Tim O’Reilly Said What? [Updated x2]
[UPDATE 2: Tim O’Reily’s has responded to this article, which prompted me to clarify my intent and position in the comments to this article.]
I really like Seth Godin’s Blog. I’m not in advertising and I’ve never taken a marketing class, so I don’t think like a marketing professional. Seth’s blog helps me see the world from a whole new perspective. It is because I respect Seth Godin so much that I will pick on him a little in this post. (Sorry, Seth.)
Seth quotes Tim O’Reilly as saying “piracy is not the enemy, obscurity is”. The problem is that Seth doesn’t give a source or link for the quote. I like the quote—it’s short, snappy, and dead on—and I wanted to link directly to it, so I punched the quote into Google. What I found was that Tim O’Reilly didn’t make that statement1. [Update: Seth points out in his comment that Tim O’Reilly is comfortable with the attribution. Thanks for the update! Now I can use the excellent quote with confidence of its authenticity.] More troubling, Seth isn’t the only person to credit Tim O’Reilly with this misquote.
Tim O’Reilly did have some very interesting things to say about obscurity and piracy, but that quote isn’t one of them. The Tim O’Reilly article that contains quotes most closely matching the one above is from openp2p.com in December 2002. The article, entitled Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution, contains the following:
- “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”
- “…obscurity is a greater danger than piracy…”
If you haven’t read the original article, you might be tempted to argue that “obscurity is a greater danger that piracy” is close enough to the “piracy is not the enemy, obscurity is” misquote that I’m just splitting hairs. However, the context for Tim’s original quote is a discussion about how the shoplifting of a physical book may have a more detrimental impact on revenue than the pirating of a digital edition of that same book. The full paragraph is:
And overall, as a book publisher who also makes many of our books available in electronic form, we rate the piracy problem as somewhere below shoplifting as a tax on our revenues. Consistent with my observation that obscurity is a greater danger than piracy, shoplifting of a single copy can lead to lost sales of many more. If a bookstore has only one copy of your book, or a music store one copy of your CD, a shoplifted copy essentially makes it disappear from the next potential buyer’s field of possibility. Because the store’s inventory control system says the product hasn’t been sold, it may not be reordered for weeks or months, perhaps not at all.
This is clearly miles away from the point that Seth Godin was making about the economies of free products and services2 when he included the Tim O’Reilly misquote as an argumentum ad verecundiam.
So, when quoting someone as part of an argument from authority, more effort should be made to ensure that quote is accurate and stop crediting Tim O’Reilly with the insight that that obscurity is the enemy.
1 At least, Tim O’Reilly didn’t make the statement in an online resource that I can find through search engines. If he made it during a speech, such as at a conference, it would be even more important to note its origins; e.g., “At the TOC Conference, Tim O’Reilly said…”.
2 Specifically, that “buying attention is a marketing expense, and one way to budget for that is to deduct it from the cost of your product”.
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Mike Harmon
Mike Harmon
February 28, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Thanks for reading. I spent some time with Tim yesterday, and we’ve discussed this, and he and I agree that when I use this line (which I love to do) I can honestly credit him. I’d prefer to credit myself, but it appears that I can’t do that with a straight face.
PS Tim was also the co-inventor of the first commercial website. It’s true.
Seth Godin
February 29, 2008 at 4:56 am
You are splitting hairs. Yes, I *added* the argument that piracy ranked below shoplifting in the range of publisher woes, but that was only one argument of several. The line “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy” was the title of one section of the piece. In fact it was “Lesson One” of the argument. The “shoftlifting” point was lesson four.
Seth’s “quote” was in a speech. “Tim O’Reilly says piracy is not the enemy, obscurity is” seems like a very acceptable paraphrase to me.
Meanwhile, your assertion that “shoplifting” was the context of my assertion is an outright misrepresentation!
Meanwhile, in the lesson that gave its title to the entire piece, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, I wrote “Lowering the barriers to entry in distribution, and the continuous availability of the entire catalog rather than just the most popular works, is good for artists, since it gives them a chance to build their own reputation and visibility, working with entrepreneurs of the new medium who will be the publishers and distributors of tomorrow.” This seems much like the point that you say that Seth is falsely attributing to me.
Furthermore, in the same conference where Seth made this assertion, I gave a talk entitled “Free is more complicated than you might think,” and one of the points I made was precisely the same as the one Seth was making, namely that giving things away for free is a great way to build distribution that you monetize in other ways. I gave the example of my “giving away” my article What is Web 2.0?, meanwhile monetizing the concept with a very successful series of conferences on the subject.
Tim O'Reilly
February 29, 2008 at 11:34 am
Tim,
Thank you for reading my blog! Based on your comments, I don’t believe I expressed my point clearly enough. I agree with both you and Seth on the substance of both the articles I cite. My concern was that I could not use the quote “piracy is not the enemy, obscurity is” because I could not find evidence that you really said it. The two quotes I _did_ find (and cite) that were similar had been used to support a position sufficiently different from the one Seth was making that _I_ was uncomfortable using them to imply that you supported the position that pricing products and services as free was an appropriate marketing decision to gain customer attention and further that the subsequent lost revenues should be viewed as a marketing expense. Now that I know you support that position _and_ that you made the statement Seth attributed to you, I am satisfied that I would not be misrepresenting you to use that quote.
It was my concern about potential misrepresentation that motivated my discussion of your quote “obscurity is a greater danger than piracy”. It was not my intent to imply that your entire article “Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution” was about shoplifting. I also did not mean to imply that you didn’t support Seth’s positions. Rather, I wanted to show why I felt I couldn’t use the quote as evidence that you support those positions because I did not believe that the context of the quote — text immediately surrounding it — was related to how “free undermines the typical human’s proclivity to ignore every offer” or how “one way to budget for [buying attention] is to deduct it from the cost of your product”, as Seth states in his article.
Basically, if I’m going say “Tim O’Reilly believes…”, I *really* want to be right about it.
I linked to Seth’s article and your article so that my readers could directly review what I said, what Seth said, and what you said — then decide for themselves whether I had a valid position or if I was splitting hairs. The point of my article was that, unfortunately, Seth did not provide a source for your quote, so I was not able to directly review what you said.
Regards,
David
dlkinney
March 1, 2008 at 12:58 pm
[...] Said It Posted in Community, Web by dlkinney on March 1st, 2008 Tim O’Reilly responded to my article on Friday. He confirms that he is the source of the quote and that the quote was used properly. [...]
Tim O’Reilly Said It « Dead Ink Vinyl
March 1, 2008 at 1:16 pm