Friday, September 21, 2012

Fair play to Bruce Willis

It's an important that he is fighting on our behalf. Even if not true, it makes a good anecdote.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/03/bruce-willis-dilemma-digital-era-own-nothing

If I have bought e-books or songs from iTunes or paid to download a digital movie I believe it should be just the same as buying these things physically. I would expect to be the owner of them and be able to pass my music, film, book collection on to my children.
I haven't read enough into the detail of the story but I don't think it's fair that companies sell you things digitally (for not much less than the physical format) and then in the small print (which nobody reads, come on!) say you are not the owner of what you just paid for.
It's a bit like Facebook claiming that any photographs you upload belong to them and not you: I don't know where this debate is at, I remember it being an issue some time ago.
I find the whole subject of digital rights confusing and murky. I feel it needs a public celebrity to challenge this apparent discrepancy between physical and digital and help make it much clearer for the public, the people who spend their income on this content.

Piracy is another debate, I disagree that it's okay to pirate digital content. If you write a book or a song or make a film then I believe you should be paid fairly for it. However, I do think pricing structures for digital content aren't quite right. It is getting much better with e-books and I was interested to see that digital book sales have now overtaken physical books. I worry what this trend is going to do to the smaller bookshops that are really necessary to our cultural vibrancy.

2 comments:

laura b. said...

There are definitely some issues to be worked out in regard to digital ownership.
For example, some publishers want to more or less rent the use of a digital copy of a book to libraries instead of selling it outright. You can "buy" it, but once it has circulated say, 25-30 times, away it goes. What?

FW said...

LB: Charging libraries unfairly for digital books is just wrong. It is libraries that encourage reading and the exploration of fictional worlds and the non-fictional world. Libraries and publishers really need to work together in cooperation not competition. Otherwise there will be no libraries and the world will be a much poorer place.