[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

This is a popular meme on this forum, but the people in the industry, who have access to the actual figures , strongly disagree. Could it be possible that the people in the industry may know more about the true cost of piracy than a bystander without access to inside info?

If that's true, why haven't they released any accurate info about those costs? Why haven't they said which books would be bestsellers if pirates hadn't killed them, or how many people would be paying for ebooks if the torrent sites were shut down?

They insist that piracy is costing them zillions of dollars--but they can't say how much any one website is costing, or how much any one title has lost, or which authors would be making how much more money without piracy. In short, they're happy to declare grand losses, but they're entirely unwilling to state (1) who would be handing them that money or (2) who would be receiving it after it was handed over.

Which tells a lot of us that they're not losing money--they're demanding a moral right to money that they never had and may not actually exist.

If you go to any major store, you will find:
*CCTV cameras
*security guards
*RFID tagging of merchandise, plus RFID tag detectors
*sequestration of small, valuable items(jewelry, ipods, eg) in locked cabinets
*storage of items on the shelves in hard-to-open plastic packages

And yet I manage to find dozens of stores with none of those things, and they don't go bankrupt.

Also: Note that none of those things apply to goods that have already been sold. Nobody's complaining about security on ebook websites; they're complaining on restrictions on use of their purchases.

In the retail industry, better customer service and convenience are the right responses to competing stores: the right response to theft is .... anti-theft measures.

Absolutely. If anyone's hacking ebook stores to download books without paying for them, that store is within its rights to implement anti-theft measures.

However, out in the real world, "theft" doesn't mean "distribute unauthorized versions so cheaply that it's no longer profitable for someone else to sell." Theft involves taking something substantial away from someone else, not spoiling the marketplace.

Unfortunately, one of the costs may be less privacy , as ISPs begin to take on the task of ferreting out and stopping pirates.

Will they be taking on other legal burdens? Ferreting out deadbeat dads, perhaps, or tax evaders, or students who buy term papers? Why stop at copyright infringement? Why not enlist them for *every* potential crime or tort that would be easier to stop or prosecute if we had full access to people's communications?

It would be helpful if the wider community treated pirates as what they are-thieves who make it worse for honest consumers- rather than as an inevitable,inconsequential and and even benign presence .

When the copyright extension acts are treated as thefts of public resources, we may consider it. As far as I'm concerned, works should enter the public domain according to copyright law at time of publication; anything else is inflicting ex post facto laws on the rest of us.