ipwars.com

Professor Joshua Gans published an opinion piece railing in the Age against the laws restricting parallel imports of book (via his blog here).

The burden of his argument is that it is absurd and outrageous that he can’t even download an electronic copy of the book he authored for use on his Kindle here.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m very frustrated not to be able to buy anything on a Kindle here (when I’m not dreaming about what an Apple iTablet might be). It is absurd. It is outrageous.

He says:

So why is it possible for hard copies of books to move across international borders but not electronic copies? The answer is that publishers, who have intellectual monopolies over these works, for their own reasons have not done the deals to make it possible. Regardless of what I, as an author, might like, a gatekeeper is standing between my readers and my book.

But, this doesn’t have anything to do with the laws on parallel imports. As he points out, even under the laws he is trying to bring to an end, you, he and I can parallel import physical copies of his book.

Rather, the problem is that, he negotiated split publishing rights – University of NSW for Australia and The MIT Press for (at least) North America – presumably in the hope that the two publishers would maximise his returns from the different markets and he didn’t negotiate a global electronic rights deal.

Now, maybe he would say he tried and the publishers refused or, more likely, even if one gave a single publisher the global electronic publishing rights, maybe they would still parcel up the world into individual territories.

If you can do a deal to co-publish with 2 physical publishers, why not with a third electronic publisher like Amazon’s Kindle? Why not do the deal with Amazon’s Kindle (or someone like that) first and then line up the physical publisher?

Nic Suzor has a nice summary of the brouhaha here.

Duncan Bucknell and the Inquisitr (lid dip Denise Howell on twitter) wonder about the ramifications for Google, MSN, Yahoo etc.

The IPKat recommends Andrew Logie on what should be done now.

Andrew Logie’s point:

The reason people use TPB is that you can get content fast, free and with hardly any effort. Take ABC’s popular series ‘Lost’. If you lived in the US you could either watch or record the series on television or watch it online on ABC’s website. However, here in the UK, you could be waiting 6 months to a year to see that same episode on television, and even longer still to buy it on DVD, and if you think you can watch it online on ABC’s website, forget it: licensing restrictions will block UK internet users.

You do have another option: piracy. ….

resonates with the absurdity Kwanghui Lim identified – he can parallel import the printed books from Amazon, but Amazon won’t sell him the audio files – because of licensing restricti0ns.

Meanwhile, the (unrelated) Swedish Pirate Party organised hundreds of demonstrators to protest the decision in various parts of Sweden, according to Louise Nordstrom.

with apologies to Chief Vitalstatistix:

ARIA’s half year figures for 2008 show that sales of recorded music are still falling – down 4% on the corresponding period last year.

But guess what, the decline in sales of physical copies is almost all set off by the rise in digital sales: 12 million digital tracks up from 8 million for the 6 month period last year.  

According to ARIA:

“… figures which demonstrate the beginning of a remarkable transition to a whole new economy that is still only in its infancy.”

Perhaps in a sign of gloom for music industry executives, a lot of these downloads were single tracks rather than albums, but digital albums still increased by 55%.

ARIA press release here; full stats here.