eBook Pirates

[darryl]

Intellectual property laws generally are long overdue for review. So far as copyright is concerned, academic publishing, particularly of articles in journals, is a disgrace that does significant public harm for the benefit of a corporate group.

Traditional publishing is offering authors worse terms than ever. I had an interesting discussion in an airport lounge some time ago with a fellow eink user. She shared my views on traditional publishers gouging of Australians for decades. However, she had an interesting philosophy on piracy. She was using a Paperwhite and had an Amazon Australia account. She paid for self published fiction from Amazon and Amazon imprints. Anything from the large publishers, no matter the price, she pirated, viewing it as compensation for decades of being ripped-off. When I asked her how she felt about the authors getting nothing from her pirated books, she had two rationalisations. One was that most of the authors would get nothing anyway as likely very few of them would have repaid their advances, and most of these would probably never do so. She also said whilst she would prefer the author to get something, it was their own fault for going with traditional publishing, which in itself she said indicated a lack of respect for their prospective readers. We had quite an interesting discussion about authors accepting "donations" on their websites. I had not heard of Patreon at that stage, but it would probably lend itself to this purpose. I asked her about possibly borrowing from libraries. She knew little about this since Australian libraries offer only epub, which she thought was a disgraceful situation. I should add that whilst I don't condone her philosophy I do understand it.

I also don't buy Big 5 ebooks. I also very rarely buy any ebook over $6.99. Any books in these categories which I really want to read I borrow from a library. Only one of the Big 5 authors who I once read regularly has survived, and he is now a library borrow rather than a purchase. I have a new set of favourite authors, all Indie or hybrid, and many of their books are available on Kindle Unlimited.

Where I am really tempted to download pirate copies is where books are simply not available either as ebooks or at all. A lot of older science fiction in particular seems to have no official ebooks available but very many unofficial versions, of what quality I can't say. However, the fact that most seem to be pdf's is in itself a persuasive deterrent.

Whilst current copyright law seeks to equate copyright with tangible property at law, the two should not in my view be treated the same way. Copyright is an artificial creation, a statutory monopoly in theory now justified only by the incentive it provides for the enrichment of our culture. As I said above, in many cases I think in its present form it in fact does public harm. However, such a right should not go without responsibility. I think a creator should have the right not to publish at all initially. However, once published, the work has become, if you like, part of our cultural gestalt. I don't think there is any rationale for allowing an author the right to withdraw a work from availability once they have taken advantage of the statutory monopoly.

I don't have all the answers to what a sane copyright system should look like. One idea which seems to me to be compelling is to allow a copyright to exist for the life of the author, or perhaps even a little longer. Such copyright would be personal to the author, and not property capable of being completely disposed of. However, the life of the copyright would then consist of two phases. During the first period, lasting for say 5 years, or some other reasonable but relatively short period, the author would have the right to grant exclusive licenses to the content for a period not exceeding the time remaining in that first phase of the copyright. During the second phase of the copyright a statutory royalty system would operate. Anyone could publish under that statutory licence on paying a hopefully very high royalty to the author. Amazon's current royalty rates are probably a good guide. The author may or may not be given the right to accept a reduced royalty from a particular publisher or publishers, but could not grant exclusivity.

This idea is not without its problems, but it does likely solve several, including the rights grab by Publishers, the exploitation of authors generally and of course orphan and unavailable works.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by AnotherCat

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.

I think part of the problem is that the laws on copyright we have now are written for paper media whereas now days more books are ebooks. It's like how the government had rules for what was legal and illegal wire usage and then the computer came along and made most of the laws at the time obsolete so that the Secret Service (which handled counterfeiting and wire fraud) had to play catch up. Some parts of it are still playing catch up I think. I mean what do you see when you open an ebook? Usually there is a disclaimer that you don't have the right to copy or transmit the book via electronic means, but aren't you doing exactly that when you download a book to your ereader and open it? We say that it is ok to do as long as we own a copy but each time you download it you are making a new copy since the old one is deleted (after you read it).

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Ran across this rather interesting article on eBook pirates, who they are and why the pirate

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...conomics.shtml

In a nutshell, the article says that more than half the ebook pirates are 30 and up and a third have an income of $100,000 or more. In addition it says that the number one driver for piracy is convenience.

I more suspect that the people who pirate in their 30's and upward started while younger and don't see any reason in paying for something that they have always had for free. Kind of the exact opposite of all the pirate advocates saying "It's like free advertising, people will pay when they are older and can afford it."

That's assuming you can trust the survey, of course.
You have 2 problems :-
1) A study about piracy by an Anti-Piracy company, bound to be above board and with no bias at all
2) Who answers the questions? Hello, I'm from Nielsen, the book people, do you buy your books or download them illegally sir?, oh and how old are you and whats your annual income?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by crich70

Usually there is a disclaimer that you don't have the right to copy or transmit the book via electronic means, but aren't you doing exactly that when you download a book to your ereader and open it? We say that it is ok to do as long as we own a copy but each time you download it you are making a new copy since the old one is deleted (after you read it).

These rights are specifically granted by the ebook licence. Take a look at Amazon's, for example. You're right, though: making copies of pirated books is a breach of copyright for exactly that reason.

[barryem]

While I think Digimarc is highly likely to have skewed things in their favor in any survey they might have made, however the idea that the pirates are an older group does seem to favor it's being realistic.

Piracy of ebooks began quite innocently, long before there were ereaders or places to buy ebooks or even, I think, before the term "ebook" was coined. My first awareness of it was on the HP forum in Compuserve in the days before the internet was available to the public. I had an HP 95lx, a pocket sized MS-DOS computer and that and their calculator forums were where I participated. Someone wrote a text reader for the 95LX that was specifically designed for reading books that had been scanned into plain text files.

The problem with this was that none of us had heard of Gutenberg.org so we had no place to get books for it. A lot of people started scanning the books they were reading, proofing them and exchanging them. Compuserve had a very strict and rigidly enforced no-piracy policy but in those days that term only applied to software. Up to that point there wasn't anything else to pirate. MP3 hadn't become a thing yet and monitors didn't have the resolution to display decent images and even if they had upload speeds (1200 baud in those days) were far too slow to make that possible. Compuserve provided the forum space to upload these books for download, not seeing any legal or ethical issues.

Anyway, perfectly honest people, mostly software developers who had a high regard for the rights of authors, were trading books. It was years before anybody thought to call this piracy. It was done in complete innocence. There was never even a question asked about whether it was okay. Trading books was something we'd been taught to do since we were kids. Of course the ramifications were different with ebooks but it took a while to realize that.

I should mention that the numbers involved here were very small. I doubt if any book got downloaded more than 15 or 20 times by the various members and the most books I ever saw in the forum's library was about 40 or 50, if memory serves. The 95LX didn't have enough room on it to store more books than you would read. I had a 5 meg PCMCIA card in mine that cost almost $600, more than the 95LX cost. I didn't buy that till the 10 meg cards came out, bringing down the price from $1500.

Years later a few companies started selling ebooks for the Palm Pilot. That's when legal considerations first began to be discussed.

I'm 76 now. This began in the early 1990s when I was about 50 and I was one of the older people in the group. Probably most of those guys are in their 50s or thereabouts today.

Let me carefully state that I buy the books I read. I buy them from Amazon and in fact I buy probably 3 or 4 times as many books as I read every year. I've been buying ebooks since ebooks have been available for sale. I'm just trying to explain the history and that ebook piracy did begin in complete innocence. That's not to say it stayed innocent. Just that that's how it began. And that might explain why some older people still do it.

Barry

[crossi]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Copyright law gives the rights-holder the right to choose whether or not to publish. It's what lets you keep your private diary private, for example, should someone try to publish it without your permission. It's a two-way street: choose to publish or choose not to publish. As the rights-holder it's your (and nobody else's) decision to make.

I disagree, if that was so it would not have been originally limited to 14 years and would not be limited at all now. What keeps your diary, just like your bank account statements, secure is that to publish them some one would have to break into your house, your locked desk, safe or bank deposit vault or hack your computer. If you want your diary to never be published lock it up in life and arrange for someone you trust to burn it after you are dead.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by crossi

I disagree, if that was so it would not have been originally limited to 14 years and would not be limited at all now. What keeps your diary, just like your bank account statements, secure is that to publish them some one would have to break into your house, your locked desk, safe or bank deposit vault or hack your computer. If you want your diary to never be published lock it up in life and arrange for someone you trust to burn it after you are dead.

You're welcome to disagree, but nonetheless copyright law does indeed grant you that right. Whether it should do is a different question to what it does do.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by crich70

We say that it is ok to do as long as we own a copy but each time you download it you are making a new copy since the old one is deleted (after you read it).

It's even worse. What if you download that book to put into Calibre (and I'm not talking about removing DRM and conversions, but only Calibre so you can side-load). And then you make a copy of your Calibre library for safe keeping. And you have a copy of the book on your reader. That's 3 active copies (presuming you deleted the downloaded version).

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by barryem

Piracy of ebooks began quite innocently, long before there were ereaders or places to buy ebooks or even, I think, before the term "ebook" was coined. My first awareness of it was on the HP forum in Compuserve in the days before the internet was available to the public. I had an HP 95lx, a pocket sized MS-DOS computer and that and their calculator forums were where I participated. Someone wrote a text reader for the 95LX that was specifically designed for reading books that had been scanned into plain text files.

The problem with this was that none of us had heard of Gutenberg.org so we had no place to get books for it. A lot of people started scanning the books they were reading, proofing them and exchanging them. Compuserve had a very strict and rigidly enforced no-piracy policy but in those days that term only applied to software. Up to that point there wasn't anything else to pirate. MP3 hadn't become a thing yet and monitors didn't have the resolution to display decent images and even if they had upload speeds (1200 baud in those days) were far too slow to make that possible. Compuserve provided the forum space to upload these books for download, not seeing any legal or ethical issues.

Anyway, perfectly honest people, mostly software developers who had a high regard for the rights of authors, were trading books. It was years before anybody thought to call this piracy. It was done in complete innocence. There was never even a question asked about whether it was okay. Trading books was something we'd been taught to do since we were kids. Of course the ramifications were different with ebooks but it took a while to realize that.

And Harlan Ellison was still peeved about it!

[crossi]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You're welcome to disagree, but nonetheless copyright law does indeed grant you that right. Whether it should do is a different question to what it does do.

But only for a limited period (though currently way too long a period) not forever. And the stated justification for even that period was given to benefit society not in particular the writer of the work much less the publishing house.

[danicca]

I think it's worth mentioning that sometimes is really, really hard to figure out if it is legal to download book. I still remember scouring internet to find out if it's ok to download some scifi books.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by piperclassique

JSWolf, did you mean "not available" ?

Yes I did. Thanks for picking up that mistake.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

However, I don't understand how people do not acknowledge the cost of creating the book in the first place.

The cost of creating the "book" is pretty low overall...about $2-3 per copy of a typical Big 5 published book goes to the author, pretty much regardless of the format...paper, audio, ebook, etc.

Everything else goes to some middleman. As you said, the convenience of download is worth something, so Amazon (or whoever actually transmits the book to you) should get their share. Other than that, though, the rest of the money goes to the publisher, and therein lies the problem.

When ebooks first came out, they were very close to the cost of hardbacks on release date, since the hardbacks were typically discounted and the ebooks were not. This has finally changed, not because ebook prices have dropped much (again, among the Big 5), but because hardback prices have jumped so much. But, that beginning was enough for people to ask the question of why something that cost almost zero per copy to produce and transmit was the same price as something that obviously cost a real amount to produce and ship. That showed us just how greedy publishers are, since the money saved in not physically printing the book was not passed on to the author...the publisher took it.

That attitude hasn't really changed, and the fact that publishers want to "license" ebooks instead of selling them bugs a lot of these older people who already have a "license" to the content sitting on a shelf. Amazon does give a healthy discount for some ebooks if you have purchased the physical book from them, but not for any books from the Big 5 publishers. This kind of double (or more) dipping was a big reason for a lot of movie and music piracy, but sadly publishers haven't learned from it. A "turn in your physical copy of a book at B&N and get a 75% discount on the ebook" promotion from a traditional publisher would have led to massive sales that were otherwise lost to illegal downloads.

But, publishers (like the movie and music industries) are so stupid that they think feel that if they can't get the full list price, it's better to get less than zero for a sale (zero for the illegal download, plus money spent trying to combat them) than to get some positive amount.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Copyright isn't property right, it's simply a government granted time limited monopoly on copying with rights and obligations on both sides.

With "Life + whatever is needed to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain", it's no longer actually limited, and thus part of the revolt from the buying public.

Originally Posted by issybird

^I want to amend the above to say I'm not including cartels or illegal price-fixing in my rubric, I'm focusing on the basic transaction.

I strongly recommend a daily read of Techdirt if you are truly interested in any sorts of rights issues that affect the digital domain. That will show you that all the big media conglomerates are part of cartels, and they engage in price fixing every day. They just don't get caught at it very often.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

One of the reason why "orphan works" laws are so problematic.

"Orphan works" wouldn't be a problem with the original 28 year limit on copyright (14 years plus one renewal for 14 more).

Just because something was once available doesn't mean it must be forever be conveniently available.

Yeah, actually, that was the original intent of the framers of the US Constitution. The whole "limited time" thing was for two reasons:

1. To promote authors to continue producing new works.
2. To allow the works to eventually become part of the shared knowledge of the country, available to all for free.