Risk of the Digital Librarian

When it comes to digital texts though even though I currently have hundreds of them

maybe into the thousands I still only keep very few of them. Such as those I wish to share with others later or would be hard to find at a later date if I needed it again.

 

Sure I love a physical book but there is only so much space where one can keep them. I can hold a million books on my fingernail while holding that many books in a physical space would take an enormous amount of cost. Sure digital space has its limits too devices can only hold so much content but with the cloud you can't lose any of it. 

 

Image by Jorel314

Even if one chooses not to save the content to their cloud storage account it can be easily be re obtained after a few minutes or even seconds of searching because at some point someone else has also found the content and re-uploaded it most likely. Sure not everything can be found on the web but once content has been digitized its hard to destroy.

Sure the complaint about digital goods is that you can’t share them with your friends and others but that isn’t necessarily true. I mean sure various content has anti-piracy checks and other forms of DMR to make sure the content isn’t being stolen which is a noble intention people should be paid for their work.  At times though that stuff is more of a hassle to the consumer than the pirate.(On a side note in reality it’s copyright infringement and not “piracy”. Sure some of the people that download content off the net won't pay for it but that dose not mean everyone will do that.

 

Roger Wallis is a professor in Sweden and the witness for the Pirate Bay in their trial. Wallis and others in the academic field have done research on piracy and its effects on industry. The conclusion is that “piracy” does not really hurt industry but in some cases strengthens its.

Even Doctorow has this to say in his introduction to "Little brother"
 
"People who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. If you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. You probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. If you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of everything that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare Eastern European covers of your favorite death-metal band."

Doctorow on Piracy video from the Guardian

http://tinyurl.com/lr6yd4k