eBook piracy, how common is it?

[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

People do it every day.

Maybe a better way to put it would be "Intentionally doing something you knowlingly believe to be wrong and you can't rationalise away is pretty close to insantiy."

If you rationalize it away, then you don't think it is wrong.

Originally Posted by PKFFW

Most people have no problem doing something they know is wrong if they attach no importance to the wrongness or rightness of what they are doing. Take speeding for example. Most people have no problem going 5 or 10 km/h over the speed limit because they don't think this amount is of any importance. They will quite easily rationalise it by claiming they are competant enough drivers to do so or they are in a hurry or in some other way. Of course they will quite happily complain if they are given a speeding ticket.

You're confusing wrong with wrong. Or put another way, you're confusing something that might be a bad idea with something that is immoral. I don't think rational people regularly (perhaps ever) intentionally commit an act they personally believe is immoral. Now, they can recognize their act as having possible negative consequences; they might even believe that as a general rule it's not something other people should do. But the whole point of rationalization is to enable one to do what they otherwise would not; if they still thought what they did was really wrong then the rationalization serves no purpose. Oh, when you ask it they may say it was wrong, but that's purely for social convenience.

A possible exception might be if the act is technically immoral but does little harm; in that case I think it's possible to live with one's actions. But to do something that's really in your mind immoral, knowingly, with full awareness of the damage it does? That's antisocial psychotic disorder. If you're not already crazy, the guilt afterwards will make you so. (And has done so with many people.)

[taosaur]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

Likening illegal downloads to borrowing a book from the library or a friend is a bit specious.

Likening it to material theft or piracy--piracy!--is at least as specious. The reality is not one extreme caricature or the other, but a bit of both: yes, it is illegal and yes, it is sharing information. The act is simultaneously a small injury and a small kindness to everyone involved.

[taosaur]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

A possible exception might be if the act is technically immoral but does little harm

...which kind of makes the rest of your post superfluous, as that's precisely the situation under discussion.

A great many people actively get a thrill out of "being bad," so long as they view the wrong to be of little consequence. It's commonly called a "guilty pleasure," not "antisocial personality disorder."

EDIT: heh, I'm up late and getting snarky, which I know is bad behavior, but I'm doing it anyway

[sirbruce]

I don't think a guilty pleasure is the same thing. Nevertheless, yes people may justify copyright infringment by downplaying the damage it does.

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by taosaur

...which kind of makes the rest of your post superfluous, as that's precisely the situation under discussion.

A great many people actively get a thrill out of "being bad," so long as they view the wrong to be of little consequence. It's commonly called a "guilty pleasure," not "antisocial personality disorder."

Actually, that isn't quite what the discussion is about.
While it is true that some might do it just to spite society (like Augustine with his pears; although I doubt you should become christian over it), most don't, because they just live by a different moral rule set.
The question at hand here is
1. whether that set of personal rules to live by can be justified to any degree,
2. whether it counts for anything that a large part of society seems to more or less share our rule set, thus partly negating the "it's immoral" claim,
3. whether that rule set isn't too biased towards the interest of a single group (the consumer),
3a. if we that is the case, should we follow a different, [according to some] more legal rule set (such as the one "supplied" to us so kindly by the recording/publishing industries) or,
3b. is there another option that centers less on the personal gain of the majority [and sod the consequences for the producers, both the author and the publisher] but also not as centered on the corporate gain of a handful (as the actual authors get little to nothing of the total sum anyway), with individual citizen's rights biting the dust entirely in favor of the latter's.

The problem that faces the publishing industry doesn't really arise from the fact that people sometimes guiltily download an album (in our society, guilty pleasures mostly seem to be about buying food you shouldn't rather than stealing cds, anyway), the problem comes from something systemic:
Either someone has created an expectation that we should have (as an example) music all around us all the time, but the prices have by now become so high that nobody can afford to get everything they('ve been taught to) want anymore, or
something happened (the internet) that made it possible for friends to share their music with each other, and it all sort of spiralled out of control from there: Oink, for example, was a very vibrant site based around people introducing others to each others tastes, as is Last.FM now, but without the possibility to download. (napster lacked the recommendation part)

Furthermore, it is the case that the music (and movie/publishing) industry has been against every technical innovation starting from the cassette recorder (which would allow them to tape radio recordings, which would "kill them"), through the VHS tape (which allowed people to tape tv shows and movies, which "would kill them"), through the CD-R and later DVD-R (which, you guessed it, would kill them; which is why we pay "copyright fees" on them, and which they even wanted to put on Hard disks and mp3 players, as they were all "likely to contain copyrighted works that hadn't been obtained legally"), and now the internet as a whole; and we started becoming sort of suspicious of their Luddite whining. (all the while still posting billion dollar profits)
Meanwhile came Sony with their rootkit-cds, which were supposed to block your established fair use right to make mp3s out of your cds to put on your mp3 players, the DMCA happened, DRM was invented and broken, lots of attempts to sue people who usually had shared only 5 or 10 tracks with others happened, there were reports of how little artists actually got, there is the currently being developed ACTA (and the denied FOIA requests), and last but not least, Music became ever more boring, unmemorable, and fleeting: we stopped caring about the recording industry's survival, as they had lost whatever sympathy we might've felt for them for recording "our music"

And now the book industry will soon be facing the same question, and the question is whether this resentment against copyright as a whole will affect the book market specifically. While some seem to have made up their minds already when it comes to the "moral criminality" (whatever that might be) of today's youth, there are at least as many others who are just sick of DRM, as it doesn't work and only keeps the people who actually bought the things from using their purchase in the way they were used to before the digital revolution came along (seeing how you're now buying a "license" to use a book rather than a physical copy that won't stop working once you change the device you read it on).
Meanwhile, questions remain: whether downloading really does (or will) negatively affect the bottom line, whether word of mouth counts, and whether there really aren't any publishing models that make use of the internet that can work (even if perhaps not with the same 'multiples of 10 of billion' dollars revenues a year) without destroying the industry.

More fundamentally, there is the question whether corporations have a "right to survive" that is more binding or overriding than the rights we have gained and come to realize as important in the wake of two world wars, as well as the entirety of the project of the Enlightenment.

Personally, I feel that if we can justify having oil companies destroy the Niger river delta for the gain of the people living in the west, we can also justify the killing of an industry for the gain of the people living here; while that analogy is admittedly is a bit heavy-handed, it does point to the fact that very little is held "sacred" in the world, unless we sufficiently believe it to be the case, and I'd rather see a few companies suffer than the things our "free & democratic" societies are based on.
That is not to say that I want the book publishing industry gone; while I pretty much despise the recording industry, both for their lobby and for the crap they produce, I still like books, and like the fact that people are publishing them. Although I tend to read more academically published books than normal ones, and even though I don't particularly care for the crap Springer et al. pull with their continuous incremental updates to textbooks, I would like to see most of them continue to exist, and even thrive, which leads me to my conclusion:
I don't know how publishers should adapt to the 'net, but until they come up with a model that is acceptable (WRT both availability and a pricing scheme that accurately reflects the new 'printing' costs) it isn't me who forces people to go 'underground' to get the titles you offer.
Do something.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

I'll put my hand up and admit I have pirated ebooks. I know it is wrong regardless of how I dress it up. Somebody has gone to the time and effort to produce the book and I have obtained illegal access to it. Simple.

It is not simple. A thing is not morally wrong just because it is not legal. If you try to follow some kind of consequence ethics than it is not obviously true that all illegal downloading is wrong.

So either you just say that things are illegal and do not discus morality. But if you discus how things ought to be then you cannot pretend that the issue is simple and just hope that people will be fooled by that.

[PKFFW]

Originally Posted by sirbruce

If you rationalize it away, then you don't think it is wrong.

Not techniquely correct.

You only rationalise something away when you know or at least feel it to be wrong. If you did not feel it was wrong at all then you would feel no need to rationalise it as it was not wrong in the first place.

Originally Posted by sirbruce

You're confusing wrong with wrong. Or put another way, you're confusing something that might be a bad idea with something that is immoral. I don't think rational people regularly (perhaps ever) intentionally commit an act they personally believe is immoral. Now, they can recognize their act as having possible negative consequences; they might even believe that as a general rule it's not something other people should do. But the whole point of rationalization is to enable one to do what they otherwise would not; if they still thought what they did was really wrong then the rationalization serves no purpose. Oh, when you ask it they may say it was wrong, but that's purely for social convenience.

A possible exception might be if the act is technically immoral but does little harm; in that case I think it's possible to live with one's actions. But to do something that's really in your mind immoral, knowingly, with full awareness of the damage it does? That's antisocial psychotic disorder. If you're not already crazy, the guilt afterwards will make you so. (And has done so with many people.)

Do people ever lie, even lie about big things and convince themselves it is in the best interests of the other person that they be kept from the truth or that it isn't really a lie because of some sort of technicality?

Do they ever have affairs and convince themselves it isn't wrong because their current relationship isn't working anyway?

Do people never steal and proclaim it ok because they are really just redistributing the wealth of a capitalist and unfair society?

Do you really think people think these things are ok? That people think these things are not wrong in some way? Or do you think only people with an antisocial psychotic disorder do such things?

Maybe in a perfect world people would not do such things because their own moral compass prevents them but the reality is entirely different.

I'm not saying piracy is on par with any of the above. However, thinking the taking advantage of another persons time and effort without fair recompense for said time and effort as being ok, for whatever reason, is simply a rationalisation. I think anyone who tries to rationalise that behaviour as ok knows on some level that it isn't. They know that if the roles were reversed they would not feel it is ok to take advantage of their own time and effort with compensating them for it.

Cheers,
PKFFW

[PKFFW]

Originally Posted by tompe

It is not simple. A thing is not morally wrong just because it is not legal. If you try to follow some kind of consequence ethics than it is not obviously true that all illegal downloading is wrong.

So either you just say that things are illegal and do not discus morality. But if you discus how things ought to be then you cannot pretend that the issue is simple and just hope that people will be fooled by that.

Did I say it was wrong simply because it is illegal? I don't believe I did.

As I alluded to in my previous post, humans are able to rationalise just about anything if they really want to.

When did the idea that we all have our own moral compasses and determine for ourselves what is right or wrong in this free society that two world wars have given us and our brave soldiers have fought and died for give us the right to do anything we want if we personally can somehow rationalise away the inherent wrongness of it?

I'm sure you'd agree that no amount of saying "well hey I don't think it is wrong" would make some acts ok wouldn't you? So why should doing so make piracy ok? Because that's all it is really.

Cheers,
PKFFW

[PKFFW]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

I don't know how publishers should adapt to the 'net, but until they come up with a model that is acceptable (WRT both availability and a pricing scheme that accurately reflects the new 'printing' costs) it isn't me who forces people to go 'underground' to get the titles you offer.
Do something.

Sorry to clip your post but this was really the part I wanted to respond to.

I'd just like to say no one "forces" anyone to go underground to get the titles offered.

As the old saying goes..."if someone spits on you they don't make you angry, they make you wet!" We all have the choice in how we respond and act in any situation.

I agree the way publishing companies are currently going about business encourages people to go underground but they do not force them to. One always has the option of simply not purchasing the item if they think it too expensive, aren't happy with the content, have problems with DRM or have any other problem with it.

I agree publishing companies should get their act together and move with the times. I don't have any answers as to how they should go about doing that either. Using the fact that they have not done so yet as justification for piracy is just another rationalisation.

Cheers,
PKFFW

[Sparrow]

Google Books has a computer book that I'm enjoying learning from.

I'd like to buy a pcopy as it would be more convenient. I was assuming it'd be around £15; but the paperback is about £38 .

Is it ok to just carry on using the Google Books version for free?

[zerospinboson]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

I agree the way publishing companies are currently going about business encourages people to go underground but they do not force them to. One always has the option of simply not purchasing the item if they think it too expensive, aren't happy with the content, have problems with DRM or have any other problem with it.

If GM doesn't sell any cars in my country, but Ford does, GM also forces me to buy from Ford.
If the government forces you to go to a drug dealer to get your marijuana, and you like smoking marijuana and think there is nothing wrong with it, contrary to the govt's opinion, you will.
Similarly here, they are forcing people to go to the "competition"; while it's all well and good that that competition isn't legally offering those titles matters little.
Black markets spring up in times of war, prohibition, trade barriers, etc.
I'm not talking about forcing to want, I'm talking about forcing to go to. Sure, teens probably overdo it slightly more than others, but that doesn't meant that they're always being overly 'greedy'. Nobody forces you to want electricity either, after all. We just consider it necessary, as opposed to people living in the Sahara, or in Amish country.
While you could try to prosecute everyone just like the US is already doing to people doing marijuana, I think I can safely say that this doesn't work. Southeast Asia is rife with copied software just because the prices companies charge for their products are way out of the league of the people living there, not because they're all criminals (convenient though that may sound). Their demand for that software, however, is still legitimate, and will not go away just because it's not being sold to them at their idea of a right price.
In the west, people are supposed to buy stuff because we're all assumed to be really, really rich. And if we aren't, we should know when to stop asking for stuff.
What makes us so different?

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

If the government forces you to go to a drug dealer to get your marijuana, and you like smoking marijuana and think there is nothing wrong with it, contrary to the govt's opinion, you will.

Not necessarily. I might not think there's anything wrong with smoking marijuana, but if the only way to get it is to fund organised crime then I might decline.

In the UK, the film industry is making a big thing of connecting pirated DVDs sold on market stalls to funding terrorism, organised crime and such.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

When did the idea that we all have our own moral compasses and determine for ourselves what is right or wrong in this free society that two world wars have given us and our brave soldiers have fought and died for give us the right to do anything we want if we personally can somehow rationalise away the inherent wrongness of it?

I'm sure you'd agree that no amount of saying "well hey I don't think it is wrong" would make some acts ok wouldn't you? So why should doing so make piracy ok? Because that's all it is really.

If you consider a specific moral system to be the correct one then an action is OK if the moral system says it is OK. Every evaluation of an action is relative to a specific moral system.

The discussion here is how things ought to be. Then you can look at different common moral systems and if you are lucky they give the same conclusions. Otherwise you have to specify what system you are using when saying that an action is OK.

And I am pretty convinced that a subset of all piracy is morally OK in a lot of consequence ethics.

[taosaur]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Actually, that isn't quite what the discussion is about.
While it is true that some might do it just to spite society (like Augustine with his pears; although I doubt you should become christian over it), most don't, because they just live by a different moral rule set.
The question at hand here is
1. whether that set of personal rules to live by can be justified to any degree,
2. whether it counts for anything that a large part of society seems to more or less share our rule set, thus partly negating the "it's immoral" claim,
3. whether that rule set isn't too biased towards the interest of a single group (the consumer),
3a. if we that is the case, should we follow a different, [according to some] more legal rule set (such as the one "supplied" to us so kindly by the recording/publishing industries) or,
3b. is there another option that centers less on the personal gain of the majority [and sod the consequences for the producers, both the author and the publisher] but also not as centered on the corporate gain of a handful (as the actual authors get little to nothing of the total sum anyway), with individual citizen's rights biting the dust entirely in favor of the latter's.

A lot of people are just not that concerned with the ethicality, because they attach so little moral weight to the issue. They're as likely to wrestle with themselves over the moral ambiguities of jaywalking.

The deprivation of artists and the death of industries is not a concern because it's not a remotely likely outcome. The only industry that ever suffered significant harm from filesharing was the RIAA, and they are still alive and well, not because they killed P2P, but because they're adapting their business model to the new reality. That reality is not defined by fiesharing itself, but by the new distribution channels and consumer expectations that P2P forced them to address.

The more practical debate is not whether filesharing is good or bad, but what are its actual effects, what does it mean for the future, and what action if any is warranted on the part of media companies, creators, and/or the law.

Originally Posted by PKFFW

I'm sure you'd agree that no amount of saying "well hey I don't think it is wrong" would make some acts ok wouldn't you? So why should doing so make piracy ok? Because that's all it is really.

Well no, no it's not. Referring to for-profit bootlegging as piracy is a bit of a stretch, and filesharing bears only an associative connection to bootlegging. "It's just bad" is no argument at all. Filesharing media against the authors' wishes is obviously not a perfectly wholesome activity, but in terms of moral outrages it falls somewhere south of littering. Most network peers are not "pirates," as if it were a lifestyle, but media consumers who take advantage of both licit and illicit means.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

If GM doesn't sell any cars in my country, but Ford does, GM also forces me to buy from Ford.

Absolutely not. In this scenario GM certainly has not forced you to do any particular thing! All that GM has done is make it really really difficult -- but perhaps not quite completely impossible -- to buy from GM. They certainly have not forced you to buy from Ford; there's no GM representative holding a gun to your head saying "buy that Ford or I'll pull the trigger!" As alternatives, you could:

• Buy from a local manufacturer -- Tata in India, for example.
• Decide that a bicycle (or motorscooter, or horse & buggy, or...) will be an adequate substitute for that GM car.
• Spend the time and effort to design and build your own car. I know that's a big deal, but it has been done before... where do you think the Big N car companies came from in the first place?
• Travel where GM does business, purchase the GM car there, and ship it home.
• Any of a zillion other alternatives.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

If the government forces you to go to a drug dealer to get your marijuana, and you like smoking marijuana and think there is nothing wrong with it, contrary to the govt's opinion, you will.

To put word that statement a bit more carefully:

IF (you want marijuana to smoke AND the government says it's illegal) THEN you can (EITHER acquire your marijuana through extra-legal means OR do without.)

I parenthesized a bit to attempt to clarify the conditions and choices. Note, however, that the Gov't is not forcing you to break the law. You do have other options including not wanting pot in the first place, moving to a locality where it is legal, etc. etc. I make no claim that the other options are palatable when considered in terms of your overall preferences. I simply observe that they exist.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

Similarly here, they are forcing people to go to the "competition"; while it's all well and good that that competition isn't legally offering those titles matters little.
Black markets spring up in times of war, prohibition, trade barriers, etc.
I'm not talking about forcing to want, I'm talking about forcing to go to.

Nope -- not "forcing to go to," but rather "denying legal access to." And those two statements differ very significantly!!! But I do agree that black markets spring up when governments (or corporations, or producers generally) make poor decisions that attempt to deny access to things that the populace generally desires. The presence of such a black market is generally evidence of a problem crying out for a clever solution.

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

[SNIP]
Southeast Asia is rife with copied software just because the prices companies charge for their products are way out of the league of the people living there, not because they're all criminals (convenient though that may sound). Their demand for that software, however, is still legitimate, and will not go away just because it's not being sold to them at their idea of a right price.
[SNIP]

In the context of DVDs, it is interesting to note that the much-derided Region protection system was an attempt to segment the market in order to address this exact issue. They wanted to sell movies for $X in the developed world and for a much lower price in the non-developed world (think SE Asia, for example). But with a world economy, if you can't segment the market Gresham's Law guarantees that the low-priced 3rd-world product will crowd out the high-priced developed-world product. Assuming, that is, that the product in question is portable enough to substitute for the higher priced product elsewhere in the world.If the studios actually used the region coding mostly to adjust for pricing differences due to cost-of-living issues, I probably wouldn't even complain too much.

My personal rough comparison for local purchasing power is the "cost of a good beer in a bar" metric; others use "cost of a cheap breakfast" or equivalently simple ballpark measures of cost-of-living. As an example, when I visited Prague not long after the Velvet Revolution, I found that a liter of fine beer in a relatively up-scale bar came to about 8 cents US; a similar beer at a similar bar in the US at that time would have cost $3. That ~37x difference in cost-of-living was reflected in other costs I saw around me -- 20x to 40x price differentials were common for any product that was sufficiently local to resist world market pricing. So pricing DVDs then-and-there at 1/30th of the developed-world price would have been perfectly reasonable.

I note, however, that the studios used (and still use) region coding for all kinds of other purposes: staggered releases, available here-but-not-there discs, etc. And that sort of thing seems wrong-headed to me. It's a sign that they haven't thought through their business carefully enough.

On the copied software front, the issue is this: As a software producer living in the US, I must charge enough money to meet my expenses here in the US market. If I lower my prices in SE Asia, how do I ensure that I still make enough sales in the developed world to make ends meet? Won't the inexpensive SE Asian version simply be re-exported to the developed countries? I could lower my prices world-wide, but I'd have to sell many times more units to bring in the same revenue -- 37x more, in my Prague example above. Alternatively, I can decide that "piracy"* in the SE Asian market doesn't matter to me so long as I can make enough revenue in the developed world. Or, I can try to find some other business model.

But no matter how you slice and dice the business issues, I must still make enough money to support myself and my family. And if widespread copying wipes out my income, I'll wind up supporting myself some other way.

To connect all of the above back to eBooks, consider this: On the one hand, I have no inherent right to make a living in any particular fashion. Not via writing software, or writing books, or whatever. On the other hand, you have no inherent right to the results of my labor whether those results are a physical object, some easily copied patterns of electric charges (i.e. software or eBooks), or some dirty marks on a piece of paper. And if you (collectively) don't pay enough to make it worth my while, I'll stop producing software/eBooks/Literature/whatever and do something else instead. I rather expect that most authors have the same attitude. They might still write for fun (and I would certainly still program for fun), but the time and energy available for that activity will be strictly limited by the need to make a living doing some other thing.

No one in this thread has yet proposed a better model than copyright and monetary payment for managing the competing desires from the above paragraph. I certainly think that the particular implementation of copyright that we have today (in the US) is quite far from achieving its goals as stated in the US Constitution. That's not an indictment of the idea of copyright, but rather of the form it has taken by way of lobbyists and the gang of 535 (a.k.a the US Congress).

Xenophon

* I put "piracy" in quotes because I agree that it's really the wrong description. But I used it anyway, because I don't have a pithy term that fits the facts better. Ideas, anyone?