rc3.org

Lots of good stuff about making money by giving stuff away:

O’Reilly publishes books that get really widely pirated on the internet, because, they publish techie books, right? If there’s a form that’s well-suited to being published digitally, this is it. You get it digitally, and then you can scan it and search it and so on. And you can find just the right bit at the moment that you need that technical advice. And the people who are in a position to nick it electronically are already pre-qualified. That’s the audience, right? They’re all geeks. So O’Reilly says, “We monitor the trafficking in infringing copies of our work, and what we find is that the works that are most profitable are also the most pirated.” So that means — for most of our works — they’re not even popular enough for anyone to want to steal them. And for the works that are really popular, we’re already making tons and tons of money off of those works. So a little bit of piracy at the edge is just a form of progressive taxation on them.