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...

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

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

8 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

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.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- 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.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
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.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- 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.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - 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...
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
    - 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.
      [ link to this | view in chronology ]
      - 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.
        [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- 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?
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]