Confessions of a Book Pirate

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

That is one argument against piracy I just can't get behind. If I steal your car, you are deprived of the use of it. If I copy your ebook, you still have it, still can sell it, still can do what ever you want with it, you just did not make any money off me.

The other question is, of each pirated copy of something, would that have been a sale otherwise?

Of course, not every pirated copy is a potential sale. Nobody argues that. Some are, but the damage is always hard to assess. But the bottom line is, if the work is copyrighted you have no right to get a copy. Period. Just read something else! Or reward people for their hard work by paying, no matter what form or shape their work takes, even if it is digital.

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by asjogren

"If there were no geographic restrictions then ebook sellers in countries where it is expensive to do business would go out of business from competition by those in other countries where the cost of business is less."

That would be OK if we had
1) Protected the jobs of the textile industry
2) Protected the jobs of the manufacturing industry
3) Protected the jobs of the Call Center industry
4) Protected the jobs of the software industry

But, of course we did not. And I am certain I missed a number of jobs that big business off shored to save wages, taxes, and regulations.

Should the eBook industry be special? If business actively plays the global market, why can't customers?

Exactly. They are gung-ho capitalists. So crying when people act in a economically rational manner when exactly such is their own justification for the above isn't too likely to garner a lot of sympathy.

American companies doing the whingeing is even more entertaining.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

Just as a funny side note.....

Here in Australia the term "WAG" refers to "Wives And Girlfriends".

So when I read your post for the first time I thought you meant the figured originated from some wife or girlfriend of a publisher!

Imagine if he had said that he was rooting for the home team...

[Pardoz]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I've heard of it before. Know of any sources that claim it? Like, articles about publishers where they mention using that as a rule of thumb to gauge market interest or number of suspected readers?

I've heard it direct from people who work in publishing, but while I'm sure it's been quoted on the 'net somewhere my google-fu doesn't seem up to finding it. Did find average readers-per-copy on magazines and newspapers (2.5 to 3).

Wasn't a total loss, though, I ran across a lovely quote from Teresa Nielsen Hayden:

"Electronic piracy is a fight that’s still being waged. Like extended copyrights, proposed draconian laws prohibiting electronic piracy and other copyright infringement are being hailed as a defense of the rights of the little guy. You know what? They aren’t. They’re being pushed because the big entertainment combines are all twitchy at the thought of their content escaping into the wild."

[GhostHawk]

Well I just read this thread through from front to back.

The clearest point made in the whole tangled mess, in my opinion. Moejoe's post about the avatar picture. That to me sums up the whole ebook thing in a nutshell.

Well said Moejoe!

If I have a "camera" that can take a "picture" of a car, and go home and reproduce it, right down to the oil in the engine, and the gas in the tank. Is my taking a picture of your car hurting you? Mind you I said hurting YOU, not the car company's.

The car company would in that analogy be doomed no matter what.

A digital copy is just that, a copy. As valueless as an avatar, (you know anyone paying for avatars?) Yet with incredible potential power. Hence all the fuss.

Traditional morality, and business methods will not work in dealing with it.
The concepts just don't carry over, they are flawed.

You will have to think outside of the box. Redefine how it works, and how it should work.
To me that includes redefining copy-write law and intellectual property.

I suspect it is going to be a long, bloody, and painful process for some.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Well-said! (And welcome to Mobileread!)


Is that right? The Statute of Anne dates to approximately 1709, well after the introduction of movable type in Europe (1436-1450). I wasn't aware that copyright had ever been used to refer to manual copies.

Certainly the gutenberg press predates copyright but I was referring to people copying text for the purpose of including it in their own documents, not publishing. Educators are well aware that that copyright has an affect in how much they can extract from a document in a research paper for example. Even people quoting the Bible in a modern version are subject to how much they can quote.

Dale

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Demented

What I'm asking is in what law does it state that it is illegal for me to download or read a copyrighted work that I haven't purchased. People do it all the time by loaning books or watching other peoples DVD's. I understand that it illegal to distribute copyrighted works, but in the act of downloading a book from a file share or whatever, what law am I breaking. Even if you break it down on a purely physical level. The distributor is sending me the bytes and I am saving them. At no point am I 'cloning' the file. As far as I know, the only prosecutions have been targeted at people who made files available for download, not the actual consumer side of the equation. In fact, I've had the publisher give away non-drm'd copies of books such as Elantris with no prohibition on distribution, yet the book is still under copyright and I have no 'receipt'.

This can be tricky as the law was written for paper and not electronic media. It has been applied to eBooks by stating that reading online is the equivalent of reading a copy your borrowed but download and making a personal copy is a copyright violation because you have a 'permanent' copy of the original. This avoids issues with a cache of the web site and other artifacts of the electronic age of computers. Of course the online copy must have permission to be their in the first place. Libraries are allowed to loan eBooks as they are not permanent. Certainly prosecution has been aimed at uploaders as that is an easier case to prosecute.

Dale

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by GhostHawk

I suspect it is going to be a long, bloody, and painful process for some.

The physicist Max Planck once said that "science advances one funeral at a time"-- some old ideas cling on until all the people who believed them die off. The same goes for social changes. 100 years from now, all the old fogies that believed in using atom rules for electrons will be long dead, and all of their quaint old ideas with them. You can bet that future generations born immersed in electronic media won't think the way they do.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Certainly the gutenberg press predates copyright but I was referring to people copying text for the purpose of including it in their own documents, not publishing. Educators are well aware that that copyright has an affect in how much they can extract from a document in a research paper for example. Even people quoting the Bible in a modern version are subject to how much they can quote.

Dale

Ah. Like that "Harry Potter Lexicon" issue a while back.

The whole subject of "fair use" is a complicated gray area. There are books that consist of nothing but quotes, but these are usually principally from public domain sources.

This again raises the issue of length of copyright term, however. For how long should restrictions on a modern translation of the Bible (for example) be in place?

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by asjogren

"A publisher with, say, North American rights, has paid for those rights. If a publisher selling out of, say, India with India-only rights were to sell in the US, he'd essentially be selling something he didn't own."

Yet, I can travel and buy a book where the publisher has no rights to sell in my home country.

Why is it OK when I travel physically, and not via the Internet? The Industry is trying to force fit an archaic model. And in doing so, making customers angry and foregoing sales. It is STUPID.

This is easy to explain, although not so easy to justify. The issue comes about through the combination of the legal "locus" of the sale (I think I have that term right) with a concept known in the US as the "first-sale doctrine" (many other countries have the same idea, usually with other names).

The "locus" of the sale is the place where the sale is legally considered to take place. For in-person retail purchases, this is easy to determine -- it's where you are when you hand over the cash (or credit card, or whatever) and walk away from the register with product in hand. For mail-order purchases, this is a bit more difficult. Does the sale take place at your home? At the headquarters of the company? The consensus answer appears to be that the sale takes place at the seller's loading dock.

When we consider purchases over the internet of digital content, it's even more difficult. In addition to the possibilities listed above for mail-order, we now add to the list:

• The location of the particular server that sends you the actual bits of the eBook.
• The location(s) of the various other servers that could have sent you the eBook. Think of the Akamai content delivery network for an example of this possible complicating factor.
• The location(s) of the various servers and network hardware through which the bits pass on their way to you
• Your current physical location.
• Your place of legal residence
• The location of the corporate gateway from which your traffic appears to originate (because you connect in with a VPN from some arbitrary other location)

There are, of course, many other possibilities.

I'm not aware of specific legislation regarding this question. However, the current consensus standard appears to be that your current physical location (to the extent to which that location can be determined, consider the VPN case, for example) is considered to be the legal locus of the sale. One could certainly argue that this is neither a correct nor ideal choice (and I'd probably agree!), but it seems to be the current standard assumption.

Thus, although you can use the net to purchase digital content from vendors worldwide, the legal location of the sale is your physical location at the time of purchase.

With physical goods,* however, the First Sale Doctrine (FSD, hereafter) comes into play. The idea is that the contract between the creator of the item and the retailer of the item cannot restrict people who were never party to that contract. So (in the case of books), an author or his/her agent can sell geographically restricted rights (US-only, for example) to a publisher (straight-forward contract law). The publisher can, in turn, pass that "US-only" restriction on to a distributor and retailer (again via straight-forward contract law). In theory, the retailer could require you to sign a contract in order to purchase the book — in which case you would also be restricted to US-only sales. But in the real world, retail sales do not involve signing a contract! Without an explicit contract, the FSD says that the contractual restriction evaporates. So the retail purchaser gets the book free of the US-sales-only restriction. The retail purchaser can then take the book anywhere in the world, resell to anyone anywhere, etc. When it comes to physical goods, the FSD is your friend.

Similarly, the locus of sale for physical goods via "mail order" is the loading dock (even when the "mail" is via the internet!), the bookseller can then ship the physical book to you regardless of your physical location. The sale took place before shipment, so the geographical restriction was satisfied, and your location no longer matters under the contract.

Originally Posted by asjogren

If the industry still wants to partition the marketplace, then LANGUAGE is the most appropriate delineation. And even then, I think it is a mistake.

I agree with you. So do lots of other folks, including those at many publishing houses. And many are trying to work deals that involve non-exclusive world-wide digital rights. It even works, sometimes, for new books. But for older books, the situation is a real mess.

Let's consider the situation of a publisher (call them T) who wishes to sell, say, the eBook version of last decade's Giant Best Seller world-wide. It's probably got a decent-sized market in bits. Perhaps not so much as todays GBS2, but enough to spend some time and money on. So let's see where they stand.

T purchased geographically-restricted rights back then; everyone did. But they were smart, and purchased digital rights as well. GREAT -- the digital edition is at least possible! But other publishers purchased similar rights in their respective regions. In order to legally sell GBS outside their region, T will have to acquire rights in the rest of the world. But... who can T purchase those rights from? Does T even know which publishers own which rights in various countries? Can T work a deal with them? To sell world-wide, T needs to get everybody who currently owns geo-restricted digital rights to agree. And that means negotiations and contracts. Are T's digital rights worth more or less than the other guys'? Who should pay whom? All this involves lawyers and billable hours. Ouch!

Consider the author/agent who would dearly love to have GBS available for sale as an eBook to everyone in the world, regardless of location. They sold US rights (say) to T. And European rights to P. And Indian rights to someone else. And so on, for all the various regions around the world, because it was a great big seller. Now T comes by wanting to purchase world-wide digital rights. The author/agent can't sell those rights to T, because various subsets of the rights have already been sold elsewhere. At best, they can give T a list of all the publishers to contact for negotiations.

Now multiply that mess by all the books that still have enough residual value that a digital edition is worth someone's time and energy to produce. It's a mess of extraordinary magnitude... and there's no single party who can fix it!

The best we can hope for is for some country to legally define the locus of sale as the location of the server, or the location of the corporate headquarters, or something. And even that has problems, because the first thing they'll want is to collect sales taxes on all those luscious transactions.

Xenophon
(As always, I am moderately knowledgeable on this topic, but I AM NOT A LAWYER and THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE! If you require legal advice on which you may place reliance, consult an actual lawyer, NOT ME)

*The FSD may well apply to digital goods after you've purchased them. But that doesn't help us for purposes of this discussion -- it only changes where you could legally re-sell the eBook, not where a retailer can sell it to you.

[edbro]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

*sigh*

You may as well have just written 'Please don't read my works because I consider most of you thieves. Please, please, target audience, please note my name and make sure that you never, ever read my stuff again.' You may have consulted lawyers, you may be able to write a thousand books on the subject, but you really don't get what's happening at all.

On the contrary, I think he does get it. The man writes books for a living and expects to get paid for it just they way I expect to be paid for my work. He is offering his product in a convenient form at a reasonable price (or even free). What more do you want from him?

I have a beef with some ebooks being listed for $25 or more but I have no problems buying (licensing?) quality ebooks at reasonable prices (<$10).

It is simple, if you want books from professional writers, you should pay them, hence the term "professional". I don't expect quality writers, such as Grisham, Conroy, King, etc to sit at a word processor and write 10 hour/day and just give all of it away. I don't work for free and they shouldn't either.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by asjogren

Yet, I can travel and buy a book where the publisher has no rights to sell in my home country.

Why is it OK when I travel physically, and not via the Internet? The Industry is trying to force fit an archaic model. And in doing so, making customers angry and foregoing sales. It is STUPID.

The stupidity isn't the concept of geographic restrictions; it's the idea that some online purchases take place in the seller's location (hence the US sales tax weirdnesses) and some take place in the buyer's location (hence ebook distribution restrictions).

What we need is a ruling that establishes absolutely where an online sale takes place. Options include:
1) Where the webstore's server is physically located;
2) Where the seller's business legally resides;
3) Where the buyer's ISP's server is physically located;
4) Where the buyer legally resides;
5) Where the buyer is physically located at the time of purchase.

Right now, sales of physical goods are counted as #2; sales of ebooks are somewhere between 3 & 4, with no official statements about what's legally preferred. To fix the geographic distribution idiocy, we just need a ruling that says "the store is selling from its location, and is bound by laws addressing that location, regardless of where the buyer is sitting at time of purchase."

[Greg Anos]

And it all loops back to start of the thread. Great Best Seller of a decade ago rights cannot be sorted out, so no e-book can be produced and sold in all markets (or not at all). Pirate A wants a soft copy. So he/she scans a copy and after a week's work, releases it into the wild so other readers of GBS don't have to spend a weeks time per person to scan it themselves.

Meanwhile, the rightsholders of GBS, who can't sort out the issues, scream bloody murder at Pirate A, stating he/she is denying them a bazillion dollars in sales - while on the other side of the mouth saying there isn't enough money in that old GBS to pay the lawyers to sort out the rights. And the rights need to be extended so it never goes into the public domain, lest they lose a cent of a possible sale...

[Demented]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

This can be tricky as the law was written for paper and not electronic media. It has been applied to eBooks by stating that reading online is the equivalent of reading a copy your borrowed but download and making a personal copy is a copyright violation because you have a 'permanent' copy of the original. This avoids issues with a cache of the web site and other artifacts of the electronic age of computers. Of course the online copy must have permission to be their in the first place. Libraries are allowed to loan eBooks as they are not permanent. Certainly prosecution has been aimed at uploaders as that is an easier case to prosecute.

Dale

The point I'm trying to make is that in no other circumstance is the infraction associated with the consumer of the infringed material, always with the distributor. If I as a consumer walk up to a vendor on the street selling Harry Potter books, I have no way to verify that they are licensed and authorized copies produced by the publisher, it could be a third party producing them and selling them illegally. The publisher would be responsible for prosecuting the distributor. What I'm looking for is a federal statute that prohibits knowingly purchasing/receiving goods that are known to be in violation of a copyright or patent. I understand that most people are prosecuted for using P2P networks which send and receive data which makes you liable for the distribution side. What if I was to turn off the sending capability and not allow uploads?

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by edbro

It is simple, if you want books from professional writers, you should pay them, hence the term "professional". I don't expect quality writers, such as Grisham, Conroy, King, etc to sit at a word processor and write 10 hour/day and just give all of it away. I don't work for free and they shouldn't either.

I don't want to attempt to speak for others, but I think both MoeJoe and Randolphlalonde both get it, but are having trouble understanding one another. I don't hear MoeJoe saying that authors shouldn't be compensated, but that under the current system they are unlikely to be compensated appropriately, because digital copies have made our previous rules and metaphors inadequate. And I hear Randolphlalonde saying that he's doing his best to play fair within the current reality, offering his books for a decent price with no DRM, which is just what the mob with pitchforks are calling for.

So let's all stop arguing on their behalf, ok?

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

To fix the geographic distribution idiocy, we just need a ruling that says "the store is selling from its location, and is bound by laws addressing that location, regardless of where the buyer is sitting at time of purchase."

I could live with that. Even though it would likely mean I'd have to pay sales tax (unless the ebook stores all move their offices and servers to my home state of New Hampshire, which has no sales tax).