Only a few will be left.

Foreword

I want to express a somewhat alternative viewpoint about the future of copyright and the book business.
Warning : all reasoning concerns only books. But who knows, maybe musicians and filmmakers cook with the writers in the same pot.

Couple of definitions

')

• The right of authorship: the right of the author to call his book. An example of his violation would be my statement, as if I had written the book “Ten Little Indians”.
• Copyright: the right or lack thereof to copy and distribute the work. In Russian legislation, this is called "related rights".
• Piracy : an attack on a sea or river vessel in order to seize someone else's property, committed with the use of violence or with the threat of its use.
• DRM: a set of technical tools that, in the imagination of their creators, will not allow anyone to copy some protected information without permission.
• Content: so often called the product of the intense thinking of the author, an extract of his nightmares and secret dreams.

Resistance meaningless

Creating such a DRM system that could not be broken, bypassed, or hacked is impossible in principle. Actually, this is the physical reality of this universe. The only exception is the creation of an absolute dictatorship following the example of Orwell. Something like this:



You can think of any abstruse multi-stage control systems. But as long as there remains a need for easier access to content, DRM will break down. Thus, a system with feedback is obtained: with toughening and complication of content protection methods, access to content becomes more complicated and slower, which leads to greater consumer discontent and stimulates DRM bypass.

So many authors should understand that the magic button “make people pay” does not exist and they will have to accept the fact that times change.

About the future

- If you do not buy our CDs, we will die, and the authors will have nothing to eat!
- We haven't bought your discs for thirty years. When will you die?

Professional writers who live off their books often say that they will soon change their profession, because they will no longer be able to feed themselves and their families. They say that no one else will write books. And this is just great! True, the writers most likely look at this reaction like this:



I sincerely hope to catch those times when only ten new books will be published a year.

When I enter the bookstore now, I am depressed by the endless rows of boring action-packed detectives, tons of snot-rosy novels and fantasy plot clones in the fiction section. Who needs all this waste paper? Of course, no one forces me to buy it. But the fact of using a large amount of paper for the production of low-grade garbage by the conveyor method ...

During the existence of writing, humanity has managed to create a huge number of wonderful texts. To read all the books ever released is not enough life.

There is nothing wrong with this if there are only five professional authors left in the world and their paper books will cost several hundred euros each. I agree to pay even 500, if this is a book that can be removed from the shelf a year later and frantically read from cover to cover, finding there again something new for myself. Just paper editions will become Rolex of the future. Books again, as it once was, will be bought in order to “throw off the show”. Or to say a big thank you to the author.

There is an argument that if such a development occurs, only grafomany will write and the quality literature will cease to exist. This, sorry, is nonsense. A holy place is never empty. Graphomania will not stop writing, geniuses will not stop being born. There will be less writing in your free time, which is good.

Technical literature is a separate topic. She is quickly becoming outdated and has a limited audience. But the existence of the O'Reilly publisher confirms that there will be no particular problems in this area.

Conclusion

The old world is once again bursting at the seams, from which a new one is born. Someone in this process will hurt. It has always been and will be repeated in the future. So relax and have fun: the future is coming now.