Authors Guild takes on Piracy/Copyright Law and eBook Royalties

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

ISP's? I think we are talking about public internet file hosting sites, not ISP's.

Whenever they do a takedown, they should obtain a hash* for the book. As a programmer, this doesn't seem onerous to me. It might take a lot of processing for large movie files, but, as a reader -- not my concern

Then, whenever uploading something that fits in the size range of a book, software would check the database of taken down hashes and make sure it didn't match. If you consider that snooping, well, I'm pretty sure they are already doing it, for all uploads, to see if it is on the child pornography hash list. So there's no new snoop.

Are there ways the pirate uploader can get around this? Yes, I can think of several. However, complicating piracy means fewer copies available for download at any one time, and less piracy. No law enforcement action stops all crime, but this would help.

_____________________
* A character string that can uniquely identify the contents of a file while being far shorter than the original.

I would venture to say that a vast percentage of those sites are actually torrent sites. Aside for the difficulty in hashing a file that was never uploaded, some of those sites e.g. The Pirate Bay are probably not going to be all that cooperative.

A lot of the rest will be copies-of-copies, which means they won't be byte-compatible. e.g. it won't help copyright holders trying to take down a home video that has music playing in the background...

This suggestion will not complicate piracy in any way, shape or form. Most infringers will circumvent it, and they will do so by accident, without even knowing there was something to get around.


Also, what child pornography hash list? I can imagine more inefficient ways of recognizing and blocking child pornography, but I would have to resort to things like "throwing darts at a list of names".

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

If they tried that, you'd see a record surge in credit card fraud, because you can typically make minor tweaks to a cable modem's configuration and sniff all the traffic for the entire neighborhood. Without HTTPS, those numbers would be sent in the clear.

"Yeah, well, what's so secret about your credit card number anyway. Are you trying to hide something illegal???"

Actually, yes, we are all aware of how ridiculous this is -- that was @Barcey's (very obvious) point.

[fjtorres]

AgG: Technology illiterates clicking their heels and wishing real hard.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

I would venture to say that a vast percentage of those sites are actually torrent sites.

I would venture to say that a significant portion of those illegally downloading books don't know what a torrent is.

Aside for the difficulty in hashing a file that was never uploaded, some of those sites e.g. The Pirate Bay are probably not going to be all that cooperative.

There is no illegality where law enforcement gets anywhere near 100 percent enforcement coverage.

In real life, I'm sure most antitrust violators do get away with it, so long as they price within a range rather than all the same. Suppose I was to tell you that antitrust enforcement is worthless, because all conspirators have to do is meet privately and avoid discussing sensitive subjects in emails, and to burn anything in writing. Would you buy that? Then why should I buy that only torrents matter?

A lot of the rest will be copies-of-copies, which means they won't be byte-compatible. e.g. it won't help copyright holders trying to take down a home video that has music playing in the background...

This illustrates one of several subtle advantages book publishers have over the music industry when it comes to reducing piracy. I realize there are ways to make book files not byte compatible. But there also are thoughtless perpetrators -- who imagine they are being helpful to readers -- who will upload exactly what they downloaded. That can and should be reduced.

Also, what child pornography hash list? I can imagine more inefficient ways of recognizing and blocking child pornography, but I would have to resort to things like "throwing darts at a list of names".

That was a guess as to what is being done. I'm sure you could catch some perpetrators that way. I thought of it, so others smarter than me have as well. I'm also guessing that none of the law enforcement methods are what you call efficient.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

I would venture to say that a significant portion of those illegally downloading books don't know what a torrent is.


There is no illegality where law enforcement gets anywhere near 100 percent enforcement coverage.

In real life, I'm sure most antitrust violators do get away with it, so long as they price within a range rather than all the same. Suppose I was to tell you that antitrust enforcement is worthless, because all conspirators have to do is meet privately and avoid discussing sensitive subjects in emails, and to burn anything in writing. Would you buy that? Then why should I buy that only torrents matter?


This illustrates one of several subtle advantages book publishers have over the music industry when it comes to reducing piracy. I realize there are ways to make book files not byte compatible. But there also are thoughtless perpetrators -- who imagine they are being helpful to readers -- who will upload exactly what they downloaded. That can and should be reduced.


That was a guess as to what is being done. I'm sure you could catch some perpetrators that way. I thought of it, so others smarter than me have as well. I'm also guessing that none of the law enforcement methods are what you call efficient.

I'm going to have to agree with eschwartz on this one. For the most part, people who are actively pirating books, i.e. not the people who buy an ebook on Amazon thinking it's legit, are a very small group of people who use bit torrent and other technologies. Frequently, they are based in countries with little interest in actively prosecuting copyright violations.

Really, we are talking two very different situations. The first situation is people who post copyrighted material in legit ebook stores either looking to make a buck or because they don't respect copyright law. This situation can be handled by giving the ebook stores an easy method of validating the right of the person to post that material. Ultimately, the solution is that the copyright holder takes the poster to court for copyright violations.

The second is so called pirate sites, which use a variety of methods and tend to be frequented by a small group of people. While this group does get copyright holders panties in a wad, it's almost impossible to block since they quickly shift technologies and sites, and ultimately does minimum harm to copyright holders since it really doesn't represent any lost sales. That is to say, few people who knowingly use pirate sites would buy the material.

[eschwartz]

As pwalker8 said. And a couple observations:

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

I would venture to say that a significant portion of those illegally downloading books don't know what a torrent is.

Besides for the fact that you pulled that conjecture out of thin air (maybe book readers are less technologically inclined than, say, movie watchers? Then how do they pirate books anyway? What makes you think books are somehow less likely to be uploaded in torrents than movies? If anything, movies are more likely to be streamed directly from online, vs. ebooks are downloaded before being read)...

...Do you have a point?

There is no illegality where law enforcement gets anywhere near 100 percent enforcement coverage.

In real life, I'm sure most antitrust violators do get away with it, so long as they price within a range rather than all the same. Suppose I was to tell you that antitrust enforcement is worthless, because all conspirators have to do is meet privately and avoid discussing sensitive subjects in emails, and to burn anything in writing. Would you buy that? Then why should I buy that only torrents matter?

You're missing the point. Trying to enforce hash comparison on sites that are already proudly against the law is not going to accomplish anything more than the ongoing legal actions and shock-troop raids. Copyright holders trying to change the laws to be more advantageous for themselves (or at least they think so) are targeting the access points that are currently in a state of legal deniability. ISPs. Search engines. Both have the theoretical power to do more than they currently do... assuming that that were a good thing on any side.
Are you even aware of the previous incarnation of this law? Stop Online Piracy Act (Wiki)

And of course it also targets small businesses, especially startups, that have no practical capability to to develop systems that cost tens of millions of dollars in order to check every file they host. Takedowns are however within their capacity -- and they tend to follow those.

This illustrates one of several subtle advantages book publishers have over the music industry when it comes to reducing piracy. I realize there are ways to make book files not byte compatible. But there also are thoughtless perpetrators -- who imagine they are being helpful to readers -- who will upload exactly what they downloaded. That can and should be reduced.

• If I convert a purchased EPUB to AZW3, and then for some godawful reason decided to post it online, I have defeated byte-compatibility. By accident.
• If I add the book to calibre, then save it, calibre will modify the metadata headers, to the same effect on byte-compatibility.
• When companies watermark their ebooks, like e.g. Pottermore does, the delivered-to-consumer file is not byte-compatible.
• DeDRM software does not even attempt to strip unique metadata headers -- and for good reason. I would venture to say those exist too, once again leaving deliverable-to-consumer files as non-byte-compatible.

That was a guess as to what is being done. I'm sure you could catch some perpetrators that way. I thought of it, so others smarter than me have as well. I'm also guessing that none of the law enforcement methods are what you call efficient.

To reiterate -- no you can't, and the reason no "others smarter than me have as well" thought of this is because they wouldn't even bother to think of an idea that is so fundamentally flawed. Rather than idle speculation, they are being paid to think of solutions, and they don't follow wild-goose trains-of-thought that serve only to generate internet "discussions".

And while other methods may not be efficient enough to End Piracy In Our Time, they generally produce meaningfully-useful results, rather than than a bridge to nowhere.

[the.Mtn.Man]

So they're trying to turn ISPs into enforcement agencies for the government. Bad, bad idea. It's like citywide smoking bans that unfairly punish an establishment when someone is caught smoking instead of punishing the person who was actually breaking the law.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by the.Mtn.Man

So they're trying to turn ISPs into enforcement agencies for the government. Bad, bad idea. It's like citywide smoking bans that unfairly punish an establishment when someone is caught smoking instead of punishing the person who was actually breaking the law.

Yes. It's the "When You Can't Punish the Perpetrator, Just Punish Someone Else" approach.

[murg]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

There is no illegality where law enforcement gets anywhere near 100 percent enforcement coverage.

Isn't this called fascism?

There is always illegality. Especially with the more enforcement coverage you have, as the police discover that they can be encouraged to 'redefine' what's illegal and what's not.

[murg]

One of the dangers of making any link in the internet chain pre-emptively responsible for any kind of enforcement is that that link then becomes legally responsible for that enforcement and can be sued (or worse) if any non-enforcement takes place.

Basically, if the ISPs become responsible for detecting unauthorised content, they become financially culpable for any infringement that occurs through their systems.

And how is an ISP supposed to discover the infringement? They are just passing the bytes through.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

To reiterate -- no you can't, and the reason no "others smarter than me have as well" thought of this is because they wouldn't even bother to think of an idea that is so fundamentally flawed.

A little googling found someone who has thought that flawed (but I think still useful) idea:

Why “Takedown” Should Become “Take Down and Stay Down”

When a file is placed on DropBox, it is processed and assigned a “hashtag,” a unique identifying series of number and letters. If a DMCA notice is filed on that hashtag, any further public sharing of the file is disabled by DropBox.

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Then how do they pirate books anyway?

I do remember a poster here saying, maybe a year ago, that most unauthorized book downloading isn't via torrents. No one contradicted him or her. I think I know what he or she was getting at but wouldn't want to go into specifics.

Originally Posted by murg

Isn't this called fascism?

By whom?

Where did Mussolini stand on intellectual property rights? Do you have a cite where Mussolini said something that anticipated the Authors Guild position on book piracy?

Or are you just trying to make my position look bad

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

A little googling found someone who has thought that flawed (but I think still useful) idea:

Why “Takedown” Should Become “Take Down and Stay Down”

How amazing, it appears this individual has nearly as much of a bias as I do!
I'm afraid I don't listen to junk science, whether one person says it or two people say it. I somehow doubt Mr. Carlisle has ever attempted to put his grand scheme in motion...

And he is invoking ContentID. I am pretty sure ContentID is a highly sophisticated semantic filter that cost tens of millions of dollars to invent, let alone deploy, and which is capable of discovering portions of infringing content within an otherwise unrelated work... not a simple database of file hashes, which would be an embarrassing cop-out for an organization of Google's talent and resources.

And as the article so astutely points out, Dropbox will freeze sharing for *that* file, not further uploads of content that infringes the IP it is linked to. This would be because Dropbox allows one to share files (and when identifying a particular file uploaded by a particular user, a hash is not a terrible way to do so).

I do remember a poster here saying, maybe a year ago, that most unauthorized book downloading isn't via torrents. No one contradicted him or her. I think I know what he or she was getting at but wouldn't want to go into specifics.

Did s/he indeed. That may be so.
And it is completely irrelevant, since my point seems to have slid directly over your head.

Allow me to reiterate my point, then:
What makes you think ebook readers are any less likely than movie watchers to know what a torrent is?


Also, I still want to know what the point of your original statement was, because I can't see why it matters whether or not most ebook pirates don't know what a torrent is.

By whom?

Where did Mussolini stand on intellectual property rights? Do you have a cite where Mussolini said something that anticipated the Authors Guild position on book piracy?

Or are you just trying to make my position look bad

Or are you just trying to bring a ridiculous comparison?

I suggest you reread murg's post in light of the possibility that he was referring to your post, rather than unrelated things you may have said previously.
Hint: your post (and certainly the bit that murg quoted) was discussing the relative effectiveness of law enforcement in general vs. an ideal.

And murg stated that 100% enforcement implies fascism complete with he attendant likeliness of abuse. I am certainly inclined to agree that an authoritarian government is far more suited than a government with checks and balances, for the purpose of ensuring 100% realization of law enforcement. That is one of the trade-offs we pay, no authoritarian gov't in return for the possibility that the jackbooted hordes who aren't there won't be able to crack down on every last little smidgen of crime.

Feel free to agree or disagree, so long as you stop trying to pretend that anyone suggested that Mussolini has anything to do with intellectual property rights.

[murg]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Where did Mussolini stand on intellectual property rights? Do you have a cite where Mussolini said something that anticipated the Authors Guild position on book piracy?

What does Mussolini have to do with anything?

I know there is a well known Internet law regarding mentions of another famous dictator of that era. Considering the Big M's (known as B.M. to his friends) relative place in the era, maybe instead of losing the argument, you just have to sit in the corner for three pages of posts.

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Or are you just trying to make my position look bad

Huh? I'll leave that to eschwartz. Or yourself.

[drjenkins]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Also, what child pornography hash list? I can imagine more inefficient ways of recognizing and blocking child pornography, but I would have to resort to things like "throwing darts at a list of names".

Like the the lists provided by the forensic databases maintained by the FBI and Homeland Security Cyber Crimes Center.
http://www.nist.gov/oles/forensics/f...ence-table.cfm

This allows investigators to discover the presence of objectionable material without having to actually view it.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by drjenkins

Like the the lists provided by the forensic databases maintained by the FBI and Homeland Security Cyber Crimes Center.
http://www.nist.gov/oles/forensics/f...ence-table.cfm

This allows investigators to discover the presence of objectionable material without having to actually view it.

Well, that's better than I thought.

That appears to be meant for referencing specific cases without actually having to bring child pornography to the courtroom.

Not a misguided belief that it will be an effective way to block new child pornography going forward.