Infringe On Me, Will You?
I got an email from a programmer with a blog who wanted to post an excerpt from the book I wrote, and he was writing to me to ask for my permission to do so. And my first reaction was to be flattered that someone would want to quote anything that I had written. I was just glad someone had read it and that they liked it enough to want to share it themselves.
As I was hammering out an email response to him, I started to think about what my publisher might think of this. And it occurred me to that they probably wouldn't like it a whole lot. They're one of those publishing companies that holds a lot of "traditional" viewpoints, and so I'm sure they see the book as intellectual property, and copying anything from it would be infringement.
I started to think about it. I suppose if someone went to the farthest possible extreme, it would be them taking the entire contents of the book and putting it up online, for free, on a blog someplace. (Actually, you can read half of it on Google books...Google never asked me about that.) And if you start Google the book's title, here are the results that come up from Google Suggest:
From the look of things, it looks like most of the people who are searching for it are looking for how they can steal it.
Try as I may, though, I can't get my head about the opinion that this is a bad thing. I guess you could argue that for every person who downloads an illegal copy, I get one less book sale and so directly, it's costing me money. You could argue it's a zero-sum game.
But the way I see it, the more people that read it, the more people there are who might use the information to create web projects using those technologies. Provided the book is good enough, perhaps it will start conversations and get people building things using the framework and programming language. And (if you need a selfish motive on my part) maybe one of them will happen to be super brilliant and start a company that will go on to be successful, and maybe one day he or she will hire me to work for them.
I know that's a stretch, but I have a sense of propriety. I didn't write the book to get rich. The only people who can count on making money on a book they wrote are the people who made money from their last one, and I definitely don't fall into that category. I did it for reputation, if nothing else, and the satisfaction of knowing (at least believing) that it might help someone else learn.
The worst thing I can see happening is someone taking its content, mangling it so that it's technically incorrect, and then both posting it online and attributing it to me. But I can't see why anyone would bother to do that, shy of a personal vendetta.
The enemy of any artist isn't piracy, it's obscurity.
As I was hammering out an email response to him, I started to think about what my publisher might think of this. And it occurred me to that they probably wouldn't like it a whole lot. They're one of those publishing companies that holds a lot of "traditional" viewpoints, and so I'm sure they see the book as intellectual property, and copying anything from it would be infringement.
I started to think about it. I suppose if someone went to the farthest possible extreme, it would be them taking the entire contents of the book and putting it up online, for free, on a blog someplace. (Actually, you can read half of it on Google books...Google never asked me about that.) And if you start Google the book's title, here are the results that come up from Google Suggest:
From the look of things, it looks like most of the people who are searching for it are looking for how they can steal it.
Try as I may, though, I can't get my head about the opinion that this is a bad thing. I guess you could argue that for every person who downloads an illegal copy, I get one less book sale and so directly, it's costing me money. You could argue it's a zero-sum game.
But the way I see it, the more people that read it, the more people there are who might use the information to create web projects using those technologies. Provided the book is good enough, perhaps it will start conversations and get people building things using the framework and programming language. And (if you need a selfish motive on my part) maybe one of them will happen to be super brilliant and start a company that will go on to be successful, and maybe one day he or she will hire me to work for them.
I know that's a stretch, but I have a sense of propriety. I didn't write the book to get rich. The only people who can count on making money on a book they wrote are the people who made money from their last one, and I definitely don't fall into that category. I did it for reputation, if nothing else, and the satisfaction of knowing (at least believing) that it might help someone else learn.
The worst thing I can see happening is someone taking its content, mangling it so that it's technically incorrect, and then both posting it online and attributing it to me. But I can't see why anyone would bother to do that, shy of a personal vendetta.
The enemy of any artist isn't piracy, it's obscurity.