P2P Licensing
This NOW magazine article is extremely optimistic about the Digital Music Exchange, a proposal to legalize P2P music file sharing by charging a universal license fee for it. The DMX software supposedly logs not only downloads of a song, but the number of plays, and can even tell if it gets burned to CD. Pieces of the compensation pie are doled out to rights-holders as usage warrants. It is further alleged that the big labels have suddenly proven receptive to the concept, despite their previous staunch resistance to it.
I’ll believe it when I see it, on the grounds that it would be the sensible thing to do and is therefore unlikely to happen.
Let’s say that it did, though. Could a similar solution aid the publishing industry against book piracy? Piracy is even a tougher issue in the case of books. A pirated RPG book doesn’t generate ancillary revenue for the creators, as you can argue that shared music increases sales of concert tickets or merchandise. A precedent for usage-based royalties exists already, in Public Lending Right, a program that rewards authors for withdrawals of books from Canadian libraries.
In the US, a drive for royalties from P2P book sharing would have to be driven by the big publishers. Comics and RPGs may be primary targets for piracy, given their geek appeal, but their creators wield limited economic clout. (Yeah, DC is part of a large conglomerate, but Time Warners isn't going to the lobbying wall for Batman alone.) In Canada, the lobbying effort could be led by the same folks who spurred Public Lending Right. But that would require a perceived impact on writers of great cultural repute.
Now I’m sure no one here would know the answer to this question, except out of disinterested desire to remain informed on intellectual property issues. Do mainstream bestsellers, like say the new Woodward book, get scanned and pirated? How many hits do you get on a P2P search for Margaret Atwood?