Do you pirate books and why?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Format C:

And it brings the whole question about why authors should be entitled to such a privilege while every other worker in every other field is not.

That's not really true. If you're a builder, you can build a house, and leave that house to your heirs. If you're a carpenter, you can make a warehouse full of chairs, which your heirs can sell after your death. The point about writing a book (or composing a symphony, or any other creative work) is that you don't get any money at all until it's finished. You're not paid a salary - the royalty payments are your salary. It seems reasonable to me that they should form a part of your estate.

[Jaden]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That's not really true. If you're a builder, you can build a house, and leave that house to your heirs. If you're a carpenter, you can make a warehouse full of chairs, which your heirs can sell after your death. The point about writing a book (or composing a symphony, or any other creative work) is that you don't get any money at all until it's finished. You're not paid a salary - the royalty payments are your salary. It seems reasonable to me that they should form a part of your estate.

And a builder has to buy or rent land to build the house upon, buy all materials, too - and he will not earn money building that house unless he rents the house to someone...

Carpenters will have to buy materials, too. And in the time needed to built the chairs to leave for the heirs, he can't build chairs to sell directly.

Both the builder and the carpenter will have to work in their spare time. The author could do the same (and lots or maybe even most of them do).

An author can get a house built from his royalties to leave for his heirs. It will be a bit more expensive for him since he has to pay for the builder as well (but I guess a builder will mostly get help he pays for as well).

And if the chairs are sold, they are gone - and I doubt he will have been able built chairs to last for 70 years after his death.

So there's still ab bit of a difference...

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Format C:

And, exactly, what is the number of downloads that configure it as "large-scale"?
How many "friend borrowings" should one be allowed to before he becomes harmful or criminal?

If you were to write a law, where would you put the threshold?

I really don't know. That's the problem I can't resolve in my own mind. But I think I can safely say that if a person uploads copyrighted material to a file-sharing site, that person is intending to engage in large-scale distribution that is likely harmful to the creator of the material.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Format C:

And it brings the whole question about why authors should be entitled to such a privilege while every other worker in every other field is not.
I firmly believe that an author's heirs do not deserve nothing.
If dad was good at managing his assets, they will have a home and some money, if he wasn't, they'll be like all the other people of the world.

Well, the problem is with the extension of copyright for so many years after an author's death.

My proposal for copyright is that it should last for a reasonable period after the author's death--say 25 years. Then require renewal by the author's estate. As long as the heirs are interested in renewing copyright on material that is still making money for them, great, let them--say something like three additional 25-year periods, for a maximum of 100 years after the author's death. But if the heirs don't bother to renew, the material goes into public domain. I think something like this would be a compromise and a vast improvement, making a lot more material available while placating the House of Mouse.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

But they do have, in my view at least, a right to their intellectual property

What this really means though is that a person has the right to ownership of a thought. I'm not sure that's such a good idea.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You might want to read what I actually said, which is that if a person illegally downloads a book rather than buying it, then IN THAT SPECIFIC SITUATION they are depriving the author of income.

Are you going to claim that nobody who illegally downloads is a potential purchaser?

I did read what you actually said, which was... "eBook piracy is depriving authors of their livelihood."

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What gives you the right to take it without paying for it?

They're not taking anything.

It's exactly like saying "what's the harm in riding on a train without buying a ticket?

Actually, no, it is nothing like that.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The answer that I'd offer is that "legal" methods of sharing content do not (generally speaking, at least) involve creating additional copies of the book.

Ebook libraries certainly do. Everyone who "borrows" the ebook gets their own copy of the file.

That's one of the main problems with copyright and digital media. The "additional copies" concept doesn't make any sense.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

An author's royalties are the legacy he leaves to his family after his death.

Really? I would have thought the savings from the money they already earned would be the legacy left to his family... kind of like every other profession.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

That's not really true. If you're a builder, you can build a house, and leave that house to your heirs. If you're a carpenter, you can make a warehouse full of chairs, which your heirs can sell after your death.

An author can write an unpublished book, and their heirs can publish it after the author is gone. That's the correct equivalent to your builder/carpenter examples.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by Catlady

Well, the problem is with the extension of copyright for so many years after an author's death.

My proposal for copyright is that it should last for a reasonable period after the author's death--say 25 years.

There's absolutely no reason why copyright should have anything to do with an author's death. Make copyright last for the amount of time it takes an average work to make a reasonable profit. Anything more than that is just about greed/control and not about encouraging the creation of art.

[AndrewH]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Ebook libraries certainly do. Everyone who "borrows" the ebook gets their own copy of the file.

Yet each "copy" is limited such that only one person can be in possession of that material at a time, and they're only readable for a set time period. They act just like paper books.

[Jadon]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Frankly, I've given up - the people who want it for free are never going to agree that is it "using without permission" and therefore wrong.

Plenty agree with that. They just don't care, and know they have a bigger chance of getting struck by lightning than hit with a lawsuit. There are some people who will cross the crosswalk even on a deserted street. And there are plenty who won't bother themselves about details.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by AndrewH

Yet each "copy" is limited such that only one person can be in possession of that material at a time, and they're only readable for a set time period. They act just like paper books.

Which was precisely my point. If the library buys (or licenses) 3 copies of the book, then only 3 people can read it at any given time.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by AndrewH

Yet each "copy" is limited such that only one person can be in possession of that material at a time, and they're only readable for a set time period. They act just like paper books.

So if I upload an eBook to a torrent site with the (trivially removable) DRM still intact... that's OK?