This problem/opportunity of piracy is of great interest to me. You’ve got some great responses and embiggened the argument.

Thanks. Looking forward to reading your blog regularly.

Let’s take for example: MBUTTHA’s self-republishing business on a new site called Issuu. http://issuu.com/mbhutta/docs. Here you will find over 250 books and magazines. Several of Wiley’s own for dummies books are posted some with pub dates as recent as 2008. You’ll also find O’Reilly, Elsevier, Thomson, Taylor & Francis, to name a few.

Even more curiously, this person’s profile has a significant number of views, bookmarks and other social features that are part of the issuu platform. More so than most other “Publishers” on the site [as best as I can tell from brief research].

Ignoring the traffic and attraction of this person’s profile, I’m attributing this mostly to the quality of the content found there. I think the important question is why did they go through this level of effort? What need where they fulfilling?

I think there is a lot more to discuss, so I’ll stop here for brevity. One final comment: I was disappointed by issuu’s lack of any feature where I might report this person. As a social netizen, one should be able to assist with the enforcement of owner’s rights.

Perhaps another business opportunity?

I’d be interested in your thoughts on how we identify, contact and engage them.

By the way, I am very interested in the services list on your blog. Ill contact you directly about that.

Restriction and arbitration have been the traditional tools for content owners. So it seems natural for them to pursue these options initially. While all subversion has a deviant element, I sometimes wonder if a meaningful dialog with those who prefer to pirate a feasible idea? How might it help publishers convert opportunities to $? Extend distribution channels? Reach new audiences?

Or perhaps, shall we bring our eye patches & sabers?

I’m not a lawyer, but my reading of the law says that no one owns an idea. Put the idea in words, you have copyright.

So while you are discussion the issue of piracy, writing a blog post, you are creating copyrighted material. And now my comment (hopefully) enhances the value of this material.. in real time.

Seem hopeless to think that the laws will ever catch up chasing this rainbow.

The world has changed. Stakeholder who did well under the old rules naturally want to hang on for as long a possible.

The positive side is that there is great power in the new way. Call it piracy, call it freedom.. who cares?

There is great opportunity in the new way.. glad to see you’re here working on that.

“I think that free content definitely has a place in our industry. I think we need to cast off old ways of thinking, and create new products and new business models in order to remain valid in the new media economy. I even think that seeding content via P2P for promotional purposes is an acceptable strategy. We are looking at Social DRM as a replacement for current technologies. We are taking steps (slowly) in the right direction here, but in these cases it is the intent of the content owners to do these things.”

While consumers are absolutely right to point out our shortcomings when it comes to certain business models, I agree with you that arguments against a particular business model are not justification for stealing content.