Is pirating a book that you already own ethical? Yes says NY Times Columnist.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by TGS

What I was questioning was whether there was a difference in ethical value between the act of downloading something you haven't paid for and the act of uploading something so that other people can download that thing, without paying for it.

I don't believe that was the point originally made. In the original example given, the downloader did pay for it.

What it appeared that you were saying was that format shifting via the darknet (good way of putting it) was ethically the same as uploading without permission. That's what I was disagreeing with, but I see now that's not what you meant.

[TGS]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

I don't believe that was the point originally made. In the original example given, the downloader did pay for it.

What it appeared that you were saying was that format shifting via the darknet (good way of putting it) was ethically the same as uploading without permission. That's what I was disagreeing with, but I see now that's not what you meant.

Mmm, somewhere between Post 1 and Post 40 I think the topic meandered a bit - imagine that!

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Format C:

I buy the Hardcover, and then I download the ebook from the dark
Cost: HC full price.
Consequence: author and publisher get paid for one copy. I got two copies
The act is illegal in some jurisdiction, and unethical to most people.

Unethical to you, maybe, but certainly not to me. And probably not to most people if they have time to think about it without the influence of vested interests.

Ever notice how they tell you you're only buying a temporary, limited license to use the content, not the content itself? In those terms, you only HAVE one copy. You don't read two books at once. You have one "content unit" -- the words in that book -- displayed in several different forms.

Or, to put it in a simpler form, would you say your town library had a great selection of books when that they really had was ten thousand copies of "The Light in August"? That would be crazy. They have one book that could be read by 10,000 people at a time. If you have both a pbook and ebook of "The Light in August" you still have one book which, unless you do in fact behave unethically by giving away copies, can be read by one person at a time. One "content unit" which can be read by one person is pretty much the definition of what a single book is.

I buy the Hardcover used in mint condition from ebay, I scan & OCR myself the book.
Cost: HC half price, 5 hours of work.
Consequence: author and publisher are not paid. I got two copies.
The act is legal with few exceptions, and it is considered ethical almost by everyone.

First, in terms of the ebook, it's identical to the previous scenario. The ethics are not changed by who does the scanning. And you still only have one book.

Second, the author and publisher were paid. They were paid when the book was sold the first time around.

And yes, that is the only time they should be paid. If you bought a used bookshelf on eBay to put your new book on, would you think that the original manufacturer of the bookshelf should be paid, too?

I buy the HC used, and don't make a digital copy at all
Cost: HC half price
Consequence: author and publisher are not paid.
The act is legal and ethical everywhere.

Again, the author and publisher were already paid.

I sell the HC half price.
If I keep the digital copy, even if it's buried down somewhere in the middle of an heap of old CD-ROM that will be trashed in a couple of years, I'm doing bad.
If I don't keep that copy, nobody will trust me, and everybody thinks I'm keeping it.
Unethical in both cases, maybe illegal somewhere (I don't know...)

Specious argument. If digital content isn't available for use, it effectively doesn't exist. If your ebook is somewhere in that box of old CDs everyone has, and if it does turn up at some point you toss it out then, or just don't read it, there's no ethical problem.

I haven't got any digital copy at all. The only copy of that book I ever saw, is the Hardcover I bought for 5$ at a garage sell.
I read the book, and I sell it for 12$ on ebay.
Now, not only I read the book without any form of compensation for the author or the publisher. I'm even making money out of it.
And it's legal everywhere, and, I bet, it's ethically fair to almost everybody.

The author and the publisher got paid when the book was sold.

How about if you bought a bookshelf at a garage sale, then sold it on eBay? You used it without any compensation to the designer or the manufacturer! You made a profit from reselling that bookshelf! How could you live with yourself?

What is unethical is obtaining one content-unit and duplicating it into multiple separate (as in, possessed/used simultaneously by different people) content-units.

Someone a while back brought up the argument that reading an ebook you do not legitimately own (illegal download, etc.) is stealing because of sort of an opportunity cost of reading -- that is, you're only going to read X books in Y time, and if one of those is a book you didn't pay for, then you've robbed the company of a sale of a book you would have paid for if that one wasn't available. On that basis, not only buying a used book would be stealing, and reading a book in a library would be stealing, and borrowing a book from your brother would be stealing, but even re-reading a book you've already read would be stealing, because if you didn't re-read that book, you would have had to buy a new one. You're enjoying that book twice but only paying for it once! You don't expect to see a movie twice with the same ticket, right? So why should you expect to be able to read a book as many times as you want if you've only paid for it once? Re-reading is stealing! I expect to hear that from the publishers any time now.

The publishing industry, which is in financial trouble due to its own mismanagement (paying millions of dollars for books which never earn out their advances, for instance, and raising the price of children's books at several times the rate of inflation,) is slowly choking the goose that lays the golden egg.

Every year, fewer people read for pleasure. I've seen these statistics quoted so many times that I'm not sure if they're valid or not, but they're disturbingly in accord with my own anecdotal evidence. The market is slowly drying up. People are not reading.

The publishers' response? Raise prices. Restrict availability. Limit ebooks. In short ... discourage reading.

If they don't wake up and smell the coffee soon, they're going to find themselves without a market and wondering what happened. They will, no doubt, blame "piracy" or some other force outside their own walls, but they're doing it to themselves.

Another item of concern is the racks and racks of spinoff kitsch you see spawning around every popular juvenile series. Harry Potter stuff. Twilight stuff. You name it, there's stuff for it. Why is this a bad thing? Simple: You have a parent and child in a bookstore. You've gotten them through the doors. The child could beg that parent to buy him a book ... or a stuffed Snitch. Every dollar spent in a bookstore on licensed items is a dollar taken away from buying books. And reading, like smoking, is an addiction which is easiest to develop in the young. You'll find very few (if any) avid readers and book-buyers who were not avid readers as children. The more that child who is standing in front of the Twilight kitsch display reads when young, the more likely he or she is to become a lifetime book addict. Or, in short, a customer. The publishing industry (with a heavy emphasis on authors who are easily seduced by the "free money" of licensing fees) is cannibalizing their own future by persuading their customers to spend their bookstore budget on non-book items which do not encourage them to become long-term customers.

Stupid way to run an industry, IMO.

Short-term thinking at its worst.

They need to expand the market. To do that, they need to get people, especially young people, to read. To do that, especially in this day when public libraries are losing their funding and used book stores are dying out as their proprietors retire (do you know of a used book store run by someone under 50?), requires cheap, readily available reading matter. Which comes down to ebooks.

Instead, they decide to do things that maximize profits per unit, like only releasing Steven Saylor's new books in trade paperback (I had to order "The Triumph of Caesar" from the UK to get it as MM). Sure, the profit per book sold might be higher -- but they're selling fewer books, and those people who aren't buying the books that just doubled in price are doing something else with their money ... which probably isn't going to be buying any further books in that series, either. They're positioning their books as luxury goods -- it is often cheaper to buy a DVD of a movie, now, than the book it was made from -- and thereby losing customers instead of gaining them.

I can just imagine the phone call:

Agent: Great news, Mr. Author! With the publisher's new pricing structure, you'll get $1,000 in royalties for every book sold.

Author: Wow, that's wonderful, Mr. Agent. How many copies did we sell this year?

Agent: Well, um, one. To a guy who bought that $999 "I Am Rich" app for his iPhone.

Author: ...

They need to get more people reading, and keep more people reading, and to do that, they need to sell cheaper books. They need ebooks. And they need to worry a lot less about someone who wants an ebook version of their existing pbooks and a lot more about the massive number of people who don't buy books at all.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by TGS

Mmm, somewhere between Post 1 and Post 40 I think the topic meandered a bit - imagine that!

You're kidding! ....

Actually, I was referring to the post by Jadon that you replied to saying that the ethical considerations weren't different. The example in that context was

I buy the Hardcover, and then I download the ebook from the dark

Opinions on the ethics of this one vary. It clearly involves an illegal act in many jurisdictions—the UPloading of the copy you downloaded. The act of downloading is legal in some jurisdictions and not in others. YMMV, and all that.

The first example never mentioned uploading, only downloading. Yes, for torrents and some other varieties of p2p, downloading implies uploading (or at least 'making available'), but for usenet, or RapidShare, or other ways of getting a file, no uploading is necessary, so it doesn't have to enter into ethical consideration.

I'm not sure the ethical considerations are that different, though the legal ones may be.

[Iphinome]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Stupid way to run an industry, IMO.

Short-term thinking at its worst.

I haven't gone to buisness school thank the gods so I can't be sure but the impression I get from people who have but short term thinking seems to be the rule. Well that and using lawsuits as a substitute selling stuff. I'm pretty sure the second part isn't taught in schools so remember parents, if you don't teach your kids about civil suits they'll learn it on the streets in an unsafe way and you can't count on them waiting till they're part of a huge multinational befroe they start.

[Jadon]

I think Shaggy and I and most others are focusing solely on the person in the original example who bought a pBook and format shifted via darknet to get an eBook, and TGS is saying that one can't simply focus on that person. One must also consider the provenance of the eBook. By paying for a pBook I may "deserve" the eBook form, but does that cover the right to receive the product of someone else infringing copyright?

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by Iphinome

I haven't gone to buisness school thank the gods so I can't be sure but the impression I get from people who have but short term thinking seems to be the rule. Well that and using lawsuits as a substitute selling stuff. I'm pretty sure the second part isn't taught in schools so remember parents, if you don't teach your kids about civil suits they'll learn it on the streets in an unsafe way and you can't count on them waiting till they're part of a huge multinational befroe they start.

Yeah, almost everyone wants short quarter gains. Sprint a year or so back sold majority of their cell towers, to have some short quarter gains, but are leasing those same towers now. Can someone tell me how that makes sense?

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Another item of concern is the racks and racks of spinoff kitsch you see spawning around every popular juvenile series. Harry Potter stuff. Twilight stuff. You name it, there's stuff for it. Why is this a bad thing? Simple: You have a parent and child in a bookstore. You've gotten them through the doors. The child could beg that parent to buy him a book ... or a stuffed Snitch. Every dollar spent in a bookstore on licensed items is a dollar taken away from buying books. And reading, like smoking, is an addiction which is easiest to develop in the young. You'll find very few (if any) avid readers and book-buyers who were not avid readers as children. The more that child who is standing in front of the Twilight kitsch display reads when young, the more likely he or she is to become a lifetime book addict. Or, in short, a customer. The publishing industry (with a heavy emphasis on authors who are easily seduced by the "free money" of licensing fees) is cannibalizing their own future by persuading their customers to spend their bookstore budget on non-book items which do not encourage them to become long-term customers.

I agree with most of what you say - but not sure I agree with this part. In this example, kid gets a toy - often kids get toys I believe, so if they have one that has contributed to making authors, publishers and bookstores money I don't think that will automatically be a negative.

Another example - I have been wondering why for example for popular authors - but not necessarily Harry Potter popular - don't have t-shirts etc.

There are a lot of cool pictures on the front of SF and Fantasy books for example. (not so much for garden variety thrillers or whatever that have a big fat author name and blurry indistinct photo of bugger all).

But take Alastair Reynolds and the cool spaceships on black on those covers, or a dragon on a popular fantasy novel.

A t-shirt or poster of those - wouldn't sell enough to be worth it? Art would cost to much to use?

Apart from the example though, people need clothes, and have 'poster budgets' that are separate from book budgets I think. Granted every dollar spent on something else is not spent on books.

For something massively more popular than either of the books mentioned - don't think sales of Spider-Man stuff or Batman, Superman, X-Men etc. changes the reading material purchase amounts much?

[TGS]

Originally Posted by Jadon

I think Shaggy and I and most others are focusing solely on the person in the original example who bought a pBook and format shifted via darknet to get an eBook, and TGS is saying that one can't simply focus on that person. One must also consider the provenance of the eBook. By paying for a pBook I may "deserve" the eBook form, but does that cover the right to receive the product of someone else infringing copyright?

Thanks for that Jadon - you manged to say in a sentence what I've been rambling on about over several posts. I am saying that any downloading implies some uploading - though not necessarily by the person doing the downloading. Given that, I'm also saying - in my first post to this thread - that I am not sure wherein the great ethical divide lies between the downloader who "feels" justified in downloading because they have paid for a version of the book in another format, and the downloader who "feels" justified in downloading because they can get away with it. I'm not claiming they are ethically identical - just not as vastly different as it might appear.

[ficbot]

How about this one: you buy the ebook when it first comes out in Format X, since that's all that's available. Later, other formats are added and you prefer those formats. One of your friends buys the book in another format and you copy his. I think this is perfectly fair and I did it once. The book had images which did not survive my initial conversion from the very messy eReader format, so when I learned a friend had the epub, I copied his. I still had paid for the book though since I bought the eReader version.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Blue Tyson

I agree with most of what you say - but not sure I agree with this part. In this example, kid gets a toy - often kids get toys I believe, so if they have one that has contributed to making authors, publishers and bookstores money I don't think that will automatically be a negative.

The reason it's a negative is that you have a customer already inside a bookstore -- and not just any customer, but a child who has the potential to become a lifelong reader (assuming for the sake of simplicity that the role of the parent here is just to set the budget). That child can buy something that will reinforce the reading habit (a book) or something that will not reinforce the reading habit (a T-shirt).

By and large, the more people read as children, the more they will read as adults. So it would be in the bookstore's best interest (and the publisher's, etc.) to sell as many books as possible to that child, in order to develop him or her as a reader. The more books you sell to that child, the more you will sell to that future adult. Selling T-shirts, stuffed toys, candy, and whatnot, will not have the same effect. You're encouraging the habit of consuming clothes, toys, and candy, which can all be satisfied in places other than a bookstore, and with products unrelated to publishing.

It's short-term thinking again. "Hey, we can get $X for licensing fees, and we don't have to do any work!" And since the licensed items are usually tied in to a super-popular property (Harry Potter, Twilight, etc.), sales of those specific books will not suffer. Instead, its the money that might have gone to buy a different book in the same genre (i.e., "if you like this book, try that book") and thereby broadened the reader's interests, which is crucial to maintaining them as a reader once the Super Series du Jour ends, is lost to the sales of kitsch.

There has been considerable concern that the "Harry Potter effect" which boosted children's interest in reading for the first time in years applied only to the Harry Potter books themselves. I think a significant part of this was the explosion of spin-off merchandise. Just as movies nowadays seem to be just a two-hour advertisement for action figures and video games, the HP books were used as advertisements for everything under the sun. This diverted money from the household budget that could have gone to other books to spin-off merchandise, and it diverted the message from "reading is fun, buy more books" to "Harry Potter is fun, buy more Harry Potter stuff." Except that publishers are in the business of selling books, and training their customers to buy clothes or toys is redirecting them to a different market segment entirely.

Nice short-term profits, no doubt ... but that's exactly what I've been ranting about: The publishing industry is trading long-term customers, with their much greater profit, for short-term profits to satisfy speculators who care only about the very short term rise in stock prices, and care nothing at all for the long-term profitability, or even survivability, of that company.

I used to work for a company that decided to trade the slow but steady profit from customers who had, in some cases, been customers for 50 years or more, for quick short-term profits based on fads. Of course, fad customers are as fickle as butterflies, and when they moved on to the next fad and the next flower, the company didn't have either group of customers anymore. Nor, within a couple of years, did they have a company. It was a smaller industry with much less inertia than publishing, but that only means that the same thing will take longer, not that it won't happen, if the publishing houses make the same mistakes.

Bookstores need to sell kids books. If you're a bookstore, and you've got the kid in the store, you want to send him out with his hands full of books, so that he'll keep reading and come and buy more books from you. Sending him out with something he could buy at Toys-R-Us builds their market, not yours.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by TGS

...I am not sure wherein the great ethical divide lies between the downloader who "feels" justified in downloading because they have paid for a version of the book in another format, and the downloader who "feels" justified in downloading because they can get away with it.

Simple: One of the two is making an ethical decision: evaluating the situation and deciding whether or not what he is considering doing is the right thing to do, and can be ethically justified. The governing factor is internal: his beliefs and his conscience. The other is ignoring ethics entirely, throwing right and wrong to the winds, and making his decision solely on whether or not there is an external constraint: whether or not he can get away with it.

It's the difference between character and reputation. The first downloader is governed by his character, and how his own conscience will regard his decision. The second is concerned only for his reputation, in the form of a criminal record or civil legal action against him. In short, they're both making the same decision, but the primary factor in how they make that decision is completely different.

(I say "primary factor" because of course the risk of reputation damage does occur to the first downloader, and it's highly unlikely that the second downloader is completely without conscience, so both factors enter into both decisions to some degree)

We have experience with this on FiFoBooks.com: Paul Carr, the author of "Bringing Nothing To The Party" distributes Kindle and Nook versions of his book for free on our site, yet if you bought the ebook on Amazon.com, it would set you back $10. Peter explains the reasons for deliberately pirating his own book here: http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/19/bri...-to-the-party/

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by dpapathanasiou

Peter explains the reasons for deliberately pirating his own book here: http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/19/bri...-to-the-party/

That article had an interesting claim--
"The hardcore book buyers who regularly buy hardback books are also the ones most likely to have an e-reader...."

Which, if publishers believe, would explain why they think ebook sales are lost hardback sales. I'd love to know where that information comes from; the people I know who have ebook devices weren't buyers of mainstream hardcovers before they got them.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

Yeah, almost everyone wants short quarter gains. Sprint a year or so back sold majority of their cell towers, to have some short quarter gains, but are leasing those same towers now. Can someone tell me how that makes sense?

I don't think that it is just a matter of short term gains. It's been a long time since I have looked into it, but as far as I know US tax law still encourages sale/lease back arrangements.

If there were no tax code, it is unlikely that companies would engage in sale/lease backs.