Is Rapidshare a promoter of e-book piracy?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

A German judge would disagree with you. See this article: Court Orders Rapidshare To Proactively Filter Content.

A judge can make whatever ruling he likes. The question is exactly how RapidShare is expected to do this.

RapidShare is a file sharing service. Users can upload anything they desire. If I want to share material where doing so would be considered theft, I wrap it in an password protected archive under a misleading name. I then post the RapidShare link in a forum where folks interested in what I'm offering hang out, along with the password to extract the content from the archive. Precisely how is RapidShare supposed to police that? The old story of King Canute trying to order the tide not to roll in comes to mind.

This is a tempest in a teapot. Yes, we can assume there is piracy of ebooks. But how much? We have no way to tell.

If I'm an author, with ebooks on the market, I frankly don't care about things like bit torrent files for downloading a thousand ebooks. Mere downloads are irrelevant My concern will be ebooks which are downloaded illegally, and read instead of buying a legitimate copy from which I'll get revenue. But even then, I have no way to determine how much of a problem it is, let alone any way of preventing it.

Given that, I have three concerns:

1. Writing the best stuff I can, to give people books they will want to read.

2. Doing everything possible to let people who might be interested in what I write know that I exist and have books available they might like.

3. Make it as easy as possible for people aware of me to find my books and give me money.

People will pay for value if you provide value at a fair price, and make it convenient for them. Can I find illicit copies of particular books? Probably. But it will take time and effort. I pay for convenience all the time. Ebooks will be no different.
______
Dennis

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

A judge can make whatever ruling he likes. The question is exactly how RapidShare is expected to do this.

Yes. With extra problems, even if they decide on a[n insanely time-consuming] "review all content before posting" policy.

Assume, for a moment, that they review all content.
They get a collection of ebooks.
It includes:
Gone with the Wind
Little House on the Prarie
The Tarzan series
Zigzags of Treachery, by Hammett
Peter Pan
Little Brother
Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom
Free Culture
Pride & Prejudice
On Basilisk Station
Elfquest graphic novel, vol 1 issue 1.

What should they do? GWTW and Little House are copyrighted in the US, but not in Canada. The Tarzan series are public domain in the US and Canada, but not places with Life+70 terms. The Hammett story is PD in the US only. Peter Pan is PD everywhere but the UK. Each of those books is PD somewhere; no place that's subject to the Berne conventions acknowledges all of them as PD.

Little Brother, Down and Out, and Free Culture are copyrighted--but released under CC licenses. (Are they required to check for CC licenses?)

Pride & Prejudice is PD, if it's the gutenberg version, but could be copyrighted if it's the BN annotated version with extra content. It's certainly copyrighted if it's Pride & Prejudice & Zombies but the name has been clipped.

On Basilisk Station and the Elfquest graphic novels are both available for free--on their publishers' websites. They're not labeled "freely available to distribute," but neither do the publishers seem concerned if someone else goes to the hassle of hosting the bandwidth for them.

Should they okay or forbid the upload? What if the uploader got permission from Baen and Warp Graphics to share those files (which is very plausible in both cases)? How would the uploader let Rapidshare know that these are shared-with-permission?

Oh, and say there's a book in there called "Dan Brown.PDF." Not "Da Vinci Code," and not "Lost Symbol." Are they required to open it and figure out what the content is? If it starts with a rant about the evils of Dan Brown as an author, are they required to keep reading to find out if his books are also included?

A ruling of "you must filter entries" is a roundabout way of saying "you may not host files; your business stops now."

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

A German judge would disagree with you. See this article: Court Orders Rapidshare To Proactively Filter Content.

I expect there is nothing more delightful than filtering a password-encrypted .zip file called "3a35f13.zip" that contains a password-encrypted .zip file called "3a35f13c.zip" which in turn contains the "best" of J.K. Rowling.

I mean... you can tell it's illegal just by looking at the filename!!

Personally, I hope every content provider that wastes any substantial amount of time and/or resources on combating piracy is eventually bankrupted by it. We'll be left both with better content and a more free and civil world.

- Ahi

[Solicitous]

Originally Posted by sriram

Years ago, when cassette tape piracy threatened to destroy the music industry in India, an enterprising company decided to take the battle to the pirates. Made tapes so affordable that it didn't make any sense to buy bootleg (i.e. reduced the price by 65-70%), turning it into a volumes game. Now, this is should be easily possible with digital media, so what's preventing these 'moguls'? I mean, if a new book were to cost $2.99 or $3.99 rather than $9.99 - $12.99, who'd risk downloading pirated versions?

Nice idea. I am speaking from a personal opinion. I don't mind paying $9.99-$12.99US for ebooks, especially given they are about 50% of the price after conversion of pbooks here in Australia. What I do have a problem with is geographic restrictions. So if I am willing and able to buy an ebook, but every ebook seller refuses to sell it to me because I live in Australia, I have a few options;

1) Attempt to circumvent the geographic restrictions.
2) Buy the pbook (defeats the purpose of buying an ebook reader).
3) Don't buy the book at all (everyone misses out, including me).
4) Find a pirated electronic copy.

Which option would you take? I don't think RapidShare promotes piracy, I think it just provides the means. Regardless of the price of things there will always be people out there trying to get it for nothing, you can stop that. But I think what really needs to be looked at is WHY ARE PEOPLE PIRATING??? Is it price or is it because people can't legitimately buy the product?

Just my 2cents.

[fugazied]

It's not a promoter of piracy, moreso a facilitator of piracy much in the same way the pirate bay is.

To avoid legal action I am sure rapidshare would have to provide an easy way for copyright holders to delete copyrighted material (or filter content). If you say rapidshare 'promotes' copyright infringement, the same could be said of youtube or the internet in general.

[junkyardwillie]

Publishers are learning the lesson of the music industry, either produce the products that people want at what they consider reasonable prices or people will find their own way around it. Rapidshare is not the problem, DRM is the problem. The publishing industry thought that books could not be bootlegged so they sat on their hands now they will be in a panic and unfortunately for them more and more people are learning about it now. Pretty soon we will only have classics to read because there won't be a market for new books.

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by junkyardwillie

...Rapidshare is not the problem, DRM is the problem...

Along with Geo Restrictions and some of the pricing where an ebook has a list price of double that of the pbook.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by fugazied

To avoid legal action I am sure rapidshare would have to provide an easy way for copyright holders to delete copyrighted material (or filter content)

It does! The publishers are arguing that this is not sufficient.

(And I'm told it's actually easy and dosn't come with massive strings like, say, Ebay's VERO program. Plus banned file hashes stay banned.)

Sheesh.

[Harmon]

I downloaded a copy of Dracula from the Sony/Borders Google Books section. It is a poorly formatted book. Gobbledygook on about every third page, interpolations of what must be the original photoscan of the volume. Now, there are a few cheapish versions on the S/B store, but not a word about the formatting. Nothing to tell me if they are text or pdf or epub or lrf. Nothing suggesting that the formatting is any better than the free version. In other words, the publishers don't seem to know what it is that they are selling. They think it's the content of the book, but don't seem to grasp that the content of this particular book is free.

So I am trudging along with the free version because I have no reason to believe that the other versions are any better.

The point is this: I don't think that what the booksellers are selling is content anymore, if it ever was. What they are selling is a number of services surrounding content. It used to be that the main service they were selling was Access, but with the internet, everything eventually becomes accessible. What booksellers need to be selling is Quality, Immediacy, Hassle Free. And they need to figure out how to price those services.

In the print environment, Amazon started selling some of the services, but not all of them. Successful bookstores are ones which sell what Amazon can't - and books themselves are not that product. Immediacy could be one. (I keep waiting for a bookstore that delivers books like pizza - call them up, and a guy in a car or on a bike delivers the book within the next hour.) Browsing is another such service, although Amazon is taking a bite at that.

For electronic books, it's going to be the same. The peculiar thing is that Amazon doesn't see that, or maybe they do but the publishers are too skittish.

"Piracy" is an illusion. The assumption that the download of a pirated book is a lost sale is just that - an assumption. An assumption more likely to be true is that a free book can be a hook into the sale of the next book. Another better assumption is that an intelligently priced and marketed book will move better than a pirated version.

Literate people do not want to pirate ebooks. They do, however, want to have them quickly, hassle free, well formatted, and at what they see as a fair price. Right now, pirated books deliver that complex of value better than publishers do. It's not that the pirates do it well, but rather, that the publishers don't seem to want to do it at all.

[tdavie]

As an example, I searched for the new Dan Brown book. I found it in Kindle and LRF format (the formatting looked pretty decent). But, I'm not interested in reading it. Not even for free. So what is the value if I download it? Full price? Half price? I don't know. I do know that *IF* I was interested in reading it, that I would not be willing to pay the same price as if I had purchased a dead tree book. And I would not accept any form of DRM.

Tom

[Mr. Dalliard]

Personally, I wouldn't download any of Dan Brown's works - even if he tried to send them to me over messenger himself.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Harmon

I downloaded a copy of Dracula from the Sony/Borders Google Books section. It is a poorly formatted book. Gobbledygook on about every third page, interpolations of what must be the original photoscan of the volume.

Googlebooks are all automatic OCR conversions with no corrections; many of them are atrociously formatted. (They're not formatted. They're auto-converted; formatting depends on the layout of the original & quality of the scans.)

However, Dracula is popular enough that it's available on almost every site that has public domain books, including this one:
formatted by JSWolf: Stoker, Bram: Dracula v2.0 2007-12-18

And Feedbooks: Dracula by Bram Stoker

Googlebooks is for looking for books that haven't been converted elsewhere. For public domain works, look here first, then Feedbooks, then Manybooks (they do less formatting), then Gutenberg. If you can't find it, THEN look at Googlebooks.

[Elfwreck]

{Removed}

[Harmon]

Thanks for those site recommendations.

I got my copy off of the S/B Bookstore mainly because as a Mac user, my access to that store is recent. Having read all the hype about how many of those books were available, I decided to try it out with the book that they are reading over at Infinite Summer. I will upgrade to the ones you pointed to!

[ardeegee]

Here's the original scan the copy of Dracula you were talking about was probably OCRed from:

http://books.google.com/books?id=k39...age&q=&f=false