Day: October 30, 2001

Finally: A Publisher with a Sane View of E-Books and Copy Protection

While searching for resources on print-on-demand publishing I ran across an excellent article putting into context potential lost e-book sales due to unauthorized copying. In an article on the web site of the Publisher’s Marketing Association, Danny O. Snow writes,

As “brick and mortar” bookstores know, a small number of consumers have always stolen books. Losses from theft are a standard factor in calculating bookstores’ operating expenses. Books with high prices seem more likely targets of shoplifters — online or offline.

…

My experience as CEO of Unlimited Publishing LLC (www.unlimitedpublishing.com) reveals a related pattern. We publish books primarily in printed form, but recently began releasing e-books in cooperation with BookZone. We typically price the electronic editions below $5, while paperback prices are $11.99 to $22.99. In the planning stages, we learned that a substantial percentage of consumers — 20% or more — who download an e-book later purchase a printed copy. As a result, we now view e-books as good tools to sell tree-books — not much different than free review copies given to journalists and VIPs.

Snow has a lot more insights which could be boiled down to this — if publishers pass the lower costs of publishing e-books on to consumers in the form of low prices, piracy will become much less of an issue. On the other hand, if publishers insist on charging the same retail price for electronic versions of a book as they do for the paper copy, then a pirate market in electronic books will flourish.

A Prime Example of Military Intelligence

This really belongs on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. The United States has been airdropping food over Afghanistan. The food comes in a plastic-wrapped square yellow container. Guess what else comes in yellow? That’s right, unexploded cluster bombs. So now, the United States is broadcasting warnings over radio trying to teach illiterate Afghanis the difference between a yellow can-shaped cluster bomb and a yellow square-shaped food parcel with the warning to “Please, please exercise caution when approaching unidentified yellow objects in areas that have been recently bombed.”

Makes about as much sense as the Pentagon’s repeated claims that they are not at war with the Afghanistan people. Okay, fine, then why the hell are they dropping cluster bombs, which kill indiscriminately by design?

Do Drug Patents Present a Major Obstacle to AIDS Treatment in Africa?

For the past several years AIDS activists have charged that patents on HIV antivirals has significantly harmed the ability of African nations to respond to the AIDS crisis. A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, however, suggests that this is simply not the case.

Researcher Amir Attaran, an adjunct lecturer in public policy and a researcher at the Center for International Development, examined the status of patents on anti-AIDS drugs and found that, in fact, most such drugs were not patented in African nations. Looking at the patent status of 15 drugs in 53 African countries, they found only 172 actually existing patents for such drugs out of the 795 patents that might exist. In fact, in several African countries there were no patents on any existing HIV drugs — and, therefore, no legal barriers to using generic versions of patented AIDS drugs — but almost no treatment of AIDS patients with those antivirals.

Not surprisingly, the real obstacle to treating HIV in Africa is the continent’s endemic poverty. According to Attaran, even with generics AIDS treatment is still going to cost $350 per person in countries that typically budget less than $10 per person in their health budgets.

Attaran could have also added to the obstacles state resistance to the reality of the AIDS epidemic. Just this month, for example, South Africa’s government stepped into a major controversy over its continuing suppression of an internal government report on the AIDS epidemic in that country. The report was suppressed largely because it called for the widespread use of anti-HIV drugs — an approach which continues to be opposed by South African president Thabo Mbeki (Mbeki has, in the past, turned down large donations of HIV drugs in accordance with this policy).

Sources:

One Expert’s Opinion: Amir Attaran Says New Study Shows that Patents Are Not the Obstacle to HIV Treatment in Africa. Kennedy School of Government (Harvard), Press Release, October 22, 2001.

Do patents for antiretroviral drugs constrain access to AIDS treatment in Africa? Amir Attaran, Lee Gillespie-White, Journal of the American Medical Association, 2001;286:1886-1892.

Animal Rights Protesters in Arkansas Show True Heart of the Movement

Surprise, surprise, surprise. Animal rights activists associated with Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty have long been extolling and promising violence, and in their big protest (if you consider 180 or so activists a major protest) against Stephens Incorporated, they tried to follow through on those promises.

Police had set up a 3 foot barrier to separate the protesters from the Stephens, Inc. building. Late in the afternoon, while one activist shouted “The Battle of Little Rock has begun” over a bullhorn, several demonstrators — pushed at the barrier and attempted to climb it, at which point police apparently used force, reportedly including stun grenades, rubber bullets, and pepper spray, to control the crowd.

Estimates of the number arrested ranged from 10 reported by an Arkansas television station two a couple dozen reported by the Associated Press.

Earlier in the day the activist, many of whom refused to give the press their last names, showed up at the homes of at least two executives of Stephens Inc. to protest. Police were well-prepared, however, with plenty of police at several points along the march and a police helicopter circling overhead (hint — maybe police in Great Britain should take a look at how police can prevent violent hooliganism while still allowing people to peacefully protest).

Animal rights activist Ryan Courtade (who still can’t make up his mind which side he’s on), quickly sent out an e-mail describing the events and, in my opinion, accurately assessing the state of the animal rights movement,

Our movement needs to take a step back and reanalyze itself. What happened today is not acceptable. If we have to force Stephen’s to drop it’s financial back [sic] of HLS from Terrorism, and Fear, then we are no better than the lowest form of life. We need Stephen’s to drop financial back because of what they are doing to animals. We need to speak in a unified voice, and not with terror.

Sure, but lets be honest — there is no animal rights movement today that is separate from this sort of violence. The handful of animal rights organizations willing to condemn these sorts of actions can be counted on one hand, while even a group like the Humane Society of the United States stoops to hiring advocates of terrorism and violence.

The problem that folks like Courtade face is that the animal rights movement already waged its nonviolent campaign and it lost big time. People do care about animal welfare, and they are certainly more aware of animal issues than they were 20 years ago, but the animal rights movement has been heard and soundly rejected by the overwhelming majority of Americans. People may disagree about the most humane way to kill a cow, but few Americans consider killing a cow for food to be inherently immoral. People may be concerned about the fate of animals used in medical research, but nobody except Ingrid Newkirk is going to go along with letting a premature infant die just to preserve the life of a calf whose lung tissue is used to make the infant’s lungs work more efficiently.

The rhetoric is stale and played out — all the animal rights movement has left are its arsonists and agitators. It’s ironic that even as SHAC should be riding high with its claimed successes at driving HLS out of business, its leaders (as well as the rest of the animal rights movement) seems to have an air of increasing desperation. Even PETA’s nutty campaigns are becoming less and less imaginative and, more importantly, the shock value is simply no longer news.

Look at the protest against Stephens. After hyping this protested practically every week on animal rights mailing lists, and garnering extensive publicity for itself, the best SHAC can do is convince a little under 200 activists to travel to Arkansas? No wonder they have to resort to intimidation and fear — without it, they’d be irrelevant.

Source:

In response to the Stephen’s demonstrations. Ryan Courtade, E-mail communication, October, 29, 2001.

Animal rights activists picket. Tim Taylor, Times Record (Fort Smith, Arkansas), October 29, 2001.

Demonstrations turn violent. KARK News 4, October 29, 2001.

Activists clash with police in Ark. Melissa Nelson, The Associated Press, October 29, 2001.

How Many People Will Die from Mad Cow Disease?

As I noted last year, although initial predictions suggested that tens of thousands of people would die from variant Cretuzfeldt-Jakob disease (Mad Cow Disease), so far the number of new cases and deaths have been extremely small. Now, a new study suggests that in the worst case scenario only a few thousand people will contract the disease — not the 100,000 or so predicted by other researchers.

A lot depends on how existing numbers are interpreted. So far, very few people have been diagnosed with vCJD. From 1995 to 1999, for example, there were only 61 cases of the disease diagnosed in Great Britain, with 55 deaths. Altogether, only about 100 people have died from the disease.

Still, researchers at the Imperial College predict that as many as 100,000 people could die from the disease. This is predicated on the view that large numbers of people were exposed to Mad Cow-infected beef, but simply have yet to show any symptoms of the disease. Researchers published this month in Science offers an alternative view — that few people have contracted the disease because few people actually consumed Mad Cow-infected beef.

In their study, the researchers conclude that even if 12 million people in Great Britain were exposed to the disease, the incubation period in most cases would be far longer than current human life spans. They estimate that the total number of vCJD cases will be somewhere between a few hundred and several thousand.

“Even in the worst case scenario, there are never likely to be more than 100 cases of vCJD pre year,” researcher Huillard d’Aignaux told Reuters.

Sources:

UK study predicts fewer human ‘Mad Cow’ cases. John Griffiths, Reuters, October 25, 2001.

vCJD ‘epidemic’ might be waning. Pallab Ghosh, The BBC, October 26, 2001.