Kids robbing JK Rowling of royalties

Rob Hammadi, a representative of the Publishers Association told a British audience of the frightening possibility of kids downloading the latest Harry Potter book from sites in Eastern Europe onto their Palm Pilots and taking them into school to show their mates.

This would deprive authors like JK Rowling of the royalties they should rightly expect for their toil, Mr Hammadi reports.

We wonder which school playgrounds in the UK he's been hanging around in recently. Palm Pilots cost slightly more than half a crown and as far as we know are not normally toted around by your average kid in your average state school.

On being pressed, Mr Hammadi did confess that it was kids from the more affluent sectors of society that were doing this, but apart from this produced little evidence of widespread copyright theft.

We must remember that while not all publishers are money-grubbing individuals who get their kicks by starting magazines and then shutting them down, the Publishers Association has a vested interest in advertising rather than content - as you can see by flicking to its web site.

There was, of course, a time when journalists and writers were publishers, and the Web put the fear of god into quite a few fat cats in pin-striped suits that those days might return.

These would be the same suits who advised their proprietors that it was worth spending megagazillions on fancy Web sites, only to realise later on that hardly anyone was reading them.

In the old, pre-Web days, the main function of a publisher was to buy paper at the cheapest price possible, chivvy along the advertising staff, and pay the journos as little as possible so that the space between the ads was filled.

Of course, not all publishers are bad. We've even known one or two who actually thought content was more important than adverts. But they never lasted long... µ