[A2k] DRM free does not increase piracy - Random House

[Michelle Childs]

This very interesting in the context of the  EU Commission's content
online consultation. If you follow the link to the Boing Boing page
you get the link to the full pdf
<snip>
    The results: we have not yet found a single instance of the eMusic
watermarked titles being distributed illegally. We did find many
copies of audiobook files available for free, but they did not
originate from the eMusic test, but rather from copied CDs or from
files whose DRM was hacked. It is worth noting that these results are
entirely consistent with what the music industry has found in the last
six months. After conducting their own tests with Amazon, Walmart.com
and others, the major labels have reached the conclusion that MP3
distribution does not in itself lead to increased piracy, they are now
moving their entire catalogs to this approach.

Michelle


 From Boing Boing
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/21/random-house-audio-a.html

Random House Audio abandons audiobook DRM
Posted by Cory Doctorow, February 21, 2008 12:44 PM | permalink

Random House Audio -- a division of Bertelsmann, one of the largest
publishing conglomerates in the world -- has announced that it will
now allow its audiobooks to be sold without DRM by all of its online
retailers. In the announcement, Random House notes that they've been
running a DRM-free audiobook program with eMusic for months, and that
none of the pirate editions of their audiobooks online came from those
DRM-free editions; rather, they've come from DRM'ed editions that were
cracked, and from ripped CDs. I know, I know -- duh. But how freaking
cool is it to have a publisher come out and say that in public?

I'm especially pleased about this because I've been doing a couple of
little publishing deals with various Random House divisions. The
German division publishes translations of my novels in Germany and
Austria, while Random House Audio is doing the audiobook version of my
forthcoming novel, Little Brother. My agent had negotiated a one-off
no-DRM deal with them for that edition, but now it seems like
everyone's going to have the same option: authors who don't want DRM
won't be forced by Random House to include it.

The big question-mark is hovering over Audible, recently acquired by
Amazon. I love the range and selection and pricing of Audible's
titles, but I got majorly hosed when I switched to Linux and had to
spend a month converting my giant, expensive Audible collection to DRM-
free MP3s. When my agent started shopping the audio rights for Little
Brother, I was shocked to discover that Audible refused to release any
books without DRM -- even if the author didn't want it -- and that
they had the exclusive contract to supply audiobooks to the iTunes
Store.

Amazon's gone on record saying that they'll kill Audible's DRM if the
public makes a big enough stink. With Random House going DRM-free, you
gotta wonder if Amazon will do the right thing and follow.

     Since our decision has been based in part on our experience with
eMusic, I would like to share those results with you. EMusic started
selling audiobooks mid-September, and their program has been a
success, with strong sales every month since launch. Since they sell
content only in the MP3 format (in other words, without DRM), our goal
was to find out if allowing them to sell our content would lead to any
increase in illegal filesharing. For tracking purposes, we watermarked
all of the eMusic files and then hired a piracy watchdog service to
monitor and report back to us if any of our titles appeared on the
major filesharing networks. We tracked a mix of popular titles,
including some that were not available through eMusic. Because piracy
is already a fact of life in the digital world, what we were
interested in finding out was not whether piracy exists, but rather
whether there is any correlation between DRM-free distribution and an
increased incidence of piracy.

     The results: we have not yet found a single instance of the
eMusic watermarked titles being distributed illegally. We did find
many copies of audiobook files available for free, but they did not
originate from the eMusic test, but rather from copied CDs or from
files whose DRM was hacked. It is worth noting that these results are
entirely consistent with what the music industry has found in the last
six months. After conducting their own tests with Amazon, Walmart.com
and others, the major labels have reached the conclusion that MP3
distribution does not in itself lead to increased piracy, they are now
moving their entire catalogs to this approach.

PDF Link




Michelle Childs
Head of European Affairs
Knowledge Ecology International
michelle.childs@cptech.org

"The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have
done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of
thinking at which we created them=94 Albert Einstein