E-Book Piracy: The Publishing Industry's Next Epic Saga?

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You are saying that you believe that everything which is written should be "made available" to the public? So if I want to write (let's say) a private diary, and keep it to myself, I should lose my copyright through doing so?

That seems the most extraordinary suggestion to me. There is no "right of access" to a copyrighted work; if I chose to write something and keep it to myself, that is my absolute right (until 70 years after my death).

Not really, I'm fine with private writing, and it wouldn't make sense if someone could demand for the work to be published after it was only heard to be created.

But I would be quite happy if there was a way to prevent a work that was once on sale and available to the public from becoming unavailable, or from restricting its availability to only some form (paper books/e-books/audiobooks). Currently there are so many books that are available on paper, and as e-books - just not for me, because I happen to live in a country where no one who has the copyright wants to sell those things to me. Why should piracy be my only option?

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by kacir

Copyright was created to protect guy with a printing press from another guy with a printing press.

The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers would disagree with you.

The rise of the American guilds on the back of modern IP law should not escape notice, either. It is very much a return to the old guilds.

[charleski]

Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj

But I would be quite happy if there was a way to prevent a work that was once on sale and available to the public from becoming unavailable, or from restricting its availability to only some form (paper books/e-books/audiobooks). Currently there are so many books that are available on paper, and as e-books - just not for me, because I happen to live in a country where no one who has the copyright wants to sell those things to me. Why should piracy be my only option?

Yes, I think it's entirely reasonable to demand that once a work be made available for purchase it should remain so, now that we have the technology to circumvent the issues of print runs and stock levels in many cases. This, after all, was a main motivating force behind the establishment of national libraries such as the British Library and Library of Congress. Electronic delivery is not a panacea, though, there are still many works that are only really of value in a physical form, think of photo books for instance.

Issues of geographic restrictions are ultimately issues of pricing, and slightly thornier, since they involve squeezing out inefficient local markets in favour of global ones.

[Crusader]

The publishing industry are creating the problems for themselves. They are putting various obstacles in the way of willing buyers, which then have to resort to other means to obtain what they can't get legally.

The true pirates are people that would never have bought the product in any case, so they don't represent a market for sales in any case.
Remove the barriers for legitimate buyers and piracy will be a minor problem.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by charleski

Yes, I think it's entirely reasonable to demand that once a work be made available for purchase it should remain so, now that we have the technology to circumvent the issues of print runs and stock levels in many cases. T..

I tend to disagree. It's better to let nature take it's course rather than die struggling in our own garbage. Those works that are relevant and important will remain so of their own accord, those that have little relevance will fade away. This is how it should be.

[barnacle]

If I - as a newcomer here - might make a couple of points? (AKA rambles...)

It seems to me that the question is basically how one wishes to - to use the modern idiom - consume one's media. (I hate that phrase).

I own perhaps four or five thousand books. I buy - currently - around fifty or a hundred a year, almost all new, but the collection goes back in rare cases to the sixteen hundreds and in a large proportion to the first quarter or half of the last century.

When I buy a book, I am buying the thoughts of the author, and I am buying a physical product which I can keep, burn (heresy!), lend, or give away. As a result of that purchase, the author (hopefully) gets some money, the retailer gets rather more, and the publisher likely gets most of all. Which is fair enough; the retailer has to pay for bricks and mortar (even in the case of someone like Amazon) and the publisher takes the risk that I won't buy the book in the first place.

However, when I buy an ebook, what am I getting? In my opinion, if it's not in a form which can be easily transcribed to other formats, so it can be displayed without issue on *any* viewer I happen to own now or in the future, then it's nothing more than an ephemera.

Any technology which prohibits how I may use, or store, or modify material is basically assuming that I am a criminal before. The presumption of innocence unless proven guilty may still inform a court of law, but it certainly doesn't appear to hold in the case of a retailer. If a product is available only with some form of DRM infection, I will not purchase it - with a single provisio I will discuss later.

As it happens, many of the books I own are increasingly fragile - consider an eighty-year collection of science-fiction magazines, printed on pulp paper. Copyright law in the UK does not allow me to copy them - full stop. There is no 'fair use' term - see paragraphs seven and eight here: http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/co..._copyright_law - and indeed there is a blanket prohibition:

It is an offence to perform any of the following acts without the consent of the owner:
Copy the work.
...

and on top of that, copyright is vested generally for seventy years after the death of the author(s).

So there's no way it's legal for me to scan, OCR, proofread, and format the vast majority of those books. But I intend to continue doing so - since many of them are unobtainable as replacements and suffer irreparable damage simply from being read (pulp paper from the twenties and thirties is often so fragile now that turning a page can crumble it; glue used in paperback spines from the seventies and eighties (or later!) cracks simply from opening the book).

Before you ask: these are not for distribution. These are for *me*, not for anyone else. They will not appear in anyone else's ebook readers, nor be available from any download site. Nor will I dispose of the original book; if I do, then it is incumbent on me to dispose also of the electronic copies. (I operate a similar policy with CDs).

A question arises: is it moral for me to download a scan of a book of which I already own a paper copy? I am torn between the saving of the effort of scanning, and the implicit support of a pirate site - and I don't yet have a definitive answer.

A second question: with a new book, I see no reason why I should pay (as a book purchaser) a price equivalent to a paper copy for an electronic version, particularly if I already own a paper version. If the author were to get a bigger cut, perhaps, but there is no bricks and mortar retailer to take his cut, and there is no issue of sale or return, and there is *no physical product* - the cost of delivering a high-speed data line to a server centre is a damn sight less than shipping paper around a country. An electronic book needs to pay the author and the editor, and a modicum of profit for the publisher - but I suspect that publishers are keen to increase their profits to exorbitant levels.

A thought: this is a situation where DRM *might* just be acceptable. One registers an ID with a publisher (or indeed, this could be cross-publisher) which need contain nothing more than a valid encryption key - perhaps on a token. When one purchases a paper copy of a book, one receives a voucher allowing the further purchase - at a very low price, under a pound, at most - of an electronic version. Your token and the voucher authorise the sale...

Sorry, I've rambled too long.

One last thing though: I'm currently working on a master's thesis looking at ways to improve the fidelity of scanned texts after the OCR process has finished with them - identifying and correcting common errors of spelling, syntax, and semantics. The aim is to produce a system which will output a much cleaner copy of a scanned text without reference to the scanned images. While the main aim of this is for my own use, it is ideal for someone like googlebooks or gutenberg (or similar) or indeed any organisation with a quantity of paper documents that must be both preserved and computer-searchable. It will also make life simpler for pirates - does that make me a pirate?

Neil

[seagull]

Now I've thought about this but am not able to draw my own conclusions, I thought that this would be a fitting place to post it. I own paper books. I would like those paper books on my e-reader. I could of course scan and OCR them but it's a process that I could skip by torrenting them, and achieve the same end product. Obviously the uploader has committed an illegal activity by uploading copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder. What about me? Should have I repurchased the titles? What if those titles are as of yet unavailable in eBook format?

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by barnacle

....

is it moral for me to download a scan of a book of which I already own a paper copy? I am torn between the saving of the effort of scanning, and the implicit support of a pirate site - and I don't yet have a definitive answer.

A second question: with a new book, I see no reason why I should pay (as a book purchaser) a price equivalent to a paper copy for an electronic version, particularly if I already own a paper version. ....

When one purchases a paper copy of a book, one receives a voucher allowing the further purchase - at a very low price, under a pound, at most - of an electronic version. Your token and the voucher authorise the sale...

....
Neil

Is it moral? Since you already own it, you purchased it NEW, right? then for me it is moral for you to copy, backup, convert etc as you wish for your own use. Is it legal. No. Not according to most countries laws (but not all).

As far as price/pricing. I agree. Because of this historical technology required to publish books the system is in place and works. It does not work for the new digital world and needs to be changed. This really involves a complete revamping from top to bottom and currently publishers are doing everything they can to stop change from happening, including pricing, drm, geographic restrictions, etc. etc.

The format thing is another issue. If you purchase the paper back does that entitle you to a hardback at reduced pricing? what the trade edition? For me the various formats must be addressed separately with respective and appropriate pricing for each. If you choose to purchase the digital version that does not necessarily entitle you to a paper version or vice versa. Some publishers might package these together and I do think it's a good idea (Manning Press does this already).

Welcome and Enjoy!

[seagull]

Thanks for that, must have missed it!

[Bremen Cole]

Originally Posted by Crusader

The publishing industry are creating the problems for themselves. They are putting various obstacles in the way of willing buyers, which then have to resort to other means to obtain what they can't get legally.

The true pirates are people that would never have bought the product in any case, so they don't represent a market for sales in any case.
Remove the barriers for legitimate buyers and piracy will be a minor problem.

You a absolutely correct. Some years ago I bought several MP3 albums. I soon realized I could not put them on the devices I wanted to, or use them as I wished because of the DRM. I was frustrated and quit buying MP3's from the main sellers at the time. I instead went to an illegal Russian site (a form of it is still up) where I could buy an entire album for $1, DRM free and in higher (360) bit rate than the 128 WMA's sold by most places. I bought from them for about three years (even got the Beatles stuff) and had zero problems. I did not like doing it, but I vowed not to buy DRM music again.

Then a few years ago Amazon (of all places) started offering DRM free, high bit rate MP3's. Guess what? I never bought another one from the Russian site again. I buy all my music from Amazon, and feel much better about it. In the end DRM hurts the publisher/vender as well as the consumer. It will take a while, but the ebook industry will find this out as well. Companies are run with old business models, and change comes slowly.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Bremen Cole

You a absolutely correct. Some years ago I bought several MP3 albums. I soon realized I could not put them on the devices I wanted to, or use them as I wished because of the DRM.

I beg your pardon? The MP3 format does not have DRM.

[seagull]

Originally Posted by Bremen Cole

You a absolutely correct. Some years ago I bought several MP3 albums. I soon realized I could not put them on the devices I wanted to, or use them as I wished because of the DRM. I was frustrated and quit buying MP3's from the main sellers at the time. I instead went to an illegal Russian site (a form of it is still up) where I could buy an entire album for $1, DRM free and in higher (360) bit rate than the 128 WMA's sold by most places. I bought from them for about three years (even got the Beatles stuff) and had zero problems. I did not like doing it, but I vowed not to buy DRM music again.

Then a few years ago Amazon (of all places) started offering DRM free, high bit rate MP3's. Guess what? I never bought another one from the Russian site again. I buy all my music from Amazon, and feel much better about it. In the end DRM hurts the publisher/vender as well as the consumer. It will take a while, but the ebook industry will find this out as well. Companies are run with old business models, and change comes slowly.

May I ask why you payed for illegal items? In my mind that's actually worse than not paying for them

[tompe]

Originally Posted by msundman

Uhh.. it's the (unauthorized) distribution that copyright makes illegal, not the thinking, memorizing or usually even the actual reproduction. If you're truly claiming that copyright differentiates between different ways in which the distributed artifact was created then please provide some support for those claims.

But you are not distributing a copy of the physical book you bought.

My point is that copyright does not distinguish between how it was created so from that follows that copyright limits what you do with ideas and from that follows from your statement that ideas are property.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I tend to disagree. It's better to let nature take it's course rather than die struggling in our own garbage. Those works that are relevant and important will remain so of their own accord, those that have little relevance will fade away. This is how it should be.

No, they will not. Since the author or survivors of the author can prohibit publishing for whatever reason they choose (and that has happened). So there is no mechanism that guarantee that work remains available. Also orphaned works seems not to be re-published since people are afraid of committing copyright infringement.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by tompe

No, they will not. Since the author or survivors of the author can prohibit publishing for whatever reason they choose (and that has happened). So there is no mechanism that guarantee that work remains available. Also orphaned works seems not to be re-published since people are afraid of committing copyright infringement.

You're missing the point. This has nothing to with whether the laws are right or wrong. If the law says they can do that then that's the way it is until the law changes. Instead of arguing here, go work with the legal entities to get it changed.

As I said there should be no guarantee that a work is available, it should follow the natural processes just as in evolution.