Found the below in a blog, on the topic of 'do publishers hate writers', from several months ago. 'Intellectual property', in the context of the article, refers to the stuff authors write, i.e. your books / stories and mine. My question: is the below indicative of a real trend and future problem, or is it just scare-mongering? Perhaps Agent Pete would have a view?
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Intellectual property will eventually become a very cheap commodity. It will be sold by one or two companies and by monthly subscription. The creator will be forced to comply with whatever contract the two companies offer.
This is why large companies like Amazon allow piracy. They are only interested in establishing the monopoly, the platform, the reading device, the service. They made it possible for one to download 10,000 kindle books with a single click on a torrent file link, because they convinced everyone they need the electronic format. But how high are the ebook sales? Ebooks took only a small part of the mass market paperback sales. These companies don't give a damn about the creator. They will even buy a book from the reader to sell to another reader without paying the creator. The patent for the electronic format is ready and they are doing it for the print formats already on a massive scale.
They will eventually say $0.05 per reading is good money for the author when there will be no other distribution option. The fun thing is that many will be happy. Many will offer their books for free. And very few people see where this is going.
Authors believe that they are the same with musicians. No, we have nothing in common with musicians. Musicians just want their music heard so they can book dates for the live music performance. This is where the money is, tickets, sponsors, promotional material, the t-shirts. Authors only have their intellectual property, and soon, it will not be worth anything.
Another issue. With self-publishing of all types of books, in a few decades from now, the large companies will have unlimited content in master form, ready to be sold. That includes the photos of that art photo album you printed in 2 copies and also your self-published novel. Your kids will have no property in their hands to sell, you have given away masters of your work. It doesn't matter what it was. You have given it away in master form, ready to be exploited commercially when the time comes. When the rights expire or are claimed abandoned through loopholes in the law.
Meanwhile, they are digitizing anything, only because it's cheap to do, ignoring the laws about reproduction. They want to be ready for offering the mega libraries, and the pay per use stock photography for a monthly subscription. They cannot do that easily with books from the 19th century, because that actually costs money to OCR and edit to a good searchable form, but we, the modern idiots, are offering the content for free in master electronic format, so we can sell 100 copies.
If you don't believe that's the long term goal, try getting your content removed from the databases of the print on demand service you use. An opt-out of course like all scams. The more honest ones will say it's impossible until you get a lawyer to contact them with a legal threat. Others will simply keep it on their servers because there is no way you can check, and the license agreements usually allows them to keep it.
So, it's not the publisher who hates the writer. Publishers and readers are the only people who DON'T hate the writer. And readers, when the time comes to get unlimited reading for $5 a month, will not give a damn if the writer is being exploited by a monopoly. You can't depend on readers. They have no investment in this.
Writers and publishers can do something about the situation before it's too late. But it will take very important publishers and very important writers. And I mean important from a market point of view. And that's unlikely to happen before it's too late.
...........................................
Intellectual property will eventually become a very cheap commodity. It will be sold by one or two companies and by monthly subscription. The creator will be forced to comply with whatever contract the two companies offer.
This is why large companies like Amazon allow piracy. They are only interested in establishing the monopoly, the platform, the reading device, the service. They made it possible for one to download 10,000 kindle books with a single click on a torrent file link, because they convinced everyone they need the electronic format. But how high are the ebook sales? Ebooks took only a small part of the mass market paperback sales. These companies don't give a damn about the creator. They will even buy a book from the reader to sell to another reader without paying the creator. The patent for the electronic format is ready and they are doing it for the print formats already on a massive scale.
They will eventually say $0.05 per reading is good money for the author when there will be no other distribution option. The fun thing is that many will be happy. Many will offer their books for free. And very few people see where this is going.
Authors believe that they are the same with musicians. No, we have nothing in common with musicians. Musicians just want their music heard so they can book dates for the live music performance. This is where the money is, tickets, sponsors, promotional material, the t-shirts. Authors only have their intellectual property, and soon, it will not be worth anything.
Another issue. With self-publishing of all types of books, in a few decades from now, the large companies will have unlimited content in master form, ready to be sold. That includes the photos of that art photo album you printed in 2 copies and also your self-published novel. Your kids will have no property in their hands to sell, you have given away masters of your work. It doesn't matter what it was. You have given it away in master form, ready to be exploited commercially when the time comes. When the rights expire or are claimed abandoned through loopholes in the law.
Meanwhile, they are digitizing anything, only because it's cheap to do, ignoring the laws about reproduction. They want to be ready for offering the mega libraries, and the pay per use stock photography for a monthly subscription. They cannot do that easily with books from the 19th century, because that actually costs money to OCR and edit to a good searchable form, but we, the modern idiots, are offering the content for free in master electronic format, so we can sell 100 copies.
If you don't believe that's the long term goal, try getting your content removed from the databases of the print on demand service you use. An opt-out of course like all scams. The more honest ones will say it's impossible until you get a lawyer to contact them with a legal threat. Others will simply keep it on their servers because there is no way you can check, and the license agreements usually allows them to keep it.
So, it's not the publisher who hates the writer. Publishers and readers are the only people who DON'T hate the writer. And readers, when the time comes to get unlimited reading for $5 a month, will not give a damn if the writer is being exploited by a monopoly. You can't depend on readers. They have no investment in this.
Writers and publishers can do something about the situation before it's too late. But it will take very important publishers and very important writers. And I mean important from a market point of view. And that's unlikely to happen before it's too late.
Once society reaches one extreme there is always a pull towards the other end. Where we reside within that spectrum is where marketeers come in - or just good old fashioned wisdom can predict.
