Yesterday, Smartmobs pointed to a BBC story noting a practice shop owners are calling "digital shoplifting." The story comments on young Japanese girls who send camera phone pictures of new dresses or hairstyles they are seeing in magazines to their friends for their opinions. The Japanese magazine publishers are complaining that this is costing them sales.

Does this sound familiar? Yes and no. The magazine publishers fear the napsterization of their content. They see this as individuals "republishing" or "copying" their copyrighted content. They see what is going on with the music industry and file sharing and they are scared. As this micro content sharing proliferates in this form, and the capturing of video, audio and text, content producers will instinctively and reflexively react by tightening the control over their content. Magazine publishers will want to "shrink wrap" their magazines to avoid people stealing the content with camera phones or portable hand held scanners. (I often carry a pen scanner to capture text to my PDA) The result is predictable. Without being able to browse through a magazine people will be less likely to buy it. The "solution" would be far worse than the "problem."

This I think is completely the wrong approach. Just as the music industry is making a mistake by seeking to prosecute it's own (former) customers, print publishers who misunderstand the potentials of new digital communication technologies may just cut their own necks by holding too firmly to their precious content.

What's needed is a deeper understanding of the social dynamics that are behind this type of micro content sharing. What's really happening here is buzz marketing. When someone sends a camera phone snap of a picture from a magazine seeking to inform and solicit an opinion from another person they are directly or indirectly creating buzz for that magazine. The first question the recipient will ask is where did you see this picture. They will discover that the place to see cool new content or content they might be interested in is in xyz magazine. This is peer to peer marketing. Something I think the magazines should welcome.

It's gonna be a great future.