Top Brit authors turn flamethrowers on barmy IPO

If the governmennt does not want to pay royalties on textbooks ...

... they can hire an author to write a textbook. They could require their teachers to spend one hour per month updating a wiki that becomes a set of textbooks and pay a software consulting firm £130,000,000 per year to maintain the wiki. Plenty of solutions without resorting to copyright infringement.

By the way, ideas are not concrete objects. If the supermarket has 100 bottles of wine, and I steal 10 copies of each, and the supermarket still has 100 bottles of wine then the laws that apply to ideas could bear some relation to the laws that apply to property. Until someone can demonstrate such a theft, the term intellectual property remains an oxymoron.

I don't know if it's the same in the UK

... but here in Ireland the textbook publishers have a lovely little scam going where they change the textbooks every year, so that they can't be passed on second-hand. Also a lot are of the type where you have to write into the actual textbook, so even if you could pass them on, they'd be useless. This is the sort of thing governments should be looking at.

The book business has no intention of making the same mistakes as the music business

...such as suing members of the public – and it is welcoming digital markets rather than fighting them.

What said that?

Not just text books.

There is an argument that various bits of Government use from time to time.

"Because you are writing this for the Public Sector, the IPO belongs to us, because you wouldn't write it if we werem't there"

This is so that they think they can collect the royalties if you resell it, usually what happens when they win the argument, is that they demand far more in royalties than a commercial organisation would do, and thus never sell another copy.

It's the obvious next step, in the mind of a cost saving government Agency. Don't pay for IPO, and then market it as you own.

Buy the IP for the books...

The government could just pay a fixed sum and buy out the IP. So set up an open tender to pay for the IP for already created content (ie not paying for 'writers' and a 'writing process'). Then provide the content as open source with wiki-style editing, possibly paying an editor to ensure harmonisation and appropriate revision.

One Rule for Them, One for Us

It seems the bureaucrats are allowing legalized piracy simply because they can yet, on the other hand there's sanctions against illegal downloads of music. Why should people respect the law if the IPO can circumnavigate it to the government's benefit (as presumably they can shave millions off the education budget) whenever they like?

The same mistakes, or different ones, lead to a similar outcome

"The book business has no intention of making the same mistakes as the music business – such as suing members of the public – and it is welcoming digital markets rather than fighting them."

It won't help them all that much. As e-reading becomes more popular, expect piracy to further undermine authors' ability to make a living from writing.

Incidentally, there is and was no strategy that the music industry could have implemented that would have prevented the situation they are now in: what they were and are up against is the tech companies that massively profit from piracy, and end-users who want everything they want, for free. What kind of business strategy could overcome that? Any remedies must come from legislation and law enforcement.

If there is one factor that might mitigate the effects on piracy on the publishing business, it is that a physical book and an e-book are vastly different experiences, as opposed to music being the pretty nearly same irrespective of its being listened to as a stolen file on an mp3 player or on a cd player as a purchased, physical item. (And don't tell me about bitrates and frequency response; I know all about it. Few people care.)

And, of course, the amount of music one can consume vastly outstrips the number of books one can consume.

And someone will have to explain to me why suing downloaders is a bad strategy. After all, by definition, someone who is downloading files illegally is hardly a paying customer. Actually it seems to me that the risk of being sued might be the only possible way to deter downloaders. (I seem to recall reading a study that said that those RIAA lawsuits actually had helped to either reduce or slow the growth of piracy, but I can not find the link now.) After all, what is a downloader going to do? Stop listening to music? Download again and riskget sued again? Boycott the music? What difference would boycotting the music make, if the boycotters stealing rather than purchasing, anyway?

Dodgy reporting

Having read the document on exemption for educational purposes (http://www.ipo.gov.uk/consult-ia-bis0317.pdf) there are a number of options listed

Option 0 – Do nothing

Option 1 – Expand the types of works covered by education exceptions and enable copies to be communicated to students via interactive displays

Option 2 – Increase the proportion of a copyright work that can be copied under the education exceptions

Option 3 – Expand the definition of current education exceptions to enable distance learners to access educational materials over secure networks.

Option 4 – Widen the definition of an ‘educational establishment’

Option 5 – Remove the ability of licensing arrangements to restrict the use of exceptions

Option 6 – Implement all of Options 1-5

And for option 5, the IPO states clearly.

"Copyright owners will experience costs due to lost licensing income. The extent depends upon how many of Options 1 to 4 are implemented in combination with this Option, and how much of the uses covered by Options 1 to 4 are covered by existing licensing schemes. Owners of literary copyright could lose up to £24.6m p.a. (CLA payments); broadcast copyright owners could lose up to £7.2m (payments from ERA), but it is likely costs will be lower (see p20). Other rights owners may be less affected."

So its not like they are hiding things. And who will decide the law - the MPs not the IPO.

i've have been more impressed if you'd mentioned that you can write to "Taffy Yiu" at the IPO.

bummer. i am writing (of getting some ideas down) for a childrens book that i want to write for my son.

it would be annoying for all schools to suddenly be able to give out free copies if it goes well.

on the other hand - was mine the only school to just photocopy anything it wanted and only have 1 of certain books?

ref the Gruffalo woman - not much sympathy. we have 2 of the books as my son likes them. i saw the DVD in asda. £9 for 26 minute cartoon seems a rip-off to me!

why do kids need ebooks anyway? they are more expensive to buy, the ereaders cost more to initially purchase too and im sure little kids will break them easily. surely with austerity measures to us all we dont need to be wasting cash on such things? what is wrong with actual cheap books?

What a brilliant way...

... to choke off the writing of new textbooks. Overnight.

I don't care what anyone says, those people we have running our country deserve the big bucks.

Choke off the writing of new textbooks? I hope so.

When I work for a company that company owns my work.

As a teacher working for the people my work is my own????

I'm not saying that the books studied in an english course should be hijacked for free but 90% of what teachers use should be prepared by teachers and shared by teachers and improved by teachers and it should NOT be in book form.

We've got how many teachers re-inventing the wheel every year? They make the railways look efficient!

And when the government changes the curriculum THEY can point to the starting points in the existing material.

Schools and colleges and universities are for educating our children in not making revenue streams for civil servants or book companies or lecturers. Or shit IT companies.

The insanity of the IPO aside, the distinction between theft and IP infringement does need to be made. The two are absolutely not the same, and the analogies that others have mentioned are irrelevant. Before the digital age theft was the material deprivation of property from an individual or company.

Getting on a train without paying invokes a material loss in fuel/energy in transporting the extra mass of the passenger as well as depriving a paying customer of a space, causing delays etc. Parking in a car park without paying deprives a paying customer of a bay. Both of these offences cause quantifiable losses of revenue - IP infringement does not. What these DO have in common with IP infringement is the devaluation of the services or properties for the owner or rights holder; copying a book or DVD causes no material loss to the rights holder but the availability to pay nothing for a good or service makes that good or service that little bit more worthless. Render something worthless and no-one will bother producing it, so there's a definite need to do something about IP. That's a certainty. But there's a middle ground to be reached here and both sides are so polarised that the argument between them has become too simple.