COPYLEFT:
PUBLISHERS HAVE EVERYTHING TO GAIN BY ADOPTING IT
L'Unità,
20 February 2003
Wu Ming 2
Recently,
the discussion on copyright and its infringement has come to sound like another
dispute, the one on drug addiction treament. In both cases, issues are both
of a practical and moral nature, but the moral issues - on which anyone can
have their say - always prevail over the practical ones, making people forget
about real figures, data and the lessons of concrete experience.
As a consequence, nobody gets much done, prejudices have the upper hand and
self-styled "experts" or "insiders" come out and show
that they don't have a clue. In both discussions, those who try hard to keep
their feet on the ground, give examples and cite precedents, are doomed to
long-term failure, for even the demonstration of a theorem may be subject
to utterly non-scientiphical evaluation. Unless...
Unless we intervene early. While the music industry has been left to run wild,
unable to face the transformation that's wiping out the record industry as
we knew it, the publishing industry has not yet gone mad. Maybe it is still
possible to talk about reality. Here we give at least three examples which
should be taken into consideration.
1.
Two years ago, at the beginning of 2001, sci-fi author Eric Flint launched
a revolutionary project. He persuaded his publisher, Baen Books, to build
a free-of-charge virtual library containing many novels from Baen's catalogue,
all of them still on the market. People could log on www.baen.com
and download dozens of novels in electronic form, each of them available in
five formats.
One might think it was going to be a suicide, for each downloaded text would
correspond to one unsold copy of the book. That's what market analysts on
the payroll of corporate record labels keep telling us every day. Well, any
"ideological" prejudice was swept away by an inconfutable proof:
from the moment their books appeared on the shelves of Eric Flint's virtual
library, most authors have witnessed an increase in sales. One example above
all: Mother of Demons, by Eric Flint himself, sold 9,694 copies from
September 1997 to the end of 2000. In the following eigtheen months, while
the text was freely downlodable from the website, the book doubled its sales:
18,500 copies.
Of course such an increase could be explained on other grounds. Mother
of Demons is Flint's debut novel. In the meanwhile, the author became
more famous. Let's cling on the lowest matter-of-fact assumption then: the
presence of that novel in the free library caused no damage to Flint and/or
his publisher.
If you pardon me the sin of self-quotation, the same thing happened with Wu
Ming / Luther Blissett. Our debut novel Q has been freely downloadable
for a long time, in several formats, from our website www.wumingfoundation.com,
and yet its paper circulation (and commerce) suffered no loss, and the book
keeps on selling very well.
There's much more. Those who say that on-line availability of a cultural product
(be it music, literature or whatever) damages its sales in any form, may show
us catastrophic sales progress charts, but still they cannot prove
a cause-and-effect relationship between free downloading and the drop in demand.
On the contrary, Eric Flint can show us tons of e-mail by readers who say
they downloaded the text to check it out and, when they read a few pages on
their computer and saw it was worth it, they went to the bookstore and bought
a copy, or they kept reading it in electronic form and then presented friends
with copies of the novel or, at the very least, they praised the novel in
public (it's called free advertising).
Of course there are people who downloaded and read the novel but did not
purchase a copy, nor did they praise the book.
Most likely they wouldn't have bought the book anyway, and that unsold copy
can't be put down to the free library. Zero
from zero doesn't leave -1.
Moreover, word of mouth even operates in reverse order: if someone is disappointed
with a book they paid $15 for, then they'll advise other people against buying
it, but if they're dissapointed with a book they downloaded for free, it will
be enough to say: "I didn't like it, but why not try it yourself, it's
free". No car seller forbids potential customers a test drive on the
new model lest they consume gas and use up the tires. If he does it, he'll
find himself on the rocks very soon.
And yet an uncanny sensation of fear still shields the public opinion from
such sensible arguments, and we are driven to think that had the book invented
recently, authorities would question whether it is lawful or not to borrow
them, and the existence of libraries would be considered an attack on commerce,
and declared illegal.
Many people, especially in the record industry, try to disprove these examples
and say that publishers are lucky because a book is harder to reproduce than
a CD. This is an important difference, but not substantial, as the next example
demonstrates.
2.
O'Reilly is a publishing house dealing
with handbooks on programming, hand coding, software, new technologies etc.,
either on paper or in electronic form. O'Reilly holds a notable position on
the market. Some books in their catalogue sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
It is clear that a handbook of this kind is not an object likely to be fetishized:
one may as well read it on home-printed A4 sheets. And yet, there's been no
decrease in the sales of purchasable e-texts, even if they can be easily pirated.
According to O'Reilly, "piracy" is a natural market risk, like shoplifting
in a bookstore. Indeed, shoplifting causes more damage because a stolen book
will disappear from the shelf but not from the account book, which means that
the bookseller won't reorder until s/he realizes it was stolen, thereby potential
customers won't find it, and this really turns into one more unsold
copy. The case is different when someone buys an e-book from O'Reilly then
decides to share its content on the Internet. Book have always been lent,
from time immemorial. At worst, this kind of "piracy" is a sort
of graduated taxation: the more an author gets famous, the more his/her books
are pirated, and the other way around: the more books are pirated, the more
their author gets famous. After all, to any artist indifference is worse an
enemy than piracy will ever be. Things change if someone buys an e-book from
O'Reilly then put it up for sale on their own website. Quite surprisingly
the readers themselves point out such violations. O'Reilly gives an explanation
of this.
The publisher's website features a special section called Safari Bookshelf
['...for when you've absolutely gotta-have-it now!']. By paying $10 a month
people can subscribe to this service and search across all the books in the
catalogue. Once you've chosen one or a few texts, you can put them on your
virtual shelf for 30 days and read them (or print them). No "pirate"
site makes best offers, and this is what earns O'Reilly his tenner.
This example proves that "piracy" can be fought by offering better
services at reasonable prices.
Perhaps the future will bring us electronic books so astounding that the industry
will drop paper once and for all. Should this happen, publishers could carry
on by offering this kind of on-line services, selecting the best texts out
of the global ocean of writing, launching new authors, keeping prices low,
allowing customers to choose between several frontcovers, and more...
By the day such products come to light, e-commerce will be different as well,
one click will be all customers need to do in order to pay 2 or 3 euros for
a downloadable text found on a publisher's website, attached with the cover,
editorial news, reviews... I think there would be a lot of clicks, and authors
would gain much more money than the current 10% of the price. Oh, and there
would be on-line exchanges and presents, word of mouth and all. What's wrong
with that?
Even the prestigious Massachussets Institute of Technology is taking steps
in this direction.
3.
The MIT OpenCourseWare project is an attempt to bring university back to its
original purpose: make culture universal instead of sell portions of
it to people who can afford the price.
Since October 2002 the lecture notes and documents used by several MIT teachers
can be consulted at http://ocw.mit.edu.
Within
three or four years the project will cover all the 2000 courses of the institute.
The project has a social purpose. Many people who are not enrolled and may
not benefit from all the MIT services can access the content of prestigious
classes anytime. This number of people includes teachers from other universities
who may use that material and combine them with their own output. It's "Open
source teaching", by which students have everything to gain.
In fact MIT president Charles Vest also expects to gain something, and not
only prestige, fame, recognition. Many of these lecture notes refer to books
published by the MIT itself, and Vest is sure there will be an increase in
the sales. That's what happened with the texts published by another academic
institution, National Academies Press,
that gives on-line access to all the 2100 books in its catalogue. These are
expensive books, NAP publishes the reports issued by the National Academy
of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine,
and the National Research Council. The same books may be purchased in another
section of the website. Last year on-line customers bought 40,000 e-books
from the website, it was NAP's most profitable year ever, and there was no
decrease in the traditional sales (bookstores, mail order etc.).
These examples point in the direction of new, viable strategies. It is possible to have a good credit balance whilst protecting the rights of customers and benefiting from the nature of the Net. In the entertainment and cultural industry most corporations have fallen into the trap of repression and are paying dearly for fighting the whole society. Other economic subjects may either follow the same path or get rid of prejudice and look for a more "aethical" and "responsible" profit, which is a profit nonetheless.
