Should Demonoid Stay Down?

[vivaldirules]

Free publicity? Sorry. It's theft. If the author and publisher wanted free publicity then they can decide to do that - not you. Yesterday I was looking for a particular highly regarded calculus text and instead of searching all the possible legal vendors of ebooks I went to Google where I was shown an incredibly long list of sites that had illegal copies available. So I reran the search to exclude hits with "torrent" on the page to see if there were legit vendors. I clicked on the top hit and an illegal pdf file of the book was on my desktop. A highly regarded and monumental work that is the result of years of effort was sitting on my PC almost by accident. I find this very sad and I would seriously like to hurt those who make it this easy.

[mflood]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

Feel free to rationalize all you want by judging for yourself what is more or less harmful to other people - whether you are knowledgeable enough to do so or not. But my recommendation is that people consider taking the high road and simply avoid the potential harm altogether. It doesn't cost much and keeps everyone out of trouble.

The high road being to avoid Demonoid and all its ilk simply because there are crimes being committed there?

I suppose you have a difficult time visiting cities. . .or towns. . .or neighbor's houses then, do you not? I'm not saying "it's not that bad, so maybe we should only download a LITTLE bit of illegal stuff. Or maybe just the quasi-legal gray area stuff." The high road that makes sense to travel is the one where you only download stuff you're sure is legal. You can do that perfectly fine with Demonoid, and every other tracker site on the web.

EDIT: Also, you're completely right in that it's not for us to decide what it's ok to steal. The law doesn't care. The owner of the content sets the rules. You can't argue however, that a crime which helps the victim (making an assumption that it does, which your post did for this particular argument) is really that bad, or upsetting to the average person.

[yvanleterrible]

One pusher down, two more take its place... it never stops.

[hidari]

Well put. I know several people who do go and buy the software after they have tried it for free on download.com for example. I buy my software from there quite often, after a free trial period. The more exposure the more sales...

Originally Posted by igorsk

I write software for money.
One piece of software I do (not alone, naturally) costs tens of thousands of dollars. There is some copy protection but it's pretty weak and can be removed by any half-experienced cracker. I've never seen it on torrent sites since it's not something usable by a general user and is not really useful without support.
Another piece is a $15 shareware program. There are cracks readily available but I don't worry about them much. The price is low enough for an impulse buy that most people don't bother wading through all the stuff out there. Also, if the program is warezed it means it's popular. Someone might download an old cracked version then see that the new one is available and just buy it. The sales are pretty good BTW.
Anyway, I agree with mflood: there are much worse things than copyright infrigement (which, incidentally, is not a criminal offence yet in most countries). I'd say, regard it as free publicity: the more your stuff downloaded and passed around, the more people know about it. Many of them would buy your stuff if they needed it and knew about it, and proper PR costs money. Eric Flint described the situation with books pretty nicely in one of his articles, and a lot of his reasoning applies to software:
http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos7

[hidari]

who died and made you the king of moral judgment ?

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

Feel free to rationalize all you want by judging for yourself what is more or less harmful to other people - whether you are knowledgeable enough to do so or not. But my recommendation is that people consider taking the high road and simply avoid the potential harm altogether. It doesn't cost much and keeps everyone out of trouble.

[HappyMartin]

Just because breaking copyright in some countries is not a criminal offense does not make it O.K. In South Africa in the not too distant past it was not a criminal offense to discriminate against people who were not of European decent. It was still obviously morally reprehensible.

Stealing is taking what is not offered. It hurts the person who had something taken from him that did not offer it. The wealth of the person that had something stolen is irrelevant. So is the morality of the person who had something stolen. The person who steals harms there own morality. All that harm for something that is wanted or desired but not needed. It is not like we are talking about hungry people taking food. We are talking about the planets most affluent, as those who have access to computers are, risking their morality and others source of income because of an inflated sense of entltlement to even more non critical consumer entertainment.

Sorry for the little rant but I see people starving on the way to work and then listen to wealthy people justifying why they should not have to pay for even luxury items. Makes me mad.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by mflood

"Criminal scum."

Heh. Have you ever driven over the speed limit, or rolled through a stopsign? You realize those things are probably more dangerous to society than torrenting a tv show or two, right? I don't mean to advocate piracy and I don't intend to do so, but the holier than thou attitude doesn't really fly with me. Disagreeing with piracy is fine and good, but the outrage is a little unjustified, don't you think?

To be honest, I don't mind TV show downloads. I recently changed the cable box to my cable TV service and ended up getting a free DVR. When I watch a network TV show I've recorded to time shift, I do fast forward past the commercials. To me, downloading a TV show is like time shifting using the DVR. Just without the hassle of fast forwarding past the commercials.

But you do have to look at it from Harry's POV. He writes commercial software. If people can get it for free, some that may have purchased it won't purchase it since it is now free. Granted, the people who download it for free that would never had purchased it is no loss. But some people when they cannot get a free copy will go and purchase. Those sales are something that Harry has lost out on. So yes, I do see things from his side of the fence.

I don't think most of us can say we've never downloaded something for free that we should have paid for or used shareware without paying. The thing is, though with some software, you have to go through so many hoops to get it to work, that it is easier and less of a hassle to find a pirated copy. Take WindowsXP for example. We have a spare computer that has XP running on it. We added more memory and a CD-Burner/DVD reader combo drive to it all at the same time. XP then decided to tell us we needed to activate it again. So we tried to activate it. Microsoft's activation system said our key was not valid. I called Microsoft to try to get a valid key. The support person gave me two keys that neither worked. These keys came directly from Microsoft. The only choice I had left was to goo out on the net to look for a program to fix the problem. So what ended up happening is I had to find an illegal way to solve a problem that should have been solved legally.

The point being, make it too hard to do things legally and people will turn to the much easier illegal way. And once they realize how easy it can be to get stuff for free, you might have just lost a paying customer thanks to someone convoluted method of forcing them to jump through hoops to get some piece of software to run.

Anyway, Demonoid is dead. It's never coming back.

[Anthuzad]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Anyway, Demonoid is dead. It's never coming back.

(I know that it must throw a strange light at me, this being my first post, so bear with me )

How do you know? Have they taken down the people behind demonoid? Communities like this have so many members because of a few reasons:

People want stuff they otherwise would have to pay for handed to them as a freebie. They want something that they either couldn't get because the original is to expensive to buy or because they are too scroogy to purchase it for it's set price.

This being the main reason there are, however, other not so obvious reasons: Have you ever tried getting a really old or really rare movie in retail? I know that I have combed my local retailers and ebay for all they were worth and couldn't find it (meaning they couldn't order it either).
Now if you fire up any of the bigger torrent sites there is a real chance you might get your hands on the item you are looking for, and that's without the hassle of driving around for hours and talking to a great deal of people just to find out that you're running against a brick wall.
(I see a great chance for distributing these things legally if only the industry would adapt to the current situation and digitalize all these things to offer them on a legal platform for a sensible price.)

I don't want to go into the whole copy protection thing because it all has been said in above posts.

There are many more "arbitrary" not-so-obvious reasons that make people use the p2p tools . As long as these reasons exist there will always be an underground satisfying these needs and no matter how often a site gets beaten down, either it will reincarnate (like demonoid has done 4 times) or another one will grow into it's place (because a community so huge has to go somewhere else for their free fix).

To make my point: You can't keep down these sites without offering a serious alternative and the industry is a long way from that yet. iTunes is a first step into the right direction but it only covers a small portion of it's true potential. If there are offers good enough to make the hassle and the legal prosecution because of illegal downloads not worthwhile anymore the illegal torrents sites will diminish by a great factor (I don't think you ever can shut them down completely because there's always somebody scroogy or brave/dumb enough to continue when there are good alternatives). The one way not to go is to introduce stricter laws though (some people get more years in prison for filesharing than a rapist. I know that's an extreme case but I still think the whole copyright thing is blown out of proportion). Guess which way we are heading and what consequences will arise for your personal freedom out of that.

[McDoof]

What we need are new categories, I think. I am a grad student (and correspondingly poor) and I recently searched for some useful books on Sony's connect site. The limited selection they did have included academic books with three digit price-tags (that was in dollars, not pesos).

I can't afford that kind of content, and if I could get similar content from P1rate Bay I would probably do it.
I can't, by the way, but if you're looking for Tom Clancy it's your lucky day.

My point is that those of you who publish or have friends who are authors or musicians need to ask yourselves how much of the final price ends up in the pockets of the artist/author/writer anyway.

Do you really thing the author of A Political Chronology of the Middle East is going to lose 175 dollars if I find a PDF of her book for free elsewhere online? Not likely. She'll be harmed, but more damage (relatively speaking) is done to the publisher.

And on a tangent...
In an ebook environment, there's no reason for academic books to be so obscenely expensive anyway. Used to be that the limited run made the printing a financially questionable process. Now online texts can be digitally reproduced but the prices remain high. It's a tradition, I guess.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by McDoof

And on a tangent...
In an ebook environment, there's no reason for academic books to be so obscenely expensive anyway. Used to be that the limited run made the printing a financially questionable process. Now online texts can be digitally reproduced but the prices remain high. It's a tradition, I guess.

On the contrary, I am a textbook author myself, and it's textbooks which always will be expensive because they are expensive to produce.

It doesn't matter (in a sense) what novels say. With a textbook, it has to be factually correct. All reputable publishers employ a panel of experts in the field to review and offer comments on the manuscript of a textbook. Textbooks are, generally speaking, also very expensive to typeset, since they generally contain many more pictures, diagrams, etc, than do novels.

Add to that the fact that a textbook has an enormously smaller audience than a novel. Sales of 10,000 copies would be pathetic for a novel, but fantastic for a textbook. Not only, therefore, is the textbook inherently more expensive to produce, but the UNIT cost is also higher, due to the lower sales.

All these factors conspire to make textbooks expensive. It's just simple economics I'm afraid - (good) textbooks will always be expensive, and the savings to be made from producing textbooks as eBooks rather than pBooks are considerably lower, due to the significantly higher cost of publication.

[McDoof]

Good points, HarryT.

But the question remains. Most people in the forum here are (rightfully) talking about the harm that piracy does to the creators of various works and not to the publisher/record company/software firm that distributes them.

The costs of peer review and research make quality textbooks and non-fiction more expensive than other genres to be sure, but does it bring you, the author, a bigger check than if you had written a romance novel? Probably not.
I mean, do you really think that 175 dollars is a fair price for an etextbook? (A question for another thread, perhaps)

My point here is really that I'd love to see a system that protects intellectual property, benefits the authors, and protects the quality of the work. Is that possible?

I'm imagining a Radiohead kind of system, I guess. One in which you pay what you can and do so directly to the creator of the work you buy. Seems to be the perfect model for ebooks. But maybe it's naive.

I'll be publishing my first non-fiction work next year and I'm terribly interested in these kinds of questions...

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by McDoof

My point here is really that I'd love to see a system that protects intellectual property, benefits the authors, and protects the quality of the work. Is that possible?

In the immortal words of every AOLer out there: Me too!

[Moonraker]

What about the honest customers who pay for software and then cannot get it registered without going through a tangle of hoops because of a paranoid developer's fear of piracy?

This happened to me recently. I purchased Hardware Sensors Monitor Pro by AB Software. The owner did not send me a registration key.

The email sent from my "trial programme" to register the product contained a large encrypted list apparently describing my PC. I tried to send many of these emails but most of them errored with a "Mapi" error. I had to uninstall my second email programme (Outlook) which I reserve for another of my more private email addresses before the errors stopped.

Some of my registration request emails must have got through eventually because I then received loads of automated email replies stating:

"ATTENTION!!! All messages originated from unknown E-mail addresses will be silently REMOVED from the queue. Only messages originated from E-mail addresses registered in the orders will be processed." (You could not reply to this automated reply). As I was not getting any replies I assumed that my order had been lost and was not in the registered orders lists.

I won't go into any more detail here about how you have to register the software because it would make some people cry. Suffice it to say that I have never experienced anything so complicated.

I emailed many times to the contact email address on the website and was told that the key had been sent and I should check my spam filter. I replied that I do check my spam filter and if the purchase receipt had escaped the spam filter why shouldn't the registration key do likewise?
I tried to post a message on the forums in the registration issues section. But guess what - you have to be a registered owner to be able to view and post in this section! And I was still without my registration key! There was no address or telephone number on the site and nowhere to contact the owner apart from the contact email address and the recipient of this was not replying in a helpful manner.

Because I was getting nowhere I eventually sent a copy of my purchase receipt which showed my order number, name and address and telephone number. This did prove successful because I received the registration key shortly thereafter.

But to add insult to injury I receive another email from this company saying I had to acknowledge receipt of the key!

I feel that to inconvenience honest paying customers is counter-productive because, although I am normally such a person, with hindsight I would definately have downloaded a cracked copy if I could have found one.

[BCCISProf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

On the contrary, I am a textbook author myself, and it's textbooks which always will be expensive because they are expensive to produce.

I am also a textbook author. Now I don't know what the practice is elsewhere, but here in the US after the first year or two of sales of a new book, the author's renumeration drops down to zero due to the huge number of books that end up in the used book market. It would be one thing, if at least the consumer benefited, if the price for the used book would be very cheap. However, the college bookstores charge almost as much for the used book as the for the new book. Of course the bookstore buys the book from the student at a pittance. Neither the publisher nor the author get anything from the used book market. That is one of the reasons the publisher charges so much for the new book. I can thus understand why students would try to get the book for nothing since they are being taken advantage of.

[NatCh]

You're leaving out the step where they pub brings out a new edition every couple of years, regenerating the "new" book demand.