[nycbug-talk] SOPA DOA

Edward Capriolo edlinuxguru at gmail.com
Tue Jan 17 14:15:49 EST 2012


On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 1:18 PM, Chris Snyder <chsnyder at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just curious, was there ever a time when you could make a living
> writing a book as specialized as "Cassandra High Performance
> Cookbook?" Did you publisher lead you to believe that you could?
>
> I've written a tech book, too. I'd be thrilled to find out that
> 300,000 people downloaded it, and over-the-moon to discover that more
> than a handful actually cared to read it.
>
> You can make the lawyers fatter, or you can accept the fact that free
> and even ad-supported downloads are part of the world we live in and
> work with it. Every download is a potential customer.
>

No. I am not living on pipe-dreams that writing specialized tech books
would make me rich. I am sure most of the 300,000 downloads were just
robots or whatever.

I am sure that some whiz kid data science summer intern guy at google could
design some algorithm and filter to filter out search results to illegal
software, movies, or books in like a month. But google has no intensive to
do that. In fact, it is the opposite. their intensive is to not block
stuff.

So everyone wins, the ad serving site (google), the illegal downloading
site (edonky.com), the download-er (the dirtbag). Well almost everyone.

CAN-SPAM helped, Do Not Call Registry helped, the advertising industry self
imposed do_not_track helped. So if people are given the proper incentive to
do the right thing, great events occasionally unfold.
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