eBook Pirates

[Terisa de morgan]

Anyway, I have a question. How do you get these statistics? Do they put a survey when you go into a pirate site, and you give freely your data? Sorry, could somebody explain how these results can be less than "an uneducated guess"?.

[ottdmk]

Digimark (an anti-piracy company) hired Nielsen to do the survey. As far as surveying goes, Nielsen is one of the leaders in the industry. So, make of that what you will.

[Pablo]

It's not that hard to understand the appeal of pirated books:

1 - They are free

2 - No DRM
This is not important for some people, mainly Kindle owners who shop at Amazon, but for many others who have ePub readers, the process of registering the reader with Adobe, installing ADE, buying a book, receiving a link to it and opening it with ADE for downloading and transferring to the reader is enough to discourage them, not to mention the difficulties involved in buying a book at Amazon and reading it in an ePub reader.

3 - You can obtain books that are not available by legal means for whatever reason.
There are tons of books that have no e-version available and are out of print.
Sometimes you cannot even get them second-hand.

4 - You can have a look and decide if you're interested without paying
Of course you can have a look before you buy in some stores. In the case of Amazon, you see the cover, the title page, the table of contents and a couple of pages and that's all...

Some people also feel the need to find a moral justification for downloading without paying, but I believe that most "pirates" know that what they are doing is wrong, only they don't mind. Downloading a book for free doesn't feel like going into a book shop and stealing a book, even if you've been repeatedly treated to all those "You wouldn't steal a car" videos before you were allowed to watch the content you had paid for.

And not all "book pirates" are created equal. There are those who both buy and pirate books, depending on the ocasion.

Anyway, any survey including the annual income of "book pirates" sounds phony...

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm pretty sure that what I said before about the law giving you the right to publish and the right not to publish, as you see fit, is as true under US copyright law as it is under British law.

Yes. That's why it's called copyright.

[gweeks]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm pretty sure that what I said before about the law giving you the right to publish and the right not to publish, as you see fit, is as true under US copyright law as it is under British law.

Not entirely. The US copyright law has the concept of a statutory copyright license. It mostly applies to music, but it is in place specifically to stop you from being able to "not publish" a work. Anyone may publish it as long as they pay the statutory license rate to you. This is what allows anyone to make a cover recording of a song. It's not a universal part of the copyright law, so it mostly doesn't apply to books. There are parts of it that do apply to books.

Greg

[JSWolf]

One thing that causes some piracy is a book series where all the books in the series are not available to buy as eBooks legally. Some people will turn to the net to find the missing books.

[piperclassique]

JSWolf, did you mean "not available" ?

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

One thing that causes some piracy is a book series where all the books in the series are available to buy as eBooks legally. Some people will turn to the net to find the missing books.

On this example, I wouldn't go looking but the author would most certainly get on my NEVER support list.
Unless of course you are talking about old books then I would keep looking because maybe they will show up sometime and if not, oh well there are other books to read.

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

...The article also talks about a subject that comes up here quite a bit, the marginal cost of ebooks, i.e. why pay for something that doesn't cost anything to reproduce?

My basic take is I totally get the convenience part. Being able to get almost any ebook that I want at one place is very compelling.

I don't get the marginal cost issue. I mean, I understand what it means and yes, I understand that it doesn't cost anything to reproduce an ebook. However, I don't understand how people do not acknowledge the cost of creating the book in the first place.

In industries that operate in competitive markets competition normally drives the selling price of a product close to the marginal cost of the last unit of production. This, as we see, does not happen in the ebook market.

For two reasons that I am aware off ebooks are in a very non-competitive environment, the main one being protectionism. I will not say any more about that last nor what solutions (which include amending legislation) could exist in the market against that so as ebooks could become much cheaper, as emotive name calling will start.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by AnotherCat

In industries that operate in competitive markets competition normally drives the selling price of a product close to the marginal cost of the last unit of production. This, as we see, does not happen in the ebook market.

Ebooks, though, are not like physical widgets, where most of the cost is in manufacturing. The overwhelming majority of the cost of an ebook is not its reproduction cost (which is as close to zero as makes no difference) but the up-front costs of actually creating it, which costs have to be recouped via subsequent sales. In many cases, lowering prices will not significantly increase sales, thus the unit price is mandated by the expected lifetime sales.

[Difflugia]

Originally Posted by issybird

Why do rights holders owe you something at the price you're willing to pay?

I expect you intended this as a rhetorical question, but there is an important argument to be made that as a member of the social framework that benefits the creator in the first place, she does owe something back to that society in the form of shared rights to the creation.

You're free to find your point anywhere on the continuum from absolute creator rights to absolute society rights, but I think the fact that most people choose a point somewhere in the middle is some evidence that authors and society both have a reasonable (though not necessarily equal) stake in the rights to a creative work.

I think an interesting point is that at least one US court has ruled that making any copy of a digital resource in computer memory (as part of opening a file, for example) is actually protected by copyright for the rights holder. That means that any action that involves using the resource and that contravenes the license is a violation of copyright. Actions such as the removal of DRM or even unpacking a mobi or epub (reverse engineering) are forbidden by most licenses.

At least in certain jurisdictions, then, the rights holder doesn't even owe you the latitude to use licensed resources as you see fit once you've paid for them. Following the reasoning in the court case linked above, if an ebook is licensed specifically to you, then letting someone else even read your ebook on your own ereader infringes copyright unless the other person also has a license for the book.

Within that context, then, the question isn't whether the rights holder owes you anything, but what exactly it is that the rights holder does owe you as part of a fair transaction.
[*] For reference, I just read through the Amazon Device Terms of Use, the Amazon Services Conditions of Use and Kindle Store Terms of Use. The closest to authorizing another user is the clause that says that anyone under 18 must use the Service "with the involvement of a parent or guardian".

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by gweeks

Not entirely. The US copyright law has the concept of a statutory copyright license. It mostly applies to music, but it is in place specifically to stop you from being able to "not publish" a work. Anyone may publish it as long as they pay the statutory license rate to you. This is what allows anyone to make a cover recording of a song. It's not a universal part of the copyright law, so it mostly doesn't apply to books. There are parts of it that do apply to books.

Greg

I seem to recall reading that this is a deal that exclusive to music. Up until fairly recently, the US has been very loose with regards to copyrights. Even now, copyright in the US has a lot of fair use exclusions and exceptions. As a general rule of thumb, unless you are actively pirating from the stand point of trying to make money off someone elses' work or in someway damaging the copyright holders' ability to make money, you are pretty safe. Of course, as is always the case, that is subject to change if you run across the wrong judge.

Also keep in mind that different mediums can get treated differently. Movies get treated differently than music, which gets treated differently than books.

[FizzyWater]

Originally Posted by ottdmk

Digimark (an anti-piracy company) hired Nielsen to do the survey. As far as surveying goes, Nielsen is one of the leaders in the industry. So, make of that what you will.

Trying to imagine a "pirate's" response to being asked to participate in such a survey....

"Hello, this is Nielsen and we want to do a confidential survey on ebook piracy. Would you be willing to answer some questions?"

How many people do you suppose actually agreed to answer? How many assumed it was a phishing scheme by the FBI/copyright police?

[Ricky D'Angelo]

Originally Posted by kyteflyer

I once wanted a book which was simply not available in any legal form. I searched for hard copy, for electronic copy, and even emailed the author in an attempt to find out where I could buy it (no response).

What to do? Pirate, or not.

I once downloaded a book by mistake (thought it was a sample). However, after reading the book I felt the most appropriate thing to do was to purchase another available ebook by the author of the book I downloaded. It just so happened the author was a member of another forum I'm a member of so I was able to explain the situation to the author. You could also try to see if your local library could obtain the book on loan from somewhere.

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Ebooks, though, are not like physical widgets, where most of the cost is in manufacturing. The overwhelming majority of the cost of an ebook is not its reproduction cost (which is as close to zero as makes no difference) but the up-front costs of actually creating it, which costs have to be recouped via subsequent sales. In many cases, lowering prices will not significantly increase sales, thus the unit price is mandated by the expected lifetime sales.

I'm not going to bother arguing with you Harry, that on past experience. There are plenty of product examples where the up front costs are much higher than those of ebooks (especially fiction) and cost of purchase is very low. You seem, in your last sentence, to believe that ebook pricing is of a "cost plus" nature, which if it is so clearly indicates that the market for ebooks is heavily protected as I have said.

Just exercise your mind by opening your viewpoint beyond abusing your "scum", having copyright enforcement punishing even "innocents" who unwittingly circumvent rights (as you claimed in a post some time back), and that ebooks are somehow different to everything else in the world. I'll leave you to it.