Is ebook piracy on the rise?

[kaas]

I think that you have to differentiate. Surveillance is quite accepted in the UK - just think about all the cameras! Thus I don't think that they would consider IP tracking as a bad thing.
While each little step seems logical (who doesn't want to stop criminals?), the result is big brother...
I find it amazing that a democratic government can actually think about tracking IP's on a regular basis without proof and honestly do not understand my english neighbors

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Exactly the same is done with cars

Except that cars generally can't be hijacked or borrowed without your knowledge, you have a private contract with a private company providing you internet service as opposed to public roads on which the rules are enforced by government, and some other bits and pieces where your analogy fails spectacularly.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Does being a "single mom" give you some kind of carte blanche to commit crimes?

Sorry Harry, I was trying to stay away from this discussion, but I HAVE to chime in.

I have to very respectfuly and very, VERY, *VERY* strongly disagree with you.

No. Being single mom does not give you carte blanche to commit crime.(**)

But, being INNOCENT single mom (we are talking about Tanya Andersen here), should exempt you from being harrased for years by a bunch of multibilon companies that have ganged up on you to make an example of you.

The RIAA continued to harras her long after it became clear that she did not commit copyright infringement. They found out who was sharing the files and one lawyer even asked her if she knows this person. So the RIAA knew! and yet, they did mot stop.

What the RIAA is doing is rackereering.
They approach thousands citizens with following proposal:
pay us $5000 for commiting something we have absolutely no valid proof of or fight us. IF you decide to fight you are very likely spend 20000 dolars EVEN IF YOU WIN.

What I personally fing very disturbing is, that once you become a target of RIAA it does not matter if you did something wrong. You lose. Even Tanya Andersen has lost. Yes the wonderfull American justice system eventualy declared her innocent, she was even awarged attorney fees (something that happens extremely rarely in RIAA lawsuits), nobody has compensated her for the broken health she has suffered as consequence of living under a terrible stress for years. Even if she was awarder 5 milion dollars, she is still the one that has lost.


(**) - I am not even sure if the copyright infringement is crime. It definitely isn't in my country. The copyright infringement is a civil law offence. PERIOD. When you commit crime - like murder - the criminal police goes after you and atorney general will sue you. It does not matter if the victim, or family sue you or not.
I can not explain it very well so let's have a look at the Wikipedia what is a crime
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime
Quote:
...
Not all breaches of the law, however, are considered crimes, for example, breaches of contract and other civil law offences.
...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I must respectfully disagree. The purpose of the RIAA is not to "be nice" to people, but to punish criminals. Do you think that someone's crimes "don't matter" simply because they are 14 years old, or a senior citizen? I think that, admitedly in a small number of cases, they've taken very effective action. I'm sure that Ms. Thomas will think twice before "sharing" files on the internet again!

Please allow me to clarify my position, by the way. Individual downloaders are "small fry" - they are not worth. It's the uploaders who need to be taken down, and they are the ones whom the RIAA goes after.

Sure, they make the occasional mistake, but I'm a big fan of the RIAA, overall. Knowing that you're liable to lose your house if you share files illegally is surely going to make people think twice about doing it, don't you think?

When the RIAA makes a mistake, they can ruin lives. The RIAA uses strong arm tactics and they go in and go after people without proof. They don't go with due process. They just assume you are guilty without enough evidence. Would you like to be accused of stealing music, have your ISP drop you, have to go to court with your rights tampered with by the RIAA when you are innocent. When they make a mistake, it's a big one.

[HarryT]

kacir,

The fact that some prosecutions are bungled surely does not mean that all prosecutions should be stopped, where there is clear evidence of guilt, does it? There's been a recent very high-profile case in the UK where a man has been released from prison after serving 8 years after being wrongly convicted of murdering a very well-known TV presenter; you wouldn't (I hope) take that as evidence that nobody should be prosecuted for murder?

[hidari]

I assume you have never been on a torrent site. The amount of Legal an illegal material is HUGE. You can download movies, books, magazines, newspapaers, software etc.....

The Music industry is finally adapting and realizing that DRM will not stop people downloading. The Film industry doesn't get it and The Publishers will most likely not either (They all want their cushy jobs). Fortunately, authors like Steve Jordan cut out the "middle man" and allow plebs (like me) to buy books directly from the author.

That said.. Many sites charge way too much for ebooks. One should not have to buy a 400 USD reading device and then have to pay 20 USD for an ebook. Some sites are starting now to get down to reasonable prices, but the selection in general is still weak.

Harry has a good point about Pirating. But, I think his ship Sprung a leak about 6 years ago.

hidari

Originally Posted by charlieperry

http://bookbook.com.au/2008/08/04/is...y-on-the-rise/

When I first got my Sony Reader I had a list of books that I wanted to download. As I quickly found out most of the books weren't available in Australia in ebook format and try as I might I just could not find them elsewhere on the web. The pirates, I assumed, hadn't really taken to books in the same way they had to movies and music.

A few experiences recently, however, have made me suspect that book piracy is becoming more prevalent. Firstly, I thought I'd have another look for Cornelius Ryan's epic account of D-Day, The Longest Day. The Longest Day isn't legally available as an ebook as far as I know and yet there at the top of my "Longest Day ebook" search was a text version of the book. Next I had to read Shantaram for a book club meeting. Shantaram is a monster of a book and I thought it would be handy to have it in ebook format instead. Shantaram is not available as an ebook (again, as far as I know) but low and behold a pirate copy from India popped up near the top of the search. I had a similar experience with a few other books as well among them the incredibly rare and expensive and very controversial Devil's Guard.

Book piracy is going to become a bigger and bigger problem for the publishing industry. eBooks are typically very small and can easily be emailed around. Most books are less than the size of a photo or a song. You can publish books on the web with very little trouble at all.

The other problem is that it isn't always clear for a lot of books whether they are in copyright or not. Copyright laws vary from country to country. A lot of books that are still in copyright in the US are out of copyright here in Australia. With the death of Solzhenitsyn today I thought I'd reread A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. There is a link to this text at the bottom of the Wikipedia page. This book was first published in 1963. Is this book in copyright or out? To be honest I'm not really sure.

Has anyone else noticed a rise in the availability of pirate books recently?

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What the publishing industry needs is a strong trade association, akin to the RIAA, which will go after criminals in the same manner that the RIAA has so admirably done in the music world. The problem is, at present, that there is nobody in the publishing world to take on these criminals.

You're right Harry. The publishing industry needs a trade group to convince the public that it is evil and monopolistic.

As it is, most publishers are relatively unknown. I can't think of a better way to get their name in the press than to sue some guy who OCRed out of print books and posted them on the web. That fiend! Can you beleive he actually made content accessible!?!

Good plan, Harry.

[joblack]

If you have the paperback edition its ok to download the ebook edition. pAYing twice is ridiculous ...

[HappyMartin]

Umm yes OK, but is piracy of books on the rise? We now all know that tempers over the issue are.

[RCR]

Originally Posted by kacir

and that is why there is Devils Guard accessible on the Australian mirror of the Project Gutenberg Australia site.

No, the "Devil's Guard" on Project Gutenberg is a much older book by a different author. The original poster was talking about "Devil's Guard" by George Elford. Elford writes about his time as an ex German SS officer and his subsequent career in the French Foreign Legion, doing all sorts of dirty deeds in Vietnam. Even though I read the book over 20 years ago, I still remember his gleeful description of tying Vietminh prisoners to the front of vehicles to forestall landmines and ambushes. (According to some folk, the book was a work of fiction).

[gwynevans]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Do you suppose that the RIAA pick names out of the phonebook at random? Presumably they have some prima facie evidence that these people are downloading illegally.

Harry, you might want to have a look at this ("Challenges and Directions for Monitoring P2P File Sharing Networks" or "Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice") before you presume too much about the validity of the 'evidence'. While there's a good chance that many of the recipients are 'valid' detections, there's also some very big assumptions going on, e.g. regarding spoofing, indirect detections and p2p vs wifi dhcp timeouts.

[axel77]

IMHO the publishing industry is just repeating the errors of the music industry. You know music industry totally slept on internet for a long time, treating the whole internet as their enemy, until only recently they realised they can turn the internet to their partner in offering onlineshops with reasonable prices (e.g. apple store for a random example). Just too long they cashed ~25€ for a CD album, altough the cost originally consisting to a hugh percentile of production prices, the production prices dropped to a few cents, altough the CDs in the shops stil did cost the same. No wonder they created a vivid pirating community, when people thought just though what the f...?

I have no problem to buy an online book, but I *really*, *really*, *really* want to buy it with discont of not needed printing costs. That is only the author marge, and the publishers marketing/correction reading costs. This is not happening at all. You pay almost the same, altough you get actually "less". Its really just IMHO the errors of the music industry repeating 10 years later..

Personally I happily am buying paper books from amazon if a) I consider them important for a long time in my work (it never hurts to have some "evergreens" at home, because they are also almost always already handed out at my libraries) or b) they are not available in any library in my hometown but I still think I might profit for them and they are not extremly expensive (<40€) (I always think, there is nothing more usefull I could do with my money, then to spent it for education. But if some scientific book costs 80€ or more, I really wonder if I'd need it all) Or I have to confess the third praxis I do at some books I'd consider a nice to have, but not that important and my library has them in stock + often enough they are out of print of difficult to aquire. I borrow them out, scan them and store the pdf at my harddisk, to either print the pages on damand or use my IlIad to read them.

The scan is still 3-4 hours of work in front of a scanner, and it isn't OCRed (and I haven't found yet any OCR that really works well without proofreading it all)... So you know if there would be a reasonable priced ebook version available, one could easily convince me not to spend that hours in front a scanner.

[slayda]

Harry is correct that those who violate copyright are criminals. There is no requirement that a crime must have a victim. See Wikipedia definition below (and yes I know Wikipedia is not a real authority but it is a good indicator).

Crime is the breach of a rule or law for which a punishment may ultimately be prescribed by some governing authority or force.

So when you run a stop sign or exceed the speed limit, you have committed a crime in the truest sense of the word. A duly authorized law enforcement officer can arrest you or impose a punishment on you.

The key point here is that the RIAA is not duly authorized by the government. That is why they use the Civil Courts rather than the Criminal Courts. In the US, at least, anyone can take anyone else (with some small limitations) to Civil Court. However having lost a Civil Action in Civil Court does not make the determination that one is a criminal (in the eyes of the law). Nor does it necessarily prove that a crime has been committed.

Many years ago, in the US, Senator Joe McCarthy used tactics against "supposed" communists that are similar to the tactics used today by the RIAA. Microsoft also uses similar tactics against their competitors. It is sometimes called the "Golden Rule", i.e. whoever has the most gold, rules. Gold here could mean money but more likely relates to power. It is a typical "Might makes right" methodology. Or put another way, it is bully tactics.

--------------------------------------------

To change the topic - I wonder why publishers who "own" the rights to books don't take advantage of the book pirates by downloading their pirated books, cleaning them up and then selling them to the public. The pirates can't complain to the legal authorities without admitting to "criminal" activities. The publishers would no be committing a crime since they already own the rights to the book and it would probably be less costly for them than scanning, OCRing, and editing. The "honest" public would benefit since a "legal" version of the ebook would be available. Seems like both a win-win proposition and an effective way to combat piracy.

[bwaldron]

Originally Posted by kacir

Sorry Harry, I was trying to stay away from this discussion, but I HAVE to chime in.

I have to very respectfuly and very, VERY, *VERY* strongly disagree with you.

Yes, I agree. Both with respect for Harry, and with vehement disagreement with his opinion of the RIAA.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by joblack

If you have the paperback edition its ok to download the ebook edition. pAYing twice is ridiculous ...

You may consider it to be OK "morally". You'd struggle, I think, to show that it's "legal" in either the US or the UK.