Cory Doctorow has articulated this issue very well. There is an excellent article from him at Forbes about this exact issue. One of the arguments he brings up is this.

“Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book–those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.”

So what struck me about the quote was the narrow thinking about sales. And it’s not that I have this crunchy attitude that everything should be free and people shouldn’t make money off their creative work (or the publishers that invest in producing and mass distributing the product to a large audience). But one of the points made in the Doctorow piece is that this is actually good business. His books are published by Tor, which is one of the largest Science Fiction publishers around.

So it’s great that the Man Booker Prize committee has taken this step. I just wish their thinking about sales wasn’t so limited to loss prevention.

(link to Times Online) (link to Forbes article from Cory Dotorow)

So not only did a 13-year old get around the new software update for the iTouch which broke many of the third-party application installers, but they did it in a interface that a larger audience could use. I do not understand why Apple insists on crippling this device that prevents it from being used the way users want to.

AT&T used to make the argument with their landlines that if third parties were allowed to make the phones they might bring down the network. And it worked for many years. “Phone leasing was commonplace until the break up of Ma Bell more than 20 years ago. Since the break up, consumers have had a staggering array of choices for local and long-distance phone service, which includes buying their own telephones. Some of the original phone renters continued leasing and many are still paying.” Fred Minnick

The same rhetoric was dusted off for the release of the iPhone, which amusingly was also a joint venture with AT&T. Of course that didn’t take long for hackers to unlock the phone in various ways, making it available to other networks (ex: T-Mobile) and also third party applications. The iTouch of course is different. Even if you believe the fact that a rogue hacker could bring down AT&T’s network (in which case read Bruce Sterling’s “The Hacker Crackdown”), the iTouch is not connected to a network.

There is the potential for a large industry of third-party applications around these types of devices. Apple’s iPhone/iTouch are the slickest right now, but this sort of mentality where the user is treated as a criminal before they even by the product is bad for business. I think of Sony and how innovative they were with the Betamax and successfully arguing that the VCR was not simply a device for crooks who wanted to steal revinue from large media companies. Sony in recent history relies on DRM models (digital rights management) to lock their products down to prevent them for being used in ways unanticipated by Sony. This is not good for content producers or for content consumers. And companies that produce products that embrace 13-year old programmers rather than treating them as criminals will have a bright future.

Enter Musicadium, an independent music distribution service that works with iTunes and eMusic. The service fee is a minimal US$29.95 compared to the fact that you retain all rights to your music, which means no signing your soul away to big businesses.

I am eager to hear some success stories about this service. I personally, didn’t purchase the ISBN number needed to make my books available on Amazon, but the option is enticing. The implication that a budding artist in any medium (print, music, video) can get their work out to a larger audience through services like this is compounded by large artists that are moving away from record labels. An example of this is Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, who have made the decision to not attach to a record label and stay independent. Radiohead in particular is releasing their latest album In Rainbows online, without DRM, and a name your price model (think NPR listener supported radio).

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