EU Piracy Report

[Thasaidon]

Originally Posted by Hitch

(The "you don't have a real job so your time isn't valuable" thing is something that every home-based worker, employee, etc., has always dealt with. People are @$$holes.)

Hitch

I think you have gone a little over the top with the above. Do you class yourself as an "@$$hole"? Or are you not a person?

Had you said "Many People are @$$holes" or "Some People are @$$holes" I would have agreed with you

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Thasaidon

I think you have gone a little over the top with the above. Do you class yourself as an "@$$hole"? Or are you not a person?

Had you said "Many People are @$$holes" or "Some People are @$$holes" I would have agreed with you

Firstly, I'm pretty sure that everyone, at some point in time, can be and have been an @$$hole(s). However: fine, people can be @$$holes.

Hitch

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Geo-restrictions can lead to piracy.

I doubt if it is one of the bigger causes of piracy, but this is a reasonable point.

Geo-restrictions are a freedom to read issue. The geo-restrictions you are referring to are IMHO pretty trivial compared to government censorship, but there's enough of a family resemblance that it all needs to end.

[darryl]

@Hitch. Sadly being ripped-off is bad in any business, particularly so when there is no physical product. I would love to have the money I was not paid, particularly in the earlier years. Sadly there is no better solution than payment up front, which is not always possible.

On the other hand, why is there still a basically thriving publishing industry, electronic or otherwise? Why is Amazon doing so well selling ebooks? I've given my views in previous posts. I certainly have no monopoly on the truth, but it seems that a large number of people simply don't download pirate copies, or perhaps both buy and pirate in different circumstances.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by darryl

On the other hand, why is there still a basically thriving publishing industry, electronic or otherwise? Why is Amazon doing so well selling ebooks? I've given my views in previous posts. I certainly have no monopoly on the truth, but it seems that a large number of people simply don't download pirate copies, or perhaps both buy and pirate in different circumstances.

Presumably for the same reason that the car industry still thrives despite the existence of car thieves: namely, that most people are essentially honest.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

I doubt if it is one of the bigger causes of piracy, but this is a reasonable point.

Geo-restrictions are a freedom to read issue. The geo-restrictions you are referring to are IMHO pretty trivial compared to government censorship, but there's enough of a family resemblance that it all needs to end.

Geo-restrictions is not a freedom to read issue. I know why it's there and it makes sense. But the problem comes when a book you want to read is not available as an eBook in your country but is available in a different country.

Take (for example) the Dirk Pitt series by Clive Cussler. Not all of the eBooks are available in the US. But the missing eBooks in the series are available in the UK. If you don't know how to purchase UK eBooks in the US, the only other choice is looking on the net for them.

[issybird]

Let's dispense with "@$$holes", please.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Geo-restrictions is not a freedom to read issue. I know why it's there and it makes sense. But the problem comes when a book you want to read is not available as an eBook in your country but is available in a different country.

Take (for example) the Dirk Pitt series by Clive Cussler. Not all of the eBooks are available in the US. But the missing eBooks in the series are available in the UK. If you don't know how to purchase UK eBooks in the US, the only other choice is looking on the net for them.

I find the notion of shopping "abroad" for ebooks to be ethically questionable, especially when it's done to save money. But I admit its appeal when it's an ebook that you can't purchase domestically - especially when the alternative is to purchase a used paper copy, in which case the author gets nothing at all.

Invoking freedom to read seems like overkill, to me. You could always buy the paper book even if you had to buy that abroad. You might not want a paper book, but that's a different issue. No one's stopping you from reading it or accessing it.

Being able to purchase a particular title as an ebook is pretty far down any hierarchy of needs. I'm not the internet morality police. But I find most justifications for it pretty thin.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by issybird

Let's dispense with "@$$holes", please.

I find that ignoring them works in most cases.
Apache

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by issybird

I find the notion of shopping "abroad" for ebooks to be ethically questionable, especially when it's done to save money. But I admit its appeal when it's an ebook that you can't purchase domestically - especially when the alternative is to purchase a used paper copy, in which case the author gets nothing at all.

Invoking freedom to read seems like overkill, to me. You could always buy the paper book even if you had to buy that abroad. You might not want a paper book, but that's a different issue. No one's stopping you from reading it or accessing it.

Being able to purchase a particular title as an ebook is pretty far down any hierarchy of needs. I'm not the internet morality police. But I find most justifications for it pretty thin.

I find this a bit confusing. Am I to understand in your opinion that for myself as a Canadian, ordering a physical book from a UK bookstore is moral but ordering the same book as an ebook is immoral? The same geo-restrictions should apply since the publisher in the UK, in most cases, would own the rights for both editions in the UK while a different publisher would own the rights in Canada.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I find this a bit confusing. Am I to understand in your opinion that for myself as a Canadian, ordering a physical book from a UK bookstore is moral but ordering the same book as an ebook is immoral? The same geo-restrictions should apply since the publisher in the UK, in most cases, would own the rights for both editions in the UK while a different publisher would own the rights in Canada.

The purchase which can only be completed with a lie is the immoral one in my opinion. Ordering a physical book from a UK store to be shipped to your real address is neither immoral, nor does it run afoul of any geo-restrictions.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Geo-restrictions can lead to piracy. Some people try to legally purchase an eBook and find it's available, just not to them because of where they live. So they go try to find it and they find it plus other eBooks and it goes from there.

I know there are ways around these restrictions, but you have to know them and piracy is a lot easier if you don't know the ways around geo-restrictions. Imagine you are reading a series where the book you've read ends in a way that to finish the story arc, you need the next book. You go to Amazon, Kobo, Google, or Apple and try to buy it. You cannot find it. You then look up online to see if it's an eBook and it is. You then find at some eBookstore and it's not available for you to purchase. You then search again and find it. You click the link and go to a site where you can get it for free. That's the start.

If they are paying the copyright owner for it, then it isn't piracy. Bypassing geo-restrictions is more along the lines of contract violations, though the actual contract is between the copyright holder and the merchant. If you violate geo-restrictions, I think the worst than can happen to you is the merchant can refuse to do business with you in the future.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Geo-restrictions is not a freedom to read issue. I know why it's there and it makes sense. But the problem comes when a book you want to read is not available as an eBook in your country but is available in a different country.

Take (for example) the Dirk Pitt series by Clive Cussler. Not all of the eBooks are available in the US. . . .

Since most Clive Cussler books seem to come in large print paper editions, I agree concerning your example.

There are two groups of people who can't read what they want due to national boundary restrictions.

One group is those who need large print. Here's an example of a book that I can't get in the US, as an eBook, and thus can't get in large print:

https://www.amazon.cn/The-Feng-Shui-...=Nury+Vittachi

Or maybe I can get it as an eBook, but I don't know how. It is fair to say that someone is trying to stop me. So I bought it as a regular paper book, which had smaller print than I like, but that I still found manageable. For someone else, in the US, who has a more serious need for large print, they would be unable to read this book.

We should keep in mind that the US is no longer the dominant country for either computer or mobile reading.
More than 330 million Chinese now read books via online platforms . . . . Some titles are freely available as eBooks in China, but not the US, as is the case with my first link in this thread. I think this should be considered a problem, just as the reverse (albeit usually for a different reason) is a problem.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

The purchase which can only be completed with a lie is the immoral one in my opinion. Ordering a physical book from a UK store to be shipped to your real address is neither immoral, nor does it run afoul of any geo-restrictions.

Minor nit 1: Very often the rights to a book apply in a limited area. For instance, Raincoast Books obtained the rights to the Harry Potter books in Canada. Knowingly selling a copy to a person in the USA where the rights were purchased by another company would have violated their agreement with Bloomsbury. OTOH, anyone selling an edition published by another company to a customer in Canada would also have violated that agreement.

Minor nit 2: The specific book I was looking at was not available in North America at that time. When I looked at the information for the book on the UK bookstore's website, I saw a cannot be shipped to your address warning. When I asked why, their response was that the book could only be shipped to Europe with no further explanation.

My daughter's work-around was to have a fellow Leicester Tigers fan/online friend purchase the book and ship it to her. As a sidenote, when she attended the Women's Rugby World Cup 2017 in Ireland, she finally met some of those on-line friends/rugby fans in person.

[DiapDealer]

Minor nit 1: concerns restrictions on the selling of physical books. A buyer has broken no rules (legal or moral) by asking the seller to sell them a book under that scenario (provided there is no attempt to hide/obfuscate their location)... regardless of the outcome.

Minor nit 2: the seller has made their position clear. As they should. Your daughter's workaround to the problem involved no deception, lie or law/agreement-breaking. Nor did it require the seller to violate their agreement/contract with publishers. Yay for legal and moral workarounds.

But like many other situations, comparing physical books to ebooks rarely yields relevant discussion. There is no similar workaround for buying a copyrighted, geo-restricted ebook without deception or piracy.

Like issybird, I'm not interested in policing the internet. If people are OK with lying to get what they want, then so be it. But I'm not obligated to buy their justifications/excuses/reasons for why they believe their deceptions should get a free pass from being considered immoral.

I hate geo-restrictions as much the next person. Just not enough to lie to get around them.