25, 2007 4:08 PM.

The previous post in this blog was Study: Consumers won't pay $500 for iPhone.

The next post in this blog is World's oldest newspaper now exists only online.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Content Management by
Movable Type

Orginal Template by Carolyn Smith. Modified by Adam Dewitz.