Joi Ito loves to share at LeWeb'08 (Photo: cvander)
Well-known writer Paolo Coelho was interviewed on the LeWeb'08 stage by Loic Le Meur. Coelho has some struggles with copyright, even when it comes to his own books. Author Paulo Coelho supports piracy: "share to get revenue", wrote The Next Web blog about this interview.
What happened? The author distributes digital copies of his own work and finds them to promote book sales. One striking example is the russian version of "The Alchemist". After Coelho posted it online, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more (watch the video from DLD in January).
Despite the sales increase, his publishers don't like what Paolo Coelho does. They insist on copyright. But copyright is a problem in a world with a large infrastructure which is basically just built for copying. We call this infrastructure the Internet. As Cory Doctorow puts it:
The Internet is a system for efficiently making copies between computers. Whereas a conversation in your kitchen involves mere perturbations of air by noise, the same conversation on the net involves making thousands of copies. Every time you press a key, the keypress is copied several times on your computer, then copied into your modem, then copied onto a series of routers, thence (often) to a server, which may make hundreds of copies both ephemeral and long-term, and then to the other party(ies) to the conversation, where dozens more copies might be made.
Copyright law valorizes copying as a rare and noteworthy event. On the Internet, copying is automatic, massive, instantaneous, free, and constant. Clip a Dilbert cartoon and stick it on your office door and you're not violating copyright. Take a picture of your office door and put it on your homepage so that the same co-workers can see it, and you've violated copyright law, and since copyright law treats copying as such a rarified activity, it assesses penalties that run to the hundreds of thousands of dollars for each act of infringement.
Joi Ito presented in Paris a modest proposal to solve the copyright issue on the web. The solution is called Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dealing with a sensible distribution of copyrights between creators and users. Instead of having classical copyright ("All rights reserved") on one hand and public-domain ("No rights reserved") on the other, Creative Commons offers several licenses that allow the creator to reserve some rights while users can simply use his stuff for clearly defined purposes. For example, both pictures in this entry are licensed under Creative Commons from their licensors.
Joi Ito at LeWeb'08 (Photo: Peter Bihr)
Creative Commons is a kind of infrastructure for the Share Economy. We define Share Economy as the increase of return on investment by sharing the same or nearly the same goods that at the same time are sold. That is exactly what Paolo Coelho by sharing his work on the web:
You'll have to share in order to get some revenue. At the end of the day, it doesn't hurt your sales. People download the book but don't read it. They wait for the hard copy anyway. Don't be fooled by the publishers who say that piracy costs authors money.
That's what we call Share Economy. Let's discuss it at the next conference 2009.
