TOR, an imprint of Macmillan publishers, posted on the
anniversary of stopping the use of DRM for their titles. The most eye-catching
comment was that there was “no
discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles, despite them being
DRM-free for nearly a year”.
The use of the word discernable is interesting; perhaps it’s
as much a comment on how difficult it is to measure piracy as it is a comment
on the effectiveness of DRM to combat piracy. The best numbers are from sales
figures, and if sales figures haven’t been hurt, then DRM isn’t effective in
combating piracy. Hmm, maybe. I would argue that there are a few
trends that add up to this result:
- We’re not used to DRM, e.g. in the same way as we’re used content protection in satellite TV. So naturally, we don’t want DRM in books. (Yet we don’t care about putting a smart card into a set top box.)
- Being able to lend books was an inherent feature of owning books that DRM constrained, so removing DRM feels like giving back something that we expected to be there in the first place. (Again, we don’t have this expectation of other digital media, particularly broadcast media; we don’t expect to lend others our TV.)
- The readership of a particular book is far lower than the viewership of an equivalent movie, so the impact of piracy per book is lower.
- Lending books is an important marketing tool in its own right, called superdistribution.
- Fair use anyone?
There’s an article from Wired in 1994
that explains the concept of superdistribution well, but also misses one key
point: because I lend a book to you, I recommend it to you, and therefore there
is a much higher likelihood that you will be pre-disposed to like it, and to
buy it or further works from the same author. In other words, this is
incredibly focused targeted marketing. And best of all, it’s free to the
publisher.
So if removal of DRM is all good for the publishing
industry, why does the music industry still insist on numbers
that illustrate a catastrophic impact of piracy? ($800 for every man, woman, and child in America,
and twice the number of jobs lost than those employed in the entire motion
picture industry in 2010.) Apart from the fact that organisations like
the RIAA are making their point in the most unsympathetic and ridiculous way
possible, they are also making counterfactual
assumptions: that piracy = lost sales, and that DRM = no piracy.
The digital world that we live in opens up far more interesting
opportunities to reward the truly creative amongst us. It’s a shame that the
industry that has evolved to make money from these creatives has decided that
they will make more money pursuing litigious protectionist strategies than to
pursue new, fairer and therefore ultimately more valuable strategies.