Piracy Experiment

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

But they do have a choice over whether it stays there, and whether Google provides links to it. Anyone can set up an alert to tell them as soon as something is uploaded, and have it removed just as easily.

There are a few places where you can't do that, but those are not mainstream places so the small minority of people who use them don't statistically matter. (not that any of them do, but I think I would have trouble convincing you of that).

That's a joke, right? Your idea of choice is for an author to report that his work has been taken without permission and to have it removed? That's like saying that someone can commit a violation against you, but you can report it. Uh, swell!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Belle2Be

Except that someone has to buy the ebook to strip and convert. So your logic applies to them as well.

Nope. If I buy a paper book, then sell it to you as as a used book, I no longer have it. There is a single copy of the book, and while it has been sold twice, one of those sales benefited the author and the publisher.

If the book is in electronic form, any number of copies may be made. The original copy that is being pirated may have been a sale for publisher and author, but it could theoretically be the only legitimate sale the book had.
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Dennis

[Belle2Be]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Nope. If I buy a paper book, then sell it to you as as a used book, I no longer have it. There is a single copy of the book, and while it has been sold twice, one of those sales benefited the author and the publisher.

If the book is in electronic form, any number of copies may be made. The original copy that is being pirated may have been a sale for publisher and author, but it could theoretically be the only legitimate sale the book had.
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Dennis

So if I delete my bought-n-paid for ebook after I share it, thats fine by your logic. Just because something can be duplicated, doesn't mean it will be. I could duplicate my paper books with a pen and paper, or my copy-printer in my office, but it doesn't mean I will.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Any ebook available as an unauthorised download will have been bought by someone originally, either in paper form or as a retail ebook. The difference would be more one of scale. A used paperbook could only be owned by one person at a time. A used ebook could be owned by millions of people.

The scale is precisely the problem.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Belle2Be

So if I delete my bought-n-paid for ebook after I share it, thats fine by your logic.

No, it's irrelevant. If you choose to delete your copy of a bought-and-paid-for ebook after selling it, you've chosen to do so. You could have simply kept it.

If you sell you paper book, you can't keep the original, as there's only one copy.

Just because something can be duplicated, doesn't mean it will be. I could duplicate my paper books with a pen and paper, or my copy-printer in my office, but it doesn't mean I will.

And it doesn't mean you won't.

What gets copied and shared depends on how easy copying and sharing is and the popularity of whatever it is. If it's easy to copy and share and it's perceived to be popular, people who do such things are more likely to do so.
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Dennis

[ikonixx]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Nope. The used paper book has already sold once, which is why it is a used book. The author and publisher got revenue from the sale.

That's not true for an ebook.
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Dennis

But, that's just it. Say that the ebook was purchased and the DRM was stripped then the author was paid for his/her work.

[Belle2Be]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

No, it's irrelevant. If you choose to delete your copy of a bought-and-paid-for ebook after selling it, you've chosen to do so. You could have simply kept it.

If you sell you paper book, you can't keep the original, as there's only one copy.



______
Dennis

Your argument doesn't really make any sense. I could have simply made a copy of the paper book before selling it/passing it on.

An ebook can remain 1 file, not duplicated by that person, the same as a dtb could. They are both bought at one point, altered either by stripping/conversion or by bending the spine or marking the pages, and can be passed on for free. A dtb can be passed around as long as the book life, which considering there are still writings from thousands of years ago, could even be seen as longer than an ebook life seems feasible.

[guyanonymous]

Authors now have a potential market they can reach in the billions (language barriers aside). They are not limited to their immediate geographic area by geographic or material constraints.

Their costs of production of a unit (one copy of an ebook) (not the writing, but the production of the end product) are arguably zero.

Their costs /unit to distribute those books are also essentially zero.

Their ability to supply is therefore virtually infinite, and demand is on a scale never previously possible...in fact, exponentially greater than it ever has been before.

There are also more authors, more books, more to read out there.

I'm sorry - but individual books are not worth anywhere near as much today on a per-unit value as they were before.

The video game industry (PC) has been turned on its head because of Steam. People are accepting its relatively minor DRM and BUYING GAMES despite misgivings, because distribution, easy of access, updating, pricing (via frequent experiments) and convenience are all vast improvements over store-bought physical purchases of the same. There is no reason for most PC games to purchase a physical copy if there is an alternative available. We don't get manuals anymore? Or hint-books....you buy those separately.

Until the book market does the same (accepting that $1-2 for a book sold to a few million people online around the world will make an author more than one sold for $30 to 10000 people), those who can will pirate books. The current and coming generations see copyright differently than previous generations. People will pay what a book is worth, and people will copyright infringe (not steal) if it's too much and they still want to read it. Authors/publishers can try to put the genie back int he bottle, but they're ignorant of the realities of a new society that is emerging. Their books aren't worth $11 for a paperback...sorry; they just aren't. Economy of scale has taken care of that, whether they want to admit it or not - the end users see that, whether they verbalize it or not, and until more value is provided, more and more people will seek out alternative ways to get their reading material they'll see piracy of books grow, and their sales decline (generalized book stores are dead, sorry if you're not ready to accept that yet).

Steam is chanign game sales.
Netflix is changing movie distrubution/sales.
Apple/Amazon/others are doing it for music.

Each of these involves drastically lowered costs and/or increased value/convenience.

Authors like JA Konrath who put their money where their mouth is by experimenting, sharing the results etc., are leaders in the future of the book industry, not those who cling to archaic systems which are based on no-longer-relevant-premeses (limited ability to produce, distribute etc) and a false sense of value.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by puddych

[snip]

I just get so fed up with money grabing which goes far over decent bounderies...does this make me a bad person..I do not think so..I just addapt to a crazy world

urs

Do you think that stealing from authors makes you a good person? Do you think that the best way to protest against a money grubbing society is to steal from authors? Really?

[Belle2Be]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Do you think that stealing from authors makes you a good person? Do you think that the best way to protest against a money grubbing society is to steal from authors? Really?

How is it stealing if he already bought the book?

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by kacir

Have you considered running on Linux? At least for browsing? At least from a virtual machine?
Give Mint Linux a try. Works nicely out of the box and if something screws it anyway, you simply reinstall, leaving your Windows partition untouched.
There *is* some learning curve, but you seem to be experienced veteran ...

+1

I only use Windows for my iPhone/iPad and a single GPS program that's not available for Linux. Ubuntu is also a good choice for an (relatively) easy transition from Windows to Linux.

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by ficbot

No it doesn't. The reader can get the book for free from the library. Or borrow it from their mother. Or sample the first few pages and decide to buy another book instead. If the reader picking up (however metaphorically) the book does not result in a sale for the author, there is a reason that browsing customer was not converted into a paying customer, and it's the author's job to convert them. There are no guarantees at all that someone who writes a book will get any profit at all, unless they do it for hire. It's just not that kind of business, and the author 'deserving' money has nothing to do with it. Some authors make a lot of money. Some authors make less money. From strictly a business standpoint, it is a commission sales job.

If you have the temerity to download an illegal copy of a book that is for sale AND you read that book - you should pay the author some money. There is no wiggle room here. There's no argument for "commission." I work for commission - the entire company is completely commission driven. When we get a contract for a customer we get paid. Period. The customer can't come back and say, "Well, you might not have gotten paid anyway so we won't pay you." The customer can't claim that they "didn't care for the contract that much." We fulfilled our end of the agreement, we get paid. THAT is commission.

The point here is that you are already converted. You picked up the book and you read it. There's no need to spend the time concocting massively unlikely situations to explain why you decided to not to pay for the book. You don't have to lie to kick it.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

There's an infinite supply of copied ebooks.

That's why I think that the current model is broken.

An eBook file is a good, a form of wealth. The more you own, the wealthier you are. The more people who own lots of them, the more wealthy the population is.

The inclusion of the concept of copyright in the US Constitution suggests to me that it has been govt policy since 1789 that people should own books. Of course, I would say that people should own books even if it were not govt policy.

I want people (including me) to be wealthy. I see wealth to be goods and services, not money.

The current model disregards all of this. The publishers want us to pretend that a computer file is a paper book, and to behave accordingly. Not only is this pretending silly, it decreases the spread of wealth.

The various discussions we have here about piracy are about money: a) People should not enjoy what hasn't been paid for; and b) Authors and publishers should be paid.

I believe that the 21st Century will see the solution of ensuring that authors and publishers are paid. And I believe even more strongly that the century will see computer files widely shared among the poor as well as the rich.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Belle2Be

How is it stealing if he already bought the book?

If you buy an electronic book, you are not stealing. You have bought and paid for the copy you have.

If you then make a number of copies and pass them out to your friends and family, what are you doing?
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Dennis

[guyanonymous]

Copyright infringing...not stealing.