★On Music Companies, Book Publishers & the RIAA
I’ve finally figured out why all these companies are getting all upset about “piracy”. It’s not about protecting the music artists or the book writers, or the movie producers. It’s not about protecting the actors, illustrators, or the guitarists. It’s about PROTECTING THEMSELVES. With digital distribution, why do you need a book publisher or a movie distributor or the RIAA mob? The point is you don’t. If you have your own content, you don’t need them to break your balls and you can distribute it yourself over the Internet in a more efficient manner than was previously possible. You cut out the middle-man!
Case 1: Book Publishers want to introduce a new windowing system to not allow some new books to be introduced in an ebook form for up to 4 months after the release of the book. Who thought this was a good idea? I think the meeting must have gone something like this:
- Hey, let’s sell these people these new ebook readers. They’re only really affordable for those who are pretty intense readers. Let’s reward them for buying these products by not allowing them to read the books the want.
In addition, when some writers want to release DRM free audiobooks because a) DRM doesn’t work and b) DRM just makes it hard for paying customers , they just can’t because the big companies are so scared of “piracy”.
Case 2: The Movie Studios keep telling everyone that their movies are being stolen. You know, you’ve seen those ads at the beginning of your legitimately purchases DVDs that tell you how evil piracy is. So since we’re in the recession and people don’t have as much money and there’s so much “piracy”, then we would expect overall movie revenues to be down right? WRONG.
It’s called listen to your customers people. I can’t stress it enough. Piracy just means you’re not catering to your customers. These companies aren’t fighting to protect the artists…they just don’t want to go the way of the horse buggy.
