Piracy Experiment

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by Duiker

Now take that idea of the stuff in your house, but put it on the street with an over inflated price tag and see what happens.

If it's mine and I price it unreasonably, it still doesn't make it OK for someone to take it. It does make it easier to take if left untended, of course.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

But let us get back to the idea of permission. Sometimes authors allow their books to be downloaded for free. See Baen. With their permission, it's not pirating. The failure to pay is not what pirating is all about. It is disobeying the wishes of the permission-giver.

Baen allows free books to be downloaded from it's site. As I understand it, even though Baen is offering the books for free, I cannot host and share those files. Instead, I should point someone directly to Baen for downloading.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Maggie Leung

Yes, it's clear that it's easier than ever for readers to disregard authors' right to distribute their work as they wish. Digital content is much easier to take without permission.

There you are then. Now find a way to work around it instead of worrying about your lost billions.

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

There you are then. Now find a way to work around it instead of worrying about your lost billions.

Again, we're talking about why people pirate vs. why they don't.

No one is saying piracy doesn't occur, or that what we post here will stop piracy.

I couldn't write anything worth billions, so nothing to worry about as far as my money is concerned, lol. I don't have any interest in writing books. I value them as a reader.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Maggie Leung

Again, we're talking about why people pirate vs. why they don't.

Why:
Saves money. Easier than buying.

Why not:
Don't know how/worries about virus. Morality. Easier than finding free copy. Concerns about future of entertainment. Think writers benefit more.

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Why:
Saves money. Easier than buying.

Why not:
Don't know how/worries about virus. Morality. Easier than finding free copy. Concerns about future of entertainment. Think writers benefit more.

I think there's more to it than that, but you're entitled to your opinion.

[queentess]

Originally Posted by Maggie Leung

I think there's more to it than that, but you're entitled to your opinion.

Like what?

I can think of another: availability! Either because it's not out as an ebook (but there may be a pirated version) or because of geographical restrictions. But this may just boil down to the "easier than buying" point.

[Maggie Leung]

Originally Posted by queentess

Like what?

I can think of another: availability! Either because it's not out as an ebook (but there may be a pirated version) or because of geographical restrictions. But this may just boil down to the "easier than buying" point.

I'm too lazy to write it all out, lol. That's the main reason I avoid piracy threads -- lots of layers and tangents. It would be fun to have this discussion in person, because it'd be easier to communicate, and we'd probably be more polite to one another, be better able to discuss it without making it personal.

I'm gonna bow outta this thread now. I usually prefer lighter fare in forums.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by queentess

Baen allows free books to be downloaded from it's site. As I understand it, even though Baen is offering the books for free, I cannot host and share those files. Instead, I should point someone directly to Baen for downloading.

Not entirely true.

The Baen Free Library exists in two forms: the books available from Baen's website, and selections included on CDs that are bound into selected Baen hardcover releases. There are many books that have been included on the CDs but not listed in the Free Library page on Baen's site.

A site called baencd.thefifthimperium.org has all of the released CDs available as ISO images and massive zip archives. The site also has a search function that will let you find and extract an individual book. This is done with the full knowledge and permission of Baen Books. (The CDs all state explicitly "May be copied and shared, but not sold." The site is simply sharing them.) The proprietor is a member of MobileRead and posts occasionally.

The Free Library selections are integrated with the Webscriptions site these days, inter-mingled with ebooks Baen offers for sale. I suspect Baen prefers you simply link to them instead of hosting yourself so that the for sale stuff is also presented. (The Free Library is promotion, after all, intended to introduce you to authors with other work you might want to buy... )
______
Dennis

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by queentess

Like what?

I can think of another: availability! Either because it's not out as an ebook (but there may be a pirated version) or because of geographical restrictions. But this may just boil down to the "easier than buying" point.

Yes it does.

[unboggling]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

Quote:
Originally Posted by unboggling
"Unless you pay for the privilege to selectively download items within it, you have to download the entire file then sort through it."

Not true. Any decent bittorrent client allows you to pick and choose which files within a torrent you want do download and which you don't, and even to place high/medium/low priorities on the order you want them downloaded. You could pick a single file from a 20,000 file torrent.

I knew not reading the help documentation would come back to haunt me….
(Again.)

[ruel]

Originally Posted by bucsie

Actually that does not apply to ebooks as much. A few months ago I was curious about ebook torrents so I browsed the pirate bay's ebook torrents. I was surprised to see there were few torrents compared to other media. So as a next step, I asked google - and I found out that not torrent sites, but forums are where ebooks lie. So google was actually the gateway to the dark net.

TPB is not nearly the best torrent site for ebooks, not by a long shot. I'm not going to list any websites here, but there are other torrent sites that are much better for ebooks than TPB. Warez forums are good also (as you pointed out), but they have approximately the same files that are found on torrent sites (but they have much slower download speeds and/or limited downloads per day and/or time limits between downloads unless you buy memberships to the file hosting/downloading websites (rapidshare, megaupload, etc).

[wvcherrybomb]

Well, things have changed considerably since I started this thread. I am no longer the naive grandmother that I was just a week ago.

Some very knowledgeable people have contacted me and let me know I was going about it all wrong. Torrent sites were not the place to find ebooks. I was led in the right direction and conducted my not-so-scientific experiment once again.

This time, I was able to find every single book on my wish list as well as any other book I could think of. All were available in multiple formats - which doesn't really matter since I use Calibre - and all were perfectly formatted. Another big plus was that they are all obviously DRM free.

So now my opinion has changed. Once a person knows the right direction in which to go, almost any book can be had free and easy with formatting indistinguishable (at least to me) from that of purchased books. This is a much bigger problem for publishers and authors than I had originally figured.

[bucsie]

Ah but it wasn't so easy to get there on your own, other people had to guide you. So I see it as less of a problem than other copyrighted-media workers deals with. For a newbie, an mp3 or a TV show is real easy to get compared to an ebook.

[tvuongpham]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

If the day comes that legit copies are uniformly high quality and pirate copies are typically poor quality, I think that the publishers will be in good shape.

However, I can imagine that people will feel burned by poor quality legit copies, and will turn to the darknet, feeling like they have nothing to lose. That is to say, if the eBook might be poor quality whether it costs money or is free, I can see a lot of people trying the free version first.

That makes me fear for the publishers' future, because I suspect that when a person becomes accustomed to using the darknet, he will stay that way.

(I have never read specifically about the music industry's experience with this issue. But as I understand it, ten years ago Napster was used mostly by kids in high school and college, not 30-year-olds. But I suspect that those people, now in their 30s, continue to use the darknet for their music because they became accustomed to doing so back then.)

My conclusion is that it is imperative for the publishers to ensure that their eBooks are high quality. The ball is in their court.

I think that was the intent of BluRay Discs...vs camera cell phone in a movie theater! Now technology is an equalizer... very high speed internet enables very high quality i.e. BluRay disc "rips" copies.. and the use of media extender devices e.g. appletv, wdtv, boxee box, hdtv etc and you don't need a media collection that has physical optical discs.

I bought a bluray player and am well am unimpressed with the inconvenience of optical media!
AS for epubs... as long as publishers raise the bar (quality) there will definitely be buyers and counterbalance that with the price of a physical paperbook... I have bought great quality epub and not so great!