RadarAs the dust settles on Apple’s launch of the iPad, rival hardware manufacturers are eagerly scrambling to produce new tools to power the forthcoming consumer boom in digital reading. Simon Cronshaw, co-founder of CultureLabel, explores how publishers in the arts sector can prepare to benefit from digital distribution, protecting their content in the process.

Is cyberspace lawless, separate from the real world, or do conventional laws and business models apply? After decades of internet exploration, we are getting closer to understanding that it’s a space where technical, financial, legal and business considerations are entirely interdependent, all equally critical pillars for successful digital publishers.

Adapting business models is central to the effective protection and management of intellectual property online. For many commentators, the best defence is a good offensive: providing access to content, in a manner that suits user preferences, at a compelling cost.

There are subscription services, pay per play/view models, and the opportunity to develop discriminatory pricing. Get it right and the rewards can be a global audience providing new income to invest in your artistic content.

Back in the 1990s, Napster demonstrated the counter-intuitive rationale for distributing content for free, and then monetising ancillary offerings instead. Two decades later, the newspaper industry is following suit with a variation on the model. The New York Times, for example, has just announced its plans to introduce a pay wall for online articles, with a central “metering” system where everyone gets a few free articles each month. Once users exceed the limit, they have to either pay or move on.

In the most successful projects illustrating this interdependency between business model and technology that we’ve delivered, the income generation principles that CultureLabel promotes (see www.CultureLabel.com/digital-museum/ for a free e-book) are matched with innovations in technology, like CultureLabel’s ability to process micro-payments and instant split-payments of multiple royalties. Both business model and technology must be optimised and in harmony for digital publishing to flourish.

So, why add your content to the digital space? Income to recoup costs and invest in content is not the only reason. Creating and distributing works can also have much to do with managing your reputation, gaining acceptance within online communities, or simply satisfying a drive to create.

For entrepreneur Esther Dyson, the end-game is nurturing a relationship with content users: “Controlling copies…becomes a complex challenge” she says. “Much chargeable value will be in the certification of authenticity and reliability, not in the content … The trick is not to control the copies of your work but instead a relationship with the customers – subscriptions or membership”.

If poetry must owe something to other poems or novels to other novels, the free circulation of ideas and information provides a difficult balancing act for arts publishers. Where on the spectrum does their distribution policy lie between the progress of art and the rights of authors?