Call it a form of “organized crime, and muse that perhaps it faces a crossroads similar to the one it faced in Gutenberg’s day 500yrs ago.
E-books are one of the last remaining frontiers for file-sharers to really trade and consume, but with technology like Amazon’s Kindle making them a more palatable reading experience than staring at a 20″ monitor for hours on end this is slowly changing.
As a result, the German book industry is see the writing on the wall and is trying to fight the threat head on.
“We are in tough against illegal downloading, against theft on the Internet, to proceed” and “the courts with thousands of procedures employed,” said (GOOGLE TRANSLATION) the chief executive of the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers, Alexander Skipis, at the opening of the Leipzig Book Fair on Thursday. “The policy is forcing us to take this step.” File-sharers tend to trivialize this “organized crime.”
This new policy means they have already readied thousands of lawsuits targeting those illegally sharing e-books, enough to sufficiently employ the German courts “for years.”
Leipzig also says he supports a graduated response mechanism for ISPs, a la “three-strikes,” for file-sharers that illegal share copyrighted books.
He also says the book industry has suffered greatly from file-sharing, though the amount is unclear.
“We can not yet say how much damage this causes. For us, we are now in the millions,” he said. “Our industry feels that small and medium-sized scientific publishers would disappear from the market. If a publisher dies, so does our culture. It has a social relevance which, unfortunately, no policy is in place to protect.”
Leipzig also observes that his industry is facing a sort of publishing crossroads similar to that of Gutenberg’s and his movable type press.
“Maybe our industry is facing a break, just as Gutenberg did over 500 years ago,” he said.
I’ll admit the e-book industry is certainly facing a critical time in its history, but just as those who made books by hand were forced to adapt to the realities of Gutenberg’s press, so will the book industry have to adapt to the realities of a digital age.
[Hat Tip]
jared@zeropaid.com
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People are still going to “write books”. A LOT of books that are sold in bookstores today that are new are not even worth using as toilet paper. People will post rough drafts of their works on websites update them periodically or we’ll see the rise of group creation of books. Maybe the book format has had its day even and will now disappear who knows. But the old days are GONE. Everyone the govts. the RIAA the MPAA the booksellers EVERYONE needs to recognize this and deal with it.
Professional jurists tend to look dimly on anyone who threatens to clog up the courts “for years.”
This is just hype. They’ll test with one or two cases, if at all, and then maybe start listening to the customer.
Dude, “Leipzig” is the name of the town, not of the man…
These people just don’t learn, sueing people does not make good customer relations
If you are interested, the science fiction author Eric Flint has written/is writing some essays about how the science fiction/fantasy publishers Baen Books has created a profitable business model for the selling of unencrypted un-DRM’ed ebooks. His opinion of people like the above Germans would burn through a teak door.
You can see the essays here:
http://baens-universe.com/columns/Salvos_Against_Big_Brother
I have translated them into Danish here:
http://jensguld.pbwiki.com/
The armies of file-sharers are as difficult to see as an iceberg; 10% on top and 90% below surface. Just make sure they don’t run into the majority.
what a crok o shit. If anything filesharing makes books and information more widely available not destroy it just because they arnt racking in the millions they want