J. A. Konrath, he who makes us want to open a Kindle store and watch the moolah roll in, has a great post about ebook piracy. In short - it's going to happen, 1000 pirates does not mean 1000 lost sales, and it often even helps rather than hinders your book sales. The actual article has some great answers to the standard knee-jerk questions and demands - go read it. I'll wait.

I'm far more familiar with the piracy/DRM debate in the video game industry - at a rough guess, I'd say they're about a decade ahead of publishing, and possibly even close to emerging from the other side of the DRM-tunnel. I'm really hoping the publishing industry can learn a little from the music, movie and game industries as a whole - that, in short, DRM and lawsuits are useless. Just make a great product and focus on getting the sales you can get, not the ones you think you've lost.

World of Goo, a delightful indie physics puzzle game, was released with absolutely no DRM. They roughly tracked their piracy rate through the IP address of registered high scores, and determined they had a ninety percent piracy rate. That is, for every legitimately purchased game, there were 9 pirated copies.

That's a horrifying number, right? The kind of number that makes shareholders and artists crawl into the comforting lap of DRM. But the developers, 2D Boy, compared the sales figures, and determined that for every 1000 copies pirated, they only lost one sale. They acknowledge that two data points don't make a trend, and that more research is needed, but their conclusion is that, as they suspected, DRM is largely a waste of time, money and customer goodwill.

It's a sentiment echoed by the producers of the Humble Indie Bundle - a collection of indie-developer games sold in a pay-what-you-like scheme, where a percentage of the proceeds went to charity. In a fairly detailed article they suggest exactly why a product that could be purchased for a single cent was pirated 25% of the time. In short - laziness, another kind of laziness, geopolitics and arseholes. 

I think the 'laziness' notion is a real teller, here - as the article states, Amazon, iTunes and Steam have a 1-click-purchase system for a reason. If it's easier to get your product via piracy than it is legitimately, you have a problem. If, in the case of Ubisoft, it's easier to enjoy a pirated version of your product than it is a legitimate version, you have a very big problem. Mitigating piracy is not about making it more difficult to pirate, it's about making it easier and more enjoyable to purchase.

Piracy in the video-game market is far more about nervous shareholders and shifting markets than actual lost sales. It's a scapegoat, but it's an attractive one - who isn't instantly outraged by the idea of someone stealing their work? But DRM isn't the answer, not for games, and certainly not for e-books. For whatever reason people pirate books, restricting how legitimate copies can be used (which is all DRM ever really does) makes your legitimate copy less attractive than a pirated one. You give the pirates the better product, instantly. You're already fighting laziness, location and arseholes, and you want to add 'quality' to the list as well? Uh-uh.

Piracy cannot be stamped out with technology, cannot be trained out with education, or squashed with threats of punitive damages. Anyone looking at the human psyche for five seconds could tell you this. So forget the pirates, and focus on the people who actually buy your products - make their experience worth their money, and you won't have anything to worry about. Yes, you'll still be pirated. But people will still by buying your stuff as well. And that's what counts, really.

• Add New
• Search
• RSS

Comments (0)

Write comment

Your Contact Details:

Name:

Email: do not notifynotify

Website:

Comment:

Title:

Message:

Security

Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 4.0 beta2