Piracy vs Bookstores

[Redcard]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

I see this is your first post. Welcome to MobileRead.



Please don't read too much into the loud argument going on. Someone with your moderate position is quite welcome here.

P.S. I am so jealous. I only have 3 copies of Narnia, and I've always wanted the large illustrated one.

Oh.. thanks

I mean, I love Narnia, but most of my "collection" has been.. well, more or less my mother trying to win me back to Christianity and using it.

She keeps forgetting I have it, and so she'll send me another one. The Large Illustrated one, though, that was my buy, as were the four exact same omnibus' editions with the different movie posters

And trust me, I like big arguments like these and it's good to know. It's just also good to point out that there are middle grounds here. I'm not against buying Chronicles (of course I'm not, I have 15 darn copies) on Ebook.. but .. there is no ebook

Love the site. I'll stick around , and don't worry about arguments like this. It takes a lot more to scare me off

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Redcard

I have fifteen copies of The Chronicles of Narnia, including the really big one with the original pictures drawn in them. There's no legitimate ebook of it out.

I don't find anything wrong with finding an illegitimate ebook of it and reading it. I'm sorry. It'd be different if I hadn't paid for the book, but I did. Many times over. And they've not released an ebook version of it because Disney has got the rights now and will milk it for all they can.

I would have liked to have some eBooks of this as well. I do have some paper books for most of the chronicles but currently I am listening to it on my iPod with an Audible version.

Dale

[JSWolf]

The thing is, most pirates pirate stuff for a number of reasons that are mostly justification reasons such as I;d never have paid for this anyway being the biggest one. And as far as eBook pirating goes, most of them were never eBook legally released for sale to the general public before they were created. It turns out that later on some of those illegal books have been released as legal eBooks.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by sebastien

Also, an author doesn't receive a cent from second hand books and libraries. Does that mean that they should be banned?

It's been mentioned before, here and in other threads, that libraries pay an additional amount when they purchase a book to account for a royalty to the author (I'm sure it's not as much as they'd get per individually-sold book, but it's something).

As far as second-hand books are concerned, the publishing system writes those books off once they are sold. Maybe when e-books become more prevalent, the used book market will largely die off... I don't know. But since a printed book generally continues to be one printed book... and not a replicated hundreds of digital books... the potential income or loss is obviously not enough for publishers to care about.

Originally Posted by sebastien

I think that the author is not the one who suffers more from pirating. The publisher and distributor are the one loosing the most.

I don't have an editor, publisher or distributor. Every book of mine stolen is money out of my pocket, and no one else's. At any rate, it shouldn't make any difference who's losing more of the money... the point is, if it's not being paid for, everyone loses.

Originally Posted by sebastien

You must be familiar with the latest Nine Inch Nail album? They gave it away for free on their web site, and yet they turned a mighty profit with special edition cd/dvd for their biggest fans.

Lucky them. And is it okay that many people downloaded the album and did not pay them a dime? If you did pay, would you feel it was fair that others took it for free? And when others decide that what's good enough for pirates is good enough for them... aren't we just encouraging more piracy?

Originally Posted by sebastien

My first order of business would be to make it more easy for the second book buyer, and 'honorable' pirates, to send me voluntary contribution.

I'm not even going to entertain the concept of an "honorable" pirate.

Originally Posted by sebastien

This generalization isn't fair. Just for fun, how much money do you make from the sale of a book? How much does the publisher? the printer? and the distributor?

I make 100% from each sale. And when the book is stolen, I lose 100% of the sale. Trying to justify a loss by saying the author gets such a small slice of the pie anyway doesn't wash.

Originally Posted by sebastien

The majority of the people on this forum are avid readers. People who most likely spend hundreds in book each year. Now they have a new toys and they are more than willing to spend as much for the material (minus the printing fee). The issue now is the availability of the material. In most cases the only way to access it is through pirating. All they ask is an easy way to have access to the material. All I ask, is a way to send money directly to the author/publisher.

No... the only way to access material that's never been converted to e-book is through pirating. But there is plenty of legitimate e-book material that is also being pirated.

At any rate, there is no god-given right to have e-book material just because you want it, any more than I have a right to pirate a Porche just because I want it. If it's not available as an e-book, you buy the print book, you make your own e-book from that, or you twist in the wind. Lack of availability doesn't justify piracy.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

So, if I have a TV with a license and I let my license lapse and I also have a CRT type computer monitor and I'm no longer using the TV because my license lapses and the TV detector van comes by and detects my computer monitor, will they come busting in the door to arrest me even though the TV is off and it's the computer monitor they are detecting?

They can't detect the computer monitor but they can detect the TV receiver that may be in the monitor (some have them and some don't). The RF detector that is used tunes to the specific broadcast frequencies +/- 10.7 MHz (The typical IF frequency) to detect, not only your receiver but the channel it is tuned to. In the US these tuners are fairly well shielded but I would imagine that ones sold in GB are less shielded.

Dale

[rationalbiker]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

At any rate, there is no god-given right to have e-book material just because you want it, any more than I have a right to pirate a Porche just because I want it.

And this is the key here. People equate wanting something to being entitled to it. I particularly find it amusing that so many people who complain about the government restricting or violating their rights are so quick to violate another person's rights themselves.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The thing is, most pirates pirate stuff for a number of reasons that are mostly justification reasons such as I;d never have paid for this anyway being the biggest one. And as far as eBook pirating goes, most of them were never eBook legally released for sale to the general public before they were created. It turns out that later on some of those illegal books have been released as legal eBooks.

That's really no better of a justification than my saying I stole a printed book because I wouldn't have paid for it anyway.

[Richard Herley]

Originally Posted by HarryT

In some countries, authors do get paid for library loans. In the UK there's a central "pot" of money which gets paid to authors each year on the basis of their total number of library loans over the previous year. It's not a fortune, but a popular author can get a couple of thousand £ from it.

It's called Public Lending Right, and most authors get no more than £100 a year from it. Although it is of course true that libraries buy books and hence pay some royalties to authors, and although it is true that libraries act as showcases for lesser-known authors, the fact remains that authors are deprived of much income by libraries. In effect, authors subsidize the public library system, paying for the entertainment and enlightenment of people who earn far more than they do.

I campaigned against PLR in the 1980s, even going so far as to see my Member of Parliament at Westminster on the subject. Why should authors be so compensated, however inadequately, from the funds raised by general taxation? Far better to charge library-goers a small fee for each book borrowed -- with the usual dispensations for the young and the unemployed. Then people would not get the dangerous and ultimately corrosive idea in their heads that reading is somehow "free".

We are seeing some of the results of the past 100 years of this cultural conditioning in (a) the parlous state of the publishing industry and (b) the steep decline in the quality of modern writing.

To the pirates and apologists-for-the-indefensible posting here: if you persist in not paying the author, he will be unable to write. It is as simple as that. If you want nothing new, of any quality, to read in 20 years' time, by all means keep ripping off the authors and the publishers. Just don't complain when all you have left to read are books written 20, 50, or 100 years before -- by authors who, being conveniently dead, no longer need to feed themselves.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

To the pirates and apologists-for-the-indefensible posting here: if you persist in not paying the author, he will be unable to write. It is as simple as that. If you want nothing new, of any quality, to read in 20 years' time, by all means keep ripping off the authors and the publishers. Just don't complain when all you have left to read are books written 20, 50, or 100 years before -- by authors who, being conveniently dead, no longer need to feed themselves.

Eee! I thought you’d be on the other side, Richard! Well, in so far as you aren’t.

This thread’s OP wasn’t completely clear, but he seemed to be saying that he “pirated” games without demos to try them out, then bought any game he planned to play more than once, and would like to do the same thing with books, but had the complication that so many books are only available as p-books, which made it more of a hassle. You know, kind of like your business model . I think there was one(?) person who jumped in and said “muahaha, I teh pirate yer stuffz,” but that was it for the “apologists-for-the-indefensible.”

The rest of us on the “pro-freedom” side have pretty much all been arguing that we very much want to compensate authors, just not in a way which forces us to treat digital media like physical media and give up the additional uses digital media enable. I for one would be happy as a clam if we kept copyright as-is but all authors “sold” their books the way you do.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by mores

Just a note: it's a quarter of an album (9 tracks) that you're able to download for free, the complete 36-track-set costs 5 Dollars.
That's where the money is. Not the special editions or the CD versions. Get the whole thing for a fair price, and "try" it for free.

Although NIN only has the first 9 tracks available for download directly for their site, the site states plainly that “Ghosts I-IV [i.e, the entire album] is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.” So try it for free and buy the whole thing, but no skin off their nose if your friend gives you MP3s of the whole thing to listen to until you decide to buy it.

[rationalbiker]

Originally Posted by llasram

The rest of us on the “pro-freedom” side

Your 'pro-freedom' stance doesn't include the freedom (the right) of the producers/owners to distribute THEIR property in a manner they choose free from theft and leeching. Their freedom doesn't matter I suppose.

Clever trying to associate the word freedom with your position, but wholly misleading and inaccurate.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by rationalbiker

Your 'pro-freedom' stance doesn't include the freedom (the right) of the producers/owners to distribute THEIR property in a manner they choose free from theft and leeching. Their freedom doesn't matter I suppose.

Clever trying to associate the word freedom with your position, but wholly misleading and inaccurate.

Have you read Lessig’s Free Culture? The full book is available on-line under a CC license, so you should give it a read if you haven’t. I’m specifically thinking of his discussion of free vs. permission cultures. He’s primarily concerned with the much deeper issue of creativity and the availability of freely appropriable cultural capital, but invoking an author’s right to control their work – not just make a living off of it – pushes things in that direction.

But ok, I really just glibly picked a positive-sounding name to preempt being called “pro-piracy” .

[hidari]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

It's called Public Lending Right, and most authors get no more than £100 a year from it. Although it is of course true that libraries buy books and hence pay some royalties to authors, and although it is true that libraries act as showcases for lesser-known authors, the fact remains that authors are deprived of much income by libraries. In effect, authors subsidize the public library system, paying for the entertainment and enlightenment of people who earn far more than they do.

To the pirates and apologists-for-the-indefensible posting here: if you persist in not paying the author, he will be unable to write. It is as simple as that. If you want nothing new, of any quality, to read in 20 years' time, by all means keep ripping off the authors and the publishers. Just don't complain when all you have left to read are books written 20, 50, or 100 years before -- by authors who, being conveniently dead, no longer need to feed themselves.

This point of there not being any good books out there because of pirating is a rather WEAK point. Most of the books published in the industry are rather poor in quality or crap. I would say less books published would be a good thing in general. Plus, the point of authors not having enough to live on is pathetic. Writing is a luxury not a right. Most writers and artists do have "regular" jobs as do most of the writers on this site.

There was plenty of "culture" in many countries before writers and artists were paid handsomely for their work.

[rationalbiker]

Originally Posted by llasram

Have you read Lessig’s Free Culture?

No, and upon viewing the free culture's manifesto, I have no intention of doing so. Here's part of it;

"We won’t allow the content industry to cling to obsolete modes of distribution through bad legislation."

This thought exemplifies what I just pointed out about how people promoting 'freedom' don't recognize the freedom of the producer. The producer is only free to the extent that this 'freedom mob' will allow him to be with respect to the product of his work and effort. In other words, if someone produces something, the mob invents some cultural claim to take that work from him under the guise of freedom. No thanks.

We already live in a culture where a man can freely choose to distribute the product of his work for free if he wants to do so. If a man so chooses, good for him and those who can benefit from his work. However, I also want the man to be able to protect the product of his work should he decide to do so. He has earned the right to do that by the effort of his work. Your 'free culture does not recognize that. It only recognizes "I want it so I should be able to take it." I don't care to live in a culture that makes man's mind a slave to the so-called "common good".

At any rate, seeing that there a few more principled folks in this thread than I initially expected, my hat is off to those people. They understand the concepts of value, rights, voluntary trade, and the self-esteem that comes from the earning of one's life rather than living a life that comes at the expense of other men.

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

llasram suggested Prohibition is a good analogy for the e-book situation. I believe a better analogy is speeding. Despite laws designed to protect society, people speed, and they always rationalize a good reason to do it ("I'm able to handle this speed"... "There's no one else on this street"... "I won't get caught").

Its the best analogy to piracy I've read about ever.

Though you neglected to mention that it shows clearly that people will always be pirating books, no matter what laws are introduced, and that it won't ever work to show them how immoral and potentially destructive it is.

Reading the rest of the topic, I started to wonder... the typical person downloading an illegal ebook from the Net is motivated somehow to do it - those motivations have been described here, along with rationalizations many times. However, it's also been reported that many, if not most of illegal ebooks are produced by OCRing and proofreading the paper book. The person who OCRs the book already has it, OCRing and proofreading takes time and lots of work, there's no profit to be made from OCRing and releasing the book at all. What motivates those people, the people who introduce new content into Darknet?

Even with people who buy an ebook, remove DRM and release it, they still paid for it full sum - why do they release it? What motivates them to do such immoral action, with nothing to be gained?

I believe mostly it's a motivation to pay back to someone, or to a group of people. The average pirate might well think: I got quite some books from those people, let me pay them back: I'll scan a book or two and give them back. I don't really care where those books come from, they say there are people on other continents, authors, publishers, I never saw them, why should I care, I don't visualize their existence. But here are people I know, I conversed with, I got files from. I feel gratitude, I'll pay them back.

So the people are paying back, and are motivated by natural human emotions. They're just not paying to the person we'd want them to pay to. I don't think human beings can ever be made to think of the author they never saw in their life before people they have direct contact with, no matter what the law or morality says. Human mind wasn't made to cope with million-people communities.