Pub Talk

By Jim Sturdivant

About Jim

Jim Sturdivant is senior editor of Publishing Executive magazine and a contributing editor at Book Business magazine. A former community newspaper editor in Philadelphia and Northern New Jersey, he has been covering the publishing industry for NAPCO since 2007. He writes about technology, market trends and revenue opportunities in magazine and book publishing. E-mail him at jsturdivant@napco.com or call 215-238-5224.

Media Vent

Thoughts and reactions to the PBAA-MPA Conference

Jun 14, 2013

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The Digital Domain

Foli Brings Digital Magazines to Waiting Rooms

Jun 13, 2013

Whether it is a doctors office, auto repair shop or other places with a waiting room, there are two things...

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The Digital Market

The Good, The Bad, The Weird: 6 Revelations from (not finished) Digital Dashboard

Jun 13, 2013

While I enjoyed the drama of the recent article summarizing PwC’s Entertainment and Media Outlook 2013-2017 on the magazine industry...

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B2B Beat

ABM Annual Conference Greatest Hits

May 17, 2013

Much has been written about ABM merging under the umbrella of SIIA. But much more was going on during the...

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Profit from Publishing!

No Line in the Sand

May 28, 2013

I have always asked why draw a line in the sand when within seconds of completion the line will be...

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Publishers' Dojo

Like practically everything else in publishing, licensing content is changing

May 20, 2013

I'm blogging from the Worldwide Media Marketplace (WMM), an annual event hosted by the FIPP, the worldwide magazine media association....

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The Postal Pundit

Climbing Out Of The Rubble Of Sandy

Dec 11, 2012

The entire Eastern seaboard, but now mostly New York and New Jersey, has been struggling through the aftermath of Sandy,...

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Everything Publishing

A New Way To Be a Player

Sep 19, 2011

If you want to increase affinity with your brand, grow traffic (up to 20x for some sites) and retention, create...

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Byte Back

What Is “Interactive” Anyway? (Part 2)

Feb 28, 2011

The real question, it turns out, is less about embedded multimedia than it is about personalization, relevance and immediacy of...

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Death of Aaron Swartz Underscores Need for Reforms He Championed

By James Sturdivant | Posted on January 14, 2013

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Much is being said about the suicide of Internet pioneer Aaron Swartz, to which I can add little except that it was a tragic end to a brilliant, troubled life. Whatever combination of factors led Swartz to take his own life, it's clear his death will serve as a grim indictment of the very legal structure he sought to upend—a system designed around older notions of copyright control and enforcement.

"There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands," Swartz said last year, after helping to stop SOPA. He saw these "traditional things"—outmoded applications of concepts like copyright, DRM, licensing and fair use—as nothing less than a threat to freedom. Though sometimes taking his "hacktivist" work to controversial extremes, Swartz's actions helped define what's at stake in the effort to preserve and enhance the critical role of information in our culture even as traditional media companies struggle with radically new business models.

While the rights of content creators and copyright holders are obviously important, it is unhelpful to compare ripping a CD to ripping off a bank, or file downloads to home burglary. Pirating movies is frequently compared (by the movie industry) to stealing a car. This ignores the fact that creative works are never just commodities, and that demand for artistic and scientific ideas can be harnessed for profit in ways that acknowledge and respect the borderless nature of the Internet—working to leverage social sharing for marketing and e-commerce purposes, for instance.

Media entities really have no choice, as each attempt to strong-arm users only leads to embarrassment, or worse. Consider the music industry's MP3 wars, or the bruising battles over DRM. Already, in the wake of Swartz's death, influential bloggers are calling for scholars to associate themselves with open-access journals only. This is certainly not what JSTOR (the database hacked by Swartz) wants to see happen.

Swartz was never as extreme as some tried to paint him. He never said regulation shouldn't exist; he simply understood that new ways of creating, storing and distributing information require a different sort of regulatory scheme. As one of the developers of Creative Commons, he sought new, positive ways to allow for flexibility in the digital sphere.

One thing seems clear: again and again, old laws and existing interpretations prove themselves ham-fisted in the face of the current realities of information access. In the end, Swartz's life and death proved this to be only too correct.

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Business Management

E-media