Do you pirate books and why?

[WritePR]

Originally Posted by Quexos

That's not being a responsible citizen, that's being a snitch.

Seriously? So if you happen to come across someone being raped, mugged, or attacked, reporting those crimes to the police is being a snitch rather than a responsible citizen? Unbelievable.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by MCSmarties

There is no such thing as "pirating" or "stealing" intellectual property.

It's properly called "copying".

Whether it is "right" or "wrong" to do so is a separate question, even offical opinion differs quite widely between European and American legislators (see the controversy about ACTA).

But at least people should be aware that the semantics in this case have been greatly distorted by the publishing industry. questioncopyright.org attemps to discuss this philosophical question in depth.

Try the following essay for some insights:
"The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World".

You forgot to mention that in Europe people who don't copy already pay for those who copy. There is a surcharge on any storage media (hard disks, SD cards, SSDs, you name it) which is distributed to "creators". This is, of course, a solution. Though a blatantly unfair one. Paying for what you use is the much better option for everyone involved. And pirating means "unauthorized copying" of intellectual property, so, of course, it exists.

And the sources you quote are completely wrong. We have discussed this previously. The first (as far as we know) copyright goes back to 1068 in China -- they already had printing presses) and in Europe copyrights were granted very soon after Gutenberg. In the 1400's and 1500' there were already a number of protected individual works (copyright was granted on a case-by-case basis expressly to allow the author to recoup the investment in time and money. Pirates were punished harshly, facing heavy fines and confiscation of all unauthorized copies.

The general copyright didn't pop up overnight, it was the result of centuries of evolution.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

When you respond to a specific argument, which makes those comparisons, by saying you don't care, you have implicitly stated (as you just did again) that you don't care about the thrust of the argument, including those comparisons. If that's not what you mean, then it's up to you to make the distinction clear.

Frankly, I have no idea what you're talking about anymore. I said very specifically--and now I am saying it for the THIRD time--that I DON'T CARE how long it took for the author to write the book, whether the author suffered for art, whether he or she wrote with a stub of a pencil by candlelight in a garret, or in a mansion by the beach while sipping margaritas. The degree of struggle and the time devoted to writing doesn't automatically affect the quality of the book. Period. Exclamation point.

Secondly, if you truly care about the quality of the book (I won't call it a product -- Faust is not a brand of hairspray) then you do care how long it took to write and how much preparation was involved because, without those factors, you wouldn't be holding that book.

I'm going to try one more time. All I have to judge is the quality of the book in my hands. What went into getting it to market is basically irrelevant to me as the end user. If the finished product is lousy, I don't care if the author struggled for ten years to write the book--it's still lousy. And if it's good, I don't care if I find out the author dashed it off in a month. Now, I may feel sorry for the author who spent ten years on a turkey, and envious of the author who could write a good book in a month, but the quality of the book is my main concern.

Let's apply your reasoning to classical music:

"Really? Sounds like you think the more time a classical pianist has to practice, without the pesky distraction of a day job, the better their playing will get, as though time automatically equaled quality."

In fact, that's exactly what happens -- not because "time automatically equals quality" but because most classical pianists at any level require five to eight hours of practice a day to improve significantly, at least at first.

No, if you want to use music as an analogy, you should be talking about a composer creating music, not a pianist becoming more skillful through daily practice. Of course the pianist will improve with practice, even the pianist with just a small aptitude. But will the composer improve just by dint of effort?

The rest of your post, once again, has nothing to do with anything I said.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by WritePR

Seriously? So if you happen to come across someone being raped, mugged, or attacked, reporting those crimes to the police is being a snitch rather than a responsible citizen? Unbelievable.

Now you're just being out-and-out silly.

The snitch comment referred to calling 911 to report a car speeding up to pass a car traveling at the speed limit on the highway. Could we please keep some sense of perspective here and not equate that with rape and mugging?

[tompe]

Originally Posted by WritePR

Seriously? So if you happen to come across someone being raped, mugged, or attacked, reporting those crimes to the police is being a snitch rather than a responsible citizen? Unbelievable.

No, but coming across somebody that cheat a bit on the taxes and report them is being a snitch.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

And the sources you quote are completely wrong. We have discussed this previously. The first (as far as we know) copyright goes back to 1068 in China -- they already had printing presses)

Are you using the word "prinitng press" in a non-standard way? Gutenberg invented the printing press (which includes movabla type) which made it possiböe to cheaply reproduce studd. Of course there were machine for reproducing things before (like the screw press) but they were not as efficient.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

No, but coming across somebody that cheat a bit on the taxes and report them is being a snitch.

If someone cheats on their taxes, the net result is that you, and every other person in your country, either has to pay more tax, or suffer a cut in services. It's a crime which affect everybody, and thoroughly deserves to be reported. It certainly isn't a "victimless crime", which one might argue that speeding on an empty road is.

[Quexos]

How can you even begin to compare rape or attacked to downloading a file is totally beyond sensible. Your sense of proportion is seriously scrambled my friend.

Originally Posted by WritePR

Seriously? So if you happen to come across someone being raped, mugged, or attacked, reporting those crimes to the police is being a snitch rather than a responsible citizen? Unbelievable.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by tompe

Are you using the word "prinitng press" in a non-standard way? Gutenberg invented the printing press (which includes movabla type) which made it possiböe to cheaply reproduce studd. Of course there were machine for reproducing things before (like the screw press) but they were not as efficient.

As far as I have read they had movable type (of course in Chinese you don't have an alphabet, you need several thousand different characters that can be exchanged as needed --- you could probably get away with 2-3000 of the most common). Printed newspapers circulated in China as early as the 9th century AD. So cheap printing was available much earlier than in the west. Though calligraphy is still considered an important art form to this day.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Belfaborac

The Mozart example doesn't really work that well. Mozart wrote his first symphony in a month at the age of eight and his last three (39,40, 41) in the space of a few weeks. Despite being "rushed", they've been "fairly enduring". On the other hand there are plenty symphonies which have taken years or decades to write and which do not even begin to approach the quality of K.16.

The same is true for writing books - decades spent writing is no guarantee of quality.

Mozart wrote amazingly quickly. The entire piece would apparently occur to his mind as a finished work, with the only remaining thing being to write it down, and once he finished a manuscript he rarely returned to it. But not all composers are identical in their manner of composition. Beethoven sweat bullets over every note he jotted down on paper, and was constantly making corrections and revisions, and I think you'd find few that would minimize his importance in the history of music. I can only assume that applies to writers as well as composers.

[Belfaborac]

Fear not, I shall make no attempt to downplay Beethoven's place in classical music.

My example was really designed to show that neither all great music, nor all great books have been paid for in sweat, blood and tears, unlike the impression which Prestidigitweeze seemed to want to create. I'll grant you that Mozart was somewhat of an aberration both in ability and method and as such not a great example, but he's not the only one. Franz Schubert, for instance, was reputed to compose so rapidly at times that he would fail to recognise a piece he had written the day before as his own.

In any case, I'm firmly in the Catlady camp here: I don't give a flying _ _ _ how long a book took to write*, how hard the author worked or whether he or she had to turn tricks to survive while writing. The end result is all I care about.

(* unless, of course, I'm waiting for it to be be published. In which case an excessively long wait will pi** me off. Yes, I'm looking at you G.R.R.M.)

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If someone cheats on their taxes, the net result is that you, and every other person in your country, either has to pay more tax, or suffer a cut in services. It's a crime which affect everybody, and thoroughly deserves to be reported. It certainly isn't a "victimless crime", which one might argue that speeding on an empty road is.

It would also cost money to investigate the reports of all the snitches ... probably far more than the cost of the initial small-scale creative bookkeeping.

[plib]

Perspiration != Inspiration
Prig != Model citizen

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

I've already made the point that the physical act is copying rather than stealing. But as in the case of the patron who sneaks into an almost-empty bar with a cover charge, what's being stolen is the paid experience and the repercussions are in the precedent and the collective result.

In the case of a nightclub, the experience is only available to:
1) Paying customers,
2) Friends of paying customers who paid double,
2) Staff members,
3) Liars or cheats who have disguised themselves as one of the other categories.


In the case of a book, the experience of reading the content is available to:
1) Paying customers,
2) Various staff in the publishing house,
3) Some friends etc. of the author,
4) Some reviewers,
5) People who visit a library that bought a copy,
6) People whose friends bought a copy and loaned or gave it to them,
7) People who bought a used copy at a yard sale or used book store,
8) People who visited a bookstore and read it while standing between the shelves (this is more acceptable in some areas, and some stores, than others),
9) Grade-school children who were handed a copy purchased by the school (said copy might have been new or used at time of purchase)
10) People who bought a copy, used, from Amazon, and paid $0.01 for the book and $3.99 for shipping,
11) People who bought or were given the review ARC after the reviewer was done,
12) People who share an Amazon or ADE account with a friend or relative,
13) People who were loaned a copy through the Kindle or B&N loan option,
14) People who downloaded it from an unauthorized source, which is probably copyright infringement. (Some nations have different rules about this).

The experience of reading the book is available, legitimately, to a great many people who have never paid for it.

I'm not arguing about the mindset of the person who downloads a torrent of a book -- I'm not interested in Boolean ideas about their morality. I'm only talking about possible pragmatic repercussions -- financial and artistic -- for the person who created the work.

What's the difference between the pragmatic repercussions of someone who downloaded from Megaupload and someone who read the copy they found at a bus stop?

But don't assume that anyone who makes the argument that authors should be paid is in favor of the actions of the RIAA or the excessive litigation and retaliation of huge publishers and music labels. The same companies that favor threats and stiff penalties for piracy often steal from the original artists as well. No point in framing either side as inherently pure or corrupt.

This is true. It's just that there's a big difference between "authors should be paid for their efforts" (presuming their efforts are judged to be of sufficient quality to entertain readers) and "authors should be paid for the experience of reading the book.

First option: Yes.
Second option: No, and it's never worked that way.

And a lot of the back-and-forth arguing is attempting to find a solution, some kind of middle ground between "it's okay to distribute all new works on the torrent networks so 10,000 people can download and read if they want" (hell no) and "it's illegal to hand your best friend your ereader for the weekend" (also hell no).

Right now, both of those are being promoted as "the real solution" to the tangle of problems of copyright in a digital world. (Ebookstores promote the latter; all their TOS's say that books cannot be lent *in any way.*) Finding a way to phrase rules so that common-sense usage is allowed and mass distribution is not, is complicated. If it were simple, we'd've done it years ago.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Belfaborac

The Mozart example doesn't really work that well. Mozart wrote his first symphony in a month at the age of eight and his last three (39,40, 41) in the space of a few weeks. Despite being "rushed", they've been "fairly enduring". On the other hand there are plenty symphonies which have taken years or decades to write and which do not even begin to approach the quality of K.16. The same is true for writing books - decades spent writing is no guarantee of quality.

This thread has entered some sort of space-time dis-continuum in which people address the imaginary posts they wish to disagree with rather than the posts to which they've actually replied.

Your response is predicated on the idea that I, a classical musician with three years of musicology who has played and studied Mozart and has read about his life endlessly, both for my degree in composition and minor in piano and as a fan, was arguing that Mozart needed to be paid because he was a slow composer. You couldn't have been more off-base.

In fact, I was using Mozart as an example of why compositional speed is often irrelevant when one is discussing the effect of not being paid on the legacy of the artist's work. The time it took to write that one individual book or piece of music is far from the only factor. Let's have a look at the actual post to which you responded:

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

The lifetime aspect can have to do with working up to that book, writing the books that make that one great book possible, or simply having the extra time that one doesn't factor in if one only marks the dates of initiation and completion.

[T]he series of books [written by Jane Austen] is effectively a single book, if you consider that the time she spent writing them all is cumulative.

Consider the number of symphonies, quartets, concertos, choral pieces and operas by Mozart. Now consider the effect that not being paid might have had on his output (Mozart the strudel packer). Would you really be willing to sacrifice any of his music to the idea he would have been just as good if he'd had a day job? Which masses and symphonies would you want to do without?

Thus, the point has never been that Mozart was a slow composer. The point is that he's quick and still needed to be paid to create the body of work he did. Never mind the fact his Six Quartets Dedicated to Haydn, the Adagio and Fugue, the Mass in C Minor and works like the Jupiter required more time than many of the other pieces. (He's also the guy who produced the most kickass orchestration of Handel's Messiah en route to studying the style -- no one's ever done it as well.) The point is that, had he not been paid, he'd have had to turn away from writing to a great extent and many of those pieces would not have been written. It's also clear, if you read about Mozart, that he was originally the creature of patrons and required deadlines very often to complete his work. The feverish pace to which you allude was simply the composer finally getting around to writing down the music which was already completed in his head, an extraordinary ability he possessed as documented not only by the famous "Carriage Letter," the veracity of which some have doubted, but also the feat of his copying down the entirety of Allegri's complex Misereri from memory after hearing it once at age fourteen.

The question I asked, and which you have not answered, is the same: If you knew he would have had less than half the time to compose and that, therefore, a great number of his pieces would not have been written, which Mozart would you decide we should do without, and how could you know that even the pieces you do prefer could have been written without the momentum and flow of the rest?

And contrary to what a few people have suggested, I can attest as a trained composer and as a person who studied composers that, yes, composing a piece is a form of practice, just as composers often begin with exercises in harmony, counterpoint and orchestration (even toward the end of his life, Bach used to copy out other composers' scores to learn what they were doing). Mozart is a great example to the extent he and Beethoven met in life and agreed together it was important for them to return to working out counterpoint, which had fallen to disfavor from the time of Bach's son, C.P.E., to that of the early Classical Period. You can hear Mozart trying on the deeper disciplines of counterpoint in the C Minor Mass, the Quartets and the Adagio and Fugue -- all efforts that would inform the greatness of his last work, the Jupiter and the Requiem, just as his operas informed their dramatic power. Without the technical problems he worked out in those pieces (such as how to incorporate baroque counterpoint into the classical style without imitation or disregard, and how to make it work formally and dramatically in later classical forms), we wouldn't have the later work.