eBook piracy, how common is it?

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

If you want some stats, I just did a quick and dirty check of a torrent site to see how prevalent e-book piracy is. I chose first the ebook section, then the movies section to compare. In both secions I chose the "mystery" sub-section and then rated by highest number of completed downloads.

Mystery (ebook) - Dan Brown Book Collection - 29275 downloads
Mystery (movie) - The Davinci Code - 1979394 downloads

That is pretty interesting. I wouldn't have expected such a high number for an ebook download.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Mystery (ebook) - Dan Brown Book Collection - 29275 downloads
Mystery (movie) - The Davinci Code - 1979394 downloads

And I bet a higher proportion of the movie downloads were watched compared to how many of the book downloads were actually read.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Lanik42

That is basically what I was going to say: The whole concept of sharing is that someone has purchased the book, and is now sharing it with others for free. Libraries purchase a copy of the book, and share with others for free. Hmm, I might see a bit of a parallel there

Please see earlier in the thread. UK libraries, under a system called the "Public Lending Right" pay authors 5.98p (roughly 10c) every time one of their books is checked out of the library, up to a maximum paymant of £6,600 per year (about $10,000) per author. ie the author does get compensated when a book is checked out of the library.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Theft? Come on, you're actually serious? Theft? How can you call something theft when nothing is taken away?

Because he's an ex-author and blindly defends copyright law from the industries point of view with absolutely no interest what so ever for consumer rights.

Obviously theft has nothing to do with it, but it's language that the industry uses as a scare tactic and to sway opinion. He's just parroting their propaganda.

If you're expecting an unbiased discussion about copyright from Harry, you're wasting your time.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by LazyScot

If I was your employer and declined to pay you for a day's work you have done, have I taken anything away from you?

They'd be in breach of contract, or possibly employment laws. It has nothing to do with theft.

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Please see earlier in the thread. UK libraries, under a system called the "Public Lending Right" pay authors 5.98p (roughly 10c) every time one of their books is checked out of the library, up to a maximum paymant of £6,600 per year (about $10,000) per author. ie the author does get compensated when a book is checked out of the library.

As I understand it, the author has to register for the scheme in order to get paid from it.

[Patricia]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

As I understand it, the author has to register for the scheme in order to get paid from it.

My partner got £37 last year.

[ficbot]

One time, I did download a book like that just to see, and it was so riddled with errors and it would take so long to tidy it up that I did not mind paying $6 for the legit copy. My time is worth something too!

With that said, most commercial ebooks are ridiculously over-priced and I only buy them on sale. Also, I have lately starting un-DRMing my purchases and have no ehtical issues with doing so on content I have legally bought.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Totally agree. It is pure sophistry to try to pretend that taking away an author's income is anything other than theft, regardless of what the law might choose to call it.

No, when someone calls it "theft" it just shows that they have no clue what they're talking about. The industry is intentionally trying to blur the lines between "copyright infringement" and "theft", because the word theft leaves a much stronger negative impression in people's minds. Obviously, there are a lot of people out there who aren't smart enough to understand the difference.

[Moejoe]

Here's an expanded list of the most popular from each category in the torrent site I've just been on:



Mystery - Dan Brown Collection - 29275 downloads

Sci-fi - Mass Effect Revelation - 72979

Action - Jazz Theory - 8026

Adventure - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (PDF) - 50560

Contemporary - The Tipping Point (PDF) - 19790

Fantasy - All 6 Harry Potter Ebooks - 98074

Horror - Silent HIll Comics (8 in all) - 21557

Humour - the Little Book of Dirty Jokes - 11854

Literary - Adam Smith - the Wealth of Nations - 8122

Romance - The Twilight Series - 25760

Suspense - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child E-Books - 697

Thriller - Tom Clancy EBooks - 6458



Make of it what you will, but I think this points to a very small 'dent' in the market, if any dent at all.

[zelda_pinwheel]

i recently read an article by highly respected tech author and publisher Tim O'Reilly called "Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution". it's from 2002 but is still highly pertinent to this discussion i think. i encourage everyone to read it.

[sirbruce]

My defense of P2P sharing varies depending on the situation. Sometimes it's good reasoning; sometimes it's just rationalizing; other times there isn't a good excuse.

Firstly, I think copyright is just too long. If Disney didn't exist, copyrights would be a lot more reasonable and there would be a lot more books in the Public Domain. So while there are many P2P books I have that are "illegal", I don't consider it "immoral" or "stealing" from the author or publisher because I think their rights expired long ago, regardless of what the law says.

Secondly, there are cases where the book is out of print, rare, or hard to get in physical form. Again, I don't consider it "immoral" in such cases where I have the ebook instead. The actual harm in these cases is zero, because neither the publisher nor author is going to get any money if I pay $200 to a third party for a rare copy. In some instances it may be argued that the author doesn't WANT the money, and is actually engaging in his rights to limit distribution; however that's rarely the case.

Thirdly, in some cases there are books which simply aren't available in ebook form but are in other forms. Forms that I have already paid for. Thus, I am just "format-shifting" to ebook form, and I don't feel like I'm doing anything immoral. I think the rights to distribution have to have some limits.

Finally, if the book is available in other forms (or even paid ebook form) and I'm simply reading the ebook form and not paying, that's certainly immoral. Yet I've done it anyway, not just with books, but with music and movies and television too. Do I feel bad? Yes. I don't do it frequently. And I try to keep the harm I do to a minimum. Many times I do pay for the ebook later when I can. But that's just a rationalization.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Totally agree. It is pure sophistry to try to pretend that taking away an author's income is anything other than theft, regardless of what the law might choose to call it.

I thought that theft was a legal term and had no well defined meaning outside that context. So your statements becomes meaningless if you just use a made up word like non-legal-theft. Calling copyright infringement for theft is a dishonest argument since if fools people to think that the situations is so similar that we can think about them in the same way.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I do accept, by the way, that it's morally (but not legally) OK to buy a book and then scan it for one's personal use, if a commercial eBook is not commercially available - in that scenario, the author is being correctly recompensed.

How about buying the book second-hand? The author was compensated, but not for *your* reading, just like if a person buys a DRM'd ebook, strips the DRM, and gives it to a friend.

I have probably only bought a few hundred books new in my life. (And most of those were role-playing game supplements.) (I have hopes of living above the poverty line sometime in the next few years.) I have read many thousands--library books, books from friends, books from yard sales, books from flea markets. The majority of the books I have read, gave their authors no royalties.

I don't feel any guilt over all those books I've read without paying the author; if the author "should be" paid for those, then loaning and reselling books "should be" illegal. They are not--instead, they are the basis for a rich culture of information sharing.

Ebook publishers are trying to cripple that culture, to make it impossible to treat ebooks like pbooks. However, they want to capture the interest that people have in "books," not in "digital information sources." By calling them "books" rather than something else, they affirmed that they should be treated, in the reader's minds, like books.

And books can be shared. Books SHOULD be shared; it's a rare person indeed who loves books because he's paid full price for the first ones he read. (Most of us discovered them through our parents; many of our earliest reading experiences were from a type of sharing that the Kindle doesn't allow: one person buys it, reads it, and hands it to a family member to read at their leisure.)

The idea that "I buy pbooks, and when I'm done reading, I throw them in the paper shredder," would appall many people. Such a waste! So many people would love the chance to read those books! Donate them to a library or a poor school; give them away to a shelter. But the same people will happily advocate, "I buy ebooks, and when I'm done reading, I delete them." Which, to those of us who grew up reading secondhand books, sounds like waste.

[Moejoe]

Okay, so I did a little more digging. The torrent site I was on is a multi-tracker site, meaning it polls downloads from several varied sources to give the results. That means the figures are quite representative as a whole. So then I checked the impact of piracy with a percentage.

Dan Brown's Davinci Code novel sold anywhere (depending on quoted figures) from 30-40 million. The downloads of the book were in the 29,000 area. I took the lowest figure of 30 million for this calculation.

So (drum roll) the impact of file-sharing on Dan Brown is roughly: 0.09758333333333333% lost or never would have bought sales.

EDIT: for the downloads of the book to be even statistically interesting they would have to be in the 300,000 to 400,000 range.