eBook piracy, how common is it?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

How is that even remotely an answer? So it wasn't when your generation was "the young ones" but it started the generation after?
What do you think happens when people grow up in a time when access to goods is relatively hard to obtain, and then start working (and become fairly affluent fairly quickly compared to their parents)? Don't you think that they will (just like Mr. Dickens whom you told an anecdote about a while back) disproportionately care about having lots of stuff? And don't you think that they will say to themselves something like: "I will never put my children through what we had to go through because of the war," and give them lots of shiny things to play with? And that, that way, whole slews of people will either care too much about good appropriation or just "grow up with the thought that they can have anything they want"?
This used to be what the "old rich" had against the "nouveau riche", specifically because the latter were fairly "distasteful", but to a lesser degree this also applies to most of western society today. While individuals might not care about acquiring 'more', most do, which is then also implicitly shown through making tv shows about "middle class" people, and so on.

I'm sure you're right about the reason it happened, but I'm afraid that I still don't think that it's a good thing. Being brought up with the attitude that "you can have whatever you want, whenever you want it" is not - IMHO - a good attitude to life. You may of course disagree; that's fine with me.

[gouzos]

One must also realize that the money that is lost is only the money that would have been gained if piracy didn’t exist.

So, the metalhead that downloads a Madonna song for fun doesn’t cost any money. Neither does a kid who downloads professional software to dabble at home.
The metalhead would never have bought the Madonna album and the kid would never pay $399 for Corel just to crop his photos.
So All they actually do is in fact help popularize the product while not costing anything.

The ones who cost the writers money are people who have decided to ditch legal music altogether, professional who make money out of copied software and bootleggers who actually sell an illegal product.

[ruskie]

I'm sure you're right about the reason it happened, but I'm afraid that I still don't think that it's a good thing. Being brought up with the attitude that "you can have whatever you want, whenever you want it" is not - IMHO - a good attitude to life. You may of course disagree; that's fine with me.

I'm having problems getting into this whole generalisation game. I've never had a "you can have whatever you want, whenever you want it" state of mind or even such an upbringing. Most of my wants/needs are small at best. And even when I was younger I was thought to save up for the things I wanted. Yet nowadays I still get things via p2p. Though I don't keep them... but I don't grab things like: music and movies

I will get TV shows but then I pay the national TV and I pay cable TV so one could argue this is just a form of time shifting.

As for books I generally look in the local library for which I pay a yearly fee and if I can't find them there I'll simply make a decision. Is the book worth enough to purchase as a pbook and will go to my fav bookstore and order there, find a drm free ebook for purchase and in the end I might go to p2p though with the amount of freely available works and gratis available work it seems to be hard to run out of things quickly.

And to make clear(my mom used to work in the publishing business)...
The local libraries pay NOTHING back to the copyright owners AND they get the books by a 30-40% discount. Why so. Because books aren't accessible to all and this ensures that everyone can get access to them. Also our national library receives 10 copies of each book published locally and this is by law. Suffice it to say the publishers aren't to happy about it but this encourages culture and language awareness and so on.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

I don't like the scheme. Let's say I'm a moderate successful author and I've got an old backlist title that's selling a few hundred to 1,000 copies a year. The 20 year renewel is a no brainer, even though it's cutting into my earnings. A 30 year renewal may be difficult if my yearly income can't handle that sort of hit all at once. A 40 year renewal is going to be cost-prohibitive; I won't earn back what it cost me to renew the copyright.

But Hollywood can then turn right around and make a movie of my 40 year old book and not pay me a cent. And Hollywood can afford to wait that long. Why pay me a percentage when they can wait a few years and get the movie rights for free? Of course, then they're in a race to see who can make the movie first. Sure, the hot new books will get locked up quick, but with all the new titles entering into the public domain every year most authors won't stand a chance at a big payday.

I think copyrights need a set period of time... maybe 50 years, or maybe life of the author plus 10. But I don't like an every-increasing scale of renewals; it punishes the less successful while giving the others another decade or two of profits.

That's why I recommend it be treated like a tax rather than a fee. If it sells little, the tax is (relatively speaking) low. If you sell a lot, it is high. The most important purpose of setting it up as a tax, is to prevent the concept of "free hoarding", i.e. the maintenance of copyrights of out-of-print works, just in case there is a future demand. You may think that that sort of "lottery ticket"
is important, but so it the public domain. Still, if you want to play the "copyright lottery", you still can, it's just that it would not longer be free...

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by gouzos

One must also realize that the money that is lost is only the money that would have been gained if piracy didn’t exist.

So, the metalhead that downloads a Madonna song for fun doesn’t cost any money. Neither does a kid who downloads professional software to dabble at home.
The metalhead would never have bought the Madonna album and the kid would never pay $399 for Corel just to crop his photos.
So All they actually do is in fact help popularize the product while not costing anything.

The ones who cost the writers money are people who have decided to ditch legal music altogether, professional who make money out of copied software and bootleggers who actually sell an illegal product.

It's not only about money, but also (if not for the most part) about power and control.
What both sides really want, aside from money, is control over the goods, and the power to grant it.
A downloaded song, even if it's never listened by the downloader, is still a song out of the publisher's control.
And that's unacceptable.

So, better to lose a client and to have one less fan than to actually have a piece of music out of sight.

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by Good Old Neon

I think you might be insane.

Yes, and I'm proud of it.

[gouzos]

Originally Posted by Format C:

It's not only about money, but also (if not for the most part) about power and control.
What both sides really want, aside from money, is control over the goods, and the power to grant it.
A downloaded song, even if it's never listened by the downloader, is still a song out of the publisher's control.
And that's unacceptable.

So, better to lose a client and to have one less fan than to actually have a piece of music out of sight.

That's exactly why I believe this to be solely a problem for the publishers and not the artists. I think that artists that have vehemently gone after independent small-scale personal file-sharing either didn't really think through what is actually to their advantage or have started to think just like the industry heads.

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by Daithi

I like it Xenophon.

Along the lines of your thought process, I'd add that the only individuals allowed to extend a copyright should be the artist, or in the event of the artist's death, the spouse and/or dependants of the artist at the time of the creation of the copyrighted work. (If the copyright died with the artist I'd be fine with that too.) [edit]Once dependents are over 21 they lose the write to extend copyrights.[:edit]

It would be nice to see something like your proposal get made into law. I know most nations follow the Berne convention (treaty?) on copyright law, which sets death+50 as a minimum. I wonder if renewable copyrights with an initial term less than 50 years are allowed by this agreement. (I think 50 years is way too long for an initial term. I much prefer 10 or 20 years with the option to prepay.)

I'd also probably vote to revise the formula for fees. Fifty years for $1110 seems really cheap and $100,000,000 for 100 years seems really expensive. I'd suggest the following formula:

First 10 years are free
10-20 years costs $100
20-30 years costs $1,000
30-40 years costs $10,000
40-50 years costs $100,000
50-60 years costs $200,000
60-70 years costs $400,000
70-80 years costs $800,000
80-90 years costs $1,600,000
90-100 years costs $3,200,000

i.e. increase by a factor of 10 until year 50 then double thereafter until max 100 years is reached.

I'd rather go with income percentage.
From around 10% for the first decade, to a 90% for the century.

But I still wonder where the money goes...

[Moejoe]

Presentation to Australian TV producers and executives about the future of television distribution in the era of Bittorrent and YouTube. (Very interesting and relevant to this debate).

PART 1



PART 2



PART 3



PART 4



PART 5



PART 6



PART 7

[taosaur]

Would it pass moralist muster if we reserve books at the library (keeping in mind authors don't get a dime here, to my knowledge, until another book is bought) and leave them on our nightstand while reading a downloaded version?

Authors in particular should be glad for the gain in readership that will lead to sales of more hardcovers and/or licensed merchandise and/or ebooks down the road. Content providers who huff and puff about the moral outrage and cling t their old business models are just shooting themselves in the foot.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Format C:

I'd rather go with income percentage.
From around 10% for the first decade, to a 90% for the century.

But I still wonder where the money goes...

For the politicians to spend elsewhere, buying vot - excuse me, helping people. Once a politician has his hooks into a revenue stream, he won't ever give it up...

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Sorry, Sparrow, but when I was a teenager in the 1970s, we all used to save up our pocketmoney to buy "45" records; we didn't expect to be able to get it "for free". There really IS a different attitude towards it these days. I don't know whose "fault" it is, but the fact that the attitude exists is undeniable.

And you probably expected them to play on any record player, whether or not it was made by the recording label's factory. And you probably expected to be able to hand it off to a friend if you grew tired of listening to it.

Ebook, music and video filesharing exist in such strong numbers because the creators have tried to convince the market that they're just like the physical objects, except that your computer, instead of your stereo/tv/book, is the medium through which you'll experience them. And so people treat them just like they would treat a record or video: I'm done, here, you can have it. Or, hey, this music will play on a device that'll let us both listen to it at once, even though we're far away. Look, fifty-mile headphones. Or, you can read this book too, and I don't even have to lose it--it saves you the time and effort of going to the library.

(Note that, in the US, libraries do not pay royalties to authors; JKRowling gets nothing for how many times her books are checked out here.)

The assumption that every file downloaded is a lost full-price sale is erroneous, and the people who download them know that. Calling them "thieves" shows an utter lack of understanding of the dynamics involved, and doesn't discourage them at all.

If you were called a "thief" for the damage you're doing to the environment--with a car, electricity, and all that--would you stop? But you're taking away the good unspoiled air and resources your great-grandchildren, and others', should inherit! You must reduce your carbon footprint! You are an environmental thief!

The argument has some merit, but on its own, doesn't convince anyone. And that's the problem with accusations of "piracy"--they show such a lack of comprehension that they're entirely ignored.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Format C:

I'd rather go with income percentage.
From around 10% for the first decade, to a 90% for the century.

But I still wonder where the money goes...

What income? Not all copyrighted works generate money. Certainly something just written doesn't have any "income," and calculating the money it's made after 10 years can be ridiculously complicated. Does the author have to pay for what income the publisher got from the book? And works donated to nonprofit organizations may have zero income, but the creator may wish to continue copyright to prevent competing groups from using their material.

The money collected can go to

• Fund a registry and archive of copyrighted works, so people know what is covered, and have access to it so it doesn't drop out of existence,
• Fund public education about how copyright works, because it's complicated,
• Fund public domain works distribution--Gutenberg could use some grants, and films that haven't had their copyrights renewed could be converted to digital and distributed online.
• If there's anything left over after those, fund public works: books, art, scientific research.

The money collected from copyright registration could go towards the purposes for which copyright was established: to promote progress in the useful arts and sciences.

[Good Old Neon]

Ugh, please stop comparing file-sharing to libraries, nowadays (if ever), you’d have to look far and wide to find a publisher or author that has even the slightest problem or concern related to libraries loaning out books. I’m sure most writers and those working within the publishing industry have fond memories of long days spent at their local library.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Good Old Neon

Ugh, please stop comparing file-sharing to libraries, nowadays (if ever), you’d have to look far and wide to find a publisher or author that has even the slightest problem or concern related to libraries loaning out books. I’m sure most writers and those working within the publishing industry have fond memories of long days spent at their local library.

But that is the whole point with comparing them. The argument is that they are so similar in certain aspects that it is inconsistent to think that one is OK and the other is not.