eBook piracy, how common is it?

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

So having hopefully cleared that up, can you think of any reason why someone murdering you for absolutely no reason whatsoever would not be considered a "wrong" act?

That was hardly my point. My point is that the fact that I evaluate a situation in some way or other does not mean automatically that you need see it the same way. Like I hinted at, unless there is uncontroversial proof, "murder" is just the way you describe the situation, because you don't appreciate it, whereas the perp might just see it as "his right to respond primally when he finds out his wife cheated on him".
Sure, he might be less right than you to condemn him, but when you look at Patricia's lifeboat example, the case becomes less clear.
That is, you choose to kill either one or 5 someones, and you choose to save the lives of either the one, or 5. However, "intending to bring about someone's death" is pretty close to murder 1; the fact that you save a few others might help your case, but that isn't to say that you might not have thought "hey, I dislike fat people, and that one person is fat, whereas the others are lean" (or vice versa), thus making it "easier" for you to choose to make sure the one guy dies, whereas when that 1 guy was a neurosurgeon, and those 5 were hoboes, you might have chosen differently.. "Murder" is not straightforward, and whether you're exonerated or not will depend heavily on the circumstances. If you disliked the single person, and you tell the jury about that, you might still be (rightly) convicted for that.

Similarly with "piracy"/"file copying" or "file sharing". The names reflect how you see the thing. I, for instance, could care less about authors like Stephen King or Rowling, and my depriving them of a buck or two, either by not reading their output, (as I do) or by downloading an unauthorized copy (like someone else might), whereas in the case of academic literature, or a good Dostoevsky translation, I might care, because I think it has added value, and is not just interchangeable, cursory-read-at-most, trash.
You might feel differently, either because of the fact that I have a take on piracy that says that in some cases I find it rather less excusable than in others, or because you really, really like rowling and think she should become more of a billionaire out of your pocket; both responses are fine, but again, they're your take on the matter, not "your take+"the absolute moral truth"".

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

So your final argument seems to be saying that it is not wrong if the author chooses to do things any way that you personally do not like. Is that it? In essesnce things are done your way or you feel you have the moral right to take the work in question without fair recompense?

Cheers,
PKFFW

(Please excuse my clumsy use of words; English is not my first language. I hope you'll enjoy the quotations though.)

Thomas Jefferson has put it in words well:

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson, Monticello, August 13, 1813

What I believe is:

1. As stated above, the author loses any claim on "fugitive fermentation of his brain" at the moment he makes it public.

2. The copyright, ie. state laws guaranteeing the author certain rights to his creation for a limited time, has been used as a tool to promote creativity, has been used in 18th-20th century, and it was mistaken by many for some natural right one could have to an idea - "intellectual property" term was coined for that in 20th century. Because a whole lot of other people don't consider an ownership of an idea a sensible notion, they come, slowly but continuously, to perceive the copyright law as nonsense, and decade after decade they put less trust in it.

As stated beautifully in Thomas Babbington Macaulay speeches in UK parliament in 1841:

I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.

Sources:
http://baens-universe.com/articles/McCauley_copyright
http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm

Please notice how it was envisioned by Macaulay 170 years ago that the law will render itself a public enemy by supporting the issue of copyright, and how his words reflect today's affairs.

3. The monetary recompensation for the author and the publisher for the effort of making the creation available to the public was neccessary in 19th and 20th century. When Internet came about, and making a thing public became as easy as typing the words on the blog, this effort becomes much less costly, and thus the recompensation can be withdrawn without the loss to the general public.

4. The civilization is a result of free sharing of ideas. The knowledge how to kill animals, how to light a fire, how to survive could itself survive the death of an individual due to sharing of it between people. It takes many years now for each of us to absorb the important knowledge our civilization has developed - and all of it was someday conceived by minds long gone. Without that knowledge we'd be just savages lost in the concrete jungle.

The notion of intellectual property is to me an intellectual perversion of the purely utilitarian concept of copyright, and I believe it should currently be dropped altogether, as in current world it causes loss, not gain, to the society as a whole. Only because it's not currently easy for the copyright holders to go after people disregarding copyright, and thus impede sharing of ideas, this loss is not yet visible to the public.

So, to answer the original question:
1) It's your moral right, and also obligation to your peers to take in the works of other minds and continue to develop them and add your ideas to them, and share them with other people.
2) It's a moral wrong to impede sharing the knowledge/ideas between people.
3) That one can see clear distinction between common thieves, fraudsters and murderers, and people who don't believe in sensibility of copyright shows that comparing "just taking" the idea to "just taking" a thing or life is nonsense.
4) (to clarify a bit) It's clear that some business models, like author who can earn millions for his books, will be made impossible by the abandonment of copyright. I believe that this will not impoverish the society as a whole as much as the copyright law does. There are enough examples of work done by people for people just for enjoyment of creation, and a feeling of being useful to convince me of it. Linux, Free Software Foundation and Calibre come to mind. The legal jump over copyright issues Google made, scanning millions of books and sharing them with people, is a right thing to do in my eyes, and I'm sad that currently popular ideas and law arrangements cause it to be in opposition to the law.

(Edit: many of opinions stated here has been put in words simpler that they are, to drive the point home. I'm aware of various degrees of gray, non-black-white, in the presented points, and bad choice of words sometimes, but I'm also convinced that none of the small corrections that would need to be put in change the general outcome of the argument. I try to present strong opinions, weakly held ( see http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_webl..._opinions.html and http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001124.html )

[sirbruce]

Just more proof that, while Jefferson was a great writer, many of his ideas were really terrible. I'll take Adams over Jefferson six days a week.

[igorsk]

Not disputing Macaulay then? ;p

[sirbruce]

I agree that the length of copyright has become too long. This does not excuse piracy, however.

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

I agree that the length of copyright has become too long. This does not excuse piracy, however.

I see. Lemme guess, everyone's supposed to "call his/her representative". Yeah, that'll work.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

I see. Lemme guess, everyone's supposed to "call his/her representative". Yeah, that'll work.

Well, it generally does work in the US -- if enough of "everyone" actually does it. It requires a landslide of paper mail, an avalanche of eMail, fax machines going non-stop, and the telephone ringing off the hook, though. And copyright law hasn't come close to that level of public interest.

Xenophon

[sirbruce]

The average citizen doesn't understand the value of having something like Mickey Mouse, or Casablanca, or TOS Star Trek be in the public domain.

For copyright to change it's going to have to be the *artists* who come forward, in concert with publishers, to agree to give up some of their years of exclusivity. And it's not in their direct financial self-interest to do so.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

I agree that the length of copyright has become too long. This does not excuse piracy, however.

In your opinion what have to happen to excuse piracy? Change of length? Other types of laws?

I wonder because if nothing excuse piracy then your statement above has no impact or meaning.

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by tompe

In your opinion what have to happen to excuse piracy? Change of length? Other types of laws?

I wonder because if nothing excuse piracy then your statement above has no impact or meaning.

I've posted elsewhere circumstances under which *I* have considered piracy somewhat justifiable when the financial impact is minor or even 0, or where hardly anyone would care. I don't want to go over them again here. But I should clarify that I meant length of copyright doesn't excuse *blanket* piracy; in other words, if you think copyright should be 40 years and you're pirating books from 40 years ago, that's different from pirating books that came out yesterday. Unless you think it should be 0, in which case you're just nuts.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

I've posted elsewhere circumstances under which *I* have considered piracy somewhat justifiable when the financial impact is minor or even 0, or where hardly anyone would care.

Well a clear bias towards the people having been granted the time limited monopoly and not taking into account the public interest.

[Krystian Galaj]

Is it that simple - just copyright over all creations of the mind, no matter how useful they would be to society?

Biology research is currently active discipline. Many farmaceutical corporations put millions into development of new medicines, and if protection of their monopoly was removed, the development would likely cease, so I support such monopoly completely.

On the other hand, there was a news item, at least some months ago, which I tried to dig up presently, but failed, where some government was trying to buy large quantities of a medicine to fight epidemic of a disease. They couldn't afford the prices of the patent holders, so they tried to buy the same compound cheaply, but illegaly produced. The deal was blocked, and the medicine secured and destroyed. Still, the news item might have been a lie, and I'm sure there would be ways to negotiate a deal with patent holders, if political pressure was applied...

So I'm all for giving copyright protection to encourage growth, but on case-by-case basis, not making it look like the natural right of man.

[PKFFW]

Originally Posted by tompe

I do not get what the difference is between "wrong" and "absolutely wrong". Usually people use terms like "absolutely wrong" in rights based theories were you do not look at the consequence of an action to see if it is wrong.

What I mean by absolute wrong is a wrong that would be considered wrong in any normal human beings moral code. By "normal human being" I simply mean someone who is not mentally disturbed, intellectually incapable of reasoning, that sort of thing. I don't mean "anyone who is different to me isn't normal" or anything like that.

Here would be an example.....

Not sure if any of you are familiar with the town of Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia. In 1996, a man by the name of Matin Bryant walked into town with two automatic assault rifle and a load of ammunition. He proceeded to open fire on the citizenry, killing 35 and injuring 21. To this day, if I'm not mistaken, it is still the record for the most dead in a single mass shooting type incident. No reason, no motive that has ever been established.

Now, if you can show me any moral code that can somehow make that not a "wrong" act, then I would argue it is not a moral code at all but the delusions of an idiot mind at work.

Cheers,
PKFFW

[PKFFW]

Originally Posted by tompe

Well, it has some similarities since you choose voluntary to drive a car and you know how dangerous it is...

If you get out of bed in the morning and go to work you run the risk of killing someone some how so would you honestly argue that this is the same as intentionally, willfuly, premeditatedly and conciously murdering someone?

To begin with two things being similar is entirely different to those two things being the same. And frankly I wont even bother debating whether being involved in a car accident in which someone dies is the same as murdering the person.

Originally Posted by tompe

Well, it depends on what you mean by "absolute" I suppose. And I do not think all theories can be shown to lead to a conclusion since one theory is that "an action is good if entity X says it is good".

Are you seriously suggesting that a moral code can consist of nothing more than, for example, "I think killing people for no reason is good so therefore it is"? Are you seriously suggesting that such a moral code can be accepted as anything more than delusion? If that is your stance then there really is no point discussing the issue because our frames of reference are so far apart that no proper discourse could possibly be achieved.

Cheers,
PKFFW

[PKFFW]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

That was hardly my point. My point is that the fact that I evaluate a situation in some way or other does not mean automatically that you need see it the same way. Like I hinted at, unless there is uncontroversial proof, "murder" is just the way you describe the situation, because you don't appreciate it, whereas the perp might just see it as "his right to respond primally when he finds out his wife cheated on him".
Sure, he might be less right than you to condemn him, but when you look at Patricia's lifeboat example, the case becomes less clear.
That is, you choose to kill either one or 5 someones, and you choose to save the lives of either the one, or 5. However, "intending to bring about someone's death" is pretty close to murder 1; the fact that you save a few others might help your case, but that isn't to say that you might not have thought "hey, I dislike fat people, and that one person is fat, whereas the others are lean" (or vice versa), thus making it "easier" for you to choose to make sure the one guy dies, whereas when that 1 guy was a neurosurgeon, and those 5 were hoboes, you might have chosen differently.. "Murder" is not straightforward, and whether you're exonerated or not will depend heavily on the circumstances. If you disliked the single person, and you tell the jury about that, you might still be (rightly) convicted for that.

Still seems like semantics to me I'm sorry. You may see a situation differently to me, I might not appreciate a murder the same way a murderer does, etc etc. My murder example was an attempt to give a clear cut situation and instead of answering with respect to that situation you choose to debate the semantics about what constitutes the situation.

Patricia's life boat example, as I said in a previous post, is more to do with justifiable killing than it is to do with premeditated, wilful and reasonless murder. Therefore it has nothing to do with my example.

As I said to tompe, if you honestly think a moral code can consist of nothing more than "I can do whatever I like and if I say it is good then it is", then our viewpoints are so far apart that no true discourse could be possible. There are always going to be delusion people who are wired wrong(for lack of a better way to put it) who think anything is ok simply because they say it is. I don't think it can reasonably be argued that that viewpoint can truly be considered a "moral code". If you do think that viewpoint constitutes a vaild moral code then we have no basis for discussion.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Similarly with "piracy"/"file copying" or "file sharing". The names reflect how you see the thing. I, for instance, could care less about authors like Stephen King or Rowling, and my depriving them of a buck or two, either by not reading their output, (as I do) or by downloading an unauthorized copy (like someone else might), whereas in the case of academic literature, or a good Dostoevsky translation, I might care, because I think it has added value, and is not just interchangeable, cursory-read-at-most, trash.

See this sounds more like a way of justifying to me but maybe I'm missing something.

I know we can all find ways to justify what we want to do. That's not really what I'm discussing at all as that is self evident.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

You might feel differently, either because of the fact that I have a take on piracy that says that in some cases I find it rather less excusable than in others, or because you really, really like rowling and think she should become more of a billionaire out of your pocket; both responses are fine, but again, they're your take on the matter, not "your take+"the absolute moral truth"".

Never said it was the absolute truth actually. I was debating whether the act of file sharing would be wrong if one was unable to justify it with the usual arguments. The debate then moved on to whether there are absolutes when it comes to morality.

Cheers,
PKFFW