talkmagic.co.uk

Its a long-term dream of mine to publish a mentalism effect (a challenge for me because I'm not very good at designing new mentalism material), and while this probably will never happen, I did start wondering about how I would protect the secrets of the effect.

For example, I read recently on TheMagicCafe that if your text is printed on dark green paper, then it cannot be scanned and copied to a computer, therefore making it harder to publish on the internet. Does anyone know if this is true?


It makes me wonder how someone would go about protecting magical secrets in this day and age, here is a short list of things I think help keep the secrets - and hopefully we can expand on it


1. Price Tag: If the price tag is high enough, it will stop "casual" people from buying the effect just to find out how it is done.

2. Limited edition: If a manuscript of gimmick is unique of rare, it is unlikely people are going to give away the secrets.

3. Asking nicely: If you write "Remember the Magicians Code, audiences love mystery" or something equally nice and friendly inside each manuscript, it discourages people from exposing the method.

4. Patent: This can work both ways, it means the effect cannot be copied (so the masked magician cannot expose it), but it also means that somewhere there is a public patent with the method on it. What do people think of this?

5. Green paper: Printing on special paper can make it harder to copy, you could also laminate it to make it unphotocopyable (?).

6. No Ebook: Any writing that is published only in print, and not online is much less likely to be exposed.

7. Mirror writing: This is boarding on the paranoid and rediclous, but mirror writing would make it harder still to photocopy - though harder to read. Still worth mentioning though; hats of to Da Vinci.



Any other ideas?


Tom
xx

Virtually impossible to prevent a determined person from pinching your text. Yes, dark green or blue paper is difficult to copy - but it's also difficult to read.

You can protect your ebook pdf document to some degree by having it password protected.

Anybody who buys a magic book, or borrows one from a library will learn a few secrets.

If you are promoting your idea via text (as opposed to dvd), you could publish your book or booklet via lulu.com (I've done this numerous times for business literature and cartoon books). Once you've made the effort to upload it, 'lulu' will print and deliver rather like amazon. You set the price, you decide if you are hardback, softback, whatever... PM me if you want to know more about this.

Nothing is 100% thief-proof though.

True, nothing is totally foolproof; but if you google the words:

"Master Prediction System revealed" or anything similar, there is no exposure there at all; in this case because of the high price tag. I think this is a very good thing


Tom
xx

I don't have any answers for you but I do like what Jon Thompson put on the "cover" of Poker Faced:

"If you did not pay for this PDF, you are a criminal of the worst kind; a foul parasite on creativity. You took my work just because you wanted it. I wish you nothing less than a life filled with pain and failure, and ending early with a lingering, agonizing death."

the best way to keep secrets in magic.. is to publish them.

in a book, or magazine. not on an open forum though.

Your questions are best answered by looking at what other authors do in the field.

Price and rarity. Yes, up to a point. People are less inclined to give away something they had to put in some effort to obtain. Legitimate magic buyers understand they're paying for the secret and the right to use it, and are therefore willing to pay relatively high prices. Magic books also have a limited audience and therefore limited print runs (even when not artificially restricted in number), so prices are necessarily higher for a magic book than a mass-market book of the same size. Legitimate buyers know this and accept it.
At the same time, you have to offer reasonable value for money. And if you intend to achieve either fame or fortune, you'll need a reasonably large distribution.
There's also the risk that, if you set prices too high or make numbers too limited, somebody will end up with "Robin Hood syndrome" and make copies for just those reasons. They'll argue that most people would never be able to buy it anyway, so they might as well have a free copy. People will also be more willing to take free copies, using the same rationale.

Asking people not to copy. Yes, of course. You'll find something to this effect in most modern books, and it doesn't have to be all that nice, either. Use a page right at the front of the book to assert your rights as the copyright holder, proclaim yourself sure that the reader is professional enough not to spill the beans, and perhaps threaten prosecution of anyone caught making unauthorised copies.

Patent. No. You cannot patent a written work.

No electronic edition. Yes, if your distribution strategy allows. If there is no legitimate electronic version, this will make it a bit harder for people to copy. It won't be impossible, though, and there's always some jerk willing to scan a book page by page.

Coloured paper, mirror writing, etc. No. This will REALLY tick off your legitimate readers. The first responsibility of any writer is to his readership, and the most basic thing you can do is to make the work readable.

Jerome Finley published one of his books on red paper.
Don't know whether this is copysave or not - but it was stressful to read.
Especially in contradistinction to the content of this book the experience was really strange.

We published a book in a very limited edition last year (35 copies).
And of cause we liked to protect it against illegal copies - knowing for sure that this won't work 100%.

Our measures were first of all to know all the purchasers personally or at minimum by name.
Each copy of our book was personalised for the special person.
The books were personalised in a visible and a secret way.
The purchasers had to subscribe a purchase agreement which compeled them to secrecy.
And last not least the price was really high.

Maybe this was all a little too much; but the purchasers were happy!
They appreciated the worthiness of secrecy and told us that the feeling of taking part in something that is not available for everybody is a good feeling and is worth its price.

Th.

What sort of agreement did you make them sign, and does it have any legal binding? For example, if they break the agreement, can you sue them?


Tom
xx

The best way to stop people from copying an ebook is to digitally watermark their name with it. That way once they've uploaded it to their favourite bittorrent network and you find it, you can find them, trace them, and prosecute them

Whatever you do, and whatever format it's published in (dead tree or electronic), someone will always find a way to copy your work. If they really want to they'll type your manuscript out word by word into Microsoft Word

People will always copy and expose your secret, always have done and always will do. Patenting your idea is a (long winded and expensive) way of stopping people from performing your effect if it's truly original and if it's not just words on paper (ie. there's a gaff in there somewhere), but as you say it will mean the method is out in the public domain. But on the other hand, I don't know anybody who's ever actually read a patent for a magic illusion just to see how it's done

Your answer depends on what you want to do. Do you want to stop people from copying a book so that they have to buy it off you, do you want to keep the method a secret, or do you want to stop just anybody from performing it?

Eshly wrote:What sort of agreement did you make them sign, and does it have any legal binding? For example, if they break the agreement, can you sue them?

Yes, theoretically. But this wasn't the point and not our intention.

The legal binding is hard to explain because of the the differences of the uk vs. the german law.
We have a copyright law and a patent law (some of our methodes were defined as patentable processes).
Both laws in addition builded the basis of the contract.

But as I said:
The juristic aspect wasn't the vital point.
It was more a reinforcement of a morally/ethical aspect.
They were guilt triped a little more.

Th.

I think the two best ways seem to be a combination of high price and guilt tripping :p

Tom
xx

The cold, hard truth of publishing of any kind is that you simply can not prevent people from copying.

The red/green paper and mirror writing ideas make sense in that they would make copying difficult. However, in that respect it's just like the DRM employed by music and film companies. All it serves to do is make life hard for legitimate users who had the decency to pay you for your work, while making the initial act of copying only a touch more difficult, though breaking the DRM is usually rather trivial.

My suspicion is that if someone wanted to copy the work, they would just type it up, make a PDF and make it available by torrent. Maybe most wouldn't bother, but I'll say one thing for sure. If I got a book that was entirely in mirror writing or on some wierd coloured paper, and it was something I was going to refer to a lot, I'd take the time to transcribe it into black on white - the initial effort would be well worth it with the increased ease of reading.

If I was the sort to then distribute it online for free, all your copy protection ideas would come to nothing, I'd have an easy to read version, so would everyone who got it for free, and yet the people who bought a copy from you would be stuck with, essentially, an unreadable book.

The one thing you could do, would be to somehow make each copy unique in some way. If you then find a copy doing the rounds online you'll have a good idea who made the initial copy and either prosecute or somehow blackball their name so others know not to sell to them. Of course, if they knew their copy might be tracable, it should be, again, trivial to recreate the work without the identifying parts and distribute.

Of course, making things unique by a subtle method - maybe something like spelling a different word incorrectly in each copy and keeping a record of who got which one - would mean a rather large increase in the price of the book.

All that said, I think it's sensible to put this all into context.
The reality is, downloads do not equate to lost sales. People who get works for free by downloading them typically would not have bought them in the first place, and unless you're asking for an unreasonably high price, people who would have bought it won't just go and download it instead.

Don't think I mean I think free downloads are the way to go, personally I'd rather have a book in my hand than a PDF and am quite happy to pay for them, but I do think people tend to go a little bit nuts about these things.

Oh and for the record, some things I wrote a while back have been published without compensation or consent, I'm not just blowing hot air here.

Concentrate on making a fine product that's well written and if you can somehow offer something that will make people actually want the official, paid-for publication rather than the scanned version or the redistributed e-book they found online you'll find people more inclined to buy than to not. There'll still be illegal copies floating around but that will probably be the case whatever.

An interesting conundrum: how to distribute something while keeping it a secret. One option, of course, is to worry about other things, but you could take a leaf out of the government space to prevent inappropriate compromise to the confidentiality of an asset:

1. Need to know. Only those who need to know, so no one else in the distribution channel.
2. Personnell vetting (of course, show me a spy who wasn't security cleared ...). You know who they are and you have some confidence that they are not a) corruptible; and b) are not known to have done it before
3. Physically limit distribution. Only let people access the asset in a restricted environment
4. Number and record all copies
5. Personally identifiable tag on each copy
6. Non disclosure agreement
7. Physically alter the hard copy to make photocopying difficult (as has been mentioned, a real pain: I once worked for the exec team of a global company that did that to its finance documents. of course I considered the security enforcing control to be a challenge to break ...)
8. secure disposal of drafts
9. Don't tell anyone

.robb. wrote:I don't have any answers for you but I do like what Jon Thompson put on the "cover" of Poker Faced:

"If you did not pay for this PDF, you are a criminal of the worst kind; a foul parasite on creativity. You took my work just because you wanted it. I wish you nothing less than a life filled with pain and failure, and ending early with a lingering, agonizing death."

Unfortunately, he also wishes this to anyone who reads the preveiw before buying, apparently!

The short answer is, you can't. The internet will see to that whatever measures you take.

If you get it into print or in the shops most folk will pay (providing it's any good of course) because for most it's easier than trying to procure it illegally. It will get ripped off but you'll still get the lion's share of any profit.

I think trying to protect it by any of the means you are contemplating, will only serve to put off your honest customers and encourage the sort of people that get a kick out of hacking such countermeasures. That's the world we live in.