Confessions of a Book Pirate

[BearMountainBooks]

*cashes in chips, waves a friendly wave*

Y'all have fun now.

[thename]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

But to think that there is anything "real" about those morel constraints is just silly.

Agreed.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

You can pretend to yourself that there is objective right and wrong-- and you know it-- for the rest of your life. But that will not make it true.

You are going to extreme lengths to justify that you have a right to take whatever you want, even if it doesn't belong to you. Well, since you do not believe in private property rights, there is not much to discuss.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by thename

Agreed.

[MrBlueSky]

To answer Schex86 (post 240), Far be it for me to “advocating theft” or anything else. I’m just telling it like it is from the perspective of a user. There is indeed a cultural revolution going on, and there is now at least two full generations that have grown up with the clarion call of Information Wants To Be Free” ringing in their ears. There’s no going back now. The copyright cartel is a busted flush and they can’t put the genie back in the bottle no matter how hard they try.

If you want to talk about theft, as I said in my initial post to the hypothetical Mr. Author, give me back my public domain that you have (already) stolen from me and then we’ll talk deals, social bargains, royalty payments or whatever else takes your fancy. Until then Mr. Author, don’t bother me with your whining because technology has upset your cozy little way of life.

File-sharing sites are nothing more — or less — than the aggregation of a big big library to be used for conveniently checking out books to read. How Mr. Author can object to that so vehemently I do not know. Do they not WANT their books to be read?

If you go to a physical library, you check out a book, read it and take it back. If you go to a digital library, you download a book, read it and then delete it. Why is the first action regarded as acceptable and the second akin to the murder of a first-born? Somebody far cleverer than me will have to explain that moral and ethical conundrum! Is it morally wrong to hike on down to the local library and check out a dozen books at a time? Is it ethically correct to file-share a single copy under any circumstances?

Meanwhile, I live in the real world and I haven’t got the time (or the patience) to explain the nuances of why copyright infringement is a civil offence and not a criminal one. Hint, there is a very very good reason why the police cannot arrest anyone for copyright infringement — IT'S NO A CRIME. They CAN arrest someone for stealing — that IS a criminal offence. Spot the difference boys and girls?

And to answer Steve Jordan (post 241), when I said that file- sharing easy, I was simply stating a fact — not making a justification for it. With file-sharing there is no need to worry about registering your device, no need to worry if the activation server is working or not, not need to worry if you book will simply ‘disappear’, no need to worry if your device breaks. If a file is not perfectly proofed, well, make your own changes.

I did give a justification for file-sharing — that of repatriation. It is my opinion that no rational minded person can defend the current life + 70 copyright rule, nor can they keep making excuses for the ever increasing attempts by the entrenched monopoly hoarders to keep on extending that length to infinity - 1 day. I see file-sharing simply as a correction mechanism to the blatant land grab that has been going on by the cartels.

I too am not impressed by greed and selfishness — and its particularly reprehensible when practiced by the robber baron cartels against the common man, don’t you agree?

And yes, I DO use file-sharing.

I use it for the choice (over 500,000 books). I use it because you can’t get some digital copies anywhere else. I use it because you can’t get the physical copies anywhere else. I use it for format shifting. I use it for my security. I use it as a library. I use it as a try before your buy store (yes, it’s not all black and white — I purchase as much as I share). I use it to discover new material. I use it to re-read old favourites. I use it for education. I use it for fair use.

Most of all, I use it for my OWN convenience — and for not being beholden to the convenience of the monopoly hoarding cartels. Guyanonymous (post 242) summed the it up succinctly enough, its time for the hoarders to find … a new business model that works with reality, not what (they) wish it would be …

And for the record. yes, authors ARE demanding that consumers pay for their works in perpetuity. If a book I buy gets damaged, lost or stolen will Mr. Author give me another one for free? When the books I once read as a child have disintegrated with age due to shoddy materials used, will Mr. Author send me free replacements when I want my children to read the same books? When Mr. Author makes minor changes to a book I’ve already purchased will I be sent a free replacement? Quite. So much for ‘just a one-time payment'.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

You are going to extreme lengths to justify that you have a right to take whatever you want, even if it doesn't belong to you. Well, since you do not believe in private property rights, there is not much to discuss.

I'm not making any attempts to justify anything whatsoever-- that is just you projecting. I need no justifications at all-- I want it, it is freely available, I take it. End of story. And as I have cleary stated (wait, I'll quote myself):

"I'm not arguing that-- because there is no objective morality-- there should not be moral constraints placed on people by the conditioning of their societies for the good of the functioning of the collective."

So, in a societal sense, I do believe in "rights"-- I simply am not trying to fool myself into thinking that there are any "rights" from any objective frame of reference-- I do not conciser humans to be anything more than evolved creatures with no afterlife and no magical sky faeries watching over us.

And you can continue to make obsolete analogies straining to equate digital copies of data with physical property all you want-- it will continue to be not credible.

Here's my vision of a morally preferable world-- all of human knowledge is available to everyone, everywhere, all the time, with no worries about whether one can "afford" to "purchase" that information. How or if content creators manage to make money off of that system is not my concern or interest.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by MrBlueSky

Until then Mr. Author, don’t bother me with your whining because technology has upset your cozy little way of life.

Er... how many authors do you know? There's not much cozy about their way of life. Unless you're talking about a very tiny minority of "best-seller" authors.

Originally Posted by MrBlueSky

File-sharing sites are nothing more — or less — than the aggregation of a big big library to be used for conveniently checking out books to read. How Mr. Author can object to that so vehemently I do not know. Do they not WANT their books to be read?

No. Really. There's a major difference between borrowing a book from the library and downloading one that has been scanned or cracked. When you borrow from a library, not only did the library pay for the book (and the library is physically local, so that implies something about how many copies of the book were paid for), but the library keeps track of how many times a given book is checked out, and uses those statistics to decide what to buy next. If you and ten friends check a book out from your local library by Author X, and Author X puts out a new book, the library will probably buy a copy of that book, too. That, in turn, affects whether the publisher is likely to sign Author X up for another book. There is no feedback like that for download sites. And the lack of physical location means that the number of copies sold to make "free" copies available is far smaller than for libraries. That's a model that will only work if authors sell their books once, to a file-sharer, for a very large sum of money, i.e. a patronage system (more on this below.)

Originally Posted by ardeegee

I'm not making any attempts to justify anything whatsoever-- that is just you projecting. I need no justifications at all-- I want it, it is freely available, I take it. End of story. And as I have cleary stated (wait, I'll quote myself):
...

Here's my vision of a morally preferable world-- all of human knowledge is available to everyone, everywhere, all the time, with no worries about whether one can "afford" to "purchase" that information. How or if content creators manage to make money off of that system is not my concern or interest.

In my vision of a morally preferable world, no one would ever starve, or be homeless, or be denied access to decent health care. In that world, I think a great many creative people would agree with you that information ought to be free. I know very few creative people who enjoy worrying about how to get paid for their work. Almost all of them simply want to be able to take care of themselves and their families and have time to create.

If you think information ought to be free, start thinking about how to make rent, dinner, and health care free. If you think worrying about that isn't your problem, well, I believe file-sharing sites have a term "leecher"....

Meanwhile, here's my suggestion. Rather than authors depending on royalty payments, they ask fans to pledge payments (legally binding pledges, to an escrow account) for a new book. When the amount pledged reaches the author's asking price, the author finishes the book and hires an editor to help do so (good books require good editors as well as authors). If the author also wants to budget for a publisher's marketing department, they can do so, but fans may not be willing to pay much of a markup for that. Then the author collects the pledges and releases the book, unencrypted, and anyone who wants it can have it. Those who want it printed can do so via a POD service.

One outcome of this scheme is that authors will probably get more donations if they offer "extras" to high-donors, such as getting a mention in the book, having a character named after them, etc. Further in that direction lies direct corporate sponsorship, complete with ads in the book, or at least product placement. I suppose the market will "decide" how much of that they're willing to put up with.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Boy, this topic do get people going don't it?

I appreciate the civility of the discussion as well. Nice job guys!

I also wanted to say thank you to everyone who has participated and kept this thread civil. I don't know if anyone's mind has been changed, but sometimes the value is simply that we learn more about one another.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by nekokami

No. Really. There's a major difference between borrowing a book from the library and downloading one that has been scanned or cracked. When you borrow from a library, not only did the library pay for the book (and the library is physically local, so that implies something about how many copies of the book were paid for), but the library keeps track of how many times a given book is checked out, and uses those statistics to decide what to buy next. If you and ten friends check a book out from your local library by Author X, and Author X puts out a new book, the library will probably buy a copy of that book, too.

If the library is a gov't supported institution, that's about how it works. If the library is my friend Kathy's house, and the books are a wall full of paperbacks (some bought new, many bought used), there's no record-keeping, no new purchases from publishers, no indication of the difference between a book that's been read by 40 people and one that's been read by 2 people who keep borrowing it so they can check the details of their fanfic.

The books on the filesharing sites? Were all purchased at some point. *Someone* bought a new copy of that book; the author was paid for one reader.

The moral issue of "reading without paying the author" is the same whether the book is borrowed from a friend, bought at a yard sale, or picked up from a free box set in a park somewhere. Putting it on filesharing sites is a just a change of scale.

If authors & the publishing industry want to stop the *damaging* forms of filesharing--and there very likely is some (as opposed to the kind that works as advertising)--they need to find a legal, simple way for people (end-user readers, not companies) to have lending libraries of ebooks like they do for pbooks, and ways to sell off the ones they don't care for anymore at half the price they paid for them.

The idea that every book that's read should be bought new at full price, has never been how most people read books.

[guyanonymous]

You're fortunate to find a place (presuming it's a shop) that'll pay half of what you paid for a book. Around here, they're usually in the realm of 5%-10% in my experience. So much so that I now donate old books to charity groups for their sales instead of trying to sell them. I just got too frustrated.

The last time it was 20 file boxes full of pocketbooks. It's nice having shelf-space again.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

The moral issue of "reading without paying the author" is the same whether the book is borrowed from a friend, bought at a yard sale, or picked up from a free box set in a park somewhere. Putting it on filesharing sites is a just a change of scale.

I'm not sure I agree, because I think scale matters here. The pricing of paper books takes into account that 6-10 people will read the books per sale. Changing the scale of sharing changes the validity of that estimate. What do you suppose the scale change really is? Let's say 100 times as many people will download the book as would have borrowed it from a local friend. Whatever portion of the price of a book that relates to that factor should probably be multiplied by 100. While it's not the full price of the book, I'd say it's probably at least $1.00 per book. So to take this kind of sharing model into account, each original copy would have to sell for something like $125. Of course, at that price very few people will buy books at all, so you might as well go for the patronage/presale model I suggested earlier.

Or, authors could go in the other direction, making online books inexpensive and DRM-free, as several authors who have posted here do, and hope that most people will buy their books rather than download them without paying. The problem we run into there is that perceived value sometimes falls proportionately to cost, so if the price goes too low, people won't buy at all and won't have any hesitation about uploading the file to a sharing site. Also, micropayments are still difficult to manage-- the credit card companies and PayPal want quite a cut per transaction.

I think we'll find one or more workable solutions within the next few years, but the current model isn't going to hold up much longer.

[PKFFW]

Originally Posted by nekokami

I'm not sure I agree, because I think scale matters here.....

Agreed.

I think most people would agree there is a moral difference that goes beyond simply scale between sharing a book with a friend, acquaintance or family member and sharing it with hundreds of thousands of completely unknown people via the internet.

Whether or not they care and whether or not it stops them from doing so and of course whether or not anything can be done about it is another matter.

Cheers,
PKFFW

[pietvo]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

I think most people would agree there is a moral difference that goes beyond simply scale between sharing a book with a friend, acquaintance or family member and sharing it with hundreds of thousands of completely unknown people via the internet.

I don't agree. I think the only moral issue here is whether you should conform to the law or not. Otherwise if it is not morally right in the USA to mass copy a book 60 years after the death of an author, why would it be morally right to do so in Canada? Or why does that change from one day to another?

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by pietvo

I don't agree. I think the only moral issue here is whether you should conform to the law or not. Otherwise if it is not morally right in the USA to mass copy a book 60 years after the death of an author, why would it be morally right to do so in Canada? Or why does that change from one day to another?

There you go confusing morals and laws again.

[pietvo]

No, I'm not confusing morals and laws. But what other moral issues are there regarding copyright? There used to be a time when there were no copyrights. You could just copy a book and it was considered right to do so. Copyright is something that is defined by law, not by morals. So I do make that distinction certainly. On the other hand I also feel morally obliged to conform to the law. Well, in fact, I go a bit further - I will not download illegal copies of ebooks although the law in my country allows it.