Yeah, note how I said “government protected” rather than “government run”. The point is that it should have special status, not that it needs to be a government body. Although the UN is hardly immune from bureaucracy either.

I have no problem with that at all! I think you’re running with the fact that I’m talking about copyright and letting that take you into a dark place where I hate all forms of sharing and lending. In fact, I’m a very firm advocate of DRM-free books, of sharable ebooks, and of electronic libraries. I got into huge trouble last year because I suggested that European copyright law was badly in need of updating. (I also think we all need to be more alert to the opportunities of the Creative Commons licences; quite a lot of the reforms which are otherwise necessary could be stood down if we had a culture which used CC Sharealike and so on more, and hard copyright less.) I was also delighted with the B&N Nook (which ironically runs on Google’s Android OS) because it has a share feature. If I’ve said once that the route to selling ebooks is not more copy protection and fences but a cool buying experience and a decent product, I’ve said it a hundred times over the last year.

The Google Book Settlement, though, is another thing all together. As far as I can see it undermines copyright at a basic level, and the bottom line is that even ideas like Freemium hinge on some form of protection of the right of creators to be paid for their ideas: there’s no free-to-consumer model if you can’t get advertisers, and if potential advertisers can simply duplicate your site there’s no particular reason why they’d use your space to advertise. Similarly, if you can’t protect your ad-free content, you can’t have premium users. If we get into a position where copyright is softened but not reformed – if we basically have a weak version of 19th Century copyright rather than a flexible, intelligent, 21st Century version – then the situation I see evolving is one where, far from getting a cloud of individual creators making money from their ideas and selling direct to consumers (which is the model people often cite as a kind of content heaven) we’ll end up with a content industry which is an extreme version of the US movie studios, turning out bowdlerised, sanitised, advertiser-friendly content and simply appropriating any more interesting work they find floating around.

In a word: this isn’t a filesharing/booklending issue. This is more like one of those old westerns where some fat old guy in a white suit announces he owns all the water rights for the town. And I’m saying: “No, you don’t, that water belongs to the farmers and that’s how it should stay.” The problem is that the fat old guy is offering a new way of trading in grain and everyone’s focused on that instead of the water, but the key thing is that once he owns the water, he can do what the hell he wants and there’ll be nothing the town can do about it.

Admittedly I didn’t download it- I went to a large bookstore (many times) and spent some good hours until I was more than 3/4 way through.

Then I bought it.

Why? I could have finished it in the bookstore- it would have been only maybe 3 or 4 hours more. And I would have had great hot chocolate supply (unlike at home, where I had to make it first).

The other, maybe for you more important question is: would I have bought the book if I didn’t have had the opportunity to read it for free?
I say no. Many reasons for that, too many for a commment.

However, am I now one of the customers you don’t want to have- one that bought your book but read it in advance for free?

This post was mentioned on Twitter by Harkaway: #GBS Ten Second Primer: http://bit.ly/8ZJaUj (Biased, because I am. Feel free to comment and object and so on.)…