Book Publishers Force Down Piracy Sites

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Book, Song, DVD - Yes, or at least, not in the last 5 years or so.

You know someone who didn't buy any books in the past 5 years but downloads them?

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

This means that even this survey quoted as showing it does no harm to sales say that a quarter of people using torrents spend less to nothing on music than they used to.

That is because of the quarter of people using torrents that pay a little or a lot more, and the half that is left pays the same. It all evens out to no harm.

On top of that you have 25% of all responders didn't buy music in the last year. Out of these 33% are pirates and only 7% of them don't buy music making up 2.5% of the total. The rest of 22.5% are from the 67% that don't pirate. That comes up to 33.6% of those that don't pirate also don't buy music.

[andreabc]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

There's a phrase that's popular in business consultant circles, "How easy are you to buy from?" The more barriers you erect between you and paying customers, the less likely you are to sell.

There's an international (NZ) remix of the comic that I think is also relevant (and even more depressing than the original).

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by sbroome

They spend money to create content, which they then recoup when people pay for it. If you don't want to watch their content that's fine, if you do want to watch their content they want you to pay to subscribe. Are they somehow violating your rights with this reasonable request?

The point of the strip was just that sometimes people will pirate even when they are willing to buy because they can't get what they want legitimately. HBO is free to make whatever business decision they want, but that business decision may result in leaving money on the table and turning potential consumers into pirates.

No one is saying that they have a right to watch Game of Thrones (or whatever), but it's a business reality that people will find the content they want, whether it's available legitimately or not. If HBO decides they only want cable subscribers to have legit access, that's fine, but then increased piracy is going to be one of the costs of that decision.

Originally Posted by sbroome

The Oatmeal art sucks and I'm sure you could have just provided a link.

And music is readily available legally for fast download and still gets pirated. After all the wannabe lawyers are done hiding behind semantics, people just like free shit.

People do like "free shit", but more than a few pirates would be willing to buy if they could, or if the legitimate version was comparable to the pirate version (i.e. without DRM). Research fully backs this up, regardless of what your gut feelings on the issue happen to be.

[sbroome]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

The point of the strip was just that sometimes people will pirate even when they are willing to buy because they can't get what they want legitimately. HBO is free to make whatever business decision they want, but that business decision may result in leaving money on the table and turning potential consumers into pirates.

No one is saying that they have a right to watch Game of Thrones (or whatever), but it's a business reality that people will find the content they want, whether it's available legitimately or not. If HBO decides they only want cable subscribers to have legit access, that's fine, but then increased piracy is going to be one of the costs of that decision.

And in those cases I understand, because a lot of old people in entertainment haven't adjusted to the way people consume media now. But if there IS a website where you can easily access the content, and people's complaint is just that it isn't specificlaly done the way they'd like, that's not the same as complaining that it isn't available "legitimately". And if you don't want to pay for the whole thing, I find it hard to believe that none of you know a person with HBO who'd let you use their account to login and watch HBO go. Maybe you can even give your friend 20 bucks for it or something. As I've said in other threads, we've never had such ease getting entertainment, and there's still never been so much whining. It's amazing.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by sbroome

I find it hard to believe that none of you know a person with HBO who'd let you use their account to login and watch HBO go.

Sounds like legalised murder to me.

[sbroome]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

People do like "free shit", but more than a few pirates would be willing to buy if they could, or if the legitimate version was comparable to the pirate version (i.e. without DRM). Research fully backs this up, regardless of what your gut feelings on the issue happen to be.

Music is available without DRM using amazon, emusic, etc..

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by sbroome

...I find it hard to believe that none of you know a person with HBO who'd let you use their account to login and watch HBO go. Maybe you can even give your friend 20 bucks for it or something.

I don't want to harp on this too much, since it's not anything to do with your main point, but I suspect sharing an HBOGO account and using a torrent are equivalent evils from HBO's perspective; neither one has you paying HBO for the content, which is all HBO cares about.

[sbroome]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

I don't want to harp on this too much, since it's not anything to do with your main point, but I suspect sharing an HBOGO account and using a torrent are equivalent evils from HBO's perspective; neither one has you paying HBO for the content, which is all HBO cares about.

I wouldn't see that as any different than people who live together paying shared costs for cable (which is sort of normal for people with roommates) but maybe HBO's view is different.

[speakingtohe]

Life just isn't fair.

DRM is way down on my list of life's unfairness. After all their are 8 year olds who know how to remove DRM and are IMO more mature than those who justify it by using evil, infested, virus to refer to DRMed ebooks, or refer to themselves as liberators of ebooks. The 8 year olds are mostly unaware of the implications and just do it because they can.

As a single person I pay the same medical premium as the guy in the next office with 6 dependents. I also pay higher taxes. I will reap on average less benefits before and after retirement. I should be able to share my benefits in the same way with someone else (non-spouse) legally, but it is not going to happen.

Getting upset because I cannot share an ebook with my mother/spouse/friend (which can be done legally in many ways) or because I cannot guarantee access to the book forever on any reader pales in significance. Especially as I cannot access my 8 track tapes or cassette tapes, my computer software from the 70's or 80's, LP records, videos on videodisc, on my player/computer of choice.

I cannot even access paperbooks on my ebook reader and have no recourse if they get damaged or destroyed. There is no justice.

Helen.

[spindlegirl]

Well, I do consider a book "liberated" when DRM is removed, but indeed, it is low on my list of "life is not fair", issues too, in the grand scheme of things. My mother died recently, for instance, and that bugs me more than DRM in some book. But when discussing books, and e-reading, different people have different standards and I respect that.

For the context of book buying standards, I do find DRM highly annoying, though, and still take a stand for what I want in my recreational spending. Reading is a recreation, and therefore I have the option and leisure, to buy and use only what works for me. But for the most part, I buy tree books since they work best for my household as a whole.

Clearly people who remove DRM from books also don't like DRM, otherwise they wouldn't bother starting kids really young teaching them how.

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Getting upset because I cannot share an ebook with my mother/spouse/friend (which can be done legally in many ways) or because I cannot guarantee access to the book forever on any reader pales in significance. Especially as I cannot access my 8 track tapes or cassette tapes, my computer software from the 70's or 80's, LP records, videos on videodisc, on my player/computer of choice.

I cannot even access paperbooks on my ebook reader and have no recourse if they get damaged or destroyed. There is no justice.

Well, if your glass is always half-empty AND you really don't care...it's not a problem for you.

If I had any 8 tracks...I would format shift. I've done the same with all my CDs...but I value my vinyl in its current format so I've not shifted those.

And there's nothing wrong with analog (DTBs)...but it can still be shifted, too...

[Jaden]

Well, this is an e-reader forum, not a "life is unfair in general forum". Of course there are things that are more important than "DRM or no DRM".

People are dying from hunger all over the world, for example. Or whole species are getting extinct... if we start that, we will never stop.

There will always be things that are more important than other things. But if we'd try to only talk about what's really important... if there was a way to determine what is really important... wouldn't that harshly limit us in what we could talk about?

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by MrsJoseph

If I had any 8 tracks...I would format shift. I've done the same with all my CDs...but I value my vinyl in its current format so I've not shifted those.

I have all my vinyl recorded through an M-Audio Delta at 24bit with a 96khz sampling rate, they sound almost as good as the originals. I also went through a phase of filming the record spinning round to make DVDs from them, but gave up on that.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by HarryT

No it doesn't. In most countries, libraries pay the author whenever a book is borrowed. Look up "Public Lending Right" (PLR).

This sounds like a nice idea at first glance, but, coming from a country where it is not implemented, I can see some arguments against it:

-- If a library has a fixed book budget, whether paper or eBook, having to pay PLR expenses is not going to change the amount they spend on books, just how they distribute it. So it doesn't really affect the degree to which I, a lifelong taxpaper and library addict, am a book freeloader.

-- The benefits will overwhelmingly go to prosperous authors who get a lot of readers. The less popular authors who get a large portion of their meagre income from library purchases will be harmed because, after the libraries pay PLR to PD James and JK Rowling, they won't be able to buy as many less popular books.

Where you hopefully agree with me is in saying that when you borrow a book from the library, you have compensated the author from your taxes (or university tuition charges), and thus are not freeloading.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Life just isn't fair.

DRM is way down on my list of life's unfairness.

DRM is not the worst, but it's just another thing added to the list. If you have better things to complain about than those on the thread, then why do you bother commenting on this?