Obscurity vs. Piracy

Tracy Chevalier, the chair of The Society of Authors, which represents more than 8,500 professional writers in the UK, recently stated that:

“… we need to think radically … we have to evolve and create a very different pay system, possibly by making the content available free to all and finding a way to get paid separately.”

This was in the context of how the publishing industry was failing to adapt to the digital age.

An interesting aside from the article referenced above:

In 1701 The True-Born Englishman, a satirical poem by Daniel Defoe became a bestseller after an estimated 80,000 unauthorised copies were distributed. It did not make him rich but it did make him famous. In the preface to a later edition he wrote of his gratitude to the “pirates” who had sold it, the first known reference to intellectual property theft as piracy

Perhaps the awning gap between that which seeks our attention and the limited attention we have to give will culminate in a model where advertising, as a separate model merges with content as a model. A state where content is advertising and advertising is content. And that the content needs to be engaging.

And to go back to the title of this post, is obscurity a bigger threat than piracy?

Thoughts?

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Picture via Hazel Tsoi