I am happy to support the “conventional wisdom” of my new media-savvy friends and colleagues when it comes to the bone-headed behavior of the music industry. This month alone, we’ve watched the threat to raise royalty rates for webcasters take center stage. And though a reprieve has been granted, it ain’t over yet. But today I’m taking time off form being smugly confident that the attempts to suppress content that wants to be in the wild always indicates stupidity or malevolence. Sometimes, knowledge should stay under raps, and sometimes, decisions about sharing should belong exclusively to the content’s creators and distributors, not for their benefit, but for the benefit of content consumers.

Various leak and hacker rumors about the ending, or even the full contents of J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows have been flying around the net for a couple of months. This week, bad copies of the book apparently found their way to BitTorrent sites, having been photographed by pinheads with too much time on their hands. While this is annoying for Potter fans like me who do not wish to be spoiled, avoiding the leaked information has been relatively easy. But yesterday, a New York Times review apparently based on an early copy of the book found in a bookstore, changed all that. Details of the book’s plot are now a mere click away, and easily stumbled upon by accidental readers. The review also appears in today’s Audible NYT digest, my usual first source of news, each day. This is not good.

And isn’t it interesting that The Times managed to show restraint while David Pogue carried an iPhone, weeks before its release. That review didn’t appear until Apple’s embargo was lifted. I guess Steve Jobs is more intimidating than J.K. Rowling and all of her magical characters.

Harry Potter fan sites have begun a letter-wiring campaign aimed at shaming The Times. I’m with the fans.

A few people have made the sanctimonious and self-serving argument that J.K. Rowling and her publishers’ insistence on complete secrecy about the contents of Deathly Hallows is an unrealistic attempt to stifle free flow of infuriation, akin to the RIAA’s obsessive crackdowns on licensed music performance and distribution. Are they afraid they’ll lose book sales?

I don’t think Rowling and company are worried in the least about revelations of Deathly Hallows plot points harming book sales. I cannot imagine a scenario in which a person who would otherwise buy the book would choose not to do so because the text was available via BitTorrent, or because of the contents of a Times review. To be sure, they’re preserving the anticipation of the seventh book, and pumping the hype associated with its launch into the marketplace, but lose book sales? No way. I think the extreme security measures, and threats of lawsuits are all about giving fans what they want, a spoiler-free experience. For once, the interests of the content distributor and the content consumer are the same.

Dislaimer: In the following paragraph, I make an allusion to someone I know who is more famous than myself. I tend to avoid that practice and believe it should be employed as sparingly as possible. I have now exhausted my quota for July.

In the too-cool-for-Harry Potter tech world, this week has brought more speculation about the identity of Fake Steve Jobs, ginned up by more people with too much time on their hands, and a desire to stir things up for the sake of site traffic. A decent percentage of the blogosphere churn continues to point to Mac author Andy Ihnatko as the man behind the very popular and very funny FSJ blog, but the evidence seems awfully flimsy. I know Andy slightly–back in the day, I interviewed him once for my podcast. And I have absolutely no doubt that being Fake Steve Jobs is completely within his talents. But I’d just rather not know who’s been writing all that great FSJ stuff. And judging by commenters to this post, I’m not alone. It’s a pulling the mask of the Lone Ranger moment. And if it is you, Andy, deny deny deny.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 7:55 am and is filed under Blog Entry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.