4 ms·

There is no argument here. There is a lot of "but they're simpletons who don't understand the Internet" and "the CEO has to answer awkward questions from other

by gchpaco 17y ago

There is no argument here. There is a lot of "but they're simpletons who don't understand the Internet" and "the CEO has to answer awkward questions from other simpletons if he doesn't insist upon the right to 'unpublish' a book". Never mind that the whole point of being a publisher is to publish books. Never mind that a bunch of people, clearly, had bought these and were therefore paying more than the paperbacks for those cost in store for fewer rights. The whole foundation of ethics is that just because you can do something does not mean you should do something.

whughes 17y ago
What is your solution? The system, if you want to call it that, is massive, bureaucratic, and has checks to stop the right thing from happening. If the publisher's CEO decides he hates DRM, then what will the board say to him? There's no way to eliminate the middlemen without eliminating the content in the process, or having to create new content. Unless, of course, you want to bring the government in or something like that.
- andreyf 17y ago
  Unless, of course, you want to bring the government in or something like that. Unless you mean "into the conversation", I think you meant "remove the government". After all, it is government which enforces copyright - removing government protection of copyright for 90 years after an authors' death is probably the best way to stop companies from being so adamant about enforcing every last bit of it. It's a bit of a Catch 22 that since copyright is so valuable, it's worth a lot of money to lobby congress to extend it (increasing its value even more).
andreyf 17y ago
just because you can do something does not mean you should do something But that misses my point precisely: if this was your buddy Josh, an appeal to ethics would make sense, but a corporation isn't a person. Publishers can't do anything else, just like moths can't help but fly to light. Bringing up ethics here is like bringing up ethics when your car won't start. In most publishers, if an "enlightened" CEO decides to give up rights, he needs to justify the business value of that - and "the 0.1% of our customers who know what DRM is and care will buy paper versions of our books instead of getting a Kindle" is just not enough business value to justify it. A CEO isn't being paid to make his company an ethical actor in the world, he's paid to maximize the value of the company. If a CEO's ethics regarding DRM don't agree with maximizing the value of the company, he'll say "I can't do my job because it's unethical" and be replaced with someone else.
- tdonia 17y ago
  i believe the parent's post is (successfully) making a counter argument that though a publisher may have an incentive to minimize risk, primarily they are deemed a 'publisher' because they publish (that is, broker the distribution of) books. approached from this perspective, it's hard to see this blog post's defense of publishers as simply minimizing their risk exposure as anything but shallow and counter intuitive to their primary goal of distributing books. that said, i don't work in publishing - i only consume it's published products - so i reserve the right to be wrong about how they make their money. i speculate here solely on the assumption that most business still does require someone to consume a product in exchange for a currency commensurate to an agreed value.
  - andreyf 17y ago
    Ah, then I should have made the distinction between "publishers" and "copyright owners", please do a mental: s/publishers/copyright owners/g Publishers have nothing to do with negotiating copyrights with Amazon, unless they are also the copyright owners, and copyright owners don't give a shit how their books are consumed, as long as they keep getting paid.
    - tdonia 17y ago
      that doesn't change the original replies basic point: without consumers, neither the copyright holder nor the publisher nor amazon makes any money. and pretty much everyone on the planet that's not a publisher/copyright owner/bookseller really doesn't care in the slightest about the perspectives of their business. sorry, but we never will. when you're selling something as abstract as a story you should consider yourself lucky that ANYONE is willing to devote any portion of their non-survival budget to such trivialities. While it's become common lately for people to be able to do so, this is a very new (less than 2 centuries) old phenomenon that's still quite fragile. And as the music industry has so effectively proven - if you push consumers hard enough they're not going to give up on their content, rather, they'll route around the choke point and take over distribution (and by extension content production) through less centralized means. this, in my mind, is a much greater risk facing the publishing/copyright holder industries than simple ebook platforms.
andreyf 17y ago
"but they're simpletons who don't understand the Internet" Sorry if I made it seem that way. I don't mean to call them simpletons. They're very intelligent, thorough, but optimizing very different constraints than people think. In the situation they're in, decision makers become extremely risk averse, and in this context, their actions make complete sense. "the CEO has to answer awkward questions from other simpletons if he doesn't insist upon the right to 'unpublish' a book" The questions about "un-publishing" aren't awkward - they're perfectly natural from the "minimizing risk" perspective. What smaller risk is there than being able to undo all sales? Publisher relations are a B2B sale with professional career sales-people. A sale from a big copyright owner is negotiation with hours of meetings, decks of power point slides, loads of cost/benefit analysis, and various value propositions (depending on whom in the organization you're talking to). Being able to say "if you change your mind, there's an undo button" is a big deal for someone trying to minimize risk. the whole point of being a publisher is to publish books By the same logic as the point of a record label is to sell records with their label on them, or by some other?
ubernostrum 17y ago
Well, from the various followups on the original story, it looks like the reality was much more complicated than this article (and your comment) make it out to be. Specifically, it looks as if the publisher of the Kindle edition was an outfit that distributes digitized public-domain books. The specific books in question are in the public domain in Canada, but not elsewhere. Therefore: 1. Neither that publisher nor Amazon had the right to offer these books for sale outside of Canada, and 2. The publisher receiving the payments for these books was not the entity which owned the rights to them in countries where the books are still under copyright. The exact means by which the screwup happened, I don't know; maybe the public-domain publisher mistakenly thought the books were PD everywhere, maybe they forgot to check a box for "only sell to Canadians", maybe Amazon mistakenly listed the books where it wasn't supposed to. But regardless of how the situation came about, this is not the publisher of a book trying to "unpublish" it, or changing their mind about whether to offer an electronic edition. This was copyright infringement which was discovered and remedied. Did Amazon do it in a way that sucks? Yeah. Should anybody be surprised that this functionality exists in the Kindle? Absolutely not. Hell, even Google -- striving for openness and fairness and not-being-Apple -- built a remote kill switch into their app store for Android.
- andreyf 17y ago
  Hell, even Google -- striving for openness and fairness and not-being-Apple -- built a remote kill switch into their app store for Android You know, I'm really glad they did. They'll know first if an application has a virus or remote exploit, I want them to take it off my device. I trust that they won't do anything shady (and I trust Amazon won't do anything shady) because (1) they're bound by laws that keep them in check and (2) they want my business.

by gchpaco 17y ago

whughes 17y ago

What is your solution? The system, if you want to call it that, is massive, bureaucratic, and has checks to stop the right thing from happening. If the publisher's CEO decides he hates DRM, then what will the board say to him? There's no way to eliminate the middlemen without eliminating the content in the process, or having to create new content. Unless, of course, you want to bring the government in or something like that.

andreyf 17y ago
Unless, of course, you want to bring the government in or something like that. Unless you mean "into the conversation", I think you meant "remove the government". After all, it is government which enforces copyright - removing government protection of copyright for 90 years after an authors' death is probably the best way to stop companies from being so adamant about enforcing every last bit of it. It's a bit of a Catch 22 that since copyright is so valuable, it's worth a lot of money to lobby congress to extend it (increasing its value even more).

andreyf 17y ago

just because you can do something does not mean you should do something But that misses my point precisely: if this was your buddy Josh, an appeal to ethics would make sense, but a corporation isn't a person. Publishers can't do anything else, just like moths can't help but fly to light. Bringing up ethics here is like bringing up ethics when your car won't start. In most publishers, if an "enlightened" CEO decides to give up rights, he needs to justify the business value of that - and "the 0.1% of our customers who know what DRM is and care will buy paper versions of our books instead of getting a Kindle" is just not enough business value to justify it. A CEO isn't being paid to make his company an ethical actor in the world, he's paid to maximize the value of the company. If a CEO's ethics regarding DRM don't agree with maximizing the value of the company, he'll say "I can't do my job because it's unethical" and be replaced with someone else.

tdonia 17y ago
i believe the parent's post is (successfully) making a counter argument that though a publisher may have an incentive to minimize risk, primarily they are deemed a 'publisher' because they publish (that is, broker the distribution of) books. approached from this perspective, it's hard to see this blog post's defense of publishers as simply minimizing their risk exposure as anything but shallow and counter intuitive to their primary goal of distributing books. that said, i don't work in publishing - i only consume it's published products - so i reserve the right to be wrong about how they make their money. i speculate here solely on the assumption that most business still does require someone to consume a product in exchange for a currency commensurate to an agreed value.
- andreyf 17y ago
  Ah, then I should have made the distinction between "publishers" and "copyright owners", please do a mental: s/publishers/copyright owners/g Publishers have nothing to do with negotiating copyrights with Amazon, unless they are also the copyright owners, and copyright owners don't give a shit how their books are consumed, as long as they keep getting paid.
  - tdonia 17y ago
    that doesn't change the original replies basic point: without consumers, neither the copyright holder nor the publisher nor amazon makes any money. and pretty much everyone on the planet that's not a publisher/copyright owner/bookseller really doesn't care in the slightest about the perspectives of their business. sorry, but we never will. when you're selling something as abstract as a story you should consider yourself lucky that ANYONE is willing to devote any portion of their non-survival budget to such trivialities. While it's become common lately for people to be able to do so, this is a very new (less than 2 centuries) old phenomenon that's still quite fragile. And as the music industry has so effectively proven - if you push consumers hard enough they're not going to give up on their content, rather, they'll route around the choke point and take over distribution (and by extension content production) through less centralized means. this, in my mind, is a much greater risk facing the publishing/copyright holder industries than simple ebook platforms.

andreyf 17y ago

"but they're simpletons who don't understand the Internet" Sorry if I made it seem that way. I don't mean to call them simpletons. They're very intelligent, thorough, but optimizing very different constraints than people think. In the situation they're in, decision makers become extremely risk averse, and in this context, their actions make complete sense. "the CEO has to answer awkward questions from other simpletons if he doesn't insist upon the right to 'unpublish' a book" The questions about "un-publishing" aren't awkward - they're perfectly natural from the "minimizing risk" perspective. What smaller risk is there than being able to undo all sales? Publisher relations are a B2B sale with professional career sales-people. A sale from a big copyright owner is negotiation with hours of meetings, decks of power point slides, loads of cost/benefit analysis, and various value propositions (depending on whom in the organization you're talking to). Being able to say "if you change your mind, there's an undo button" is a big deal for someone trying to minimize risk. the whole point of being a publisher is to publish books By the same logic as the point of a record label is to sell records with their label on them, or by some other?

ubernostrum 17y ago

Well, from the various followups on the original story, it looks like the reality was much more complicated than this article (and your comment) make it out to be. Specifically, it looks as if the publisher of the Kindle edition was an outfit that distributes digitized public-domain books. The specific books in question are in the public domain in Canada, but not elsewhere. Therefore: 1. Neither that publisher nor Amazon had the right to offer these books for sale outside of Canada, and 2. The publisher receiving the payments for these books was not the entity which owned the rights to them in countries where the books are still under copyright. The exact means by which the screwup happened, I don't know; maybe the public-domain publisher mistakenly thought the books were PD everywhere, maybe they forgot to check a box for "only sell to Canadians", maybe Amazon mistakenly listed the books where it wasn't supposed to. But regardless of how the situation came about, this is not the publisher of a book trying to "unpublish" it, or changing their mind about whether to offer an electronic edition. This was copyright infringement which was discovered and remedied. Did Amazon do it in a way that sucks? Yeah. Should anybody be surprised that this functionality exists in the Kindle? Absolutely not. Hell, even Google -- striving for openness and fairness and not-being-Apple -- built a remote kill switch into their app store for Android.

andreyf 17y ago
Hell, even Google -- striving for openness and fairness and not-being-Apple -- built a remote kill switch into their app store for Android You know, I'm really glad they did. They'll know first if an application has a virus or remote exploit, I want them to take it off my device. I trust that they won't do anything shady (and I trust Amazon won't do anything shady) because (1) they're bound by laws that keep them in check and (2) they want my business.