"Piracy is Progressive Taxation"

[Edward Wigg]

There is an interesting article by Tim O'Reilly available on-line 
"Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of 
Online Distribution" 
<http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html>

He states seven "lessons" learned from file sharing:
Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative 
artists than piracy.
Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation.
Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film 
publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.
Lesson 7: There's more than one way to do it.

As a publisher of books about Free/Open Source software his position on 
the politics of the free sharing of information might be considered a 
foregone conclusion, but he is still in the _business_ of publishing 
(echos of the for profit/not for profit debate of a couple of days 
ago?). Still, he claims giving books away on-line does not hurt sales:

"At O'Reilly, we publish many of our books in online form. There are 
people who take advantage of that fact to redistribute unpaid copies.... 
While these pirated copies are annoying, they hardly destroy our 
business. We've found little or no abatement of sales of printed books 
that are also available for sale online."

You may find the full article worth a read.

Edward.