Piracy vs Bookstores

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by moz

Context dependent. If you said "in the USA taking a physical good that is for sale without paying is stealing" you would be correct. But watching a television in the UK when the license fee has not been paid is not stealing. Both are "taking" as you're trying to define it.

Since I don't know what the "licence fee" you describe is for, exactly, I cannot answer that. But if the fee is for the TV itself, and it was not paid, then what is it that you've done by watching the TV? If the fee is to pay for delivering the content to the TV, and you didn't pay for the content, what have you done by watching the content on the TV?

If, in the U.S., you watched a TV connected to a cable content delivery system, and you did not pay the cost of the cable, you would be guilty of stealing the cable's signal. (Even if they couldn't prove you actually watched the content... just having it hooked up is enough.)

Just a comment: This thread is entitled "Piracy vs Bookstores." If it is going to become just another "your piracy isn't my piracy" discussion, this subject will go nowhere fast.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Puddytat purr

Are you going to ask the author if it's ok to personally rip a copy of one of your pbooks? What's the difference between doing it yourself or getting it from someone else who knows what they're doing?

A book's copyright notice should specify whether you have permission to convert or reproduce a book, or not. An example from a Penguin book I recently bought:

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights.

That notice is telling you that you do not have permission according to the author's copyrights... so you should not be making even a single digital copy for personal use. Of course, their real concern is whether you distribute it, and most jurisdictions will look the other way if you make a copy for yourself (unless it gets out, in which case, they stop looking the other way, and you will be charged with a copyright violation).

The difference between doing it yourself and getting it from someone else is just this: Neither of you had permission to make the copy, though the law would not bother to indict either of you for that. However, in the eyes of the law, distribution of the copy is worse than actually making the copy, so the distributor is considered guilty of copyright violation, and the recipient is an accomplice. It's really a double-standard, but there it is.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

That's easy: It means a product which the author intended to be sold for money, but which you obtained for free. That's my definition of wrong.

Ok, but which is the wrong: the acquisition for free or the lack of author compensation? I really hope we can agree that the author not receiving compensation for their work is the problem.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Saying "It's not stealing because the law hasn't gotten round to calling it stealing" doesn't mean it's right. This is false justification for such actions.

Actually, that’s the opposite of what I meant . I was suggesting that there are many cases which are currently illegal and may even strike our initial intuition as “wrong,” but are fully justifiable.

At least in the US, copyright is explicitly a utilitarian, practical system we constructed to compensate content-creators. It isn’t the only such system possible, and its practicality depends upon a particular set of technological conditions which have pertained for only the past few hundred years. What value would copyright have in pre-literate societies utilizing purely oral traditions? Or even merely prior to the invention of the printing press? The high unit costs and miniscule market would make contemporary copyright useless then.

And now technology is developing beyond those conditions. Perhaps even now a system other than copyright would be more effective at compensating content-creators. Or perhaps innovators such as yourself will find ways to keep it working. Either way, our understanding of copyright is facing situations which simply weren’t possible prior to copying and distribution via digital data networks. But the key question to ask in all of these situations remains: is the system effectively compensating content-creators?

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

I don't have an issue with (1), assuming the e-book is made by the owner of the p-book, and it stays in their hands.

With (2), if the author agreed that the owner of a P-book was entitled to a free copy of the e-book, okay. However, that's not always the case. If you're expected to pay for it, you have to pay for it. No one expects that if they buy a hardback, they'll get a free paperback. The exact same issues apply.

Why would someone want both the hardback and the paperback? Not being facetious here. People find value in having both the p-book and e-book editions of a work or e-book editions in multiple formats, while I can’t think of a single reason I’d want to own both the hardback and the paperback of a book. This suggests to me that these situations are fundamentally different and the analogy is flawed.

Ignoring the analogy, you seem to be assuming the case where the recieved–e-book is an edition assembled by the publisher. I was assuming a pirated edition produced at no additional cost to the publisher whatsoever. In that case the impacts on the author’s bottom-line of just buying the p-book vs. buying the p-book and receiving the e-book are identical.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

(3), (4) and (5) are simply false justifications of the taking of a book, scarce in print form or not, and not paying for it. Unless that book is in public domain, or the legal producer of the e-book is willingly giving it away, not paying for it is wrong.

You seem to have missed that I agreed (4) and (5) were wrong and felt (3) was borderline. I think the important thing is not whether or not the recipient pays for the book, but whether or not the author receives compensations. The extremity of your position seems to suggest that borrowing a book from a library of from a friend is wrong as well.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

No... it leads publishers to believe that they cannot make a profit from that book, because it has been pirated, and they will subsequently not release it. (This is not necessarily true, in fact, but true or not, it is the perception on the publisher's part.)

This seems like a pretty shaky assumption. Many publishers have demonstrated awareness that their books are being pirated without noticing their sales dwindle to nothing. I have a hard time imagining that a publisher upon seeing a book being actively pirated would conclude that no market for that book existed.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

If they made e-books available in preferred formats and selling models, then yes, they'd be better off... they would not be pirated, because the legit copies were out there. There would still be theft, I'm sure, but a great deal of the "kudos"-based piracy would be reduced or removed.

I’m glad we’re at least in agreement here.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by moz

I've added "typing it all in" since you reminded me that that is an option.

I prefer the term “manual OCR”

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by moz

There's a wiki page!
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Digi...ooks_to_Ebooks

I've added "typing it all in" since you reminded me that that is an option.

That was actually how PG got started back in the 70's.

Dale

[cmbs]

Gotta love these "I'm an honorable thief" or "it's the publisher's fault I have to break the law" threads.

Far as I'm concerned, if mobile read is so upright, they shouldn't allow talk of illegal activities on their website. Surely there are forums just for honorable and unwilling-but-forced thieves where they can discuss this stuff.

[moz]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

A book's copyright notice should specify whether you have permission to convert or reproduce a book, or not. An example from a Penguin book I recently bought:

Copyright holders commonly misstate their rights in such places, and those rights change over time. At the most basic level, copyright typically used to expire some years after the death of the author, so living authors couldn't really put an expiry date in the book. They also fall into the trap you do, of assuming that their work will only ever be available inside the jurisdiction they live in. As soon as someone moves the work in either time or space those assumptions might be invalid, and the applicable law might change too.

Example: DVDs in Australia often say "only legally permitted to be used in DVD region X" (or words to that effect), a statement which is false in Australia where region-coding has been declared not legally binding. Manufacturers who continue to print that on the DVDs they sell in Europe or the US are not being accurate, but it's in their interests to try to convince their customers of the lie in order to sell high-priced DVDs locally.

Example: music CDs also say I may not rip them. That too is explicitly legal in Australia.

You don't have to like the law, but you do have to accept that it exists.

[sanders]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Actually, the industries could have controlled "the game" if they'd wanted to, simply by forcing the middleman--the ISP--to pay a "tax" for transmitted music, much like the "tax" we paid per blank cassette tape to cover their expected losses, and let the ISP pass the cost on to us. In fact, if they did it that way, the added cost per person would have been so small as to be negligible (most of us pay more through inflation every year). This plan would have been so painless as to render the whole MP3 issue a non-starter.

This is a tricky issue. Would you say the ISP had to track the actual data they pass through ("This is HTML - okay, no problem... This is an MP3 - add the copyright tax"). There are MP3s available for free, so they would have to have some kind of (huge) database to check for the legal status of each piece of data.

A different implementation would say "We'll add 10 cents of 'copyright tax' for every G you download" - much like the cassette tape tax. However, would that imply a "license" to freely download copyrighted works? Or would that still be illegal and this would be some kind of "statistical fine"?

I am heavily opposed to the latter. I think the cassette tax was like that. "It's illegal to copy music, but we know you'll do it anyway so we've added a precautionary fine."

Imagine you would have to pay a few hunderd bucks extra when you buy a car "just in case you break the speed limit and there's no cop around to notice"?

I don't think this would fly.

[moz]

I'm surprised no-one has yet complained about the blatant theft of intellectual property inherent in my appropriation of the French term "liseuse" into the English language, without paying any kind of fee at all. Here was me thinking everyone here were fine, upstanding defenders of the property of others. Tsk, tsk

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If you have an LP, you are NOT entitled to download a CD RIP of that LP. But you are entitles to convert that LP into digital form. if you've purchased eBook in eReader format in the past to read on your PDA and now you have a 505 or a Gen3 or other eink device that will not read eReader, I don't see any issue with format shifting it to be able to still read the content on your current device. But just because you have the pBook, you still do not have the right to download a digital copy. However, you do have the right to format shift the pBook yourself.

Depends where you live. Format shifting is not currently legal in the UK, although the government are considering changing the current law to make it so.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Since I don't know what the "licence fee" you describe is for, exactly, I cannot answer that. But if the fee is for the TV itself, and it was not paid, then what is it that you've done by watching the TV? If the fee is to pay for delivering the content to the TV, and you didn't pay for the content, what have you done by watching the content on the TV?

The "TV Licence Fee" in the UK funds the BBC. It currently costs £135.50 (about US$270) per year, and every household which own a TV set has to have one. Not having a valid TV licence is a criminal (not civil) offence, the penalty for which is a statutory £1000 fine. It's free for people aged 75 or over.

[spooky69]

Originally Posted by cmbs

Gotta love these "I'm an honorable thief" or "it's the publisher's fault I have to break the law" threads.

Far as I'm concerned, if mobile read is so upright, they shouldn't allow talk of illegal activities on their website. Surely there are forums just for honorable and unwilling-but-forced thieves where they can discuss this stuff.

Freedom of information, maaan!
I'd agree that it's not fair (or logical) to blame the publishers for an individual's desire to take something for free that they would otherwise be paying for, but it's also unrealistic of the publishers to expect to be able to maintain complete control of their content in the current technological climate. Seems like even encrypted/copy-protected media will almost always end up being pirated, and failure to recognize this reality and plan for it will always increase the damage done to a distributor's bottom line. Please don't mistake me saying that for the attitude of "they should know that people are going to pirate, so it's okay to pirate" or "it's okay to pirate because the music and movie industries just don't get it...you gotta adapt, grandpa!" as I have seen people argue plenty of times as justifications for their stealing/distribution of copyrighted materials.
The big point is that piracy isn't going away any time soon (if anything, it will probably get easier and easier), and anybody trying to market a product that can be pirated will eventually need to take advantage of the styles (and routes?) of distribution that piracy uses as a key tool for generating awareness of that product. In one form or another, yes, you probably do need to put your product out there in some form in order to lure people into buying it.
A lot of the things that we see used to market these "piratable" types of media today would have scared the crap out of publishers a few years ago ("You're giving the first chapter away for free?!" "And people can go to your website and listen to the song any time they want...for free?"). In other words, frustration about and denouncement of piracy isn't going to make it go away, but paying attention to methods in which it takes advantage of modern interconnectivity is what will make or break the long-term viability of many publishing and distribution entities.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by moz

I'm surprised no-one has yet complained about the blatant theft of intellectual property inherent in my appropriation of the French term "liseuse" into the English language, without paying any kind of fee at all. Here was me thinking everyone here were fine, upstanding defenders of the property of others. Tsk, tsk

That's because you stole it from the French. That's like taking candy from a baby. If you want to publicly embarrass yourself by stealing from the French, that's your problem.

[igorsk]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

That's like taking candy from a baby.

Anyone who uses the phrase "easy as taking candy from a baby" has never tried taking candy from a baby.
-- Robin Hood

(I'm pretty sure I've actually first read that in Heinlein but can't find a confirmation)

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

The only thing that gratifies me out of this thread is that it is providing a clarification of PD and DRM for those who do not know how it works. The rest of it, unfortunately, is all about seeking rationalizations and justification for taking something that wasn't intended for you.

Or just observing certain facts, when you don't feel guilty about taking something that wasn't intended for you.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Our societies are based on commonly-accepted understandings, such as the concept of the sanctity of property (you know: Thou Shalt Not Steal?). The fact that you can steal something easily, or that you know you won't get caught, is no justification for stealing it. If you can get it fairly, get it. If you cannot... go without. We're talking about books, not food.

I don't agree with the concept of society based on anything as a whole. People, individuals, come onto the world, grow, look around, and learn what they can, and cannot do in current state of society, or rather decide that the society's reaction to certain actions of theirs is bad enough not to undertake the action - and then they do want they want within those limits. They in turn determine the views of next generations, and society evolves. In 50 years cannibalism may well be fashionable, if it evolves that way.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

As long as there's a "darknet," there will be publishers who will not want to release titles into it. That will not help the publishing industry, nor will it help the consumer. So it's worth while to play "by the rules" and shun the darknets, thereby encouraging e-book publishers to give us more legal books.

Darknet grows, and the ways for the end-user to get to ebooks multiply, and it gets easier and easier to find any text you seek. I see two possible futures.

One is that the publishers make a system (or systems) that will give the people easier access to texts better put together than there are on Darknet soon, and this system will grow into something people become accustomed to, like Windows or iTunes.

The other is that is won't happen - then next generation will know the Net well enough so everybody will be able to access the texts without any problems, enough good search engines and programs will be made, freeware, that it'll be easy to access any title by simply writing it, like on Google, and everyone's acceptance of that will grow to the point when the laws will observe the reality and adjust to it. Then no one will pay any money to make ebooks - or paper books.

I understand your views originate from living where you live, in a kind of society you live in, observing many good examples of moral people. I spent all of my life in a country which knew no copyright law, and though now it's been introduced in law, it's only laughed off by people I know here. For years the only way to access any content in English - which was always very desirable - was to buy it from pirates, or somehow get an access to Internet and contacts there. It's now very easy to get everything on the Net, and pirates make money selling Windows and games only to people who didn't learn to use the Net here, and the only places you buy the software for are the legal businesses which may come under inspection by the state. And then you usually only buy the sticker with serial number, as it's cheaper, and get the software yourself, with eMule. As I know how it works here, I also know that most of the world has it worse with morals, if they ever knew any Western philosophy, and the Net access is getting better for them as well. Even if not a single person in USA or UK ever pirates a book, they'll all be available the day they come out, for people in many other countries, who thank the pirates for the time they spent on delivering the goods, on forums and irc channels made just for that.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Sure, it's not a perfect system. Sure, it means waiting seemingly forever for some books, and maybe literally forever for others. But in this case, it's better than the illegal alternative: A continued stifling of the e-book market thanks to the operation of scofflaws.

When it's made legal, I don't expect you'll start using the Darknet though...