Copyfraud - public domain's fate?

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Let me put the question to you another way. Say tomorrow someone comes to you with an idea for making a quick buck. He says, "Let's download all the books from PG and run them through calibre, then sell them for $x."

Would you encourage this person, or not?

Of course bloody not. I already said that that running PG text through calibre and selling it at the price comparable to best-sellers is "highway robbery".

But what about a convenience fee of $0.25? Or one-time charge of $5 to cover costs of running server that eliminates:
a) need to access your computer when you are on vacation and just want to read a classic from PG in format for your 3G capable device?
b) time to plug device into USB port, to find, download, click, transfer the converted file to device?

Is that morally acceptable? I personally don't find any issues with it.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Herding cats. First there were the people that objected because fraud is a "legal term". Now there are people that object because, even if it is vraud, it's impossible/inefficient/inelegant to enforce a law against this type of vraud.

I am not objecting, Kovid. I am merely pointing out to you that we are dealing with clear moral issue, and that discussion about morals can quickly become heated.

Since intentions of the perpetrator are tricky to judge, and if I am correct, what you would like to achieve is a differentiation of "vraud" vs. "acceptable use of PD" based on:
1) The amount of human work, "the sweat of the brow", that was included in preparation of the "modified" work. One-click run of automated converter does not qualify as a "modification", HarryT's hand-crafting does.
2) The amount of money asked for the service. A "small convenience fee" (TM) is acceptable, a "full price of the new ebook" (also TM) isn't.

The problems for respectable requirements are:
1) This is a FAST moving target. You have improved calibre in very short time to do things that once required hand-crafting, and you will add stuff in the future. How do one judge what is "vraud" and what is useless work of the individual who was simply unaware of the latest vintage of calibre capabilities?

2) Who and how defines the acceptable price for the service?

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Can we all agree first, that it is fraud.

No, we can't, because there is no deception here. Period.

Anyone is allowed to charge and/or profit off of public domain works. It doesn't matter who preserved the work in the past, or who put any effort into it. There are no legal OR moral constraints in this regard.

Again, this is why dozens of publishers have been able to print public domain works for decades, why you can charge for a movie version of a Jane Austen book, why you can charge admission to an opera....

As far as I know, the only thing PG can do is control their own trademark. You can't sell an "official Project Gutenberg edition!" without their permission, but that's pretty much all they can do.

Of course, it may be a good idea for the seller to donate to PG. And you have no idea whether they donate. But it's not a requirement.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

And if you don't agree, then please present a counter argument that addresses the classification of the act, not its legal definition or legislative consequences.

Sure.

The only way you can legally restrict what a person can do with content is via copyright. If a work is under copyright, then the rights holder is the one who can say "yes give it away for free, at all times, and anyone who charges for it will get sued" or "I only want one company to publish this book and collect the profits."

If it is in public domain, then the work has no copyright protection, and the public can do whatever they want with it. You can publish your own paper version of Emma and charge for it, as can Penguin and Random House. You can make a movie version of Emma, and so can 2 other movie studios. You can create derivative works (Emma Vs Zombies), as can someone else (Emma Vs Dracula).

The only way PG could stop you from charging for a public domain work -- even one they formatted -- would be to assert a copyright.

Protecting a public domain book by asserting copyright is clearly a contradiction.

Ergo, PG cannot control the works their volunteers prepare.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Let me put the question to you another way. Say tomorrow someone comes to you with an idea for making a quick buck. He says, "Let's download all the books from PG and run them through calibre, then sell them for $x." Would you encourage this person, or not?

Encourage? Not really.

Call him a bloodthirsty leech, when nothing they do deprives the public of the free versions? No.

I might add, as long as there are free versions that are indistinguishable from the paid ones, no one is going to make a mint off of this. And many paid versions do have at least some additional work.

[kovidgoyal]

Again, selling an exact duplicate of a PD ebook and not informing the people you are selling it to that it is an exact duplicate of a PD work is vraud.

Step out of your own shoes for a minute and imagine you are someone who knows nothing about copyright or public domain and just wants to read a book by, say Jane Austen. You therefore google "Pride and Prejudice" and the first link you find is Pride and Prejudice on Amazon.com being sold for $10. You just buy it, without going through the trouble of scouring the internet for a free version, because you have no idea that said free version should exist.

To re-iterate, ebooks are different. Historically, when a publishers republished a paper book they provided a service by making that book more available. That is why it was acceptable for them to do this. You do not provide that service with an ebook. At best, you might make it a little more convenient, and even that is a dubious short term proposition. Sooner or later all ebook readers will be internet enabled and it will be possible to get the book onto your reader just as easily from PG as from amazon.com.

And I am going to ignore all the points about how such a law would be difficult to implement/a slippery slope/etc. Read my previous post.

[charonme]

Originally Posted by tompe

But that case is totally different.

I see no relevant difference. Maybe it's different in a few technicalities.

Also, it's never completely the same thing. Even if the seller would be the same, the price still makes a difference for some people.

I still can't see the mechanism how selling something that is otherwise free could be immoral

kovidgoyal, ok, but you still didn't show why or where the supposed deception is

[charonme]

kovidgoyal, how is the morality of your example different from a case when I would buy an ebook for $30 not knowing that a competitor offers a copy for $20?

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by charonme

kovidgoyal, how is the morality of your example different from a case when I would buy an ebook for $30 not knowing that a competitor offers a copy for $20?

Because a competitor that sells something for $30 is not selling the exact same thing as the one selling it for $20. If he is, then it is because of factors like the cost of importation/local manufacture/local tax rates etc being different in the different locations. None of those apply on the internet with a product whose base price is 0

Once again, I'm not saying that you cannot sell a PD work for >0, I'm saying that if you do and the edition you are selling is identical to an edition available equally easily elsewhere for $0, then you need to inform your customers of that little fact, otherwise you are deceiving them.

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

I'm not saying that you cannot sell a PD work for >0, I'm saying that if you do and the edition you are selling is identical to an edition available equally easily elsewhere for $0, then you need to inform your customers of that little fact, otherwise you are deceiving them.

OK, so how do you propose to bridge "need to inform your customers" to "must inform your customers"?

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Sooner or later all ebook readers will be internet enabled and it will be possible to get the book onto your reader just as easily from PG as from amazon.com. Sooner or later all ebook readers will be internet enabled and it will be possible to get the book onto your reader just as easily from PG as from amazon.com.

Well... Putting EVERYTHING that is in public domain, not only in English, but everything-everything-everything that was ever written and now is not protected by copyright laws will take some time and resources.

Are you suggesting that we need tax-funded effort to digitalize, preserve and ensure availability of public domain works?

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Read my previous post.

It is actually possible for people to have read what you have written, but still disagree with you.

[charonme]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

otherwise you are deceiving them.

I don't see how.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

is not selling the exact same thing

I assert that the differences or non-differences between the 2 products in my example and between the 2 products in your example are the same, so if they don't sell the same thing in my example, neither they are in yours and vice versa

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

It is actually possible for people to have read what you have written, but still disagree with you.

Considering that I wrote that I was addressing the question of whether people should be doing something, not what we should be doing to stop them, and yet all the responses I get are about how it is impossible/undesirable to stop them, I am forced to conclude that people cannot read.

I give up, go in peace.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

It is actually possible for people to have read what you have written, but still disagree with you.

Not in questions of facts. Vraud is not a legal concept so thererfore all points about implementing a law is irrelevant.

[charonme]

I still address the morality issue. It has not been shown why would the above mentioned case be immoral/deception nor what is the crucial difference between one case of not informing about a competitor's lower price which is not immoral and another case which allegedly is immoral.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Again, selling an exact duplicate of a PD ebook and not informing the people you are selling it to that it is an exact duplicate of a PD work is vraud.

Please stop it with the "vraud" stuff. It's not helping.

And no, there is absolutely no obligation to notify anyone that you are charging for something that another person is giving away.

If I buy a car, the dealer is not obliged to say his competition will undercut him by $500. If I buy a name-brand cereal, the manufacturer is not obliged to tell me the store brand is identical and half the price. If I go to Tourneau corner and ask to see a $1000 precision hand-made mechanical watch, the staff are not obligated to tell me that it's functionally identical to a $500 mechanical watch, or functionally inferior to a $25 digital watch.

The only way that selling a PD book would be unethical is if you attempted to copyright the PD material and subsequently control what gets done with it. And that is not what's happening here.

This is not like an open source project, where the individual(s) who put in effort get to control subsequent and derivative uses. Open source works because the code is protected by copyright. Public domain works are 100% out in the public. If a volunteer chooses to openly release it in a digital form, they should not have any illusions about it being exclusively released for free in all iterations thereafter -- because they have no rights in this regard.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Step out of your own shoes for a minute and imagine you are someone who knows nothing about copyright or public domain and just wants to read a book by, say Jane Austen. You therefore google "Pride and Prejudice" and the first link you find is Pride and Prejudice on Amazon.com being sold for $10.....

http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=pride+prejudice+ebook

Also, the free version comes up first with Amazon's listings.

And of course, every major ebook retailer touts all the free books you can get that are compatible with their devices / systems. I really see no reason to fear here.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

To re-iterate, ebooks are different.

Not in this regard.

Once a book is in public domain, that is it. Copyright is finished, done, taken down, game over. If you add new content -- an introduction, insert material about a zombie attack -- that portion is copyrighted and protected (and ONLY that portion).

It doesn't matter if someone else did the hard work of OCR'ing and proofreading, or retyping. PG did not add any new content, therefore they cannot copyright it.

In fact, if PG did try to insist that "their" ebooks could not be duplicated and distributed, THAT would be an instance of "copyfraud" -- because it would be an instance of them attempting to assert control over a public domain work.

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You do not provide that service with an ebook.

That's nice, but completely irrelevant.

You're expecting to impose copyright on a book where the copyright has expired. It's a contradiction, and therefore is not valid.

[kovidgoyal]

@Kali Yuga: Sigh. Again with what the law says, or should say or should not say. Do you want me to post in some language other than English?

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by charonme

I still address the morality issue. It has not been shown why would the above mentioned case be immoral/deception nor what is the crucial difference between one case of not informing about a competitor's lower price which is not immoral and another case which allegedly is immoral.

Let me put it to you like this: Say you are running a food kitchen for the homeless and someone invents a magical machine that duplicates all the food in your kitchen and transports it to their store a couple of blocks away.

There they start selling this duplicated food at $1 per meal "special discounted rate for the homeless". Now since homeless people are distributed all over the city, some of them will wander into our duplicators store and spend what little money they have on that food, because they will not know about your food kitchen.

Now if the duplicator had not duplicated but instead had used his own ingredients/labor I would say he is free to charge whatever he wants and he is not devrauding them by not telling them about your food kitchen.

Even if the duplicator has duplicated, I would say he is free to charge what he wants, but that if he does so without informing his customers that the same thing can be had for free down the road, then he is devrauding them.


So to summarize: Either you make your own product and then feel free to charge whatever you want with no obligations, or you sell identical effort free copies you have made of someone else's product at whatever price you want, but inform your customers about the original price, if it is lower.