DRM Good or Bad?

[JSWolf]

Pirates do buy a lot so they have the content to pirate and they can be one of the first one to have it out there.

If my mother buys a book and I borrow it from her to read, it's the same thing as if the pirate bought it and I downloaded it to read. Same sale/no sale.

Now, if there's a book that sounds interesting but I don't want to risk my money on it and I download it, like it and buy the author's next book, isn't that better then my not having bought any of the author's books?

[Davidwtc]

Perhaps the following book may help clarify your thinking on this issue. It is Against Intellectual Property by Stephen Kinsella from the economics think tank, The Ludwig Von Mises Institute. It is a free book, no DRM, not surprisingly.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

The person whose book you would have bought if you weren't reading that illegal ebook?

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Not quite. This is a case of I was never going to buy it. So because of that, I've not taken a sale away from the author.

I think you've mis-read DrNefario's post. By pirating and reading a book that you wouldn't have bought in any case, you have taken away the sale of the book that you would otherwise have bought to have something to read instead of the book that you pirated.

It's like people who pirate Microsoft Office, and say "but I would never have bought it full price, so pirating it doesn't affect their sales". Their action affects the sales of other, cheaper, alternative software.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I think you've mis-read DrNefario's post. By pirating and reading a book that you wouldn't have bought in any case, you have taken away the sale of the book that you would otherwise have bought to have something to read instead of the book that you pirated.

It's like people who pirate Microsoft Office, and say "but I would never have bought it full price, so pirating it doesn't affect their sales". Their action affects the sales of other, cheaper, alternative software.

But doesn't that assume facts not in evidence?

There's no guarantee that he would have bought another book to read. He might go re-read a book he already has. Get one from the breakroom. Check one out from the library. Borrow one from a friend. Sit very still and stare at the bedroom ceiling for 20 hours straight. Etc.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

But doesn't that assume facts not in evidence?

There's no guarantee that he would have bought another book to read. He might go re-read a book he already has. Get one from the breakroom. Check one out from the library. Borrow one from a friend. Sit very still and stare at the bedroom ceiling for 20 hours straight. Etc.

Just because I've downloaded an eBook from the net does not mean a sale of some other eBook has been lost. I may have purchased this other eBook before the download or I may also purchase this other eBook or maybe I wasn't planning on buying another eBook at the moment. You don't know what my plans are. So assuming is wrong.

[Freeshadow]

Ass suming never is wrong. It's easier than counting the legs and dividing them thereafter.

[ScalyFreak]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

It's like people who pirate Microsoft Office, and say "but I would never have bought it full price, so pirating it doesn't affect their sales". Their action affects the sales of other, cheaper, alternative software.

MicroSoft didn't lose a sale, but LibreOffice lost a downloader? Now, that is logic I can understand.

Unfortunately, that only applies if there is a vialb ealternative to MS Office. If there wasn't, as is the case with most eBooks, then one pirated copy = one lost sale. That is, if you assume that if piracy was not an option the pirate would spend money. That is not the case.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

And you're guessing this because...?

One of the reasons people get into torrenting, especially of ebooks, is to find content that's out of print, often with deceased authors and an out-of-business publisher, books of unknown copyright status stuck in legal limbo.



Conflating all forms of unauthorized copying as "stealing" bothers me. Why not call it "murder," after all, the pirates are "murdering the author's career?"

Different laws. Different penalties. Accurate labels are not incidental to the issue; one of the essential problems is sorting out exactly what's going on, from a legal standpoint.



Whether the pirate buys *that author's* next four books on the basis of getting one for free, is directly relevant. Or would the author prefer to not make any sales as a result of free reads? Or, somehow, they think fans who downloaded a free book are inferior to those who got it from the breakroom at work where people drop off books they don't want to keep.

Perhaps I am guessing as I don't know many ebook pirates personally.

I personally don't buy into the anecdotal evidence that a person pirating a book is likely to buy the next four. But I also do not know for a fact that none of them will.

My opinion is that if an author wants someone to download their books they will make that clear. If in doubt email and ask for permission.

And stealing is perhaps a murky area. People take things with all kinds of justifications, "it was just sitting there", "they left the keys in it", "the window was already smashed and someone else would have got it so why not", "they were asking for it".

Maybe this is all okay in today's world and I am totally behind the times. Still I think it is wrong to take a service, commodity etc. that is not clearly labeled as free without paying for it. If one thinks it is too expensive possibly there are alternatives. If one thinks it is worthless why bother.

Helen

[DrNefario]

Edit: Okay, I should have read the next page before replying.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Not quite. This is a case of I was never going to buy it. So because of that, I've not taken a sale away from the author.

You miss my point here. Author A might not lose out, because you'd never have bought his book, but if you weren't reading the pirate copy of author A's book, you'd have (hypothetically) bought and read author B's book, so author B is losing out.

Your reading time is finite, so time spent reading pirate books is not spent reading paid-for books.

Of course, it might not be spent reading at all, or your total reading time might increase if you have access to better books, but it's something to bear in mind.

I don't intend to DRM my books. It's simply a matter of being nice to my customers.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

You miss my point here. Author A might not lose out, because you'd never have bought his book, but if you weren't reading the pirate copy of author A's book, you'd have (hypothetically) bought and read author B's book, so author B is losing out.

Your reading time is finite, so time spent reading pirate books is not spent reading paid-for books.

Of course, it might not be spent reading at all, or your total reading time might increase if you have access to better books, but it's something to bear in mind.

But you can't say what I might do or not do due to having downloading an eBook. For all you know, I could have already bought author B's eBook before downloading author A's eBook.

Now the thing is, if I was planning on buying author B's eBook, why would I not do it as once I finish author a's eBook, I'd be looking for what next to read. So saying I might not buy author b's eBook is silly.

I don't intend to DRM my books. It's simply a matter of being nice to my customers.

That is nice. Thanks.

[QuantumIguana]

Lets say that a reader switches to a different brand of reader, and wants to migrate their books. Or two people get married, and they have two different brands of readers, and want to merge their bookshelves. They aren't asking for anything but to be able to read books that they paid for. If they can easily move their books, they will do that. But the more difficult you make it, the more likely that they won't even bother to remove the DRM, but instead simply download the book from pirate sites. Once they are going to pirate sites, they become increasingly likely to download not only books they have already paid for, but to download books that they haven't paid for.

[Justin Nemo]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

Lets say that a reader switches to a different brand of reader, and wants to migrate their books. Or two people get married, and they have two different brands of readers, and want to merge their bookshelves. They aren't asking for anything but to be able to read books that they paid for. If they can easily move their books, they will do that. But the more difficult you make it, the more likely that they won't even bother to remove the DRM, but instead simply download the book from pirate sites. Once they are going to pirate sites, they become increasingly likely to download not only books they have already paid for, but to download books that they haven't paid for.

There are hundreds of torrent websites with thousands of ebook collections in epub and mobi. You can even get the recent New York Times best seller list of books. So why do some publishers insist that you use it? It's totally useless.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Maybe this is all okay in today's world and I am totally behind the times. Still I think it is wrong to take a service, commodity etc. that is not clearly labeled as free without paying for it. If one thinks it is too expensive possibly there are alternatives. If one thinks it is worthless why bother.

One of the issues is, who has the right to label it as free? If I buy a paperback, I can then declare it free and hand it to anyone. If I buy an ebook... it's a lot more complicated. Some vendors claim I'm not buying an ebook, but a "license to access" the content. However, their shopping carts all say "buy this book" not "license this content," and the supposed terms of the license tend to be buried in the middle of a long screed of general site rules, rather than spelled out carefully as a license. Other vendors have never updated their "how to buy and use our ebooks" sections--Fictionwise says you can't share ebooks but it doesn't say this is because you haven't actually bought a "book."

When I buy a pbook, chop the spine off, scan and OCR it... under what conditions can I share my efforts? If it's a matter of "no extra copies," then the answer would be "when I sell/give away the hard drive on which that work is stored." (I could scan books to a flash drive & do the conversion work there; I've done that before.) The idea of "you can't; anyone else who wants to read it that way will have to do the same conversion work themselves" is ridiculous. The author doesn't benefit from more people buying used books to destroy, nor by those people spending hours converting instead of reading books.

The insistence that only the author (or authorized agents, like the publisher) are allowed to declare a price on access to content flies against thousands of years of literary and other entertainment culture. Claiming that the new technology should change the way we think about books--*not* thinking of them as something that can be shared--because DRM can be applied, is no more reasonable than claiming that obviously, only one person should ever need to buy a book anymore.

We do need to find ways to pay authors in this new realm. But insisting that the right way to do that, is to allow them to redefine the concept of "book" so that it's one-reader-per-purchase isn't going to work. Authors have never been allowed to declare "only people who pay me can read my book," except by personally directly managing all copies.

[StephenM]

Originally Posted by VydorScope

By trying to not call it theft, what are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to say that "since the author lost nothing, its okay to do?" Or you just trying to stick a different label on the crime?

Personally, I do not care what label you put on it, the end result is the same. It is a loss to the content creator caused by another person taking something illegally. Sure sounds like theft to me though!

This argument presumes that I am reselling or giving away copies of the picture. This is a straw man argument, as I said no such thing. To reiterate my point more clearly, I am implying that I have taken a perfect picture of the original picture, which I wouldn't have purchased at any rate, and merely kept the copy on my computer to look at on occasion. I do not share this image with anyone. The original artist is free to sell the original, and any copies he / she wants to make, as often as possible. My having a copy does not impede his ability to make money from the image, as no one willing to purchase it will have any disincentive towards purchasing it. It is still wrong for me to have made a copy in the first place, but it is certainly not theft. This is like making a clone of you without your permission. It may be morally and ethically wrong, but it is certainly not kidnapping. The same principle applies. Calling copyright infringement "theft" does not help your cause. It just muddies the water, and desensitizes people to the real issues.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

One of the issues is, who has the right to label it as free? If I buy a paperback, I can then declare it free and hand it to anyone. If I buy an ebook... it's a lot more complicated. Some vendors claim I'm not buying an ebook, but a "license to access" the content. However, their shopping carts all say "buy this book" not "license this content," and the supposed terms of the license tend to be buried in the middle of a long screed of general site rules, rather than spelled out carefully as a license. Other vendors have never updated their "how to buy and use our ebooks" sections--Fictionwise says you can't share ebooks but it doesn't say this is because you haven't actually bought a "book."

When I buy a pbook, chop the spine off, scan and OCR it... under what conditions can I share my efforts? If it's a matter of "no extra copies," then the answer would be "when I sell/give away the hard drive on which that work is stored." (I could scan books to a flash drive & do the conversion work there; I've done that before.) The idea of "you can't; anyone else who wants to read it that way will have to do the same conversion work themselves" is ridiculous. The author doesn't benefit from more people buying used books to destroy, nor by those people spending hours converting instead of reading books.

The insistence that only the author (or authorized agents, like the publisher) are allowed to declare a price on access to content flies against thousands of years of literary and other entertainment culture. Claiming that the new technology should change the way we think about books--*not* thinking of them as something that can be shared--because DRM can be applied, is no more reasonable than claiming that obviously, only one person should ever need to buy a book anymore.

We do need to find ways to pay authors in this new realm. But insisting that the right way to do that, is to allow them to redefine the concept of "book" so that it's one-reader-per-purchase isn't going to work. Authors have never been allowed to declare "only people who pay me can read my book," except by personally directly managing all copies.

Legalities aside, I am not saying you should not be able to give away or sell your ebook. I am saying that this should be a one-off transaction (ie. one sale/gift per item purchased) or when lending only lend one copy at a time to a person you can trust not to keep it and pass it on.

Perhaps I am unique in that it never occurred to me that there was any way to sell/give/lend an actual pbook to more than one person at a time.
Photocopying/scanning is never as nice as the original.

And while you call it a new realm, which perhaps you feel authors and publishers must adapt to, and I agree that they must, it does not follow in my mind that they should have to swallow people doing whatever they see fit to acquire the authors work.

The attitude "suck it up because I am only going to pay what I want to or not at all" seems reasonable to many. I could perhaps agree with it if applied as rigorously in more mundane situations such as the grocery store and merchants of clothing, cars, jewellry and stocks and bonds.

To me the current situation seems as if some people are saying we can take what we want and you have no way of stopping us, but.... if you make it really really easy and agree we are right and just and kind for even considering it there is the very small possibilty we will throw a few coins in your basket and if we get a grovelling thank you email we might possibly do it twice.


Oh well, more than a bit of a rant but I do feel that justification is depersonalisation on another level. As you said in an earlier post why not call it murder. Most people who justify are aware they are doing wrong or why would one bother. Just point to the legal or moral ruling that makes it justifiable. Perhaps Giggleton could provide a few although I suspect he is just toying with us

Helen