Good post at Techdirt on Friday about a particularly nice response to debate about the morality and whatnot of sharing digital content online.  Two things jump out at me.  First, Alex Feerst, the IP lawyer who wrote the response, lays out a lot of the underlying ideas at Manfred Macx a lot better than I ever have.  If you don’t understand our philosophy, read his letter.  Or, read this excerpt:

These two issues – payment and ownership/control of copies should be conceptually separated. They are connected under our current system, but they are not naturally or necessarily connected. We can unfasten them and toggle them separately to see what happens. If we could imagine other ways for you to get paid for your work (maybe we can’t, but assume for argument’s sake we can) as an artist, then whether or not people “take” your song is beside the point. You only want to stop people from taking things because you need to get paid. If you got an acceptable income from your work, you would probably not care about who plays or doesn’t play your song. This is because, unlike a screwdriver, it is not bound by physical world zero-sumness. In fact, you’d probably prefer such a system because you’d get paid and at the same time a greater number of people would hear your song. I think your teen correspondent mentioned a similar point.

Emphasis is mine.  This is what we do at Manfred Macx.  We are trying to allow authors to earn an acceptable income from their work without needing to think about who might have given a digital copy to a friend (or a couple thousand anonymous P2P users).  Fighting against what technology allows is a losing battle.  Embracing new technology, and seeing how it can work for you, not only good business, but it’s future proof.  If you stop caring about copies of your content, you still have a business when the next killer delivery system comes out.

Both articles, however, don’t address one important point made by Jason Robert Brown, the composer who originally argued with the fan and started this whole thing.

Let’s say I invent a self-replicating screwdriver. There’s a whole pile of them in my driveway – if you take one away, another one will appear in its place. Weirdly, my neighbor also invented a self-replicating screwdriver. I think mine is better, but that’s neither here nor there. On my driveway, there’s a sign saying “Screwdrivers $4.00″. On his driveway, there’s a sign saying “Free screwdrivers!” There is no legitimate defense of the idea that it’s okay to take my screwdriver for free just because there are an infinite number of them available. If you want a free screwdriver, go get the one from my neighbor; but if you want mine, the fruit of my labor, as Locke would have it, then you are obligated – in every sense of the word – to pay me the price I am asking. I don’t owe the commons a free screwdriver, nor do I owe them free sheet music to my songs. Nothing you’ve written above changes my mind on that matter.

This is really important.  When someone is using a business model that you feel is outdated, you may write blog posts about how wrong they are, you may boycott them, you may even petition your elected officials to relax the laws on which these models depend if you feel they are no longer just or relevant.

What you can not do is take and share their content without their permission, and then think you have the right to tell them why their business model is wrong.  You forfeit that right when you fail to respect the wishes of the content creator.

It’s getting closer and closer to launch time.  Manfred Macx is looking for authors interested in taking control of their book and using free infinite goods to sell more of something else.  Leave a comment here or send us an email if you’re interested.  We’ll even let you poke around the private alpha release of the website so you can get an idea of how it’s going to work and what you’re getting yourself into.

Needless to say, we’re pretty excited.  There’s still plenty of work to do, but the site launch is getting close.  It will only get more exciting as launch gets closer, so drop us a line if you want to get involved.

I don’t share the optimism of Teleread and Kindle Nation, but it appears that Amazon has not entirely deserted free ebooks.

They do, however, remain committed to controlling virtually every aspect of the Kindle that they’ve leased you, which is not terribly consumer-friendly.

Still, at least it’s not as bad as it originally seemed.

Free ebooks back at Amazon- John Lutz Urge to Kill | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home.

Over and over, when someone proposes giving away something for free in order to make more money on whatever else it is you’re selling, whether it’s the hard copy of your book, the tickets to your show, or anything else, some people see “free” and can’t understand that it doesn’t end there.  People get so mad that you’d suggest that everyone starve because “kids these days” don’t want to pay for music.

One of the comments on the really nice article linked below is one such person.

Eric: I have to say that this model saddens me.   Where’s the respect for the value of the artist’s labor when its given away free?  In over 25 years as a music writer for film/tv/theater, etc. I have many times been approached with some version of “We don’t have much budget on this one but do us a solid and there should be a good budget on the next….”  NEVER, has one of these ever come back with a decent paying gig and more than once people have come back with, “Oh, but last time you were able to do this for us.  How come?”

First of all, it’s clear the guy didn’t read the post.  No one was suggesting you do the show for free.  The author of the article (Derek, not Eric) didn’t actually say to give anything away for free.  He just advocated making an appeal to fans to buy your cd.  Pay what you want, even if it’s nothing, but walk out of the show with a copy of the cd.

The point is that, in his experience, the bands make more money this way.  This has nothing to do with giving away your work for some idealistic notion of good for society.  It has nothing to do with disrespecting creative works.  The opposite, in fact – it’s all about compensating the creator in a way that allows him or her to continue creating, and treats fans like fans, not potential thieves.

You have to stop and think – is it better to make a living doing what you love, or to be compensated for each and every use of your work?

Article: Emphasize meaning over price = More paid sales | Derek Sivers via CwF RtB on Twitter

Bad news for Kindle readers, especially the less computer-savvy.

But it is worth noting at this juncture that Amazon appears to have made a business decision, at least for now, that “free” will play an increasingly limited role in the Kindle Store

Amazon certainly has a right to shift focus and resources from free and public domain books to the books they’re trying to sell.  But it’s pretty disappointing.  For many people, unfortunately, the Kindle is the ebook reader.  It’s done wonders in showing the non-technical part of the population that ebooks and readers are out there.  But it’s these very same non-technical people who are likely to get all their reading material from the Kindle store, which is of course what Amazon wants.  They’ve put up all sorts of hoops to jump through if you want to put other content on the Kindle.

And so these non-technical people are effectively cut off from public domain books, or books from other publishers who can’t or won’t play ball with Amazon’s restrictions on the Kindle.

Also disappointing is that Amazon doesn’t want to deal with free promotional titles.

The number of free promotional titles has been dwindling since August, and no new free promotional titles have been added this month despite numerous publisher requests to offer free titles.

There is no question that free promotional titles can grow your fanbase.  Two of my favorite science fiction authors reeled me in with free ebooks (here and here).  I’ve since not only bought books from them, but pre-ordered a couple.  Again, Amazon certainly has a right to do what they’re doing.  I’d just rather they chose not to.

Fortunately, it keeps plenty of room in the ebook market and the ebook reader market for others to come in and fill the holes.

Article:  Kindle Nation Daily: Honey, They’re Shrinking “Free” in the Kindle Store via Teleread.

My last post got linked with a very flattering writeup on Techdirt, which is pretty awesome.  The conversation in the comments, however, is a bit disappointing.  A lot of people still think that giving away the infinite goods means you give away everything.  They think that by giving away the content, you make it impossible to make any money on anything related to the content.

This is completely untrue.  There many differences between scarce and non-scarce goods.  The important one here is that the marginal cost (the cost to make one additional unit) of a scarce good is greater than zero, while the marginal cost of a non-scarce good is either zero, or close enough to zero to no longer matter.

Cheap or free goods have always been used to increase the value of more expensive goods.  For example, I worked at Boater’s World in Annapolis in high school.  One of my managers used to tell the young associates, “Whenever someone drinks a soda or a beer on the Chesapeake Bay, I want it to be in a Boater’s World can coozie“.  He gave them away all the time to good customers, or to someone making a large purchase.  The can coozies are cheap – Boater’s World charges 99 cents, so I imagine they cost something like 25 cents.  But sometimes a free coozie is just the thing someone needs to decide to buy that expensive new fishfinder.  And it’s always good to have things out there advertising the name of your business.

Of course, Boater’s World loses some money by giving the coozies away.  But in return, they have a sale on a larger item, and a satisfied customer, and marketing materials out where people can see them.  Even if you make the false assumption that every coozie you give away is a lost sale, meaning the marginal cost to the store is 99 cents rather than 25, it doesn’t take many large purchases by happy customers to recoup the losses.

But does giving away the coozies prevent all sales of anything else?  Of course not.  It also doesn’t force Boater’s World and all of its suppliers out of business.  And this is a situation where the marginal cost of the giveaway item is greater than zero, so the store does take a real loss when it gives them away.  Imagine how much better it would be for Boater’s World if the coozies cost them nothing to produce?