10 ms·

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 wo

• 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
        without consumers, neither the copyright holder nor the publisher nor amazon makes any money And that doesn't change my point: most customers don't care. If customers cared, DRM would be a business risk, and acted on accordingly. But they don't, and so it's not. I wish customers cared. I really do. I wish they cared about their shoes being made by little slave children and civilian Iraqi deaths, too. But they don't. Now, we can make ourselves feel better by sitting here and bitching about it, or we can understand the world and try to make it better in whatever little way we can.
• dasil003 17y ago
  In most publishers, if an "enlightened" CEO decides to give up rights, he needs to justify the business value of that How about justifying it by the fact that it could cause a huge backlash and cause customers to decide buying ebooks is just too risky, and paper books are too bulky, and by god the whole "book" thing is just too much of a hassle and we'll just stick to blogs and wikipedia. I mean it's not exactly an inelastic market. I'm not sure what you're getting at with "enlightened." That sounds an awful lot like you think this is about some RMS-inspired freedom ideology. No, it has nothing to do with that. It's not even a digital issue (other then that technology enabled it). It's the fact that if you sell shit to people and then take it back they don't like that. It's utterly moronic. Being able to say "if you change your mind, there's an undo button" is a big deal for someone trying to minimize risk. So cancel the deal and stop selling more copies. What exactly is the risk of someone keeping something they purchased? If it didn't sell well that will be very few people. The production and distribution costs have already been sunk, so the undo button is doing nothing but pissing off customers. Are they scared it's going to be pirated? Well if it was going to be pirated, it already is, and now there's no other way to get it. I agree with you about how they think, but you still haven't shown what risk they are minimizing and how it's anywhere near the risk of discouraging sales by pissing off customers like this.
  • andreyf 17y ago
    How about justifying it by the fact that it could cause a huge backlash... Heh, I sure am glad I don't work in market research for you ;) "WHAT DO YOU MEAN PEOPLE DON'T KNOW OR CARE ABOUT DRM!? IT'S WRONG!"
    • dasil003 17y ago
      Your response makes no sense at all. It's completely unrelated to what I said. People don't need to "know about DRM" in order to be pissed off when stuff they bought disappears.
• olefoo 17y ago
  """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.""" That is wrong, and wrong in a way that is very symptomatic of the illness afflicting our society as a whole. A CEO or other officer of a company has a fiduciary responsibility to her shareholders, but she also has an ethical responsibility to the society in which her company exists; and without which it would not exist. That the myth that fiduciary responsibilities trump all other responsibilities is so widespread that many here hold it up as an unquestioned truth should be disturbing to you. If you believe that your companies profitability outweighs any moral, ethical or legal obligation; then you are criminally insane and it is societies right and duty to limit you so that you do not harm others.
  • andreyf 17y ago
    "Wrong" meaning you wish it wasn't that way, or wrong meaning inaccurate in describing the state of the world? The former I agree with, the latter you don't seem to give much evidence for. If you wish it wasn't that way, how do you suppose we should define corporations? You can't just stick a "must has an ethical responsibility to the society in which her company exists; and without which it would not exist" clause in a law somewhere... myth that fiduciary responsibilities trump all other responsibilities Again, this is like talking about the myth of gravity after a rock falls on your head. Fiduciary responsibility is the law under which corporations like publishers operate. If you don't like the law, it would be a nice exercise to suggest an alternative (which we can debate). If you believe that your companies profitability outweighs any moral, ethical or legal obligation; then you are criminally insane and it is societies right and duty to limit you so that you do not harm others Let's simplify: a rock fell on a baby's head and smushed it. I point and say "hey look, a rock fell on a baby's head and smushed it, because it's really heavy". You say: "If you believe that babies should be smushed by rocks; then you are criminally insane and it is societies right and duty to limit you so that you do not harm others". See my point? See, and this confuses me - in your last sentence, you used "fiduciary responsibilities", which makes me think you went to college. But this shows such a lack of reading comprehension... oooooh... are you one of those "globalization" majors? <offtopic>Geezus fuck, has news.YC really come to this!?</offtopic>