“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” ….

The industries of Music, Movies, TV Shows, and books will all follow the same path. That path is, protect their content, protect their profits, and stop piracy at any cost.

The music industry began with DRM which would only work on specific platforms, and pissed off consumers who turned to piracy. They then tried to threaten and scare everyone into doing things their way with lawsuits. As new models began being developed and implemented they began quashing them with, lawsuits, and finacial profit sharing deals set up to cause the partner companies to fail. Everything they did made it more difficult for people to legitimately download music. They offered nothing to replace what they were destroying with the exception of i-Tunes, and raised the prices there. Then the education campain began, “think about the artists whose livelyhood you are destroying”, “copyright infringement is theft”, “let your middle school students do these exercises”, etc. And lastly the need to get the governments to intervene to protect their businesses by passing laws like ACTA, UK’s Digital Economy Bill, french three strikes law, south korea’s new IP laws.

Now enter the e-book publishers 10 years later, they begin with DRM, next there are the threats and lawsuits, then …. nothing …. the worlds internet has adapted. people are truely anonymous. internet connections can’t be spied on because all communications apps now contain the ability to plug in encryption of your choice. video and audio compression techology gets better so the files are much smaller. The official numbers for piracy go down because no one can tell what people are doing online. The only people that get caught file sharing are newbies who start using encryption after their first warning letter. People have 500 tByte hard drives and store pretty much everything they have ever watched or listened to.

The e-book publisher got there late and began following the same path that the music, movie, and TV industries had followed. But technology out ran the attempts by the media industry to legislate knowledge and information.

Looking back on this era financial historians will have 20/20 hindsight telling students how the customer is always right and the e-book industry was destroyed by the recording industries inability, unwillingness to adapt, and never ending greed.