chosaq

Digital shoplifting revisited

On his blog, Vincent points to a recent Asahi.com article about “Digital shoplifting” (デジタル万引き), a term that refers to the recent phenomenon of people taking pictures of unpurchased book or magazine pages with their mobile phones.

First of all, this is old news, as this BBC article of 2003-06-30 and a simple Google search reveal.

Secondly and as I have argued before, I don’t quite get the point. There’s no shoplifting going on here – reproducing information by taking a picture nicely hooks in on its nonrivalrous aspect; the (digital) consumption of the person who takes the picture does not reduce another person’s consumption of the same good – the magazine is still there, something that is not the case with ordinary shoplifting. And also: allowing people to take and exchange pictures of magazines probably has the reverse effect – the hype surrounding the magazine increases and with that also its sales will.

For now, however, copyright extremism (in the form of “mobile phone manners”) prevails.