Live Copyfraud Discussion With Jason Mazzone; Techdirt Book Club

from the join-us dept

Fri, May 11th 2012 11:30am — Mike Masnick

As we mentioned earlier this week, we're experimenting with doing a live discussion for the Techdirt book club. For April, the book was Copyfraud by Jason Mazzone who will be joining us today to talk about it at noon PT (3pm ET).
And don't forget that the book club book for May is Reclaiming Fair Use by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi. We'll be publishing more excerpts in the coming weeks...

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Filed Under: book club, copyfraud, discussion, jason mazzone, live chat

8 Comments

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iamtheky (profile), 11 May 2012 @ 1:15pm

Thank you kindly for asking my question, though I would have liked to get his opinion on the very small difference in price for the physical and electronic version, rather than just acknowledging that he has no role in the process.

was mighty nice of him to point to the paper, any author willing to point to free versions while selling the same is high quality, may just purchase a copy for that very reason.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 May 2012 @ 1:20pm

Re:
It is a pity that the university press doesn't seem to realise that ebooks give them a potentially wider readership than they have had before, the small quantities they print have always meant that they have always had to charge more for physical copies than the cover price of the average bestseller and everyone understands that; but no such constraint exists for them with ebooks.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 May 2012 @ 6:02pm

I can't say I'm a fan of the chat platform. It would have been nice for all the readers to have more of an active role in the discussion; instead, we were treated to a show starring Mike, Jason, and HuwOS.

I understand this chat was an experiment, and I understand the point of the book club is for people to read the excellent book Jason wrote (yes, I'm glad I bought a copy). However, I would like to see a different chat client put in place the next time a chat with an author is scheduled.
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HuwOS (profile), 11 May 2012 @ 8:01pm

Re:
How was it a fault of the chat platform?
I have a feeling, but don't know for sure, that there was an unusual (for this site) reticence when it came to asking questions and perhaps a smaller number of readers than techdirt might have hoped for, watching live.
I thought it might be an issue to do with the time of day rather than anything else and perhaps that's something that Mike might take on board.
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Mike Masnick (profile), 12 May 2012 @ 1:10am

Re:
I can't say I'm a fan of the chat platform. It would have been nice for all the readers to have more of an active role in the discussion; instead, we were treated to a show starring Mike, Jason, and HuwOS.

When we tried to do a straight conversation via comments, not too many people bothered to take part. This way, we actually got a lot more engagement -- by making it something of an "event."

What about the platform bothered you specifically? What could be improved?
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Mike Masnick (profile), 12 May 2012 @ 1:15am

Re: Re:
I have a feeling, but don't know for sure, that there was an unusual (for this site) reticence when it came to asking questions and perhaps a smaller number of readers than techdirt might have hoped for, watching live.

Actually, I was pretty happy with the number of live watchers -- which ranged from about 100 to 150 during the course of the hour.

In terms of questions... it was a mixed bag. We ended up using maybe 25% of the questions asked, but the rest were not particularly on topic. Many were generally on topic for *the site* but not for Jason specifically, so we didn't use them. We tried to stay focused on topics related to his book, rather than general questions about business models, IP law, etc. -- which made up many of the other questions. Overall, though I thought it was a good level of participation and that the questions that were asked were good (thank you for your questions, btw!).

Of course, we're always open to other ideas for getting even greater engagement.

I thought it might be an issue to do with the time of day rather than anything else and perhaps that's something that Mike might take on board.

We tried to pick a generally reasonable time, but you never know. What do you think might be a better time?

We'll certainly continue to experiment...
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Mike Masnick (profile), 12 May 2012 @ 1:31am

Re: Re: Re:
Interesting... I hadn't even realized that CoverItLive has a stats page, but I went and looked and total readers over the course of the hour ended up being 662 -- which is more than I expected. However, since at any one time we were mostly around 100, it seems like there may have been a fair number of "in and out" people.
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Mike Masnick (profile), 13 May 2012 @ 10:56pm

Re: Re: Re: Re:
And one more point on this... As of now (Sunday night) we're up to 7,000 people have watched the replay of the conversation. So it seems people were interested, though I'm not sure how many of the latecomers would have wanted to watch it live as well.
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