Piracy vs Bookstores

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

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".

i've kept out of this discussion so far because i really didn't see anything to add that hadn't already been said (usually several times) but i really can't let this slip past.

attacking the idea of free public lending libraries ?? seriously ??? i can understand you, as an author, possibly being annoyed that a library could buy (and pay royalties on) just one copy of your books, which would then be enjoyed by countless people, none of whom would pay you anything, but i really can't accept the idea that the best solution to this is to impose a fee on library goers. and the idea of putting libraries in the same pot as pirates is just completely aberrant.

granted, the implicit subject of most of this debate has been recreational (or "luxury") reading, the latest science fiction or mystery or romance or whatever, but please let's not forget that libraries also serve as a repository and a conserve of our accumulated culture. this raises therefore many questions, one of the obvious ones being, who are you going to pay royalties to when you tax the library goer for checking out a work by shakespeare (or any other highly worthwhile but long since dead author) ? besides this purely pragmatic question, would you really want to put *any* obstacle, no matter how slight, in the way of the education and cultivation of people who might not otherwise have access to it, which is also represented by libraries ? what about students doing research ? what about people who are neither young nor unemployed, but nonetheless poor ? should they also be deprived of any culture or recreation ?

much of the argument against piracy seems to revolve around the notion of sacrificing the perception of individual good (i want this book, so i will take it) to the greater good of living in an organised society with laws and constructs ; however as far as i am concerned, society also has the responsibility of providing for its members who are less privileged, including by providing them, as much as possible, with education and a minimum of culture. this is not merely preferable to the individuals it benefits but overall i beleive completely necessary if we as a (global) civilisation (indeed, as a species) want to continue to evolve ; the Dark Ages were dark in large part because no-one knew how to read, and for that reason didn't know anything else either (it's the short version). without the preservation of and access to their cultural heritage, societies and individuals degenerate into ignorance and / or barbary. it's not completely irrelevant to cite the old standard "those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it" (or something to that effect, i don't remember exactly the citation).

for my last anecdote, when i was a child, both my parents worked but they still managed to be poor, so we could never afford to go away on holiday. instead, during the summer, every week we would go to the library, and i would check out a stack of books, that i would read all during the next week. in some ways, those stacks of books were more enriching than a month at the ocean might have been. those library summers certainly shaped who i am today in some very important ways, and would never have been possible if there had been a "fee" imposed on users.

i am afraid i have not been as eloquent, exhaustive or convincing as i would like on this subject but (as you can probably tell) i do feel rather strongly about it and it seemed to me rather important that someone should defend the public library system.

that's all, you can get back to it now.

[moz]

Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj

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

Unfortunately the guy making it failed to explain why he doesn't mail in a cheque for the fine amount every time he breaks the law, which makes his analogy a bit suspect. I leave the possibility that he never breaks the law as a test for people with more imagination than I've got.

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

Actually, the profit is that each book I OCR and proofread is one less book I have to lug about for the rest of my life, or do without.

[moz]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If you ran a company, you would be allowed to pass the ownership of that company - and the income from it - on to your heirs.

I don't know about the USA, but the law where I live is that your "will" is only binding in a very loose way, and can be interpreted and challenged on a whole raft of grounds. There's no legal way around that (the only solutions I know of are gifting before you die and killing off anyone that might challenge it).

And on a different note: what is the difference between me buying a second hand book, reading it and reselling it; and me buying it, OCR'ing it, reading it and reselling it? Specifically, from the authors, publishers and wider society's point of view, as well as the bush lawyers.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by rationalbiker

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.

I really would urge you to read Free Culture anyway. I understand and appreciate that you currently disagree with Lessig’s conclusions, or at least a strawman form of them. But one is never belittled by critically examining the arguments of those one disagrees with. For example, Lessig has concrete examples of where I think it’s hard to argue the current degree of freedom allowed under copyright law is sufficient:

Gone with the Wind was published in 1936....

In 2001, Alice Randall tried to publish a work called The Wind Done Gone. While she called it a parody of Gone with the Wind, that was her lawyers speaking more than Randall. The work is clearly based on Mitchell’s work; in telling the story of Gone with the Wind from the perspective of the African slaves, it clearly relies upon Mitchell’s work in an intimate and extensive manner. The Mitchell estate called the work a sequel and brought a federal lawsuit to stop its publication. This story, the Mitchell estate essentially argued, was theirs to control well into the twenty-first century.

To most people, this is plainly absurd. Gone with the Wind is an extraordinarily important part of American culture; at some point, the story should be free for others to take and criticize in whatever way they want.

(The Future of Ideas, pg. 212-3)

If you don’t agree that this is “plainly absurd,” then okay – you should skip Lessig’s books .

[rationalbiker]

Originally Posted by llasram

I understand and appreciate that you currently disagree with Lessig’s conclusions, or at least a strawman form of them.

If you are asserting that my interpretation is a strawman, please tell me in what way.

[spooky69]

To throw in one thought on the side of justification and reasonableness of piracy, I would say that the one right that is being gained by pirating is the right to information regardless of income/spending ability. I've pirated thousands and thousands of dollars worth of material, and not needing to pay for that stuff means that I place no limits on my ability to acquire information that I wouldn't reasonably be able to pay for without an exorbitant amount of financial sacrifice on my own part. The trade-off for me hurting the artist has been the (admittedly selfish) benefit of compiling really decent digital collections of music, books, and art. It's really been a big gift to myself, and the benefits I've gained has been massive compared to the disenfranchisement of any one individual's bank account that I'm personally responsible for. In other words, it's a really big win for me at the cost of many small individual losses for others.
If you want to go beyond my individual responsibility to the artist, I mean, obviously the culture of piracy clearly feeds off the attitude I just described, so I'm certainly not helping the problem. Also, the very nature of P2P sharing involves giving as much as you take (or often more than you take), contributing to the proliferation of that material to new groups of non-paying customers.
So basically pirating is really bad but not all that bad sometimes but also it's complex and definitely more complicated than just good vs. bad, although it can boil down to that if you want to get really practical, but people don't actually operate within an "I'm right" vs. "I'm wrong" mentality, so holding up the negatives of pirates and piracy as the be-all and end-all of this discussion, no matter how clear and universal those negatives may be, doesn't really have a lot to do with the way pirates are actually operating as they decide to steal material, making it almost into more of a straightforward legal issue rather than one dealing with the intricate dynamics of society and technology, which, even if you are simply looking for ways to prevent piracy, are the most important keys to understanding what has become a ubiquitous phenomenon.

[rationalbiker]

Originally Posted by spooky69

To throw in one thought on the side of justification and reasonableness of piracy, I would say that the one right that is being gained by pirating is the right to information regardless of income/spending ability.

You see, you can't argue with someone like this. He has rationalized in his mind that his "need" gives him the right to steal and that it is therefore acceptable.

You make other men slaves to your inability to provide for your own life.

I think at this point I've said all I care to say and I'm outta here.

Thanks for the discussion folks.

[spooky69]

Originally Posted by rationalbiker

You see, you can't argue with someone like this. He has rationalized in his mind that his "need" gives him the right to steal and that it is therefore acceptable.

I never said I had any "need" and I didn't even say it was acceptable, only that it's beneficial to me since any guilt of mine over the stealing is negated by tremendous personal benefit. Also, you don't have to "argue" with me (notice how I'm quoting something you actually said) because I'm not here to promote an agenda but rather to offer thoughts related to the piracy discussion. One of the themes of what I've been saying here is that fighting the financial downfalls piracy as an us vs. them issue is becoming increasingly irrelevant as piracy becomes more and more mainstream, and thereby accepted. I'd hope that the most relevant point content distributors (Steve Jordan, I'm looking at you) can take away from my comments and the similar comments from others is that the pool of people who pirate can't be viewed as autonomous from the positive revenue you receive from legitimate sales. Pirates are a huge market that encompass every single demographic in every country throughout the whole world, and many of them are also active purchasers of legitimate media. If you can get your media into the hands of enough pirates (with whatever safeguards you deem necessary to protect your interests) then some of those pirates will eventually turn into new customers (albeit morally ambiguous ones).

[Richard Herley]

llasram, the interim results from my experimental business model may cast some light on this thread. My site has been open for five weeks and so far over 5,000 ebooks have been downloaded. I have received payment for 61. The most charitable gloss I can put on this is that people do not like the books; or perhaps they are all unusually slow readers. In either case it sends me a clear message, which I fully intend to heed, about what I should be doing with my time in future. I salute those honourable few such as yourself, who paid, but you are in a tiny minority.

zelda, as a private citizen I fully support the idea of a properly run and funded public library system. It was one of the great civilizing influences of the nineteenth century. But can you explain to me why some of the poorest people in society -- the authors -- should be made to subsidize it?

[Lemurion]

The pirate ebook "economy" is a "gift economy" like the Potlatch cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Status comes from giving.

Even so, the crux of the copyright matter hasn't changed. People can argue it all they want but the only reason copyright exists is to give content creators an incentive to create new content. New derivative works are a benefit just as the original works were, but they cannot exist without access to the original. Copyright is like a patent, an artificial time-limited monopoly that exists to balance the needs of society against those of creators.

Yes it's good for a given individual to pirate lots of copyrighted data, and it may become part of the cost of doing business in future. One interesting thing I heard recently was how Stardock makes a distinction between their user base and customer base. All their games are released without copy protection and run well on mid-range systems. They don't do it because of any inherent dislike of DRM or any desire for information to be free. They do it because their customer base (the people who give them money) have told them they don't want DRM, and Stardock is listening to them.

Pirates aren't customers.

If you want what's already out there-- piracy benefits you as an individual. What it costs you is less new material in future. Yes distributing early novels for free can help an author, but only if there's a later novel that's not freely available that the person then buys.

In the long run we need to settle down with some solution that compensates creators because if we don't they won't create. Whether from frustration or from having to spend the time doing something else to pay the bills.

Originally Posted by hidari

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.

Before we started paying creators they tended to rely on patronage, where the wealthy would subsidize them. As a system it works, but there are a limited number of patrons, and the patronage system gives them a lock on the kind of content that gets produced.

Writing is a right in many countries, freedom of expression. What's not a right is the ability to read whatever you want for free. No one guarantees that.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by rationalbiker

You see, you can't argue with someone like this. He has rationalized in his mind that his "need" gives him the right to steal and that it is therefore acceptable.

You make other men slaves to your inability to provide for your own life.

I think at this point I've said all I care to say and I'm outta here.

Thanks for the discussion folks.

Right behind you.

Spooky, one word: Library.

Hasta luego.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

llasram, the interim results from my experimental business model may cast some light on this thread. My site has been open for five weeks and so far over 5,000 ebooks have been downloaded. I have received payment for 61. The most charitable gloss I can put on this is that people do not like the books; or perhaps they are all unusually slow readers. In either case it sends me a clear message, which I fully intend to heed, about what I should be doing with my time in future. I salute those honourable few such as yourself, who paid, but you are in a tiny minority.

Oh, I didn’t realize that you were expecting even the majority of downloads to translate to a payment. I’d just assumed your plan was that you expected to be paid by a smaller percentage of a sufficiently larger readership to turn a net profit vs. a more traditional business model. For that model, I think it will take a longer time for word-of-mouth to get your books out there – even 5,000 downloads is a pretty small percentage of your potential audience. It might help if you had attractive versions of your books in common e-book formats – perhaps the text files are invoking too many associations with Project Gutenberg and the public domain?

Either way, I’m sorry to hear the experiment isn’t working out as you’d hoped.

[spooky69]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Spooky, one word: Library.

But with the library, you have to give stuff back...

[hidari]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

The pirate ebook "economy" is a "gift economy" like

Before we started paying creators they tended to rely on patronage, where the wealthy would subsidize them. As a system it works, but there are a limited number of patrons, and the patronage system gives them a lock on the kind of content that gets produced.

Writing is a right in many countries, freedom of expression. What's not a right is the ability to read whatever you want for free. No one guarantees that.

I would say that most people are well aware of the patronage system of Europe in the past on this forum. . Also, I understand freedom of expression is a right. , so is going to the toilet, so what. I figured you would understand that I was referring to being paid to write. Saying that writing will suffer without writers being paid a fine wage is what I find a weak argument. There are many a fine writer from the past that did not earn a good wage, yet were able to "survive" in their respective cultures.

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

llasram, the interim results from my experimental business model may cast some light on this thread. My site has been open for five weeks and so far over 5,000 ebooks have been downloaded. I have received payment for 61. The most charitable gloss I can put on this is that people do not like the books; or perhaps they are all unusually slow readers. In either case it sends me a clear message, which I fully intend to heed, about what I should be doing with my time in future. I salute those honourable few such as yourself, who paid, but you are in a tiny minority.

Many people who in their early life had no access to information, as there was no Internet, and they lived in a backwater country, later on start collecting voraciously. I frequently see on forums I browse, or in Usenet emails people saying they have over 100 GB of unique pirated ebooks, and measuring with it their progress in... I don't know what.

They can't read them all in their life, there's too little time. But they commit large part of their time to make their collections bigger still, perhaps more time then the spend reading books. They love collecting, feeling of having a possibility to read, much more than reading as such.

I expect some downloads from your site were made by those collectionners, which then put the book in a nice folders with your name and book title, added it to their database and went on to look for more.

61 out of 5000 is a small number - but. I wonder, if your book was on the bookstore shelf, and customers were looking at various books, and some picked yours up, browsed through few pages and put it down, and others would decide to buy it, if 51/5000 wouldn't be the part of the people that decided to buy and read it of the set that decided to look on the few pages... don't assume they read it because they downloaded it, it's so easy to download and look at for a minute... just like browsing in a library or bookstore.

About OCRs earlier: I was wondering what motivates pirates who OCR books with the intention to release them into Darknet. OCRing your books to switch from paper copy to digital copy is a whole different animal, and I think anybody who prefers to do it and not search for the copy on the Darknet won't upload to Darknet.