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Old 05-22-2008, 09:49 PM   #1
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Can e-Publishing Overcome Copyright Concerns?

Today's Circuit's column in the NY Times by David Pogue concerns copy protection in the ebook world. Specifically Mr. Pogue relates his own bad experience with distributing his work free of copy protection:

"Unfortunately, I've had terrible experiences releasing my books in electronic form. Twice in my career, 'blind' people e-mailed me, requesting a PDF of one of my books. Both times, I sent one over--and both times, it was all over the piracy sites within 48 hours, free for anyone to download.

"I've got a mortgage and three kids to put through college, and it broke my heart! Unfortunately, the bad apples have once again spoiled it for everyone else."

Link is to the printable version which hopefully everyone can read without having to log into the NY Times site.

New York Times Article
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Old 05-22-2008, 11:38 PM   #2
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"I've got a mortgage and three kids to put through college, and it broke my heart! Unfortunately, the bad apples have once again spoiled it for everyone else."
Unfortunatley there is no way he can travel to a parallel universe where he didn't do that and see what the difference was. My guess, he sold less books in that parallel universe since there was no way for people to get the book, and realize how good it was so they could buy it.

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Old 05-23-2008, 11:42 AM   #3
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I am of the opinion that most of the people who downloaded it wouldn't have purchased it anyway, so why beat yourself up over it?
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Old 05-23-2008, 01:37 PM   #4
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Originally Posted by pilotbob View Post
Unfortunatley there is no way he can travel to a parallel universe where he didn't do that and see what the difference was. My guess, he sold less books in that parallel universe since there was no way for people to get the book, and realize how good it was so they could buy it.
What he needs to do is travel to the parallel universe where everyone is guaranteed to make a living, even if nobody wants to buy their stuff.
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Old 05-27-2008, 01:20 PM   #5
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Problem with most of this speculation is: You can't assume how much money he's potentially lost, any more than he can. No one can.

But the fact remains, the system as-is likely has cost him money, and to anyone who is trying to make a living, losses have to be a concern.

Also fairness... as he points out later in the article, others try to accept the system by telling artists to go out and "play live, sell T-shirts, etc"... IOW, do twice the amount of work (or more) for the same profit. How many people working for an employer, for example, would be satisfied if their boss told them to do their full-time work for free, then go out and sell umbrellas with the company logo on the street for their income? Not many? Then why should an artist have to do that, just to make a living?

It's a whole new ballgame, the ball is filled with helium, and the gloves have spikes on the fingertips. I feel for Pogue in that he is being put in the position of the companies he often ridicules, the music industry, in trying to figure out how to quantify his losses and deal with piracy. But he isn't being given too many choices, nor much support from the public, for his efforts to make a living... so can you really blame him? His concerns are legitimate, and shouldn't be dismissed as lightly as they tend to be by consumers (and some MR members).
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Old 05-27-2008, 01:24 PM   #6
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efforts to make a living... so can you really blame him? His concerns are legitimate, and shouldn't be dismissed as lightly as they tend to be by consumers (and some MR members).
I certainly don't dismiss his concerns. And, I certainly think an author should be paid for their work.

However, as we said...

1. There is no proof or way to prove that this affected his book sales for the bad, and could have improved them.
2. Even if he wasn't nice and didn't send out PDFs himself to blind readers... that doesn't mean there would not have been a pirated copy of his book floating around.

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Old 05-27-2008, 02:24 PM   #7
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I'm an author myself, so I certainly don't dismiss his concerns lightly, I just think he's overthinking it. It's like stressing out over used book sales or people borrowing the book from the library or a friend. Most of the people buying used copies or borrowing would not have bought the book anyway. Are you going to not sell your books to libraries, or forbid used booksellers from selling it? Good luck with that! I maintain that a lot of the people who downloaded it on the darknet not only would not have bought the book, likely they will never read it. They are collectors.

I see that a lot on the needlework lists and forums. I can't tell you how many times I posted "I made a scarf out of really nice yarn" or something like that and received several e-mails demanding the pattern. You need a pattern for a scarf? It's a giant rectangle. Figure it out. I usually make up that kind of thing, and use interesting stitches or pretty yarn, and that's what makes it interesting. But they MUST HAVE EVERY PATTERN. There's a site that offers (or used to offer) a free crochet pattern every day, which goes away at midnight and is replaced by a new pattern. If they miss downloading one day's pattern, they're on the list having a nervous breakdown, and trying all kinds of underhanded ways to get someone to give it to them (the listmods don't allow discussion of distribution of copyrighted patterns). Nobody can make a new item every day, and a lot of them are free for a reason (because no one would buy a pattern for such a fugly useless thing), so there's no reason to be upset over it. But they MUST HAVE EVERY PATTERN. It's a form of OCD, I guess. I think a lot of darknet e-book collectors operate from the same place. I do it myself a bit with the free books here at MobileRead. I'll see a book that looks interesting and I download it and I have no idea when or if I'll get to it, but maybe I will someday, and there is plenty of room on my SD card, so why not?

So my point (and I do have one) is that there's no use stressing over illegal downloads too much, because the sales you lose are infinitesimal compared to the bad will you will engender with actual readers if you treat them like criminals by locking up your ebooks with restrictive DRM. I'd rather see authors turning their energies to finding a better solution. I'm not sure what it is, but complaining about a tiny minority snatching the bread from your mouth is not it.

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Old 05-27-2008, 03:18 PM   #8
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Nice responses. I'm not a published author (yet) but I can feel his pain. I agree MaggieScratch, that he shouldn't sweat the illegal downloads, and instead focus on getting DRM-free legitimate copies into the hands of more readers.

The library analogy is interesting. Once or twice, if I could not buy an ebook for a particular title, I would buy the paper edition, and then go out on the darknet to find the digital. It may be a violation of the law, I suppose, but I am willing to pay the author for the work, and then find a way to get the convenience of an ebook.
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Old 05-27-2008, 04:38 PM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MaggieScratch View Post
So my point (and I do have one) is that there's no use stressing over illegal downloads too much, because the sales you lose are infinitesimal compared to the bad will you will engender with actual readers if you treat them like criminals by locking up your ebooks with restrictive DRM. I'd rather see authors turning their energies to finding a better solution. I'm not sure what it is, but complaining about a tiny minority snatching the bread from your mouth is not it.
I understand what you're saying here... I just often find myself wondering how realistic it is.

For one thing, how do you quantify "the bad he will engender"? And does that "bad" directly correlate with the amount of sales he will lose? Looking at services like iTunes that use DRM, one can say the "bad" engendered by those artists still seems to be getting them good sales. That's even more vague than the guesstimate of his "losses," and ultimately unhelpful in trying to compare one perceived "loss" against another... you might as well try to guess the weight of two clouds on sight alone.

Also, suggesting that all DRM makes people feel they are being treated like criminals is, I think, an over-reaction. DRM is designed for security... but security in itself doesn't really imply that everyone is a criminal. It just acts to protect the producer from the unlawful consumer, in as fair a way as possible (in theory) given that the unlawful consumer is hiding effectively amongst us. I don't feel I'm being treated as a criminal because I shop in a store with surveillance cameras... I just shop and leave, and let the criminals feel like criminals. And again I bring up iTunes' use of DRM as proof that the process doesn't automatically alienate and piss off everyone. If done right, DRM can be a publicly-accepted security tool.

Anyway, I didn't mean to simply promote DRM here...

My point is, Pogue has a right to be concerned, because in "normal" society, the law and the public work in concert to weed out unlawful activities, through mutual cooperation... and on the web, the law and the public refuse to work together for any purpose (other than catching child porn, maybe). And one can't work without the other. I think copyright can adequately address digital files and guarantee a producer's rights, but only if it has the acceptance and cooperation of the public at-large.

Until the public proves that it is willing to hold up its end in law enforcement, by accepting a system that permits some security for Pogue's product, there is no reason for him to expect that he won't be robbed blind by the public (based not just on supposition, but on the experiences he's already had). And with that expectation, if he decides it is not worth his while to put his documents online, because he can't see how he will profit from it, I wouldn't challenge him about his decision.
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Old 05-27-2008, 04:55 PM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan View Post
Looking at services like iTunes that use DRM, one can say the "bad" engendered by those artists still seems to be getting them good sales.
Have sales gone down since the non-DRM files (iTunes Plus and Amazon MP3 store) opened? I'm thinking no, sales have increased at iTunes month over month, year over year, even with nonDRM files out there. Yes, people still pirate, but buyers still buy. DRM only hurts the legit customers.

Ug... am I invovled in another neverending DRM thread?

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Old 05-27-2008, 05:12 PM   #11
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I wonder whether he looked for pirate copies before he sent out the pdf. One thing he doesn't mention is whether what he found online was the pdf as he emailed it... As it is we have a report of two quite possibly unrelated events: pirate copies and blind people. As we all know, lack of a pdf from the author does not seem to hinder the production of pirate copies of books.

A second possibility is that demand for his books is so low that without a zero-effort pirate copy being available no-one had ever bothered to produce one. I know there are a lot of authors who I personally would never bother to rip their work. It's just not worth the effort.
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Old 05-27-2008, 05:51 PM   #12
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P... How many people working for an employer, for example, would be satisfied if their boss told them to do their full-time work for free, then go out and sell umbrellas with the company logo on the street for their income? Not many? Then why should an artist have to do that, just to make a living?
...
On the flip side, Steve, how many people working for an employer have the possibility of becoming wealthy because their work was made into a movie that became a success thereby selling more books and more movies?

I realize that the number of authors that experience this is very small, but it is infinitely larger than zero which is the chance that it could happen to people working for an employer.

Selling, which is what authors end up doing, is a hit or miss thing. You can get rich but you can also go broke.

Admittedly success in the entertainment fields is not always related to the quality of work. Sometimes it's a matter of time & place. However, being one of those people working for an employer, I knowingly gave up a possibility for potential wealth (or the opposite) for the security of a consistent pay check. (Never mind that I evaluate myself as very poor in "any" entertainment field.)

That said, I still believe (and apparently I'm vastly in the minority) that you can not lose that which you never had. I agree that it is unethical to take what is being sold without paying but he never had the money from those copies that were downloaded without paying. I could say that I had lost millions because nobody has bought a copy of my life with my employer but I would not have lost it since I never had it.

Enough of my rant.

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Old 05-27-2008, 11:59 PM   #13
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moz's post reminded me of something: another thing about the darknet (at least from my admittedly small experience therein) is that most of the books available do not seem to be pirated ebooks, but scanned hard copy books. One suspects they are loaded with OCR errors, because nobody has that kind of time to not only scan but also proofread all those books. ;-) The larger point is that DRM won't stop those kind of ebooks from being produced and distributed. It will just annoy and inconvenience paying customers.

Steve--the author will engender bad will when the reader, who paid good money to purchase a book, has to repurchase it or do without when s/he decides to switch to a different reading device and, when s/he complains, is accused of stealing from the author and forcing him to live in a garret and his children to walk to school barefoot in the snow because they want their legally purchased books to work on their new device. That hasn't really been a major issue with iTunes because iPod users tend to stick with iPods. Also my understanding is that there is a fairly easy workaround--burn the iTunes music to a CD and re-rip it as an mp3. A mild pain but doable for the average person. Breaking ebook DRM is possible but you have to be reasonably tech-savvy to do it and many people won't think it's worth the bother.

I think the answer is make ebooks affordable and worth the money (that is, have some kind of added value, like DVD extras) and readers will buy them and probably not share more than they do hard copy books. The collectors will continue to play with their substandard toys. The constituencies should not be confused.
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Old 05-28-2008, 09:25 AM   #14
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On the flip side, Steve, how many people working for an employer have the possibility of becoming wealthy because their work was made into a movie that became a success thereby selling more books and more movies?

I realize that the number of authors that experience this is very small, but it is infinitely larger than zero which is the chance that it could happen to people working for an employer.
In fact, I'd argue that probability is about as small as someone who works as a cashier, gets discovered by an agent, and becomes the next supermodel. Nice dream, but not enough of a reason to make me work two jobs for such a slim possibility.

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Steve--the author will engender bad will when the reader, who paid good money to purchase a book, has to repurchase it or do without when s/he decides to switch to a different reading device...
Actually, I tend to blame the publisher for that, myself. But I get your point. My only point there was, it's too unquantifiable, much like the piracy debate. Without hard numbers, either on the extent of "piracy," or the losses due to "bad karma," nothing can be solved on that front. We need to move on to concrete solutions.

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Also my understanding is that there is a fairly easy workaround--burn the iTunes music to a CD and re-rip it as an mp3. A mild pain but doable for the average person. Breaking ebook DRM is possible but you have to be reasonably tech-savvy to do it and many people won't think it's worth the bother.
I (a non-iPod user) have an even easier workaround: My MP3 player includes SW that will record anything played on the PC... including something being played BY the PC. I just start the recorder, play the song from iTunes, and save it as a new MP3. It's not hard. My point here is that even with DRM, you can find a way to make it work for you that makes it worth the discomfort of some DRM.

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I think the answer is make ebooks affordable and worth the money (that is, have some kind of added value, like DVD extras) and readers will buy them and probably not share more than they do hard copy books.
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle... namely, an amount of value, an amount of DRM, and (this is the important part) an amount of customer cooperation to make it manageable. Yes, that means rules we'll have to abide, sacrifices we'll have to make, and DRM we'll have to accept. But they don't have to be horrible or insurmountable, or make us feel like criminals.

Who feels like a criminal when they look at the surveillance cameras at their grocery store? Who feels like a criminal because they have to put in their credit card before they pump their gas? How many of us have sworn off grocery stores and driving because of it? All of those are the equivalent of DRM, yet we've learned to live with them, because of the value we get from those products.

DRM can be simple, and workable for people who feel it is justified for the value they get out of it. Ask anyone who owns a Kindle... they bought into a DRM system to buy Amazon books, but if they consider it worth the value of the books they receive, they're okay with it. And they can still work around their DRM by buying non-Amazon Mobi books for their Kindle.

Bob, you're right... we're in another DRM thread. Should we kill it now, before the monster rises up and trashes the place, or do you think there's still room for discussion before it wakes up? (If you want, I'll willingly abandon ship right here...)
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Old 05-28-2008, 09:29 AM   #15
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For the average person, DRM is not really an issue. The 505 & Kindle are the two easiest ones to use. You don't need to go and find a PID and plug it into some website to then purchase eBooks. The 505 you plug in and it's a simple registration for the device with Sony's software. The Kindle is already registered when you purchase it. So you can then just purchase eBooks, load them and go.

The average person just wants to read the purchased eBook and is not really concerned with rereading it or the fact that it may not be transportable to some future device.
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