The Sword and Laser discussion
'Pirating' Books
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Gaiman is a smart guyEven if you don't buy the book if you like it you tend to want to tell people about it.
Rasnac wrote: "I couldn't read all 57 posts, so I apologize in advance if he has been quoted earlier in the discussion, but I find Neil Gaiman's opinion on the issue of "piracy" of books most accurate approach to..."If he adds a donate page in his website or a pay want you want option to buy his eBooks, he'll get a lot more money out of his sales.
James wrote: "Gaiman is a smart guyEven if you don't buy the book if you like it you tend to want to tell people about it."
The problem with that system is that if presupposes that the person you tell will by the book and not also seek out a free copy of it.
The issue with Piracy is very similar to the fable/parable of the king and his community wine.
Somewhere, I want to say Sunday School but I could be wrong, I heard the story of a king. He wanted everyone in his land to contribute to a grand feast by bringing a bottle of wine from their own vineyard. They would then pour all this wine together into a large keg and the king would be able to drink, truly, the greatest wine as it was made from the best of all the wines in his land.
But one of his subjects reckoned that he could just bring a bottle of water. A single bottle of water in a massive keg with hundreds of bottles of wine would make no difference at all, and cost him nothing. After all, why waste wine that could be sold.
So the feast happens and the king goes to draw off his glass of wine only to find that the entire keg is water.
Ethics, at least in my opinion, require us to ask the question "What if everyone did this?" or the Universal Will of Kantian philosophy.
It actually makes downloading the eBook if you own the print editions fairly safe, from a philosophical stand point, but it does make it harder to justify just downloading it because you can.
Rob wrote: "James wrote: "Gaiman is a smart guyEven if you don't buy the book if you like it you tend to want to tell people about it."
The problem with that system is that if presupposes that the person yo..."
It might be a different issue.
If you don't support the author you like, he won't be able to write anymore, if your King doesn't get his childish wish you don't lose anything.
To be honest, in cases where books (especially e-books) are not available in other parts of the worlds, I strongly believe that it's less an active choice made by the publisher and/or author, but rather a negligence or a simple case of "don't care".We can discuss whether it's legally/ethically/morally right or wrong to pirate a book "just" because it's not available in my country, the fact is I would do it if I really wanted to read the book. Period. More than that, I wouldn't really feel bad about it, as long as I tried hard enough to obtain a legal copy.
If the publisher/author doesn't care enough to make their work available where I live I don't feel like I have to pay extra-attention to the author's well-being - so to speak. I don't mean it as harsh as it sounds, but you get the idea.
It remains a grey area, but if someone can assure me that they tried to get a legal copy of a book and were unsuccessful and so they downloaded it for free, I would understand.
As for the publishers, I would say that in the 21st century it shouldn't be a problem to make a product available worldwide, so if they don't care to do so, they should be aware that people will just get what they want without paying.
Jacob wrote: "I am currently reading the fourth book in the song of ice and fire series - a storm of swords: blood and gold. I try and bring it around everywhere I go, but it is much more convenient to just whip out my iPod touch and read the book there.My question is this; what are you people's views on pirating a book you already own?"
You are not "pirating". You are format-shifting content you have already paid for and own. This is no different than ripping CDs you bought and paid for to transfer the MP3s to your iPod, rather than buying MP3s of songs you already own from iTunes.
Joe wrote: "You are format-shifting content you have already paid for and own. This is no different than ripping CDs you bought and paid for to transfer the MP3s to your iPod, rather than buying MP3s of songs you already own from iTunes. "Well, not quite. The equivalent of ripping a CD would be to scan your physical book to create a digital copy. Illegally downloading an e-book is the equivalent of saying "Well I own the CD already so I'll get the MP3s off the Pirate Bay."
Calling it "format-shifting" is like saying that since you already bought a book in hardcover means you should be able to walk into a bookstore and take a paperback copy for free.
Rick wrote: "No it's not. None of us have the right to possess something simply because we want to. If the creator chooses not to sell in your market that's their choice. Is harm done? LIkely not. But you've confused what you want with what's ethically OK."You're assuming the creator has more say in the matter than they actually do. Take manga for instance -- only a small fraction of the series running in Japan ever get published in English. It's not because the authors don't want to sell to Americans -- they'd love the extra money -- but there are only a handful of companies in the US that publish manga. If there's a series you're interested in that's not one of the lucky few to get licensed, your only options are (A) learn Japanese and import copies, or (B) read a pirated translation.
And guess how publishers determine which series to pick up? That's right, they look at how popular it is with pirates.
Rob wrote: "I feel a little demoralized in these conversations because it seems to be a lot of hate at DRM, and a lot of anger at people who try to defend their right to be paid for work. ... and who really has a strong personal dislike for authors, publishers and agents. I'm just a guy who's hoping to make enough as a writer to justify taking summers to write."Rob wrote: "I write a book. I make it available for sale. I sell it for $3. You download a copy rather than buying one from me. How is that ~not~ depriving me of property, specifically $3?"
The Neil Gaiman video gives a good answer but let me give a perspective:
You write a book and sell it for $3. In a world without piracy you sell 100 copies and make $300.
In a world with piracy the 100 people who were going to buy your book, buy it anyway. You make $300. But it also gets pirated, downloaded and read by 10,000 people. Of those, 300 decide they like your book and decide to pay for it (or because they now like you as an author, will buy all your future work). You make an extra $900 for a total of $1200.
Are you happy that, through piracy, you earned an extra $900 and that an extra 10,000 people got to appreciate your work, or are you grumpy that 700 people read your work and didn't pay for it (bearing in mind that if it weren't free, they would not have read it at all)?
Charles wrote: "Rob wrote: "I feel a little demoralized in these conversations because it seems to be a lot of hate at DRM, and a lot of anger at people who try to defend their right to be paid for work. ... and w..."You make it sound like people who buy books are in the minority of those who read. Look at this discussion very little int favor of piracy gives you a small sampling of how scewed your numbers are.
Not only do you add more word of mouth you increase your own fan community. You give through sites like this one more people to buzz about your work and the extra discussion and fan content makes your community that much more enjoyable for all.
The simple fact is piracy isn't quite as easy as its made out to be. One can't just go and decide they don't want to pay for books first you would have to learn how to get the raw files find out where to look for them and what method you want to use to download them. Then you have to deal with the smaller sampling since somebody generally has to buy a file or steal it to put it up for download. Then with all the different readers and formats for the file you have to find and learn how to use a program to change your epub files to mobi for example depending on what device you use for a reader. Most people just don't have the patience to learn that stuff even with sites like youtube giving instructions on how to do virtually anything.
I can see the frustration from the authors that people are reading their work and not paying. I just want to point out that the cost of Piracy isn't nearly what its made out to be. If 10,000 people Pirate a book how many of those just pirated it because they saw it up for DL on a pirate website. Then when they don't want to wait for a pirated version of the follow up will buy the next book the day it comes out.
Pardon me for this long post, but I have been following this discussion for a while and have finally decided to add my penny’s worth. Not that I am an expert or anything, or that my opinion is any better than anyone else’s. I just like to hear the sound of my typing.
It seems to me that the views expressed here are generally “It’s not really ethical but there is no harm done so it’s okay really...sort of.” Which is probably about right...sort of, maybe.
As a clarification, plagiarism, with regards to books, whether digital or not, is when someone steals an example of the original, changes the names of characters and the title, and then reproduces it under a different author name and sells it as their own. Has anyone bought one of these? No, I didn’t think so.
Piracy is when someone steals an example of the original and then reproduces it exactly and then sells it on as if it were the original. In art, as referred to above, this would be known as a forgery. This is most common for other products like fake Rolex watches, and in all cases requires the purchaser to assume that it is the real thing (even if they sort of know it isn’t). Has anyone paid actual money for an ebook that they are pretty sure didn’t come from a legitimate source? Any admissions?
So, if the answer to both the above is no, then no one has committed piracy or bought or downloaded anything from pirates as far as I can tell from the discussion so far. What people have been doing it appears to me, is the downloading of original and legitimate copies of the ebook from sources which do not require payment and therefore do not contribute any financial gain to the publisher and author, or in fact anyone. Is this actually wrong?
No.
I know some people will complain about that view, but it comes down to those dreaded Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights. But that is not true either. Neither one is about ownership. What they are about is identifying ownership. So this discussion isn’t about copyright or intellectual property rights at all. It is about profit from such property.
For example you can buy a DTB, read it and sell it on at a garage sale. The money you make from the sale does not go to the publisher and the author makes no royalties. But it doesn’t matter because the copyright and intellectual property rights are stated in the book, and it includes a statement that says the statement itself must remain with the book. It doesn’t matter if the book gets sold on a hundred times so long as the publisher and author remain clear. Their rights have not been violated by the subsequent sales.
The same applies to ebooks. The only difference is that everyone knows that a single ebook can be reproduced forever; printing presses aren’t required, it doesn’t wear out like a DTB and it can therefore flood the market and take over the world. So publishers and authors are a little worried about that. Forgive us for our panic.
As an author I don’t mind at all if you share a copy of one of my ebooks. I publish through Amazon on Kindle with DRM, but I also publish through Smashwords in just about every format without DRM. I also have two of my books available at zero price. And I am happy to supply a copy to those who can’t get hold of one. So my view is simple.
Create a Sword and Laser Library which includes copies of ebooks you are discussing so that those in regions where it is unavailable can get access. It seems perfectly logical to me that you should keep one copy of each of the ebooks you have featured and discussed in the library. You could allow access only to members of the group. This would seem perfectly valid to me as you are promoting the book by discussing it. So no harm done to anybody. And I agree with others on the fair use idea. So long as no illegal act is intended, and you are only using it to read yourself, don’t worry about it.
Yes, I know, some people might take advantage and only read books for free. The shame of it. Excuse me but they are doing that on Amazon every day. The free books promotions and threads on the Amazon forum and others are updated daily.
As someone has already said, free books are free promotions, and us self published authors need all the visibility we can get. So if you download one of my books for free and like it, fine. Just tell someone will you?
It seems to me that the views expressed here are generally “It’s not really ethical but there is no harm done so it’s okay really...sort of.” Which is probably about right...sort of, maybe.
As a clarification, plagiarism, with regards to books, whether digital or not, is when someone steals an example of the original, changes the names of characters and the title, and then reproduces it under a different author name and sells it as their own. Has anyone bought one of these? No, I didn’t think so.
Piracy is when someone steals an example of the original and then reproduces it exactly and then sells it on as if it were the original. In art, as referred to above, this would be known as a forgery. This is most common for other products like fake Rolex watches, and in all cases requires the purchaser to assume that it is the real thing (even if they sort of know it isn’t). Has anyone paid actual money for an ebook that they are pretty sure didn’t come from a legitimate source? Any admissions?
So, if the answer to both the above is no, then no one has committed piracy or bought or downloaded anything from pirates as far as I can tell from the discussion so far. What people have been doing it appears to me, is the downloading of original and legitimate copies of the ebook from sources which do not require payment and therefore do not contribute any financial gain to the publisher and author, or in fact anyone. Is this actually wrong?
No.
I know some people will complain about that view, but it comes down to those dreaded Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights. But that is not true either. Neither one is about ownership. What they are about is identifying ownership. So this discussion isn’t about copyright or intellectual property rights at all. It is about profit from such property.
For example you can buy a DTB, read it and sell it on at a garage sale. The money you make from the sale does not go to the publisher and the author makes no royalties. But it doesn’t matter because the copyright and intellectual property rights are stated in the book, and it includes a statement that says the statement itself must remain with the book. It doesn’t matter if the book gets sold on a hundred times so long as the publisher and author remain clear. Their rights have not been violated by the subsequent sales.
The same applies to ebooks. The only difference is that everyone knows that a single ebook can be reproduced forever; printing presses aren’t required, it doesn’t wear out like a DTB and it can therefore flood the market and take over the world. So publishers and authors are a little worried about that. Forgive us for our panic.
As an author I don’t mind at all if you share a copy of one of my ebooks. I publish through Amazon on Kindle with DRM, but I also publish through Smashwords in just about every format without DRM. I also have two of my books available at zero price. And I am happy to supply a copy to those who can’t get hold of one. So my view is simple.
Create a Sword and Laser Library which includes copies of ebooks you are discussing so that those in regions where it is unavailable can get access. It seems perfectly logical to me that you should keep one copy of each of the ebooks you have featured and discussed in the library. You could allow access only to members of the group. This would seem perfectly valid to me as you are promoting the book by discussing it. So no harm done to anybody. And I agree with others on the fair use idea. So long as no illegal act is intended, and you are only using it to read yourself, don’t worry about it.
Yes, I know, some people might take advantage and only read books for free. The shame of it. Excuse me but they are doing that on Amazon every day. The free books promotions and threads on the Amazon forum and others are updated daily.
As someone has already said, free books are free promotions, and us self published authors need all the visibility we can get. So if you download one of my books for free and like it, fine. Just tell someone will you?
Edited.On second thought I'm going to bow out of this conversation. As is often the case things go in circles and very few minds are changed. I think both "sides" have good cases to make; it just happens that I don't agree with one of them.
:)
David wrote: "Pardon me for this long post, but I have been following this discussion for a while and have finally decided to add my penny’s worth. Not that I am an expert or anything, or that my opinion is any ..."*clap* *clap*
Don’t take it to heart, Rob. I share your views, believe me. But we have to be practical. I have been writing a long time. I have published twelve ebooks, ten as paperbacks. I charge $2.99 for the ebooks. I worked hard and long to generate those twelve titles. I get no support from the publishing industry. I tried to go the traditional route and it didn’t work for me. So I self publish and learned my trade over the years.
Am I bothered by people getting free copies of my work? No.
Am I bothered by people doing a hatchet job on someone else’s characters and storylines, using their fan base to bounce ideas off, and then using those very same fans to sell to in order to get their trilogy to the top of Amazon’s best selling list? Hell, yes.
If you want to go viral you have to first go with the flow.
Am I bothered by people getting free copies of my work? No.
Am I bothered by people doing a hatchet job on someone else’s characters and storylines, using their fan base to bounce ideas off, and then using those very same fans to sell to in order to get their trilogy to the top of Amazon’s best selling list? Hell, yes.
If you want to go viral you have to first go with the flow.
Rob wrote: "Edited.On second thought I'm going to bow out of this conversation. As is often the case things go in circles and very few minds are changed."
Rob, your point was fine, though as you say, a little circular. I agree that people should feel an obligation to pay for things and it seems to me that most people are of the same opinion. If I enjoy the results of someone's hard work, I want them to benefit from this financially. I think the only counter point is really against the whole 'anti-piracy' movement, which has probably done more harm than good by making uneducated attacks at things such as peer to peer services without looking at the facts.
Most people do want to buy things, rather than just take them. Have faith! :)
Disclaimer: I haven't actually read this thread beyond the original post, because I can make some assumptions about the discussion taking place, and I don't really want to get into that argument. That said, there is some precedent for having a backup of an item you already own. I remember back when I was using emulators and roms, it was always plastered all over that you were only supposed to use them if you had the originals. Software actually has rules in place to allow you to have a backup as well. Of course they don't say you can pirate them, but realistically the method of acquiring is irrelevant. As long as you're not distributing, I'd say you're ethically in the clear.Side note. I've always wanted there to be some way to pay some reduced cost to get a product across platforms. Be it books or video games or what not. I bought it here, and I want it there as well, and I'm willing to pay some just to cover the costs of producing the additional product, but it would be nice if you didn't have to pay $60 twice to have the same game on 2 platforms.
James wrote: "You make it sound like people who buy books are in the minority of those who read. Look at this discussion very little int favor of piracy gives you a small sampling of how scewed your numbers are."True, my numbers are very skewed. I just plucked them out of the air. The point, though, is the same: odds are that piracy will actually result in an increase of your book sales, so you may as well just accept it rather than try to fight it.
James wrote: "The simple fact is piracy isn't quite as easy as its made out to be. One can't just go and decide they don't want to pay for books first you would have to learn how to get the raw files find out where to look for them and what method you want to use to download them. Then you have to deal with the smaller sampling since somebody generally has to buy a file or steal it to put it up for download. Then with all the different readers and formats for the file you have to find and learn how to use a program to change your epub files to mobi for example depending on what device you use for a reader. Most people just don't have the patience to learn that stuff even with sites like youtube giving instructions on how to do virtually anything."
This is the significant point here. Piracy originally became a big thing because it was easier to obtain a pirated copy than to obtain the item legally (as was the case in the music industry). If you make it easier to obtain your item legally, people will be more likely to do that than to find a pirated copy. And thus making your item (book, music, whatever) easily obtainable is your best method of tackling piracy.
Piracy originally became a big thing because it was easier to obtain a pirated copy than to obtain the item legallyJust as a data point, I paid $15 on iTunes yesterday for a movie I already own on DVD because Disney DRM is a PITA to break, and I didn't have the mental energy to deal with it. (It's a movie for my five year-old to watch in the car when we drive 18 hours to Canada this weekend - for that kind of peace of mind, $15 is a bargain.)
So yeah, making the legal route more convenient than piracy does work. On me, anyway. (And I wasn't even technically pirating! Breaking DRM to create personal use backups is completely legal! Argh...)
All software, including digital music, books, etc., should come with a licence for them to be used on at least five different devices. That would solve many problems for people wanting to transfer things from computer to tablet, phone, car, etc.
Charles wrote: "James wrote: "The simple fact is piracy isn't quite as easy as its made out to be."This is the significant point here. Piracy originally became a big thing because it was easier to obtain a pirated copy than to obtain the item legally (as was the case in the music industry). If you make it easier to obtain your item legally, people will be more likely to do that than to find a pirated copy. And thus making your item (book, music, whatever) easily obtainable is your best method of tackling piracy."
I totally agree with this. Back when I got my first mp3 player I spent more than £10 trying and failing to legally download a track to my mp3 player. Back then, I didn't even know how to rip a cd I owned, and even though I was strongly against piracy, I wanted some music on this cool new device someone gave me, so reluctantly I tried limewire, and it was so so easy that I happily downloaded whatever I wanted, and became very comfortable doing so. These days it has finally become just as easy to download music legally (thank you Amazon) as it is illegally, and I haven't pirated music since that happened. T.V. programmes, films and anime could do to catch up on the music industry for this. Well, I've heard there is itunes, as alterjess notes above, but I've boycotted them ever since they pushed me to pirating music in the first place by limiting their stuff to only work on their products (die apple die :D).
Books have never been a problem for me. I first became interested in ebooks after a friend showed me his new kindle, and I saw that they were not the horrible machines I had imagined them to be, trying to steal the place of my beloved paperbacks (;P) and when I saw the relative cheapness of them, and the range and price of the books, I was sold on them. Downloading books legally to the kindle is a breeze, but illegally...I don't even want to think about it! Anyway, there are so many free books available that I can't see why I would want to. Of course, kindle books, like itunes music in the past, works only on kindle. I wonder if this is an issue for some people.
What little sympathy I had for pirating music/movies and to a lesser degree publishers has died.The action taken by the RIAA is more than enough to make sure that I will probably never buy a CD again except on the occasions I catch a smaller band live and i Feel absolutely no sympathy for the artists either. The amount of money they make for what they do is exceedingly ridiculous. The same is true for the MPAA and the hollywood side. Then they go lobbying to make more.
Authors have my sympathy I try to buy books when i can and support especially my favorites but times are tough. I'm not going to feel too bad about pirating a few books a month to keep myself entertained. Especially when thats how I have found most of my favorite authors and are behind the books I do buy.
Ruth wrote: "Well, I've heard there is itunes, as alterjess notes above, but I've boycotted them ever since they pushed me to pirating music in the first place by limiting their stuff to only work on their products (die apple die :D)."Um, your info is out of date. Apple only used DRM because the music industry insisted on it. Apple went DRM-free on music years ago, and even when they had DRM, it was pretty easy to clone a DRM-free version.
Or were you talking about TV shows and Movies? Again, that's not Apple's doing, but the studio's requirements.
Doc
Doc wrote: "Ruth wrote: "Well, I've heard there is itunes, as alterjess notes above, but I've boycotted them ever since they pushed me to pirating music in the first place by limiting their stuff to only work on their products (die apple die :D)."Um, your info is out of date. Apple only used DRM because the music industry insisted on it. Apple went DRM-free on music years ago, and even when they had DRM, it was pretty easy to clone a DRM-free version. "
Um, no, I have heard that music from itunes now works on all devices. I said earlier that I tried to buy mp3s legally back when I had my first mp3 player, but after spending money and being unable to get the songs I bought onto my device, I gave up and resorted to piracy. It is this experience that began my dislike for Apple.
I also said that at the time I didn't know how to rip a cd, so what on earth makes you think I would have known how to 'clone a DRM-free version'? The point I was agreeing with in my post was that people are more likely to pirate if it is difficult to get hold of the product legally. Now that it is easy peasy even for people like me who aren't great at computers to download music legally, I no longer pirate music.
I have no idea how itunes works for TV and movies. Every now and then I feel a rare curiosity to see what itunes has available and at what prices, but then I realise that to do so requires me to download the itunes software. The last time I did that (long ago on an admittedly old computer) it slowed my computer almost to a halt, so I have no desire to do that. I'll wait for other companies to offer digital versions of TV and movies.
The Sword and Laser
Books mentioned in this topic
Warbreaker (other topics)On Stranger Tides (other topics)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI