My last two columns were focused on the ultimate source of most tie-in work: the film, television and gaming industries which typically create and produce the properties that novelizations and tie-ins are based on. Now it’s time to consider the publishers who purchase the rights and produce the actual books.

And who better to talk to on that subject than Betsy Mitchell, VP/Editor in Chief of Del Rey Books, and Ginjer Buchanan, Editor in Chief of, ACE/ROC Books. Both being very well known to the SFWA community because of their long time involvement with Science Fiction and Fantasy.* As with previous columns, I asked the interviewees a series of nearly identical questions and in some cases summarized their answers.

My first question focused on the overall size of the market. Mitchell replied by saying that Del Rey had published 85 fiction books, 25 of which were tie-ins during 2008.

Buchanan explained that “The ACE list consists of 5 mass market titles per month, and 2 or 3 HC (hardcover) or trade. The ROC list consists of 3 mass per month, and 1 or 2 HC or trade. Some of the mass markets are reprints from the previous year’s HC/Trade list, of course.”
Where tie-ins are concerned she said, “We have a media related imprint named Boulevard, which publishes all kinds of things, including media related science fiction/fantasy. It’s generic to the mass market division, by which I mean that a book can be Berkley Boulevard or NAL (New American Library) Boulevard. The big tie-in last year was The Dark Knight novelization (by Dennis O’Neil), which was done as Berkley Boulevard.

“There was only one ACE tie-in in 2008. It was the novelization of the animated film Gotham Knight, which was released on DVD the month before Dark Knight.”

I asked both Mitchell and Buchanan what percentage of total revenues were derived from their imprints and from tie-ins. Not surprisingly both declined to answer citing the proprietary nature of such information, although Buchanan was willing to say that, “The science fiction and fantasy imprints are contributing significantly to the company, particularly over the last five years with the rise of urban fantasy.”

The question, and their answers, served to remind me of the fact that the publishers we work for are competing with each other. And nowhere is that more visible than with the realm of properties like the Dark Knight where it isn’t unusual for the licensor to receive numerous bids. Typically the highest bid wins but other factors play a part in the outcome as well.

When asked why ACE/ROC went after Dark Knight in particular Buchanan said, “It was going to be a big movie and it was offered. One of the reasons we got it, I think, was that Warner Bros. insisted that the novel not be put on sale prior to the movie’s release and we agreed to do that. Others may have been reluctant to do so. As a result we were able to get the rights for a reasonable price.”

As for how that business decision turned out Buchanan said: “It made the NY Times Best Seller list, which made both us and DC (Comics) very happy!”

The decision to go ahead in this case worked extremely well—but had the movie bombed sales for the novelization could have tanked as well. The point being that each time a publisher buys the rights to publish a tie-in novel they are rolling the dice. A reality that most authors understand but may not think about much.

After twenty years at a major corporation I know companies tend to measure the things they consider to be most important–so I asked both Mitchell and Buchanan if tie-in related revenues are totaled and tracked for corporate accounting purposes. Both responded by saying that while their companies track individual books they don’t track tie-ins as a group.

I think that’s interesting because it runs contrary to the theory that a tidal wave of tie-ins is sweeping original novels off the shelves. Were that the case I believe publishers would measure the performance of the category as well as individual books.

And when I asked Mitchell if she could provide me with the average profit margin for a mass media tie-in novel she responded by saying “I have no clue. I can say they have the same chance of failure or success as other projects.”

Buchanan answered the question this way. “It wouldn’t be any different than for a regular novel. We do a profit and loss calculation for every book., thus you have to do a P&L on a tie-in…”

One of the perennial questions we authors ask our agents and each other has to do with the size of an average midlist print-run. What is it anyway? Fifteen thousand? Twenty-five thousand? Most of us want to know. And for good reason. Because if we knew what the average is it would be easier to locate ourselves on the publishing food chain and figure out whether we should keep writing or look for a real job. (Not that there are many right now.) And it might come in handy during negotiations too!

That’s why I put the question to Mitchell and Buchanan. But it turns out that there’s no such thing as an average tie-in. Each project is associated with a franchise–and some franchises pack more marketing punch than others do. That means each license is acquired for a different price and will incur a different level of expense depending on the print run, the cost of hiring an author, and related factors. All of which makes it difficult if not impossible to generalize.
Here’s what Mitchell had to say: “Without using actual numbers, we don’t sign up a tie-in unless we expect it to result in a significant print run. We don’t publish “midlist” tie-ins, in other words. Our goal is not just to fill a space on the list; it’s to bring in sales.”
That’s an important point. Because there are critics (you know who you are), who see tie-ins as midlist dreck that publishers put on shelves because they’re too lazy or too stupid to buy original novels.

But what Mitchell is saying is that “no,” publishers don’t produce tie-ins because they’re lazy, they’re trying to put a book on the New York Times best seller list ala Buchanan’s Dark Knight anecdote. They aren’t casting about for a way to plug a midlist slot, they’re trying to hit the ball out of the park, and that’s what they have in mind when they hire you. They aren’t looking for some hack to grind out 350 pages worth of filler, they’re looking for a true professional who can capture a universe, and deliver a satisfying experience to hundreds of thousands of readers.

Of course not all of the properties publishers buy become runaway hits. But many do extremely well even if they don’t achieve formal best seller status as Buchanan points out: “There’s tie-ins and novelizations. Most of the tie-ins that are done here are NAL mystery titles like Murder She Wrote, Monk, Psych, and Burn Notice. They’re doing quite well—and they’re genuine tie-ins–original novels, not novelizations. Monk and Murder She Wrote are done in hardcover, in fact.”
By the same token there are those who assume that tie-ins must be less costly to produce since novelizations are clearly derivative, and when an author writes a tie-in they have the advantage of an already fleshed-out universe, and an existing cast of characters. That perception simply isn’t true as Mitchell pointed out when she told me that tie-ins can be more expensive–since both the licensor and a writer-for-hire must be paid.

And Buchanan agreed, adding, “Depending on the level of oversight exercised by the licensor they can be more time consuming. So if time is money, I guess they can be more expensive…”
So, what about shelf life? Ahhh, there’s the rub, as a best selling author with one heck of a strong back list once said. “In general tie-ins have a shorter shelf life,” Mitchell observed, “since once the property had had its time in the public eye readers often move on. Licensors also will restrict the time a book publisher can keep the books in print—a typical license term would be five to seven years. That said, if a publisher has term of copyright in a book and the license is allowed to continue, some tie-ins can remain in print for years. One example is our Dark Angel titles, which keep going back to press years after the show went off the air.”

Buchanan agreed: “I think tie-ins are pretty ephemeral because of the nature of what they are.” Later she added, “A successful original novel is going to stay in print longer. Tie-ins aren’t bought with the notion that you’re going to make money over the long run.”

And here’s why you should care…. Even though the typical work-for-hire contract involves a fixed fee paid in one, two, or three payments some tie-in authors ask for and get a small back-end royalty. Usually one-percent but sometimes more. Although the trade-off for the royalty might be a smaller advance. So if the book earns out, and remains on the bookshelves for a long time, there is an opportunity to make more money.

Plus, every book that has your name on it constitutes an advertisement of sorts, and the more eyeballs that see it the better. So while it isn’t the most important deal point, potential shelf life is a legitimate criteria.

Based on what these two industry experts have said so far, choosing the right property is key to making a profit. With that in mind I asked both interviewees about the criteria they use while shopping for tie-in rights. Mitchell answered this way: “Advance buzz, pedigree of the property (for example, do the creators have bestsellers in their backgrounds?), and the history of the brand.”

“I think that the most successful books aren’t tied to heavily-arced series,” Buchanan observed, “where you have to watch every week in order to know what is going on. Lost and Heroes being the current prime examples. On the other hand, Eureka, while it has some thru-story elements, is a series in which every episode is a stand-alone. Thus, every book can be stand-alone too. That’s at least partly why the mystery show tie-ins have been so successful, I think. Neither Monk nor Jessica Fletcher change all that much from one week to the next.”

Of course every business has to deal with competition, and from the perspective of a flinty-eyed tie-in writer, the companies that Del Rey and ACE/ROC see as competitors are potential clients! Mitchell identified Harper as “….a big buyer.”

And Buchanan pointed to Mitchell’s operation. “Del Rey has more of a program—and so does Simon Shuster. The assumption is that if there’s something hot they’ll be in there—but that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily get it or that they will be the only other bidders. I’ve lost projects to Harper and TOR, too.”

In a follow-up question I asked Buchanan why ACE/ROC puts out less tie-ins than other publishers do. “Two reasons,” she answered. “First, other publishers are paying more money for them. There have been several things I went after but I was outbid. Del Rey and Simon Schuster, for instance, have tie-in programs more or less, so their incentive to acquire projects is perhaps higher.

“Second, we used to do more when we were owned by MCA which also owned Universal Studios and Television. We would get first look at whatever was being developed, like the film ET, and all of the Spielberg television projects. That’s how I came to do fifteen Quantum Leap novels.

“Now, since there aren’t that many publishing companies that share parentage with movie studios or television networks, things tend to be shopped more.

“Currently, other than the NAL mystery tie-ins the only license we have going is Eureka novels. They will probably be done in Berkley Boulevard.”

Then, as in previous columns, I asked both interviewees to address the question of what they’re looking for where tie-in writers are concerned. Mitchell replied by saying that the most important criteria are, “Their love of the property, ability to meet deadlines, and lack of ego.”
Each element of Mitchell’s comment is worth consideration. If you’re interested in tie-in work it’s important to realize that the licensors be they film/television producers or game developers all eat, sleep, and drink their franchise. It’s everything to them and they are looking for people who understand the property and love it as much as they do. And editors have their favorites too… Ginjer Buchanan wrote Highlander: White Silence for Aspect.

So any writer who shows up for work hoping to simply churn out some words for a pay check should be warned: If you can’t find something you genuinely like about the project you should probably pass, because the principals including your publisher are likely to sense your lack of enthusiasm and never invite you back. Oh yeah, and they might generalize to your original work, so why take the chance?

Meeting deadlines is always important, regardless of what kind of project you’re working on, but it’s usually absolutely critical where novelizations and tie-ins are concerned, because they are typically tied to the release of a movie or a game. So to miss a deadline is to miss the opportunity to leverage the marketing effort, and for the purposes of a work for hire project, the author is part of a team that’s depending on him or her to deliver the goods.

And there is no room for ego where work for hire is concerned. For example if you are invited to write a novel tied into a game, you will typically be expected to not only work with whatever editor is in charge of the project, but a team of people who work for the licensor. They tend to have flat reporting structures and pride themselves on very egalitarian cultures. Which means everybody gets to question your assumptions, comment on your outline, and suggest changes. And this process may require you to participate in meetings where you’ll need to look out for your publisher’s interests as well, because your editor won’t be able to participate in all of them, not given all the other projects they are responsible for.

Interestingly enough you may be asked to provide input that won’t impact your book. I happen to enjoy that process, and find it to be a wonderful counterpoint to my solo writing, but it isn’t for everyone. In fact some critics are of the opinion that the process is potentially usurious since the group might adopt one or more of your ideas without paying you for them. So if that possibility troubles you don’t do it.

Here’s what Buchanan is looking for where authors are concerned and it tracks with the points that Mitchell made. “Reliability. That’s number one, two, and three! Also I would say that if you’re writing a tie-in you need to know that you’re playing in someone else’s sandbox. You can’t be adverse to taking input from someone other than an editor. And you can’t be contentious about that input. It takes a certain mindset, a certain way of viewing one’s own writing, to be able to do that.”

One of the things that usually comes up during any discussion of work for hire is the extent to which writing tie-ins might help or impede a particular author where his or her original fiction is concerned. With that in mind I asked both interviewees the following question: “Would Del Rey/ACE/ROC be more or less likely to buy an original novel from someone who has written tie-in novels for them (or others)—or would it make no difference at all?”

Mitchell indicated that, “Writing a tie-in can give a publisher a good sense of an author’s personality under fire, as it were. A good experience on a tie-in project can certainly cast a good light on an author’s future prospects.”

And Buchanan agreed. “Well, if someone had proved to be reliable we would be more likely. It would depend on what the project was. From my point of view as an editor if someone has written a tie-in novel for us it would make me more willing to consider their original work.”
I thought both responses were interesting since some members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy community seem to believe that once an author soils him or herself by accepting work-for-hire they will never be taken seriously again! Apparently this isn’t so…. Not where publishers are concerned anyway.

Finally, I asked both interviewees about the recession, and whether they were going to cut their lists. Mitchell responded by saying that Del Rey is “holding steady” and does not plan to reduce the number of tie-in slots.

And Buchanan said, “Nope. None of the lists here are being cut. We had a terrific year last year—including the final quarter—and for as far as it goes, this year seems to be starting out well. Of course, the fact that accounts—particularly the brick and mortar stores—are cutting initial orders pretty much across the board will have an impact. But we will see how things develop.”
My next column will focus on the art of the tie-in deal featuring interviews with two prominent agents. If you would like to provide feedback regarding my column, or make suggestions regarding future columns, please send them to bill@williamcdietz.com. *Disclosure: William C. Dietz has written tie-ins for ACE/ROC and Del Rey, as well as original novels for ACE/ROC.

“Don’t Fight the Things You Can’t Change or Control.” That was one of the “koans” gleaned from Sunday’s digital publishing in America seminar by Publishers Lunch founder Michael Cader (in his role of intrepid correspondent attending the London Book Fair). And there is no better way to characterize the Kübler-Rossian way that the British have handled publishing industry changes blowing from America.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross formulated the five states of death and dying, and whether it be hard-soft deals or e-books, the Brits have greeted American innovations with Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Reading reports from London, I’m not sure how much acceptance is to be found toward the juggernaut of digital publishing that rolls inexorably toward the UK. The English want to keep their industry neat and tidy, but another Cader koan applies: “Paradigmatic Transitions Are Not Orderly.”

RC

One of the programs presented at the London Book Fair was a panel on e-books attended by the heads of such illustrious British publishers as Random House Group, Hachette Livre UK, HarperCollins, and Penguin Group. The host, BBC News Media Correspondent Torin Douglas, asked what he called “The $64,000 question”: Where’s the money in ebooks?

When it comes to digital technology the sun always seems to rise last on the British Empire. The same question was raised in the US over a decade ago and settled five years later as e-book sales began a rocket-boosted double-digit assent that has not remotely begun to level off. Indeed, January 2009 e-book sales jumped an astounding 173.6% over the same month of 2008 – while England slept.

The very title of Douglas’s panel tells us what time zone the Brits occupy. “The $64,000 Question” was a television quiz show introduced over fifty years ago. Though the size of the jackpot was unprecedented in that postwar age, it is dwarfed by those paid today. Hello? We’re up to “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” We’re also up to more than $50 million in e-book sales annually. So, the real $64,000 question for our friends across the Pond is, What part of Money in E-Books don’t you understand?

RC

Behold the two books I place before you. Both are thrillers by authors whose names are unfamiliar to you. But attached to the one on your left is an endorsement by one of today’s bestselling thriller writers. The other has no such recommendation. Which will you be inclined to purchase and read?

The obvious answer to that question formed the eye of a tempest that swept through the publishing industry some years ago, leaving in its path a shattered deal, damaged credibility, and a dazed author and his agent wandering through the rubble seeking something to salvage. The only good to come out of this event is the possibility that the rest of us may learn something from it.

How much is an endorsement from a famous author worth? Read here.

RC

Last week, our distributing partner Lightning Source announced their pilot program with the Espresso 2 Book Machine (see the press release here). E-Reads is proud to be one of the first publishers in the program, which will see our titles available to the “ATM for books,” alongside offerings from Wiley, Hachette, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, and the University of California, among others.

We’ve always hoped that in the future we’d see mini-POD machines out in physical bookstores, making hard-to-find titles quickly accessible to customers who’d otherwise make special orders.

“Since the introduction of print on demand over a decade ago, I’ve dreamed of a day when the technology would be refined and reduced to in-store scale,” says E-Reads President Richard Curtis. “At last it’s here and I’m overjoyed at this significant moment in the evolution of the book industry. Now you can visit a bookstore, order a book online, and pick your copy up after a leisurely cup of coffee.”

Thanks to Lightning Source and On Demand Books, the Espresso 2 is the first time E-Reads has been able to make in-store book printing possible for our customers. The advance press materials will tell you that the Espresso 2 is a very practical and small machine that can print and bind paperback books in under 10 minutes. With a really fast optional Xerox copier and a short book, it gets the job done in about 5 minutes.

Last month, we took a quick trip to SoHo to see the offices of On Demand Books, where their prototype Espresso 2 print-on-demand machine was being demonstrated for publishers and retailers.

What we saw was a prototype the size of a squat refrigerator, with metal hydraulics pushing the paper around, whooshing and whirring as it shaved off the edges and glued the spine. Final shipping iterations of the Espresso 2 will use electric motors and reduce the noise. For now, the prototype’s pistons were all perfectly visible behind clear acrylic panels on the machine’s sides to demonstrate the mechanics. An inkjet printer on the top printed a color cover, a fast copier on the back printed out the interior pages, both of which get taken up inside and formed into a paperback while you watch. Then after a few minutes, out pops a little book from the dispenser, hot off the press (and a teensy-bit sticky until it dries).

Whitney Dorin, On Demand Book’s director of Business Development, made two copies for us on the spot, expertly checking on the process and helping the paper along (pictured above). The results were perfectly acceptable paperbacks, but everyone acknowledged that even though the covers look great (“They’re the most expensive part of the printing process,” she said), they don’t quite feel like your typical mass-produced covers because the heavy cover stock isn’t gloss or matte coated. In a best case scenario, many large scale print-on-demand operations give special attention to the covers and may even print them in advance, but the Espresso 2 is only a fraction of the size of those machines, so for now it looks like simple covers are a necessary trade-off.

Most of the printing components of the Espresso 2 seem modular, so that upgrading a machine to faster capabilities can be done relatively easily. Dane Neller, the CEO of On Demand Books, showed us how the Kyocera copier on the back could be swapped out for a Xerox 4112 copier capable of 110 pages per minute, accommodating books up to 830 pages long. Dane was very pleased to say that they had done all the work necessary to bring the printing costs down to a level where it was possible to see the machine pay for itself in about 9 months with daily printing.

Print-On-Demand technology really has come a long way in the past decade thanks to the hard work of Lightning Source and On Demand Books. It’s hard not to get grandiose visions of every school and bookstore having an Espresso printer, finally turning the page on hundreds of years of distribution problems for publishers. That revolution might be closer than you think.

- Michael Gaudet

After its latest round of cost-saving reductions, The New York Times may have to change its name to The New York Times Newsletter, and its motto to “All the Skinny That’s Fit to Print”. Bill Keller, the daily’s executive editor, announced the elimination of a number of weekly sections that are much beloved by readers but a luxurious liability for a newspaper fighting for its life. A number of sections have already been merged, such as business and sports (on most days, at least).

The Times‘s Richard Pérez-Peña reports that “The affected sections include Escapes, published on Fridays, and Sunday sections that only readers in the New York metropolitan area receive: City and regional sections named for New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester and Connecticut.” They will be absorbed into a new Sunday section that should slim the paper down. Some say it will be slim enough to slip under your front door. Even now it sometime has the heft of a supermarket circular inserted into a grown-up newspaper from an earlier, happier era.

Furthermore, the Sunday magazine section is ditching its regular back-of-the-book fashion layout, so say goodbye to those fey, leggy mannequins on location in Brazilian favelas clad in nothing but boa constrictors, and male models in garish plaid tuxedos, short-shorts and basketball sneakers biking to their Wall Street management jobs.

But the unkindest cut of all is the elimination of “Escapes” as an autonomous travel section. For years its coverage of faraway places illustrated with photos of exquisite landscapes and local chefs proudly displaying platters of irresistible gourmet specialties have evoked unbearable pangs of wanderlust in the hearts of countless housebound New Yorkers. Mr.Keller, can’t you save “Escapes” and drop “Automobiles”? Screw automobiles, I want to fantasize about living in a rain forest tree house in Costa Rica.

And don’t we feel it for those globetrotting freelance writers whose ranks are to be reduced by 10-15% and who as a result will have to curtail their travel plans? You can expect lots of stories about living in tree houses in, well, Patterson, New Jersey.

RC

I read somewhere that cuteness is a biological trait shared by the young of most mammals. Its evolutionary function is to compel mothers to bond with their babies. Button noses, enormous eyes, round cheeks, and Cupie doll mouths are endowments guaranteed to elicit an “Awww” response from adult animals of almost every species and a preternatural need to proffer protection. Love of cute is hardwired into most mammalian gene pools. Grown-ups of every animal species are big suckers,whether it be for baby seals, ducklings, infant chimps or itsy-bitsy human babies. But…robots?

Whether tenderness extends to baby robots is a leap of credence that requires some pretty compelling evidence. Thanks to a delightful experiment conducted by a student named Kacie Kinzer, we have the evidence. As described on the O’Reilly Media website, Kinzer, a student enrolled in NYU’s Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program, created a darling-faced little robot called a Tweenbot. It wore a label stating its destination but was programmed to move in a straight line. She turned it loose in New York City’s Washington Square Park and observed what strangers would do when, predictably, it ran into fences, benches, passersby and other obstacles. Would they leave it to struggle? Would they set it down on the right path? Would they stuff it in their pockets or worse, a trash can? Would they stomp it with their boot heels?

We are happy to report that cuteness triumphed. As reported on O’Reilly,

“Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, ‘You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.’”

Charmed by the tiny robot’s smiley face, disarmed by its fragile helplessness and stirred by the primal need to protect an innocent (albeit an innocent piece of machinery), humanity came through with flying colors. And not just any humanity – New York humanity!

A map of Tweenbot’s tergiversations can be seen on the O’Reilly site.

A word about the Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program, the fertile environment that gave birth to this engaging experiment. A page on the program’s website describes it thus:

An oversized Greenwich Village loft houses the computer labs, rotating exhibitions, and production workshops that are ITP — the Interactive Telecommunications Program. Founded in 1979 as the first graduate education program in alternative media, ITP has grown into a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists uniquely dedicated to pushing the boundaries of interactivity in the real and digital worlds. A hands-on approach to experimentation, production and risk-taking make this hi-tech fun house a creative home not only to its 220 students, but also to an extended network of the technology industry’s most daring and prolific practitioners.

Next time an out-of-towner utters a cynical remark about New Yorkers, tell them about Kacie Kinzer and her Tweenbot.

RC

Joe Wikert, who operates and blogs about all things Kindle on a website called – natch! – Kindleville, has reservations about the device, and he’s expressed them in a posting headlined Why Isn’t Amazon the 800-Pound Gorilla of eReaders? A great many observers have issues with Kindle, but this Kindlekind earns triple points for candor.

For one thing, asks Wikert, how many Kindles have you seen “in the wild?” meaning on a bus or subway or airplane. “I’ve been on at least 30 different flights since the original Kindle arrived in November of 2007 and I think I’ve seen one other person using one on a plane. It’s an unfair comparison, but I couldn’t even tally the number of iPhones I’ve seen on those same flights.”

He also accuses Amazon of complacency. “It seems every time I turn around someone else is announcing plans for a new reader. Why do I get the impression Amazon isn’t hungry and aggressive enough to dominate this space? They seem perfectly content to take the slow and steady path, focusing more on customers with the most disposable income and not the mass market.”

So deep is his disillusionment that he openly speaks of transferring his affections to a more satisfying love object.

“I admit I’m down on Amazon right now. I feel like I spent $360 on a Kindle 1 and although I use it every day I don’t see growth potential or an upgrade path for it. My iPhone, on the other hand, features a slew of new apps every week, making it even more appealing today than it was yesterday…and who knows about tomorrow? How long will it be before someone creates an e-reader with that sort of sex appeal? Or does it already exist and it’s called ‘the iPhone’?”

With just a little more kindling Wikert’s love affair with the iPhone will burst fully into flame. Does that spell Splitsville for Kindleville? And if so, what will he call his new website? Not iPhoneville.com – the domain is already taken. But it looks like plasticlogicville.com is still available. Grab it, Joe!

RC

The other shoe dropped for the Pirate Bay today (news here, and for the first act, see The Pirate Bay: Standing Up In Court For a Generation of Blackbeards). The four co-defendants were each found guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement in a Swedish court. The court’s documents say that the Pirate Bay co-founders helped promote theft and so they’ve each been sentenced to 1 year in prison and fined $3.5 million ($14m total). If the judgment stands, maybe the next files they’ll be looking to share in secret will be in a cake.

Sweden had already been strengthening its reputation for being hard on piracy since they recently began requesting that local internet service providers log all the IP addresses of computers involved in file sharing starting at the beginning of this month. Consequently, Swedish internet traffic has fallen by over 30% (see this BBC article). If something similar were to be enacted in the U.S., it could be decried as further infringement on our right to privacy and it wouldn’t be tolerated well at all.

Much is going to be made about this Swedish court decision and the forthcoming appeals in the short term, but it’s hard to predict if the outcome is really going to deliver much of a blow to file sharing in general until the stigma of copyright transgressions is something that’s educated effectively to scoffing young users.

The Pirate Bay is akin to a fleet of off-shore gambling boats floating in international waters. Even while the main defendants are caught up in Swedish courts, the operations can and probably will continue under the supervision of other affiliated groups. And it’s not like the Navy can escort our copyrighted materials. So, while this news is fresh validation for the media rights holders, it’s still not the end of the battle.

- Michael Gaudet

One of the world’s largest producers of newsprint, the papers on which newspapers are printed, filed for bankruptcy protection on Thursday. Suffering from nearly $9 billion in debt, it sought to compensate by raising newsprint prices at a time when newspapers, with more than enough troubles of their own, were desperately cutting costs.

“A rapid decline in advertising has prompted some newspaper closings and industrywide cutbacks in the size, and in some cases the frequency, of newspapers,” reported Ian Austen in the New York Times. “The Pulp and Paper Products Council, which is also based in Montreal, reported that in February alone newsprint demand in North America fell by 33 percent compared with the same month a year earlier.”

It’s easy to make fun of company name, a tonguetwisting composite of two firms that merged in 2007, but the results of bankruptcy are far from funny, impacting as they do on a newspaper industry that is already running on fumes. “If they go under,” we wrote last month, “so does a big piece of the paper industry.” A spokesperson for the firm said that for now, its vast pulp and paper mills would continue producing.

RC