Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How To Deliver a Print Magazine Online, While Avoiding Piracy?
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a technical magazine that has been available in print for over 40 years. Moving to providing an alternative subscription available online has been hard; the electronic version is quickly pirated and easily available around the world each month. We are a small company, and our survival depends not only on advertising but on the subscription fees. Do any slashdotters have experience of delivering electronic magazines via a subscription service in a way that is cost effective and secure?"
Make the advertisements and credits for your web site part of your content in a way that it's too much work to remove so the copied versions retain this stuff. Like watermarks in images, maybe an article delivered as an image with advertising and credits, etc. Then embed tracking links so you can demonstrate to advertisers the total "viewage".
The expert's forum is an excellent idea. I often read the article comments for valuable insights beyond the article.
This makes me think the best way is to deliver the "magazine" in a continuous flow instead of as a "monthly". On the web, monthly magazines make no sense. Publish an article every few days and link between articles such as part 1 and part 2.
Who wants to pirate one day at a time? Who wants to have to sort and organize multi-part articles? This increases the labor for the pirates and actually gives you some labor flexibility on producing content.
How about if you know who posted the last copy online, he doesn't get any more issues? Assuming that most people are honest (and I believe they are) makes it easy to weed out the jerks.
Not only that there are plenty of PDF password strippers out there that if you have a quad or better (and considering you can get AMD quads for like $70 its kinda nuts not to have at least a quad) can go through entire rainbow tables in no time at all, just set it to use dual cores and you can keep doing other stuff while it runs in the background.
I'd say the best bet is the watermarks but they'll have to be well hidden as its too easy to strip a watermark out if its obvious, maybe have an obvious personalization watermark and a second hidden one with a code that can be traced back to the purchaser, that way you go after the source without punishing your readers.
And I'd like to say how proud I am of this community right now, here is a legitimate small business trying to stay alive and instead of the usual "Just accept getting ripped off, information wants to be free!" bullshit instead there is actual discussion on how best to protect his content while still giving the customers a good experience. If everyone would work together and find compromises like this maybe we could actually show its possible to sell digitally without nasty DRM schemas like SecuROM, we've had Steam show us the way for games but there is still a lot of work that needs doing for e-books and other works and its just nice to see it being discussed like rational adults instead of breaking down into dogmas and bullshit.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This increases the labor for the pirates and actually gives you some labor flexibility on producing content.
You clearly have not seen the tenacity that pirates are capable of. For most, it isn't about ripping someone off, it's about sharing something. Add to that a lot of people with with a lot of time on their hands, and they will work tirelessly to put those articles together, day after day, month after month.
,make so much more money on the web if you have good content.
The other posters suggesting the value-adds mixed with free are bang on. Forums, article archives, lots of "free" stuff, and a reasonable price will potentially get you far more revenue on the net than your print editions would. Embed short videos or effects that help get the article's point across. That's tougher to include in pirated versions, and generally won't be, so you have one up one the pirated version. Use the medium to it's potential, and they will come.
Most important, work on eyeballs for advertising revenue, not necessarily subscriptions. You have the potential
And if the one who that copy is "registered" to was finished with it, and passed it on to someone else without keeping any copies for himself wasn't the one who uploaded it?
Typically, with magazines or any other media, when you are finished with it, you are well within your rights to give it away, resell it (if you can find a buyer), or do whatever you want with it, as long as you don't keep any copies for yourself. Just because said media is distributed electronically instead of printed on paper should in no way give the publisher any additional special privileges than what copyright already grants.
This space unintentionally left blank.
This is the digital age... the best method is to re-tool the publication process. As part of the subscription service, have a questionnaire to fill out that personalizes the ads. As part of the publication process, include information about the subscriber in the ad holes -- you can even customize the content to some degree (in an automated manner) based on the subscriber.
This results in an excellent watermark, as each subscriber will have slightly different content. Just do rolling MD5 hashes, and you'll quickly figure out who's leaking the content. Then stop their subscription.
It comes back to the old "give them something to make it worth it" model -- if you make the subscription for more than "get a dead tree magazine in digital form" and add in the ability to provide online feedback for ads and content, do things to make the customer feel connected to what you're sharing with them, and as a side benefit get excellent demographics information for your advertisers, then even if the magazine itself is pirated all over the place, people will still subscribe, as you're providing them a service that goes beyond that.
One idea off the top of my head: have an online forum where subscribers can discuss the content -- close it off to everyone else. When you print the digital copy for the individual for the month, include the "top 5 posts in customer's chosen category" as part of the Letters sections, and maybe even a roll-up of all comments the customer left on the website since the last publication, plus responses to those by other customers. Costs virtually nothing, but would be an excellent hook and security mechanism.
The best approach for dealing with piracy is making your content easily accessible, hassle-free (i.e., no DRM), and offered at a fair price.
Let me expand on this point. There are broadly 2 kinds of pirates - those who enjoy your product and pirate for personal use (the fans), and those who pirate commercially to make money for themselves (the thieves).
The fans are normally concerned with easy and cheap access to your product. Give it to them and most fans will not bother to pirate because it is risky (exposure to malware), often time consuming (some obscure products can be really hard to find), inconvenient (usually need to assemble from multiple sources) or require technical expertise (eg. applying cracks, rooting). A good example would be Steam which provides cheap and convenient access to games. A counter example would be Game of Thrones - If you live in Oz, you can't get it (no access) and it is expensive (requires cable subscription).
As for the thieves, normally an obscure small technical magazine would not be of interest to them. The exception is if your product is so expensive that even your fans are willing to buy copies from pirates, making it financially worthwhile. Again, reducing your product to a fair price (by market standards) will largely solve this problem. One example is AutoCAD, which has a captive market, ridiculous monopoly pricing and a huge piracy problem.
Since you mentioned "secure", I assume you are contemplating some form of DRM. Just be aware of its disadvantages -its usually expensive (you need to buy/licence the DRM, maintain some way of policing it, maintain customer service to handle irate buyers, have some sort of refund sceheme for customers who cannot run the DRM), it can negatively impact sales (see Sony rootkits), and if badly implemented, can actually cause lawsuits e.g. SecureROM.