Ed Felten on "Harry Potter and the Half Baked Plan"
"Despite J.K. Rowling’s decision not to offer the new Harry Potter book in e-book format, it took less than a day for fans to scan the book and assemble an unauthorized electronic version, which is reportedly circulating on the Internet.
"If Rowling thought that her decision against e-book release would prevent infringement, then she needs to learn more about Muggle technology. (It’s not certain that her e-book decision was driven by infringement worries. Kids’ books apparently sell much worse as e-books than comparable adult books do, so she might have thought there would be insufficient demand for the e-book. But really — insufficient demand for Harry Potter this week? Not likely.)
"It’s a common mistake to think that digital distribution leads to infringement, so that one can prevent infringement by sticking with analog distribution. Hollywood made this argument in the broadcast flag proceeding, saying that the switch to digital broadcasting of television would make the infringement problem so much worse — and the FCC even bought it.
"As Harry Potter teaches us, what enables online infringement is not digital release of the work, but digital redistribution by users. And a work can be redistributed digitally, regardless of whether it was originally released in digital or analog form. Analog books can be scanned digitally; analog audio can be recorded digitally; analog video can be camcorded digitally. The resulting digital copies can be redistributed." ....
Read the whole thing here.