Pirate Bay founders found guilty

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Hey, I'm on board with ebooks. I'm just pragmatic when it comes to my fellow man. Hope for the best; prepare for the worst!

So you do what worked so well for the RCC, namely try to shame everyone into submission? Because regardless of your statement to the contrary ("I'm not going to take the several weeks it would take to try to convince you of that") your posts sure read as though they were prepared by a vicar

[kad032000]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

You can't equate that at all; at best you'd have to find a correlation between movie piracy and DVD sales/rentals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dar..._video_release

http://torrentfreak.com/search/dark%20knight

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Can you find someone guilty of accessory to X without charging/prosecuting someone else of actually committing X? Can you be an accessory to a crime when the crime itself was not tried in court? I don't recall this trial including any of the actual copyright infringers being defendants?

Yes. The motivation was general knowledge about crime committed. And that is not so strange. And they did not deny general knowledge. The strange thing is that the considered it shown that the intention was to help with illegal file sharing and that laws protecting for examples having links on a web page was not applicable.

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by netseeker

I know there were (and are) bands who lived from the revenue of concert tickets and the merchandise sales in those concerts. (Ramones for example)
Authors can (under certain circumstances) get paid by publishers for book readings*. Isn't this compareable to the sales of concert tickets?

Authors don't get paid for book readings unless the store wants to pay a big name like Dan Brown. They don't get paid much for going to conventions, or signing books, or anything else that takes time away from their writing, either. (They might get paid for interviews.)

Compared to how much bands make from live concerts it's really no comparison.

[tirsales]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Compared to how much bands make from live concerts it's really no comparison.

Depends on how famous a band is (but your point came across )

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

So you do what worked so well for the RCC, namely try to shame everyone into submission?

More like navel gazing at the grim reality of it all. I have no solutions to offer other than for retailers to drastically cut their margins and for publishers to eliminate the retailers as much as possible via cheap online ebooks. And/or hope that Amazon succeeds.

[tirsales]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

And/or hope that Amazon succeeds.

Throughout history monopoles never had any good - thus I do hope that Amazon fails.

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by kad032000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dar..._video_release

http://torrentfreak.com/search/dark%20knight

Right, so now get into your time machine and see what the world was like without piracy. Oh, right, you can't. So we're all left groping in the dark looking at trends in overall statistics and making inferences.

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by tirsales

Throughout history monopoles never had any good - thus I do hope that Amazon fails.

Amazon has done more to make ebooks commercially viable than all previous stakeholders combined.

[netseeker]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Authors don't get paid for book readings unless the store wants to pay a big name like Dan Brown. They don't get paid much for going to conventions, or signing books, or anything else that takes time away from their writing, either. (They might get paid for interviews.)

Compared to how much bands make from live concerts it's really no comparison.

Ok, the turnovers are different but it seems to me that such paid book readings are much more important for authors in europe than in the us because i know some authors here and the revenues of book readings, conventions and so on are a important proportion of their income. In other words: Those authors couldn't live from their work without these revenues.

[tirsales]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Right, so now get into your time machine and see what the world was like without piracy. Oh, right, you can't. So we're all left groping in the dark looking at trends in overall statistics and making inferences.

Chicken or egg .. The overall market for entertainment was either stable or increasing throughout the last years - file sharing not withstanding. Film and music quite often got first shared "more then average" and shortly afterwards their sales increased (Heise had some studies on this topic - but its German). But I though the music-market was unimportant for eBook?

[tirsales]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Amazon has done more to make ebooks commercially viable than all previous stakeholders combined.

I strongly doubt this - maybe they advanced the progress one year, maybe they did not.
But: A monopole would be a very, very bad idea (I personally do not like the Kindle (for a variety of reasons, US-only BS and DRM among them) and I strongly object being bound to only one device).

[netseeker]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

Amazon has done more to make ebooks commercially viable than all previous stakeholders combined.

Amazon has done more to make ebooks commercially viable for amazon itself than all previous stakeholders combined. I'm sure you know what amazon charges from authors and publishers in the affiliate program. Imho amazon already has too much market power (at least here in europe) and abuses this market power (acts like a monopolist) sometimes against authors and publishers.

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by netseeker

Ok, the turnovers are different but it seems to me that such paid book readings are much more important for authors in europe than in the us because i know some authors here and the revenues of book readings, conventions and so on are a important proportion of their income. In other words: Those authors couldn't live from their work without these revenues.

Perhaps they do things differently in Europe. If you can get one of those authors to post about his experiences here I'd love to read them.

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by tirsales

Chicken or egg .. The overall market for entertainment was either stable or increasing throughout the last years - file sharing not withstanding. Film and music quite often got first shared "more then average" and shortly afterwards their sales increased (Heise had some studies on this topic - but its German). But I though the music-market was unimportant for eBook?

I don't understand how any of this relates to what I said.