Stampeded?

Did opponents of SOPA throw the baby out with the bathwater? Cary H. Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, says yes in a recent New York Times op-ed piece.

Sherman asserts that Google, Wikipedia and other Web heavy-hitters cried “Censorship!” like shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and stampeded a gullible public and its government servants into reversing legislation that would have afforded some measure of protection to the victims of copyright piracy.

“Policy makers had recognized a constitutional (and economic) imperative to protect American property from theft, to shield consumers from counterfeit products and fraud, and to combat foreign criminals who exploit technology to steal American ingenuity and jobs,” writes Sherman. “But at the 11th hour, a flood of e-mails and phone calls to Congress stopped the legislation in its tracks. Was this the result of democracy, or demagoguery?”

“Since when is it censorship to shut down an operation that an American court, upon a thorough review of evidence, has determined to be illegal?” the editorialist asks. “When the police close down a store fencing stolen goods, it isn’t censorship, but when those stolen goods are fenced online, it is?”

Now there is no legislation in place except the joke known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, piracy is out of control, and legitimate copyright owners are being stripped of their hard-earned livings by brazen thieves operating in broad daylight (See A Bootleg E-Book Bazaar Operates in Plain Sight)

Sherman urges the Web minions who lead the charge against SOPA to do the right thing and listen to the voices of the victims. “Perhaps this is naïve, but I’d like to believe that the companies that opposed SOPA and PIPA will now feel some responsibility to help come up with constructive alternatives. Virtually every opponent acknowledged that the problem of counterfeiting and piracy is real and damaging. It is no longer acceptable just to say no.”

That’s a motion we’re ready to second.

Details in What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You by Cary H. Sherman.  And a complete archive of E-Reads postings about piracy, visit Pirate Central.

Richard Curtis

Note to readers: Digital Book World has invited me to post my blogs initially on its website before releasing them on E-Reads, and this content is re-published with DBW’s permission. Click here to view the original posting.

Back in June 2010 we gave our opinion of what we called the westcoastification of YouTube: “Hollywood, there are millions of us who don’t want YouTube to mature,” we wrote. “We like it just the way it is — embarrassingly sophomoric, amateurish, LOL hilarious, pathetic, dopey, dirty, funky, and utterly counterculture. It belongs to We the People. Can’t you go co-opt some other industry? We can think of a lot of them that could use your genius, your money and your values.” (See Do We Want YouTube to Grow Up?)

We might as well have spit in the wind. YouTube is on the way to becoming as slick as television, as highly monetized as a currency printing plant, and as tightly controlled as a high-security prison. A superb analysis in the New Yorker by John Seabrook tracks the evolution of YouTube from”the home of grainy cell-phone videos and skateboarding dogs” to YouTube Original Channels, dedicated to giving viewers 24/7 online coverage of the subjects in which they are particularly interested.

Once these channels are in place, writes Seabrook, “the niches will get nichier, and the audiences smaller still. But those audiences will be even more engaged, and much more quantifiable. Advertisers have to rely on ratings and market research to get even a rough approximation of who’s watching which show. Because YouTube is delivered over the Internet, the company will know exactly who is watching—not their names but their viewing histories, their searches, their purchases, their rough location, and their online social connections.”

For anyone interested in media – and who is not? -  Streaming Dreams: YouTube turns pro  is required reading.

Richard Curtis

Stephen Roxburgh, founder of a small press called namelos llc., has written a guest editorial in Publishers Weekly defending Amazon.com against accusations of predatory behavior and thanking it for its support, without which namelos might not have survived.

Besides the obvious boost in e-book sales, Amazon’s POD program made a huge difference for this embryonic press. “Our new company publishes titles simultaneously in hardcover and paperback using print-on-demand technology, and e-books. Because our books are nonreturnable, most booksellers will not carry them. Amazon does.”

Though Amazon may not strike many as being in need of friends, Roxburgh feels the behemoth has been excessively vilified. “Not since Hester Prynne walked out of prison with an infant in her arms and ‘a rag of scarlet cloth’ in the shape of the letter A has there been such public hue and cry as Amazon has provoked in the past few weeks,” he declares. “From the point of view of this lunatic fringe publisher, Amazon, with all its glitches and stumbles, is crucial to our success. And I, for one, applaud the innovation and transformation Amazon has brought to the publishing world.”

Okay, that’s one. Anybody want to make it two?

We will. Without Amazon’s retail clout and marketing genius, E-Reads would still be in the dark ages of the 20th century (when it was founded).  We are also happy to shout out our other indispensable partners: BN.com, Ingram, LightningSource, Apple, Sony, Google, Kobo, Diesel, Content Reserve, Baker & Taylor and Fictionwise. In 2011 E-Reads sales exceed $1 million and we could not have done it without them.

For Roxburgh’s full editorial in PW, click here.

Richard Curtis

If you’re a fan of  Clash of the Titans you’re in for a real treat: two titanic lobbying groups are on a collision course.  Ground zero for the impact is the United States Congress. The issue is piracy.

Bills currently being written in House of Representatives committees are aimed at curbing search engines like Google and Yahoo that link to illegal file sharing and bitTorrent websites, and stopping payment facilitators like PayPal that enable transactions for unauthorized books, movies and music. (In fact, you can use Google to link to free versions of Clash of the Titans here, but we urge you to be very careful  clicking on links to free downloads as they may be phishing for your bank account information.)

Among the parties lobbying for passage of a tough law are the movie and music business, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the book industry (see Authors Guild President Scott Turow’s testimony before Congress). Even big unions like the AFL-CIO are pushing for passage, because piracy, particularly the offshore brand, steals American jobs.

On the other side of the issue are Yahoo, Google, Mozilla, the Tea Party and a lobby-full of freeists including, predictably, the Civil Liberties Union, all rallying under the banner of Down With Censorship. “Naturally,” writes Edward Wyatt in the New York Times (Lines Drawn on Antipiracy Bills), “the howls of protest have been loud and lavishly financed, not only from Silicon Valley companies but also from public-interest groups, free-speech advocates and even venture capital investors. They argue — in TV and newspaper ads — that the bills are so broad and heavy-handed that they threaten to close Web sites and broadband service providers and stifle free speech, while setting a bad example of American censorship.”

“Google itself,” Wyatt informs us,  “has hired at least 15 lobbying firms to fight the bills; Mozilla has included on its Firefox browser home page a link to a petition with the warning, ‘Congress is trying to censor the Internet.’” Texas representative Lamar Smith takes a different view of the Silicon Valley pressure groups: “They’ve made large profits by promoting rogue sites to U.S. consumers,” he contends.

Last May, when Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt declared in unequivocal terms that he opposed any effort to curtail Google’s right to link to piracy websites like Pirate Bay, we declared “Game Over.“  Now, with US lawmakers taking up the issue, there’s a glimmer of hope that the game is back on.

But it’s only a glimmer, and if our legislators are true to form, the Right-to-Information promoters will either kill the bill or water it down to the same kind of joke that is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That piece of legislation is ostensibly designed to punish pirates, but the Silicon Mafia prevailed on the lawmakers to create a “Safe Harbor” provision that gives accused infringers a period of time in which to respond to accusations. Safe Harbor also puts the burden of proof on rights holders, causing them to go through  hoops of flame to prove they are the true owners of the stolen content.

We have been criticized for supporting tough antipiracy measures because they might lead to government censorship. The chances of the pendulum swinging from its current position to state censorship are so absurdly long they are not worth discussing.  Meanwhile, the pirates continue to screw legitimate copyright owners while the search engines hold down their arms and legs.

Richard Curtis

Ultimately, the boss

Which is more effective, an autocracy or a democracy? A monarchy or a republic? A fiat by one person or decision by committee?

That’s the question raised by Randall Stross in the “Digital Domain” feature of the New York Times.  He was referring to opposing business models governing two colossi of the tech world, Apple and Google.  Apple’s model is clearly autocratic, a hierarchy topped by its founding genius Steve Jobs. Google on the other hand operates on more democratic principles where decisions are reached by something like consensus.

“One person is the Decider for final design choices,” Stross writes about Apple. “Not focus groups. Not data crunchers. Not committee consensus-builders. The decisions reflect the sensibility of just one person: Steven P. Jobs, the C.E.O. By contrast, Google has followed the conventional approach, with lots of people playing a role. That group prefers to rely on experimental data, not designers, to guide its decisions.”

Though his analysis is fairly balanced, Stross clearly favors the Apple model for its efficiency in converting its boss’s brainstorms into beautifully modeled, handsomely packaged, brilliantly marketed products, and it would be hard to quarrel with that assessment.  But he has omitted one downside factor that balances, and maybe outweighs, all the flaws in Google’s groupthink approach to decision-making.  If – when – something happens to Jobs, what will become of Apple?

Early in 2009, when the indispensable Jobs’ was forced to temporarily give up leadership to combat pancreatic cancer, we reminded our readers of Charles De Gaulle’s grim remark: “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

“Every business captain,” we said, “needs to post that quotation on the wall in front of his or her desk as a reminder that great leaders must be great delegators. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, is as indispensable as corporate heads can possibly be, but adverse health has forced him, as it did De Gaulle, to look at his mortality and relinquish to others tasks that threaten to sap the energy he needs to restore his health.” (See My Irreplaceable You.) Jobs’s medical leave in ’09 was enough to depress the value of Apple’s shares by 2% in the domestic stock market and as much as 7.9% overseas.

We need to look at the Apple strongman’s mortality and see beyond today. Though he has populated his company with gifted managers, Apple’s fate might well be encapsulated in the bon mot uttered by another brilliant and indispensable autocrat, choreographer Georges Ballanchine: “Après moi le board”.

“At Apple,” says stross, “one is the magic number.” But one is succeeded by an infinite string of numbers, and whether all of them add up to the effectiveness of Apple’s Number One in creating and producing astounding technical wonders, we will inevitably find out.

The Auteur vs. the Committee by Randall Stross.

Richard Curtis

If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.

Since media companies can’t stop people from recording movies and television shows and uploading them to YouTube, YouTube has found a way to make a profit on this illegal activity. It leaves the video clips up, runs ads with them, and splits the revenue with the movie or television company, according to Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times.

When you upload clips from your favorite show to YouTube (yes, I’m talking about YOU),”they are automatically recognized by YouTube, using a system called Content ID that scans videos and compares them to material provided by copyright owners,” writes Miller. The website monetizes your clips with ads and shares the money with the proper copyright owner.

How much do you get? Nothing. What were you expecting for your illicit activity? Be grateful you haven’t been clapped in the Googleplex dungeon beneath Mountain View, California.

YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006 and despite traffic that is the envy of any website, the company has struggled to find a profitable formula. (See YouTube Goes Hollywood) The bandwidth necessary to service all that traffic was eating up the profits, and copyright headaches created by illegal uploaders were driving executives up the wall. “YouTube’s new profitable relationship with content creators was not always so easy,” Miller reminds us. “For a long time, YouTube executives spent their time across conference tables with lawyers worried about copyright violations.”

Now, with the “Join ‘Em” solution, YouTube is starting to mint the kind of money Google envisioned five years ago.

YouTube Ads Turn Videos Into Revenue

Richard Curtis

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt dealt authors and publishers a staggering and possibly fatal blow by declaring he opposed any effort to curtail Google’s right to link to piracy websites like Pirate Bay.  And he said it in such unequivocal terms that any author cherishing a shred of hope for the protection of his or her rights is spitting in the wind.

Josh Halliday of The Guardian reports: “Speaking to journalists after his keynote speech at Google’s Big Tent conference in London, Schmidt said the online search giant would challenge attempts to restrict access to the Pirate Bay and other so-called “cyberlocker” sites that encourage illegal downloading – part of government plans to fight online piracy through controversial measures included in the Digital Economy Act.”

We don’t know how his speech went down, as England’s Digital Economy Act is one of the few government initiatives anywhere in the world that attempts to punish illegal filesharers.  (See Brits Hit Pirates While Yanks Fiddle)

Comparing efforts to control Google links to pirate sites with repressive Chinese mind-control, Schmidt said in no uncertain terms: “If there is a law that requires DNSs [domain name systems, the protocol that allows users to connect to websites] to do X and it’s passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it,” he added. “If it’s a request the answer is we wouldn’t do it, if it’s a discussion we wouldn’t do it.”

Read Google boss: anti-piracy laws would be disaster for free speech and despair.  But save your spit.  This game is over.

Richard Curtis

For a complete archive of posts about piracy visit E-Reads’ Pirate Central

It’s bad enough that authors are being gang-raped by file-sharing pirates and content-theft syndicates. And that, thanks to the very law created to protect authors, the Federal government is actually holding authors down while they are being violated. And now the corporations are jumping in.

There is a growing body of evidence that Internet Service Providers and search engines are enabling pirates to ply their activities by generating ad revenue for them. To extend our metaphor, by directing traffic to pirate sites these corporations are acting in the capacity of procurers.

The experience of Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books with what he calls party sites exemplifies how big corporations are tied to copyright infringement. After Google updated its Panda feature, Rosenthal’s website lost a huge amount of traffic. You can read details on WebProNews here.

In Rosenthal’s case the corporation is Google, but we can cite other firms that, deliberately or inadvertently, are shilling for content hijackers. What is worse, as his video reveals, some searches lure the unwary searcher into malware traps.

We invited him to guest-blog for us.

***********************************

Who profits from copyright infringement?
The greatest myth about internet piracy is that it’s just a bunch of kids sharing digital products which wanted to be free in the first place. Piracy in all of its forms is a business. The scale involved means it’s often a corporate business, complete with stock market listings and highly paid legal talent.

Boiled down to its essence, the business model of online piracy is attracting visitors to a website with content the website owners don’t pay to create. But the marketplace for free content is so large that there’s room for a business model to fit every budget and every shade of grey. The written word is best suited for business models built on copyright infringement because, unlike entertainment products like songs or movies, the value can be unpackaged and disguised.

First we’ll shine some light on the file sharing business, then we’ll take a look at the search dominated business of web page infringements.

The File Sharing Business
File sharing sites specialize in wholesale infringements, complete versions of works. Many publishers like myself have come to see file sharing as a “shrinkage” phenomena, digital shoplifting, because the users of those sites don’t represent lost sales in direct proportion to their numbers. But when the #1 search engine in the world starts promoting a piracy directory as the #1 site for a search on a book title, it becomes an existential issue.

The file sharing directory in this case, one of the top 200 most visited sites in the world according to Alexa, makes its money on advertising which it has the staffing to sell direct. Getting large fast and then going legitimate is another model for copyright infringement, which drove the early growth of YouTube (now owned by Google) and ScribD (now working with trade publishers).

The Ripple Effect

Once a popular work is released on file sharing websites, it proliferates at such a high rate that an author working alone is helpless to regain control. For the last several years, I’ve focused filing Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices with “legitimate” sites like ScribD, where a normal person could believe they are downloading an eBook that the author and publisher decided to offer for free.

Through purportedly protecting “innocent infringers”, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has done more to encourage Internet piracy than the invention of the file server.In a typical example, a version of my laptop workbook that I requested ScribD to remove had been edited to remove my name, which had been replaced with “FOR SCRIBD.COM” and the entire copyright and license agreement page was replaced with “INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK”

It’s not unusual to find copies of eBooks that have been purchased directly from a publisher website uploaded to ScribD and other sites under the real name of the purchaser. They can do this without fear because it makes no sense, financial or otherwise, for publishers to take individuals to court for copyright infringement.

The Web Page Infringement Business

Authors and publishers should all be happy to hear that content is still king, but unfortunately the search engines are gods. Nothing has brought this home during my sixteen years of publishing online like the Google Panda update of February 23rd that has led to Google promoting many copyright infringers over the original creators.

Reading through the 1,100 plus posts from website publishers in the poorly publicized discussion Google started in their WebMaster Tools forum, the same complaints about copyright infringements now ranking above the originators appear again and again.

The web page or article infringement business exists in many more variations than the file sharing business, with more opportunities for owners of those sites to make money. The biggest abusers are “community” sites that encourage users to post articles without doing a simple test to see if they are plagiarized, and then syndicate those articles to hundreds or thousands of me-too sites, all of which are monetized by advertising networks.

Not surprisingly, the ad network I see most on these sites is the biggest, Google Adsense. The larger community sites that solicit articles are protected by the DMCA and will remove copyright infringements on request, but this comes after they’ve been syndicated all over creation and can’t be recalled. Steering visitors away from large article farms was a major goal of the Google Panda update, but whatever technique they used ended up punishing the victims along with the thieves.

They have the Technology But Won’t Use it

A classier group of copyright infringers are large corporate sites with community sections, such as Yahoo Answers and eHow.com. These large players certainly have access to the technology that could prevent cut-and-paste copyright infringement, but apparently haven’t found it to be in their best interest. While sites like these earn money directly from advertising, the more important consideration is to grow their user base and page count. The page count drives search engine traffic and page views, and the user base makes for a higher stock valuation.

Because large sites are well regarded by search engines, copyright infringements in community sections and thin rewrites by contract staff reduce the search visibility of original content creator’s websites.

The Big Business of Rewriting Content

The business of getting large numbers of people to work rewriting original content may sound like High School English class, but it’s a big business. Imagine hiring a hundred different contract writers on commission to recast the articles of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal every morning and having your own Internet paper published daily by the time most people are ready for breakfast. The writing would end up being on a lower grade level, and the writers’ lack of subject knowledge would lead to some pretty amusing errors, but to a search engine it would look every bit as authoritative as the original. Explain to the ever expanding pool of writers that their earnings are dependent on getting links to their articles, and suggest they spend their time leaving comments on other online newspapers, blogs, and anywhere else they or their friends can stuff a link. If the New York Times or Wall Street Journal didn’t stop you, pretty soon you’d have a website worth more than the Boston Globe.

The Bad Guys Are Winning

Between the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the new search emphasis on large sites with community features, the pirates are winning the war. While it’s still possible for new authors and publishers to build an online presence and attract thousands of visitors daily via search, it’s no longer an investment for the future. The more popular a small website becomes, the more it gets ripped off, and the greater the danger it will be downgraded by search engines for having published content that no longer appears to be unique.

A Possible Solution

My advice to writers of all stripes today is to focus first on dedicated eBook platforms, starting with Kindle, where the storefront owned by the eBook device maker means you won’t be competing against pirated versions of your work. Or at least if somebody does try publishing your work on Kindle, as has already happened to me, Amazon will take it down within hours of notification.

**************************************
Morris Rosenthal has been publishing online since 1995 and has
authored a dozen nonfiction books, including McGraw-Hill’s bestselling
“Build Your Own PC” series. He has been active in the small business
community for the last decade, founding Internet groups with over
1,000 members for professionals in the computer and publishing
businesses, and blogs about self publishing at http://www.fonerbooks.com/selfpublishing

One thing you can always count on when it comes to Google: whatever they put their mind to, they will do it better than anyone has ever done before. Search? Maps? Photo organization? Email? When Google applies its collective genius to a technical challenge, the result is guaranteed to be groundbreaking.

So it should come as no surprise that when the company took up the matter of bookmarking and surveyed existing systems such as Kindle’s (above), it found so much to be desired that rather than patch up existing configurations, it decided to rethink, reconfigure and rebuild the application from the ground up.  Though glimpses of beta testing had filtered out of corporate headquarters, it was not until today that the product was released before a clamoring crowd at the New York Public Library.

As is the case with so many Google products the design is deceptively simple: a 6″ x 2″ rectangular plastic card with a message and “Google ebooks” stamped on one side. Among the messages we viewed were “Take your library anywhere” and “My other book is a tablet”. Samples were distributed to the press and we wasted no time field-testing it. Unlike Kindle bookmarking, Google bookmarks are inserted between the leaves of a printed book to indicate the place where the reader discontinued reading. When the reader wishes to resume reading, he or she activates the book by opening the pages to the place occupied by the bookmark. The bookmark is then manually removed from the printed book in order not to obscure the reader’s view of the text.

It took some fumbling and manipulation before we got the hang of it, but when we finally mastered it we were awed by its elegant utility. Another technical triumph from the people who brought you G-Mail, Picasa, Chrome and Android.

A day will come when you will look back and wonder how you managed to live without Google bookmarks.

Richard Curtis

(Thanks to EPC)

Jeff Mayersohn and his wife Linda Seamonson own the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As might be expected, it carries some very old books. What is not so predictable is that it carries 4 million of them. It happens that they installed an Espresso print on demand press.

Customers access Google’s vast database of titles, many of which are facsimiles of antiquarian works worth a king’s ransom in the original but only a few dollars in replica. Writes Mayersohn: “The first book that we printed on Paige [the owners' nickname for their pet printing machine] was the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in English-speaking North America. The original was printed on Stephen Daye’s press in Cambridge, about a hundred yards from the location of our store, almost four centuries ago. There are 11 extant copies of Daye’s original printing. Now any customer can own a scan of the original book.”

Interestingly, though customers can download the Google  e-book versions of these editions free, they like the feel of a printed book in their hands, and the look of it on their shelves. “For many readers and for writers, the allure of paper remains,” says Mayersohn. ” Watching the joy on their faces leads one inevitably to the conclusion that we still cherish the experience of the printed word, preserved for eternity in the pages of a book.”

But reprints of ancient tomes are only one part of ye olde booke shoppe’s custom. Of the 1500 or so books that “Paige” prints monthly, three quarters are self-published works, Mayersohn explained in the “Soapbox” feature of a recent Publishers Weekly. You can read details in Hit ‘Print’: How One Bookstore Uses Its Espresso Book Machine.

You can expect to see more Espressos popping up in bookstores as the technology is perfected and miniaturized.  Indeed, as we recently pointed out, there’s no reason why POD kiosks need to be restricted to bookstores.  See I’ll Have Four Sesames, Four Poppy-Seeds, and One Copy of War and Peace

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.