Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web; The New York Times, 5/12/09

Via The New York Times; Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web:

"For now, electronic piracy of books does not seem as widespread as what hit the music world, when file-sharing services like Napster threatened to take down the whole industry.

Publishers and authors say they can learn from their peers in music, who alienated fans by using the courts aggressively to go after college students and Napster before it converted to a legitimate online store.

“If iTunes started three years earlier, I’m not sure how big Napster and the subsequent piratical environments would have been, because people would have been in the habit of legitimately purchasing at pricing that wasn’t considered pernicious,” said Richard Sarnoff, a chairman of Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer titles...

Others view digital piracy as a way for new readers to discover writers. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/technology/internet/12digital.html?scp=2&sq=piracy&st=cse

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