I do this funny thing where I buy an ebook and then turn around and.. uh.. "acquire" a copy of the same book.

The purchased ebook may never get opened.

A significant amount of piracy is not to avoid paying, it's to get a functional product that I can actually keep backed up and have across all my devices.

Ditto. I own a great many movies on physical media, and then have digital pirated copies that I actually watch. These digital copies are much easier to store, can be viewed on pretty much any device with no hassle or setup, and are easy to share with friends and family without depriving myself of my own copy. I already paid for a copy of the films once (sometimes twice!) so I don't feel particularly guilty about downloading copies for more practical use. If they want me to stop doing this they should provide a better service.

With a NFT of a GIF, you don't need to pay to see the content. People are not buying these tokens to see the content, because it is free for everybody to see.

What Pearson is suggesting is a different model: that you have to buy the NFT to see the content. This will lead to piracy, as most people will not be buying the textbooks for the token, but for the file it points to.

> Why would people want to pay royalties to an artist, and not to an author? I would actually agree with you, but I think people don't want to pay royalties full stop.

People usually are happy to pay and see royalties going to content creators, and if Pearson set up the smart contract to split royalties across the dozens of editors and designers that had a hand in making the book it would be a fantastic use of the blockchain. But this article suggests that Pearson as the distributor will be reaping the most rewards, not the authors of the textbooks.