We did a great panel on DRM and the Digital Hub yesterday here at OSXCon with Tim O’Reilly, Victor Nemachek (from El Gato, makers of the EyeTV digital TV recorder for the Mac), Dan Gillmor, and JD Lasica, who’s working on a book on fair use and copyfights. Glenn “802.11b Networking News” Fleishman took great notes through the talk:
Dan: Tim, you’re a “content or copyright holder…talk about these issues.”
Obscurity can be a tool. Something like 100K books published in the US. Most books are forgotten after publication. Ravening copying theft is wrong: most aren’t pirated. Publishers puts book that someone sweated over for years on shelves for three months, doesn’t sell, that’s it, and the author has no rights. Publishers keeps rights til out of print, etc.
Oblivion is fate of most books: “Piracy would be the best thing for those books.” People wouldn’t pirate them in general, because people generally like to respect the rights of creators. “Piracy is a marginal act; it takes away some of the cream.”
Publishing won’t go away, but it will change the idea of who is a publisher. Early on in the Web, the idea was that everyone could be a publisher. The way in which Web sites interact with publishers is often very much like the way that book publishers try to get placement and position in bookstores.
Publishing is aggregation. People will re-emerge as publishers. Will Hollywood be the publishers of the future or will someone else?
Users are voting by their use of programs like Kazaa. Eventually, media companies will adopt. But if the changes are hardcoded into law, then we’re stuck for a long time with “some mistakes.”
(via Dan Gillmor’s eJournal)