Massive wave of ebook piracy?

[GA Russell]

Steven, when Henry David Thoreau wrote about Civil Disobedience, he wasn't talking about test cases.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

Steven, when Henry David Thoreau wrote about Civil Disobedience, he wasn't talking about test cases.

So?......

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

And thus marks the breakdown of society.

"What is easiest for them" is NEVER what counts. That's the logic of the rats in the alleys and the flies on a carcass, not of humans in civilization. No one lives in isolation; it's time everyone on this planet--and especially those who take advantage of technology others provided for them and plug into these stoopid tubes--accepted that they are part of a society, and in a society, there are rules to follow.

Don't want to be part of society? Fine. But society is kinda tight, so give all our stuff back...



Exactly... that's the way people in a society do it.

Rubbish.

Videotaping stuff off the tv was illegal until very recently in Australia. Everybody did it. No-one was interested in forcing a 'test case' into court, as everyone knew it was stupid so they just went ahead and did it.

[ManosHandsOfFate]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

Don't bet the farm....

Large portions of the good 'ol US of A still do not have broadband and probably will not in any near future.

Some of us still use POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) to join you folks and some of us (me.....) have enough crappy copper between us and the switches that we're lucky to get 22K connections with a 56K modem.

Phyisical media players aren't going anywhere soon.

And don't forget bandwidth caps. The 250 gig per month that Comcast allots me isn't going to allow me to stream a lot of Blu-Ray quality movies.

[speakingtohe]

I was at a friend's house this weekend looking at his books. I saw a book I've been meaning to read for a long time. I thought about asking to borrow the book. Then I thought "Why not save us both the trouble and I'll just find the torrent. He can keep it safely on his shelf while I still 'borrow' it. I'll delete it when I'm done."

Sounds reasonable, n'est pas?

Nope because it is stealing plain and simple. Anyone with half a brain knows this.
Do whatever it is that you do, but don't try to gain respect by justifying it.

[MrPLD]

Regarding net-access, I was referring to ~10 years time when BR finally dies.

[toddos]

Originally Posted by ManosHandsOfFate

And don't forget bandwidth caps. The 250 gig per month that Comcast allots me isn't going to allow me to stream a lot of Blu-Ray quality movies.

Actually, 250GB is quite a lot. Note that I'm not necessarily supportive of any cap, but as far as caps go 250GB is a good number to choose.

As for streaming a blu-ray quality movie, that really depends. First, let's make some assumptions:

• The average movie length is 2 hours (120 minutes). While movies have been growing in length (I hate 3+ hour long movies!), there are enough 80 and 90 minute movies to compensate for the average.
• Blu-Ray movies often waste bitrate because they can. When you have 25GB or 50GB of space to work with, who cares if you use a constant bitrate rather than constant quality (variable bitrate)? For streaming, bits are precious. Depending on the movie, a 30,000kbps constant bitrate movie will look good with as little as 8000-10000kbps bitrate. Let's be generous and call it 15,000kbps average.
• Sound costs much less in terms of bitrate. Many blu-ray movies will use an uncompressed audio track, but again that's just a factor of having space to burn. For this comparison, I'm going to assume a 1500kbps DTS Surround soundtrack. That's 10% of the video bitrate, and gives excellent audio quality.
• I'm completely ignoring special features, multiple language soundtracks, commentary tracks, etc. All I'm considering here is the main feature and a single audio track in the language of your choice.

So, let's math.

Video + audio bitrate = 15,000 + 1,500 = 16,500kbps. Note that's in bits not bytes, so let's divide that by 8 = 2062.5 KB/s, or just over 2MB/s. Let's round to 2MB/s. There are 60 seconds in a minute, so that's 120MB per minute. Using our previously stated 120 minutes per movie, that's 14502 MB per movie, or 14.2GB. With a 250GB cap, that's 17.6 movies you can watch per month. That seems like quite a lot to me. I have a hard time watching 2-3 movies per month (I watch considerably more TV, but we're just talking about movies here -- we need different assumptions and calculations for TV). Also, that assumes you're using your network connection only for streaming TV, so let's drop that number down a bit. Let's call it 15 movies at 14.2GB per movie. That's 213GB, leaving a healthy 37GB for everything else.

All of the above assumes you can even stream 16,000kbps. My Comcast connection can (I've got the 20Mbps plan, and I can actually do closer to 25Mbps sustained), but what do you do if you have the 12Mbps plan, or have slower DSL?

tl;dr: You have to try really, really hard to go over 250GB per month.

PS, If you want to do the math for other types of video, using the following:

• HDTV tops out at 20,000kbps, but is also MPEG2 which is much less efficient than other codecs. Comcast's HD is closer to 13,000kbps. You can reliably reduce that by at least 50% (and closer to 75%-90% -- I routinely compress MPEG2 HDTV recordings to ~2500kbps without any noticeable loss in quality), call it 5-7,000kbps. Audio is generally 384kbps AC3.
• TV shows tend to be 42-44 minutes per "hour", or 21-22 minutes per "half hour" (yay for ads!).
• If you don't need 1080p and are fine with 720p, the 15,000kbps number we used before can be reduced to 5,000kbps or less without any noticeable loss in quality. For comparison, Netflix's 720p streams are 3000kbps or 3500kbps, depending on the title.
• If you're fine with Dolby Digital 5.1 and don't need DTS, AC3 caps out at 640kbps.

In other words, there are plenty of ways to reduce bitrates without sacrificing much (or any) quality. The 14.2GB 1080p video we calculated above could be as little as 3.6GB using 3500kbps 720p video and 640kbps AC3 audio. You could watch over 70 of those before reaching the 250GB cap.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience

Then a way to combat the foolish laws on DRM would be for lots of people who circumvent DRM on ebooks or distribute ebook de-drm software to publically post that they are doing so, and write letters to publishers of the books informing them that they are doing so, and wait to be prosecuted so that they can either clog the courts system or get a ruling that what they're doing is legal.

Just quietyly downloading pirated ebooks from torrent sites isn't Civil Disobedience.

[MrPLD]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Just quietyly downloading pirated ebooks from torrent sites isn't Civil Disobedience.

So, you have to shout it out and wear the T-shirt to make it disobedience?

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Libraries have limited copies of each ebook which limits the number of people who can read them.

"Borrowing" an ebook from a torrent site is not legally or morally the same thing, since licenses weren't purchased for such activity.

I don't think people who borrow from libraries care much whether licenses were purchased or not. In the UK, writers get a few pence every time one of their books is borrowed, but that wouldn't sway my decision whether I read it in the library or take it home to read. For a lot of people the internet has replaced libraries for research/reference, so it is no surprise that they would turn to it for fiction too. If writers are happy with the few pence they get from library loans they will be just as happy with a few pence every time one of their books is downloaded.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

And thus marks the breakdown of society.

"What is easiest for them" is NEVER what counts. That's the logic of the rats in the alleys and the flies on a carcass, not of humans in civilization. No one lives in isolation; it's time everyone on this planet--and especially those who take advantage of technology others provided for them and plug into these stoopid tubes--accepted that they are part of a society, and in a society, there are rules to follow.

Then I will rephrase it. What is easiest for them is what they will do. As an asside, I think we lost our society in the 80s when everyone was encouraged to be greedy, but I've already been told off once for politicking.

[AndroidGold]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Their way of looking at it is why should they adapt to market forces when they can go against the market and use the government as their private enforcer?

I agree and loved Napster as much as the rest, but at the end of the day, writers are not going to get book deals from publishers if publishers can't make money off the books they sell.

It would be sad to see profits get stripped to the point where advertising starts slipping into the eBook/eReader experience - perhaps even product placement in the context of a story like the do in movies will evolve.

I know money isn't the only motivating factor for writers, but the publishers who distribute this content and make it readily available in high quality formats certainly have one thing in mind and that's bottom line profits.

I agree that something has to give when it comes to purchasing and then sharing books, but then again, if book clubs that used to purchase a copy of a publication for each member of the group now just download a single file and pass it to each member's Kindle or Tablet, then the publishers are going to cry "foul" and will likely take measures to try and curb that behavior.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Civil disobedience for the purpose of forcing test cases of laws into the courts is one thing. Lawbreaking for selfish purposes is totally another thing.

But the example that started this was not law breaking for selfish reasons.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Nope because it is stealing plain and simple. Anyone with half a brain knows this.
Do whatever it is that you do, but don't try to gain respect by justifying it.

Copyright infringement is still not theft (see other threads).

The argument that it is wrong just because it is illegal seems strange. With that reasoning if I had to choose between "buying 200000 paper copies of a book and illegally downloading one electronic copy of the book" and "doing nothing" the right thing would be "doing nothing". I do not think the publishers or author would be happy with me doing the right thing.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by tompe

Copyright infringement is still not theft (see other threads).
...

Yes we have as as I've said, the current transitory legal definitions have little to do with the act itself and what it is.