Content and Digital Asset Management

One more person has discovered, like Baen, that if you release your content inexpensively and without DRM, you can beat piracy at its own game. Comedian Louis CK recently tried an experiment in which he made a full-length comedy special available for sale from his website, to stream or download with no DRM, for $5. [...]

Amid the press of daily news, it sometimes helps to step back a bit to examine the larger Internet trends driving a lot of what we see crossing the tickers and newswires. At the AlwaysOn Venture Summit today in Half Moon Bay, AlwaysOn Founder and Editor Tony Perkins is outlining the big trends he sees with Kelly Porter, managing director of Woodside Capital. Here are the big ones they’re watching: Big Data + Cloud: More data has been created in the last three years than the previous 40,000. And with services such as Amazon Web Services, using that data is

This story might need to be taken with a grain of salt based on its sources, but it could have some serious implications if true. Megaupload, like Rapidshare, is a cyber-locker site where people can upload files of any kind for others to download. Many of those files are illicitly-copied commercial material, which naturally gives [...]

From the Fortykey website comes this screenshot of a clever marketing idea: Actually, the book looks pretty interesting: ABOUT “CARDANICA” “A delicious steampunk nightmare dripping blood and oil from every crevice.”Graham Edwards, Fantasy writer “Not since Harlan Ellison’s ‘I Have no mouth and I must scream’ has there been a better depiction of man at [...]

The Swiss government commissioned a study on the impact of copyright-infringing downloading. The independent study concluded that downloaders use the money they spend to buy more legitimate entertainment products. So they've concluded to maintain Switzerland's extant copyright law, which makes downloading for personal use legal. It's a rare victory for evidence-based policy…

(h/t TeleRead)

Valve is one of the major players in the gaming arena.

Piracy is a ‘non-issue’: “Managing director says piracy is a 'service problem.'"

Gabe Newell, Valve managing director, has claimed that software piracy is a “non issue” for the company’s Steam gaming service. Instead, he said that the fundamental misconception about piracy is that is that it is motivated by price.

Author Charlie Stross unloads both barrels on the big six publishers and their insistence on using DRM in connection with their ebooks, arguing that their demands for DRM lock their customers into Amazon's Kindle platform, "handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder."

Like many of you, we’re wondering about what caused today’s OverDrive/Penguin news:

"OverDrive Suspends Access to New Penguin eBook Titles, 'Get For Kindle' Access Also Shut Down"

Only time will tell  why Penguin decided to change their policy with OverDrive (and libraries) but we’re wondering if a February letter by OverDrive CEO Steve Potash might provide clues...

From Torrent Freak: European Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes has once again spoken out against the so-called copyright monopolies. Last year at the Forum d’Avignon she noted that if media companies want to tackle piracy, they should look beyond “corporatist self-interest.” During this year’s speech titled Who Feeds the Artists, Kroes went even further [...]

Got the following email from Thad McIlroy of The Future of Publishing: I thought you might get a kick out of this: http://thefutureofpublishing.com/2011/11/music-business-teach-the-book-business/ I took a Salon.com article on the death of record stores and substituted ”bookstores” throughout: It’s scary that it reads so convincingly. Best regards, Thad Here’s the beginning: As book sales plummet and famed shops close, [...]