Head of Publishing Industry reports his brain missing
Maybe it’s just me today, but this outburst of ignorance reported on The Register really has me fuming.
The latest in a series of idiocies in the publishing industry’s campaign against Google Books features Francisco Pinto Balsemao, head of the European Publishers Council, ranting about “parasitic” search firms:
The Associated Press reports that Francisco Pinto Balsemao told a conference in Brussels that Google and others were attempting to reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model. Warming to his theme, he said it was fascinating to see how these companies help themselves to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenues off the back of other peoples content. While Balsemao slated Google and the like, he accepted that consumers too had to be weaned off free content, so that the publishing industry could legal certainty and the confidence that their intellectual property will be protected.The Associated Press reports that Francisco Pinto Balsemao told a conference in Brussels that Google and others were attempting to reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model.
Mr Balseamo follows the music industry down the well-trodden path to the commercial lunatic asylum where everyone looking at material you hold rights to means a lost sale, and customers are criminals. He entirely fails to realise that Google Books amounts to the greatest advertising campaign for books he could never imagine.
The point he so gloriously misses is that books and computers are different media altogether. Mr Balseamo, I challenge you to introduce me to a single individual on this planet who will read through Shakespeare’s collected works on Google Books.