10/30/2009

New post on BSCReview.com

And this time it's a rant about DRM and ebooks and piracy. It started out as a post on a website, but a thousand words later I realised I had the solid bones of an actual article:

"There are many pro writers out there worried by piracy, who see the internet as the greatest illegal intellectual land-grab of all time. Here’s the deal: if you’re worried enough to want to stop it, you’re not only going to have to stop people’s internet connections, you’re also going to have to ban photocopiers, computer scanners, OCR software, and computers. At the least.

The vast majority of those books floating around on bittorrent sites were derived from print copies of books. You scan the pages with a scanner and run OCR software that creates an unedited, error-filled file that is then saved as a PDF – surely the most unwieldy ebook format ever created – and uploaded. No professionally edited ebook files were involved ..."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST

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