With cell phone carriers pushing camera phones, will booksellers soon share the concerns of colleagues in Japan depicted in an article from the Asahi Shimbun? Apparently people have taken to using their phones to capture all kinds of information as visual notes, often from magazines and now from BOOKS as well, which the Japanese Magazine Publishers Assocation has dubbed “digital shoplifting.” The organization has distributed posters to 20,000 bookstores asking that people “please refrain from using such devices as cameras in mobile phones to record information.”
What’s your take on this? Is digital shoplifting a real issue? I think it hasn’t come to Taiwan yet, but it soon will? What do you think? I never thought about this before, until i saw the new term. Wow!
Maybe not shoplifting because one doesn’t take the original, but it could be copyright infringement, because the author or his assigns has the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the work unless it falls into the fair use exception.
Fair use depends, in the US and Taiwan, on the nature of the exploitation (commercial or personal use?); the nature of the work copied (a simple map of taiwan or technical know-how?); the amount and percentage of the total work copied; and the effect of the exploitation on the current and potential market for the work.
Digital cellphone cameras may be new technology, but if one copies valuable original information without permission of the author and either uses it for commercial gain or distributes it over the Internet, it sounds like old-fashioned copyright infringement to me. On the other hand, copying a small portion for personal use might be considered fair use.
But new technologies do spawn new problems (or opportunities). I recall reading somewhere about warnings to female metro riders to watch out for people photographing up their skirts with their cell phones.
Well, what’s interests me, is that it would be possible for a customer to go into a bookstore, say, and he wants to read Paogao’s new book from Locus Bookstore. So he goes into Eslite, and with his digi camera, he takes snaps of the first 10 pages, downloads them on hism home computer and reads them. he likes the book so far. so he goes back the next day, and shoots 10 more pages, until after a month or so, he has casually stolen the entire book. Big trouble if this catches on in Japan or elsewhere. do theu have those camera phones now in taiwan? anyone ever try it?
Anyone wiling to a: go back a dozen times to photo the book, or B: read crappy ass low res digital images of an entire 2 or 300 page book is clearly NOT going to shell out the cash to buy it. No way, no how. If they do this your not really behind as they were never going to pay cash anyway. Your only behind if people are stealing something they might otherwise buy. Someone like myself, who reads obssessively, is the target market for a book. I spend significant money each month on books and I enjoy the physical object as much as the writing at times.
I cannot fathom staring at images on my computer in lieu of an actual book. For Sports and the weather, it’s fine, but for 300 pages…yikes.