Confessions of a Book Pirate

[pietvo]

Originally Posted by llreader

In Spain we pay a tax on hard drives, flash memory, etc. to pay for piracy, but it is still illegal to copy, How does that make sense? And the money goes to this organization, no one know how they divvy it up (and how much the keep for themselves).

In the Netherlands we have such a tax (levy) only for writable CD's and DVD's. On the other hand the law allows us to make copies for personal use. It's the same article of the law that regulates both. There isn't even a requirement that you own the original, so you can make a copy of a CD that you borrow from a friend. Or even download from the Internet. So at the moment as the law stands, it is not illegal to download illegal stuff. Only the uploading is illegal because it is a form of publishing/broadcasting. The law doesn't speak about music or video so this also applies to ebooks. So the interesting thing is that for example downloading an ebook from a Canadian site where it is PD because the author died more than 50 years ago while still being copyrighted here because we have life+70, is considered legal. It would also apply to pirated copies. But you cannot sell or give away the copy; it is only for personal use.
If you keep the copy on your hard disk, MP3 player or ereader you don't pay the levy, of course. So people from the copyright mafia have proposed to also put the levy on hard disks, memory sticks, MP3 players etc. Anything that has a mass storage. Of course that would also apply then to office PC's, so I don't think it has a big chance. For the time being it won't get into the law, I think. The discussion about it died.
The government also has been talking about changing the law so that you will not be allowed to make copies of illegal content. I have no problem with that but then the levy should at least be diminished. The industry should not have their cake and eat it too!
PLEASE NOTE: This is not a legal advice. IANAL.

[PKFFW]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Competitors can peacefully coexist, even in a "truly capitalist" society.

I disagree.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

There is nothing about capitalist society that demands "the strongest must survive by consuming all competitors." You are describing a society of 100% greed and unreasonable avarice, and despite common perception, capitalism and greed are not absolute bedfellows.

Actually Capitalism does demand that all competitors be consumed or subsumed. This is not "greed or unreasonable avarice". It is simply the way of Capitalism. Any competitor is, by definition, taking away some portion of your profit. If there is further profit to be made then Capitalism demands that profit be sought out and claimed.

Remember that "greed and unreasonable avarice" are merely words that are defined by humans. Everyone will have a different definition and these words mean nothing to Capitalism itself, which is merely an economic construct or set of rules.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

In fact, too much greed can corrupt a market to the extent that all competitors are destroyed, including a top dog that cannot sustain itself after fighting too hard to control its market, and finally leaving a market to more savvy and reasonable newcomers.

Absolutely. Hence why, in Capitalist economies, there are few companies that rule their industry for longer than a few short years or decades.

However, this is rarely due to "too much greed". Capitalism doesn't come in and say "sorry Microsoft, you have become too greedy and I shall now smite you and allow other software companies to take over the industry".

What you describe or are alluding to is when companies become so large and have so few competitors that they believe they can charge consumers too much for their product. Eventually consumers will revolt and not buy the product and the company will fail. That is the greed of the individual company and will lead to it's downfall.

However, there is nothing to say that the company would not simply learn from its error and reduce its pricing to what the market can bear whilst still being the single company offering that product or service.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Don't condemn a system for its bad practitioners.

I am not condemning anything. I am merely pointing out what can be the only outcome of a truly free market under the Capitalist system.

Hence why most countries have both laws against anti-competative practices and laws preventing true monopolies. If Capitalism truly allowed for many companies offering the same product to peacefully co-exist and compete evenly and openly there would be no need for such laws.

Cheers,
PKFFW

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

I disagree.

Actually Capitalism does demand that all competitors be consumed or subsumed. This is not "greed or unreasonable avarice". It is simply the way of Capitalism. Any competitor is, by definition, taking away some portion of your profit. If there is further profit to be made then Capitalism demands that profit be sought out and claimed.

Remember that "greed and unreasonable avarice" are merely words that are defined by humans. Everyone will have a different definition and these words mean nothing to Capitalism itself, which is merely an economic construct or set of rules.

Absolutely. Hence why, in Capitalist economies, there are few companies that rule their industry for longer than a few short years or decades.

However, this is rarely due to "too much greed". Capitalism doesn't come in and say "sorry Microsoft, you have become too greedy and I shall now smite you and allow other software companies to take over the industry".

What you describe or are alluding to is when companies become so large and have so few competitors that they believe they can charge consumers too much for their product. Eventually consumers will revolt and not buy the product and the company will fail. That is the greed of the individual company and will lead to it's downfall.

However, there is nothing to say that the company would not simply learn from its error and reduce its pricing to what the market can bear whilst still being the single company offering that product or service.

I am not condemning anything. I am merely pointing out what can be the only outcome of a truly free market under the Capitalist system.

Hence why most countries have both laws against anti-competative practices and laws preventing true monopolies. If Capitalism truly allowed for many companies offering the same product to peacefully co-exist and compete evenly and openly there would be no need for such laws.

Cheers,
PKFFW

If I may parody Diana Darby...."You don't know your capitalism..."

What busts monopolies in Capitalism is new inventions. Karl Marx, bless his poor lil' heart, didn't figure that one out before he published. I can have the most perfect monopoly on buggy whips there is, but if the car makes buggy whips obsolete, my monopoly won't be worth anything. Monopolies inherently become profit maximizing organizations, leaving room for new technologies to undercut them. When they do, another monopoly bites the dust....

[guyanonymous]

Originally Posted by pietvo

In the Netherlands we have such a tax (levy) only for writable CD's and DVD's.
PLEASE NOTE: This is not a legal advice. IANAL.

Like you, IANAL

In Canada, as I understand it, we pay a similar levy and have done for sometime. It also applies to portable media players (MP3 and video) depending on the size of their HD. It's created a "grey zone" as I often hear it called. It is 'not illegal' to download music; I'm not sure if movies and ebooks are covered by this. This is because, in theory, artists are covered by the rampant piracy that is the only reason people buy cds/dvds/etc. As mentioned above, though, the accountability for where this money has gone is somewhat in question.

Note, I've said, 'not illegal', which isn't to say it's legal. It's undefined because of how the levy was setup - that explains it being a grey zone. It is illegal, as you mentioned, to upload/distribute music (and other) at this time.

Please, if any Canadian lawyers can better edumacate me on this, speak up, but this is my understanding of the current situation (and why Canadians haven't been beset by all the lawsuits seen in the US and GB (?).

I've read suggestions of simply adding a $5 or $10 fee to broadband internet access which, at current levels, would provide MORE compensation to artists (if they could figure out fair distribution of the $) than they currently earn in the present system by sales alone. I'd support that - however, I can understand why those who do not download and would not download (for moral reasons or just because they don't listen to music) would resent things. I myself resent paying for a levy on dvds and cds which, primarily, I use for my own photography and sharing of personal data/work with others - not for music at all.

[guyanonymous]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Monopolies inherently become profit maximizing organizations, leaving room for new technologies to undercut them. When they do, another monopoly bites the dust....

Or the monopoly, being the only ones with $, buy up the upstart that dares challenge them, destroying their engine that runs on water! <insert fist shake here>

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

Just as people do not take the idea of "every download is a lost sale" seriously because there is no evidence for it, so should the idea that "most/lots of people just like to download for the sake of it and would never buy or read the books" be taken with a grain of salt.

Oh, sure. Do note an important distinction between 'every download is a lost sale' and 'most/lots/many of people download for the sake of it', though. The first statement is falsifiable - if I can find a single case of a download that didn't result in a lost sale, it's false. The second isn't - no matter how many people I point to and say 'those people are downloading to collect, not to consume' somebody will inevitably say that that number, whatever it is, doesn't qualify as 'much/lots/many'.

But if we phrased it as 'some downloads are lost sales, some downloads are people downloading for the sake of collecting, and we have no empirical evidence of how many people fall into either of those categories' we wouldn't have anything to argue about. And if not for the heat generated by meaningless arguments, the whole series of tubes that powers the Internet would grind to a screaming halt, and then where would we be?

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

Hence why most countries have both laws against anti-competative practices and laws preventing true monopolies. If Capitalism truly allowed for many companies offering the same product to peacefully co-exist and compete evenly and openly there would be no need for such laws.

Ralph's right: You've got a really funny idea of capitalism.

Capitalism allows for competing products to coexist today... there are plenty of examples. Products can compete, specifically because they are not all the same: Company A offers a square widget with a manual crank, while company B offers a round widget with a solar-charged crank, and consumers can choose which they want.

Monopolies are not inevitable products of capitalism, nor are they intended goals of capitalism; they are aberrations, a sort of capitalist cancer, that ultimately damages the concept and process of capitalism... that is why there are laws to prevent them, just as there are laws to prevent other undesirable aberrations that can damage a capitalist system, such as unfair labor practices, false advertising, unsafe products and price-gouging.

[llreader]

Originally Posted by guyanonymous

Like you, IANAL

I've read suggestions of simply adding a $5 or $10 fee to broadband internet access which, at current levels, would provide MORE compensation to artists (if they could figure out fair distribution of the $) than they currently earn in the present system by sales alone. I'd support that - however, I can understand why those who do not download and would not download (for moral reasons or just because they don't listen to music) would resent things. I myself resent paying for a levy on dvds and cds which, primarily, I use for my own photography and sharing of personal data/work with others - not for music at all.

There is a certain appeal to "all you can eat" pricing. The biggest problem for me is how the money gets divvied up. How does Ani DiFranco get her cut? What about Tuvan throat Singers, like Huun-Huur-Tu? Does Beyonce get 90% of everything?

In these deals, the money goes to organizations that represent big content management corporations. Independent artists can be pirated to the ends of the earth and they won't get a dime from this.

[guyanonymous]

I agree...and in Canada, with our Canadian content fixation for Radio/TV broadcast, I suspect things would be even more complex. Is it based on airtime? On sales? Are sales unit-based or $ based? It would be complex.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by guyanonymous

Or the monopoly, being the only ones with $, buy up the upstart that dares challenge them, destroying their engine that runs on water! <insert fist shake here>

Assuming the business is for sale....

Question. Set the wayback machine to 1956. IBM is sued for having a computer monopoly. Do you think that hadn't happened, that 1. Shockey over at Fairchild wouldn't have invented the Integrated Circuit. and 2. Texas Instrument wouldn't have used them in 1969 to create the pocket calculator. and 3. Nobody would have stretched the Pocket Calculator design to make a microprocessor?

Sorry I don't buy it.... monopolies don't ever get big enough to be as you project without being undercut by new technology first...

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by calvin-c

Hmm, following this line of thought, in order to create anything 'private' you'd need to forgo public education? It seems to me that what you're proposing is anarchy-a social system in which everybody is free to impose their own rules on everybody else, to the extent they are able to, whether by physical force or mental coercion (aka persuasion).

Not my cup of tea, at all.

I don't see why what I suggested would be anarchy. Could you clarify? What I intended to be describing was our current system, in which copyrighted works eventually become public domain.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Applying the analogy, it would depend on where the author did the writing/who he was writing for. If done for a public entity, or with public resources, it would be considered a public document. If done themselves, or for a private institution, that did not use public resources, the document would be private. But the document could be done as a private project, then offered to the public for purchase, essentially making it "public-access."

This doesn't mean it can't still have restrictions on what the public can or cannot do... for instance, to vandalize the work, or to refuse to pay whatever (reasonable) compensation the author demands for access.

Drawing from public experiences does not necessarily make the document public, IMO, any more than land that benefits from blown seedlings to establish its garden cannot still be private land.

I disagree. While drawing from public experiences does not make a work immediately public, because the author contributes his or her own efforts to construct the work, I also think that failing to acknowledge the extent to which we draw on public commons leads directly to the situation we see with Disney, et al, trying to extend copyright into perpetuity.

(As for the seeds blowing over and landing in your yard, ask Monsanto whether that creates any obligation on your part... )

[guyanonymous]

If public funds are involved, I've come to the firm belief that the public should have full access to the creation involved, be it through physical access to a garden/museum/etc or at cost access to the information (which via electronics is near $0.00).

One of my pet peeves is that publicly funded research is often only available through costly journals as opposed to free access via the net. The fact is, free access is possible, as most journals already have electronic versions they charge big $ to access. Similarly, research that isn't published, but has been paid for via public funding, shoudl still be made accessible. If artists, writers, musicians, and movie makers are funded by the public, their work, too, should be made available at minimal cost/free to the public who paid for the work.

I find it, for example, galling that I have to pay for postal code/GPS coordinate data from the Canadian Postal Service. Our taxes have already paid for the material.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Ralph's right: You've got a really funny idea of capitalism.

Capitalism allows for competing products to coexist today... there are plenty of examples. Products can compete, specifically because they are not all the same: Company A offers a square widget with a manual crank, while company B offers a round widget with a solar-charged crank, and consumers can choose which they want.

Monopolies are not inevitable products of capitalism, nor are they intended goals of capitalism; they are aberrations, a sort of capitalist cancer, that ultimately damages the concept and process of capitalism... that is why there are laws to prevent them, just as there are laws to prevent other undesirable aberrations that can damage a capitalist system, such as unfair labor practices, false advertising, unsafe products and price-gouging.

May I split the difference? What he says would be true, if there was no new inventions for 100-200 years. Chances of that happening in a capitalistic system - slim or none (and we just strung up Slim....).

That is the great failing of Marxism (Karl - not Groucho). It was written to view the world as static.

In the real world, new inventions are always overturning applecarts!

[MrBlueSky]

An explanation why piracy is so prevalent over the internet is, well, because it’s so … easy.

There’s no other justification needed than that.


By the way, demanding a ‘justification’ for wanting to read a book implies that engaging in that activity is somehow immoral, illegal or just plain wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A rationale for piracy (or at least a reasoned explanation for it) is that each and every download of a copyrighted book is a message to the content hoarders that the peasants are reclaiming the commons for their own.

In simple terms, give me back my stolen Public Domain.


I allowed the copyright cartels to reap monopoly profits on their material for a certain defined time on the basis that I would benefit from unrestricted access to to the said material at the expiration of that term of monopoly. When that time came, the corporate shill, namely Mr. Author, said “No deal, you have to pay me for the rest of my life — and for seventy years after that too. That's the deal — take it or lump it”.

Well Mr. Author, here’s the new deal.

I no longer require your permission to read as many books as I like, when I like and how I like — and I’ll pay you your Groat seventy years after I’m dead.

If that doesn’t suit you, well, copyright at infinity - 1 day doesn’t suit me either — so we’re even.


Fellow travellers can prop up the existing copyright regime as much as they like with periphery discussions of Business Models, Publishing House costs, Authors Rights over their ‘creations’, DRM protection, Intellectual Property and whatnot — but sheep penned up in a field are still sheep eating grass in a field — even though they may believe they are Princes dining at a banquet in a palace.


Rise up. You’ve nothing to lose but your blinkers and your chains.

[schex86]

MrBlueSky, are you advocating theft? If not that, then a form of civil disobedience, akin to driving 65 in a 55 on an open stretch of desert highway.

Or is it something more fundamental? The fact that the sheep are waking up, that their rights are self evident and can no longer be denied.

Can we imagine such a society of empowered individuals? Does it frighten us, cause us to stumble back into our place of comfort?

What are we afraid of? If we are creators, let our creations stand on their own merits, for our creations are nothing without the society that contributed to them, that respects them, that understands them, that marvels at them.

If monopoly power over such creations can be justified, then express that in social contract with the very society to which they are inexorably fastened. Honor the contract, and society will do the same.

There will be change, but that too is a constant, or should be. Embrace that condition, accept it, and continue to create, as you always have, as you always will.