Very cool, if true

Well, given 14 days of no coalition being formed it will be dissolved anyway, so probably no need for an act to be passed.

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pseudomonas.livejournal.com

Yup - and that's not much more governmentlessness than we have with general election periods at the moment.

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Exactly! Nor much worse than the time we spent post-election this time around.

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captainlucy.livejournal.com

Suddenly, I want to see what 1mol O2F2 and 1mol H2S get up to when they are put on a blind date... I get the feeling it might put my old chemistry teacher's wonderfully thought-out "Magnesium Wool in a Pure Oxygen Environment" exp~~losion~~eriment just a little in the shade.

*goes looking for the Braniac e-mail...*

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I was right about the screwdriver analogy being broken.

One of the best comments was
"I have even had to endure singing in choirs who blatantly photocopy music which I publish. It is truly heartbreaking and a major factor in my decision to develop a career in other areas."

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It's as bad as when I was a kid, and we all taped stuff for each other! Appalling behaviour, which destroyed the music industry!

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Not that simple. You weren't taping on an industrial scale, some effort was required, there was degradation between copies, and the paid-for-product had added value, such as iconic cover art etc.

Nowadays, the pirate version of a digital product is identical to the original, so the creative ecosystem is genuinely under threat.

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The problem is - I've yet to hear any way of dealing with it that wouldn't be worse than the current situation.

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Sell stuff you can't copy.

Ta-dah!

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How does that work for writers?

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Sell special editions, behind-the-scenes, book tours, signings, and advice.

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And if .txt is de rigeur, sell nicely formatted PDFs. If PDFs are commonplace, sell ePub.

The game book I'm editing/developing at the moment, we chucked on a filesharing site as advertising. One thousand downloads, hundreds more pageviews. When we have a physical product with art, support material and access to the author, there's going to be some extra sales because of that.

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PDFs, ePubs, etc. are all freely copiable.

Physical versions less so, but the question is whether there's a market for physical versions in 5 years. I don't believe there is for music, TV or movies, and there's a great big question-mark over books.

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How many box sets do you have, though? Right now, they make sense, just about.

We've had this conversation a few times, and ultimately I can't see how you can effectively subsidise creative industries for very long. It's only ever going to be a short-term fix, and the marketplace is changing a lot.

So be agile. If you can produce something rare and charge for it, or produce something common that has stuff nearby that's rare, then that plan makes sense to me. In Brazil, music is pirated, and the bands make money from tours. They apparently *expect* piracy and use it as a promotional tool.

PDFs etc are of course copiable, but if they're more special for a little while, they'll make a little money.

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I have box sets for some stuff, but less as time goes on, and only when they're on cheap offers.

I got the box set for Mad Men seasons 1 and 2, but then season 3 was on "live" in the US, so I just downloaded it.

Of course, I happily buy into the Spotify model, but Virgin's VOD is still tiny compared to how much stuff is out there.

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Yep. I can't remember the last time I bought a CD. Probably a decade ago.

I downloaded all those seasons. And I'd have loved a service where I could have downloaded more easily. I did pay for a monthly Rapidshare account.

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Come to think of it, I've bought non-mainstream CDs in the last year from bands whose gigs I've attended.

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>behind-the-scenes, book tours, signings, and advice.

That's fine for the healthy, naturally didactic extrovert author without a family who writes material that reads well.

>Sell special editions
Yeah, I'm wondering whether we'll have a return to the illustrated pulps, complete with schematics and maps.

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ashfae.livejournal.com

What about legitimate copies? The obvious: burning a CD so that I can listen to it on my mp3 player. I've legally bought the music. Should I be required to buy it in CD and mp3 format?

(granted, my attitude towards CDs has changed; it used to be that the CD was the end in itself and I'd listen to that on a discman; mp3s mean that now I buy a CD, rip it to my computer, and keep the CD as a sort of backup in case something goes wrong with the mp3 version somehow)

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I'm not sure what you're responding to in my post.

I don't think selling MP3s and CDs makes sense, no. In fact, selling CDs without giving away the MP3s seems daft. Selling the CDs as something more than a container of music also makes sense to me - whether that's including a lock of hair or a picturebook or something else unique.

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ashfae.livejournal.com

I was responding to "Sell stuff you can't copy." What if you've bought something and wish to make a copy for your own personal use? Making things that are uncopy-able (huh, is there a word for this?) would make that impossible, yes?

Or for another example, I've been known to take my books of sheet music and photocopy the piece I'm currently working on, so that I'm only hauling the one piece around rather than the weight of the whole book of sheet music. If it's uncopy-able I wouldn't be able to do that, though it's a completely legitimate use.

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I mean sell stuff which is literally not ever possible to copy. :)

Concerts, meeting the band, artbooks, anything unique like that. Sell unique experiences. Sell memories.

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ashfae.livejournal.com

That makes more sense! Though quite a lot of those can be copied too. Even if only to an inferior extent. ;)

But it's true, you can't copy an experience. It's unique!

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Yeah, we were totally talking past each other. :)

What you're making isn't necessarily going to make money. But stuff around it might make money.

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"What you're making isn't necessarily going to make money. But stuff around it might make money."

Yes, but of course this will change the art forms.

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Definitely, but I don't think the art forms are precious.

And I remember another analogy I heard recently. How much is a drink?

In a pub, it's a few quid. In a strip club, it's a lot of money. In a casino, it's free.

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Absolutely. I don't think that art forms are necessarily precious, but nor do I want to see Terry Pratchett out there on the road doing paid-for signing tours rather than at home typing.

Whether that's achievable via non-draconian means is the big question for me.

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Depends on what you mean by draconian.

At the moment DRM on e-books is usually so annoying that there are good economic reasons for not doing it. This may change with the rise of handheld books.

Personally, I would embed the user's name in e-books, and explicitly invite them to share their books with 3 friends.

Simultaneously, I would go after file sharing sites - especially the smug ones claiming to be online libraries circumventing greedy publishers and authors etc - using ninjas or possibly Serbian mercenaries in such a manner that my name would supplant that of Dracon in common usage.

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>Definitely, but I don't think the
>art forms are precious.

Dunno. I rather like the well rounded 100K SF/F novel... as do the people who download pirate copies.

>How much is a drink?
Not a good analogy because, whatever the source, a bottle of Becks is a bottle of Becks.

Analogies really just obscure the simplicity of what's happening: the Tragedy of the Commons.

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Not a good analogy because, whatever the source, a bottle of Becks is a bottle of Becks.

Yes... but that's my point. :) The content is the same, and we pay for the medium (venue). I've paid for physical copies of books that are free and Creative Commonsed. I've bought electronic copies of books I own. The actual *stuff* might not be what I'm paying for.

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a-pawson.livejournal.com

This. We all taped music from the radio and from albums when we were younger, but I very much doubt it occurred on the scale it does nowadays. It took effort and required the purchase of blank tapes, which were far from cheap. Certainly looking at my collection of tapes from the 80's, less than 25% are copies.

To download mp3's requires almost no effort and no expenditure on media. I have no figures, but I would not be surprised if 90%+ of mp3's stored on computers worldwide were illegally obtained.

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Studies have consistently shown that people who download music are more likely to buy it than people who don't.

The majority of my MP3s come from my CDs. Which makes them illegal, admittedly, but that's something I really don't care about.

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pete stevens (from livejournal.com)

The pirated version is usually better than the original in the case of films. No trailers, no menu scenes, actually works on everything (windows/OSX/ubuntu), fast forward works, so does rewind etc.

I once decided to catch up on Southpark, and bittorrent.com were doing a special offer selling episodes at 0.01c each. When I discovered I'd have to buy them all twice and download them all twice to get a copy on my laptop and a copy on my desktop, and it'd take about three weeks through their horribly slow website to select them all I gave up and downloaded them illegally because I just wanted it to work.

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