Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
I thought debating it was exactly what we'd been doing  . Lack of evidence as to the relative sizes of the effects was the point of my post. Note too that there seems to be an almost unquestioned assumption that everyone understands copyright and IP, in my experience this is simply not true. From what I have seen, especially on the Internet, if people can copy things easily many appear to do so without ever considering whether they are doing anything wrong. DRM at least forces them to be aware of the issue. |
The internet encourages easy copying--see, I quoted your words here, without your direct consent.
Posting an excerpt and a link to news articles is common on much of the web. There's no nice sharp line that indicates how much is acceptable, and when the quoting veers into infringement... the A.P. tried to license quotes as small as 5 words, implying they believed that those would be infringing if not paid for.
- Downloading ebook I bought onto my reader: obviously legal.
- Downloading ebook I bought onto my husband's reader so I can read while mine is recharging: probably legal.
- Giving husband's reader back to him without deleting book: who knows, but nobody sensible thinks this is a problem.
- Repeat same process with friend's ereader: nobody knows.
- Downloading onto my computer: Legal.
- Allowing several friends to read whatever ebooks they want on my computer: who knows.
- Downloading my collection onto a memory card in my reader: Legal.
- Giving the memory card to a friend when I'm done with those books: ebookstores would say "illegal," but I haven't made any unauthorized copies.
Copyright law is a *mess* right now. It wasn't designed to deal with easy-instant copies, and it assumes that if you legitimately acquired a copy, you can legitimately transfer ownership, temporarily or permanently, to someone else.
Authors need to stop worrying about "who has an unauthorized copy" and focus on "how can I get more people to buy my books?" The idea of casual sharing somehow being the bane of sales is so mind-boggling that most people can't even imagine it--they assume the purpose of DRM is to block widespread public distribution, because they all know that sharing books is how authors get new fans.
I'm not sure what authors think is going to fill that niche for them if they've got DRM to block it. Amazon's popularity lists, so they only get customers from one store? Sample chapters that only indicate if the author can make a good setting, not if they can tell a complete story?
Where are the high sales numbers for any author whose works aren't pirated?