When I was a child my friends and I used to make mix tapes by recording songs off the radio. The music was freely played, so no one thought it was stealing. Then I got a little older and got a double cassette player, and we made mixes from that and shared them. No one thought that was stealing either. We'd paid for the original cassettes, right? Then CDs came out and we still used our cassettes to make mix tapes and copies. Again, it was lending and giving something we'd purchased, to friends and family. And still I never heard a fuss about it, not even in church, or from the nuns that ran my Catholic school. It wasn't until the ability to rip a song from a CD and put it online that someone cried foul. Then... it was stealing. But by the moral rules, the rules we're using in this forum to talk about theft, what we did when I was a kid would count as theft. But no one I knew, no one I talked to then, not even the moral compasses of my world at the time thought anything of sharing music. Just like we don't think anything of sharing books.
But back to the music. It was only a few years after I graduated college that a friend told me about napster. And I downloaded music like a maniac. But who did I listen to? Phish. DMB. Bands that supported show taping and tape trading. I downloaded so many live recordings of great shows that my hard drive filled up. But other people were downloading Metallica, and the band cried foul and the whole world stopped to think about the rights of the artist, morals, ethics and creative property. And we got itunes and DRM, and a whole host of problems for people who bought music legally. A lot of my friends still went to torrent sites, mainly because they got fed up with the hassles of DRM. I was a big chicken, so I kept buying CDs and ripping the songs myself. Then Amazon started selling DRM free music, and my world changed again. My CDs sit in storage and my entire library is digital. And when I love an artist, I support that artist, over and over again. I am not unique, or on a moral high ground. Everyone I spend time with feels the same way as I do about supporting artists.
And where are the music pirates today? Still pirating music, but no faster than before. DRM didn't slow them down, so a lack of DRM hasn't sped them up.
So, after all that, what did the publishing industry learn? Not a damn thing! What did we learn as consumers? I don't know about all of you, but I learned that people are better than I used to think. The music industry didn't crash because we stopped buying CDs, or because I can now make 5000 copies of Lady Gaga's latest album. Would the publishing industry crash if I could make 5000 copies of Twilight? No. Because ultimately most people want to give credit where credit is due, and want to make sure artists are compensated for their work. Most people are GOOD people. There it is. They'll still give copies of stuff they like to their families and friends, and yes, it will be a copy, not the original file they downloaded, but it won't really matter because they're not reading the same book, over and over, day in and day out. And some people will read an ebook, and then go and buy their own copy to make sure the author is compensated. And some will just buy the next book themselves. And the world will still go round, and life will continue as we know it.
A lack of DRM doesn't turn a good person into a money-grubbing thief, the desire to steal has to be there already. The music industry has already proven this - why can't the publishers learn from that?
