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An Ethical Question Regarding Ebooks
tytso writes "Suppose there is a book that you want to read on your ebook reader, but it is out of print (so even if you purchase the dead-tree version of the book used, the author won't receive any royalties) and the publisher has refused to make it available as an ebook. You can buy it from Amazon as a used book, but that isn't your preferred medium. It is available on the internet as a pirated etext, however. This blog post outlines a few possibilities, and then asks, 'What is the right thing to do? And why?' I'm also curious if the answers change depending on whether you are a Baby Boomer, or a Gen X, Gen Y, etc. — I've noticed that attitudes around copyright seem to change depending on whether someone is a college student or a recent college graduate, versus someone who can remember a time when the Internet did not exist."
And if your conscious really bothers, send the author's estate a few bucks anonymously.
Yours is a loaded question. I may be do the same thing as you, but not for the same reasons. If I want to sample an ebook, or just use it for reference, I'll download it for sure (I'll either pay for it, or barring that option I'll find it some place else). On the other hand, if I want to read a book in its entirety, I'll get a dead-tree version (new, used, or from the library, it doesn't really matter, I don't want to read a book in its entirety from a screen). I'm 33 years old, if that makes any difference.
Isn't it about time we stopped equating legality with morality? One need only look to corporate law to see that one's a slippery slope.
Also, can we get it through our collective skulls that piracy DOES NOT EQUAL theft? Piracy deprives no one physically or monetarily, though I agree it might be argued that it deprives them of the chance for a sale to whoever pirated the product. Nonetheless, the possibility of a sale does not equal a sale.
If a book is out of print and the publisher isn't going to ever publish it my feeling is that it is perfectly ethical to use the pirated eText that is found on the Internet. Legal? More than likely it is not. Is that right? More than likely it is not. You would think that in copyright law that if a publisher chooses to no longer publish a book than shouldn't that book fall into the Public Domain, assuming of course that the original author is dead, or has given up their copyright or copylefted it. I'm a 40 year old GenXer - who is currently a college student.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
Born early 80s. I agree. Buying second hand books still has an effect on the market. The better the second hand price is, the more can be charged for new books. If you want it in a format that isn't legally available, at least buy it in a format that is legally available as well. This is my conclusion to the situation that has been presented of someone who wants to act ethically.
I'm gonna need a spec.
My book is currently in print and available in both electronic and dead-tree versions, so this doesn't apply to me directly, but if it goes out of print I would have no problems putting the PDF version online. Quite a few authors have done the same thing - put the PDF copy online when the publisher has decided to stop distributing. Typically, all rights revert to the author at this point, so they can do whatever they want with it. If they think there's still a market for it, they can keep trying to sell it, or just put it online for anyone to read if that's too much effort for the return.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The "copyright police" are irrelevant to the question. The question is, "What's the right thing to do?" For an out-of-print book, it seems like the right thing to do is buy it wherever possible, and make your own e-book as backup. If you can't buy it, there is no ethical problem with acquiring the book in what ever form you can find it. There is, however, an ethical question about whether you should enable the persons who created a "pirated" e-book to enjoy financial or psychological rewards for their un-ethical behavior. How about contacting the copyright holder and getting permission to create/publish the e-book ethically?
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Keeping it out of print may also be the desire of the creator or of their estate. Look into the on-line publications of the secret Scientology writings of L. Ron Hubbard, or look at the fascinating material over at www.wikileaks.org. Much of that is material the original authors or current owners absolutely do not want available for general information, much less duplication. And this policy goes right back to the beginnings of copyright law and the Catholic unhappiness with Bibles being printed in English.
It is fascinating history, and reveals the roots of copyright in the _prevention_ of publication to keep material secret, not in the assistance to public education and welfare offered as a reason for copyright and patent laws.
Out of print does not mean the copyright has expired. Selling a used book is of course permitted under the First-sale Doctrine exemption recognized by SCOTUS in 1908 and codified in the Copyright Act of 1975. If publisher's would digitize their complete copyright inventory this problem could be quickly rendered mute once that is done and an accounting system for it established. The more recent works are probably stored in digital format already.
Amazon could promote potential reprints by reporting used book sales figures by title to the publishers. Search requests for ebooks by title that don't have an existing ebook could have a similar effect. Where Amazon maintains such databases and queries them resulting in information they think would improve their sales they should make the appropriate requests to the publisher which would mean guaranteed sales of the requested numbers and thus have a greater chance of getting the publishers to react. If this information results in new reprint and ebook sales then the creators should gain royalties.
so do e-books actually go out of print?
Depends. If the DRM isn't cracked soon enough eventually the DRM servers will go dead and the book ends up effectively going out of print. If the DRM is cracked or the book is DRM free then no because there can easily be new copies made. Now, these new copies might not exactly give the author any profit but it will effectively keep the book in print.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
A few years ago I was faced with a similar dilemma: a book on computer game creation, one which I wished for my students to read, was regrettably out of print.
I found a PDF of it online, being used at another university. I contacted the professor and asked how she had come by it; she gave me the author's email address.
I contacted the author, explained what I wanted to do, and he gave me authorization to freely use the PDF.
Also a child of the 80's and I agree; obv IANAL, but to me the spirit of the license and fair use of the content transcends the medium. Example: you simply can't buy a mini-disc with commercial content on it such as Name Popular Album. People buy the album in whatever format is available and convert/record it onto the mini disc, the desired format.
FWIW I also think that if you already owned a copy of the book but perhaps it was faded beyond readability / eaten by the dog and you disposed of the remains you would similarly have the 'ethical right' to download the book.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
same thing with any other media. these guys can keep their content availiable 24/7/365/endless for the cost of two sales a month. if they don't want to, then AFAIAC they have abandoned the work, do what you want.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
There are other benefits to the author for having a dead-tree book purchased, even when out-of-print.
That sale helps improve the overall rating for the book, and all other books the author has written. So, your purchase may actually trigger the purchase of other sales from the same author. This works electronically on sites like Amazon, and in the real world when statistics are tabulated in all sorts of ways.
An out-of-print book might also be sold directly by the author or publisher, or just some guy who doesn't want the book any more. Either way that purchase is helping other people, even if it helps Jeff Bezos's gigantic empire and the thousands of people who work for him.
I think the ethical thing to do is purchase the dead-tree book and then download the ilegal version so that you can enjoy it in the medium you intended. This might not be legal, but it's ethical in my eyes so long as you don't pass it on. If you later sold the dead-tree book, you could then delete the electronic version.
-David
Early boomer here. You mean one of these big publishers who deliberately destroy perfectly good copies of books if they don't sell within x-period of time? Those guys? Running the old artificial scarcity consumer ripoff model? If it is one of those places, you can guess my reaction to the ethics of downloading a copy. Ask anyone who has worked in a bookstore about the sheer waste involved with selling books and why prices are high. And you have to remember, the industry as a whole fought tooth and nail to make lending libraries more or less illegal. They are spit swappers with the MAFIAA in their business tactics and alleged "ethics". And they don't discriminate, look at school textbooks for another example of their greed.
1) Copyright laws are not there to protect the "book market" as some kind of ephemeral whole. They are to protect creators of works.
2) Copyright laws are not there to protect used book sellers.
3) True, but the ultimate aim of copyright is to encourage production and distribution of creative works. When the owner lets them go out of print they are abusing the system.
I think you're close to something here, but not quite there. When you buy a used book, there's not a clear way in which you're supporting the new book, and supporting the copyright holder of that original book is even more indirect.
In response to issue #2, no one is saying that used book resellers deserve to starve, but they really aren't the issue. Used book resellers don't own the copyright to the books they're selling, so when you copy those books, those resellers aren't being wronged morally/ethically/legally. Even if their business model becomes obsolete, that's not really my problem to solve. You know, the whole thing about buggy-whip makers...
Even point #3, which seems the most sensible to me, doesn't quite hold up. There are a variety of reasons that things go out of print, and it's not clear how to get them back in print. Again, you might have something, but it's pretty unclear, indirect, and uncertain.
I guess what I'm saying is, I would agree with you that the situation it more complicated than whether the original creator gets directly compensated. At the same time, I feel like your arguments might be a little too complicated, a little too much of a stretch.
I think part of the problem is that people are feeling like businesses aren't really providing the things they want. Lots of people think it's all about "free". The ebook is free, so greedy people will just get it. But often it's about availability and a sense of fairness, and people feeling like they don't want to have to search around for rare out of print books in order to read something, only for the purpose of propping up a secondary market.
I think if you want to make an argument here, the only real angle I can see is that, if you destroy the secondary market for a book, you're also diminishing the value of new books (i.e. if I can't resell my books, then the price I'm willing to pay for new books is less). However, that issue is complicated by the fact that the book is out of print. lessening the market for out of print books isn't going to retroactively decrease the price of the book when it was new, taking money out of the pocket of the author.
You could argue that declaring "open season" on all out of print books makes it less likely for people to buy new books, because if the books goes out of print then its value drops. But that seems to assume that speculative book collectors who buy books new, hoping they'll go out of print and become rare, are a significant part of the book-buying market. If that were the case, these books probably wouldn't go out of print, since there'd be such high demand.
Ultimately, yes, I think that's what the courts should (and probably eventually will) end up concluding. It may take several iterations for them to see reason in this regard, but it is pretty clear, at least in my mind, that downloading content in electronic form that you legally own a copy of in another form is no different than doing the format shifting yourself, and thus is protected fair use even if downloading ends up causing you to push out copies of fragments of the content as a side effect of the protocol used (seeding). Creating the torrent, on the other hand....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Gen-Y - What if you went to the library and borrowed the book, and then downloaded the e-version. Once you finish reading the book delete the e-book and return the library book?
I don't see an ethical problem here, not sure about the legal ramifications. Knowing copyright holders it's probably completely illegal.
Why? A book that's out of print is only available on the secondary market (unless it just went out of print yesterday or something); the author gets nothing when I buy a used copy. The author gets infinitely more out of the deal if I copy the e-book and send him or her a crisp one dollar bill in the mail, than if I spend five dollars on a used copy of the dead trees version.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
You can't photocopy books, whether or not it's for private use.
Yes, you can photocopy books, even in their entirety, if you own the original.
What you can't do is distribute the copies.
This still leaves grey areas, as making copies of a book and having all the people in your immediate household reading copies at the same time may or may not be "distribution".
Meant to link the article in the above post: An article about a guy who republished out-of-print cocktail books. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/dining/30cocktail.html
Format shifting for personal use, for digital audio recordings, has been found to be legal. The reasons had to due with the laws in effect as they related to digital audio recordings.
While one could argue from analogy that therefore format shifting from dead trees to ebook is legal, that's uncharted territory. It is unlikely to prevail in a court of law unless a good fair-use argument could be made.
You're also on much shakier legal ground if you buy a copy of the work in one format, and then download a copy in a different format. There one could easily argue that you didn't format shift the work at all, but rather engaged in two separate acts, which means the second one might well not be legal at all.
The trouble with copyright law is that there's too many special cases. Some things are OK in one format, but are expressly forbidden in other formats. Things you can do with digital audio recordings have a longer list of dos and don'ts than things you can do with a printed book or a digitial CD (which differ one from the other if the latter has an effective copy protection scheme employed). The real, underlying problem here is that the copyright law not only encouraged people to write books, but also created entrenched interests that have hindered the law changing to keep with the technology and the like.
... but what about medical textbooks where they wouldn't normally be available or affordable?
Funny thing; about 5 years ago I was working on a software project in which we were trying to develop portable wireless access to various medical reference texts and databases, primarily using wireless "smart phones" as the hardware. The main thing that killed the project was that we developers needed access to the text for testing. My part in the project was writing decoding software that could understand the texts' formats and convert them to usable databases. But most of this work couldn't be tested, because we couldn't get access to the medical texts. The printers would only sell them to people with official medical credentials, and as software developers, we didn't qualify. The companies lawyers couldn't find a way to break this lockout, so eventually we had to give up. A number of doctors, mostly EMTs, didn't get the wireless access that we'd told them we could build.
This was a good lesson to all of us in what copyright is really about. The publishers and authors knew quite well what they were doing when they refused to even sell or lease their data to us. They made it quite clear that they understood what we were trying to do, and they weren't going to allow it.
It's, uh, interesting to see the concept of ethics tied into this.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
In summary, if can't put the money directly into the hand of the person who created the work, it's better not to pay for it at all, and it's better to help others to also not pay for it at all.
This I agree with. Assuming that you mean "if I don't want to support the corp doing this, I will not own this, and will encourage others to also not own it". This is the same kind of choice we have to make with tangible goods: either we want it enough that we pay for it despite moral qualms; or we do without in hopes that enough people doing without will make a difference.
Why should this be different?
Yes, but those people have the ability to be hurt, in a much much much larger way, at random by the book publisher, who can print ten times as many copies as currently exist.
People don't have the 'right' to have their copies of out-of-print books be expensive. It is an artificial scarcity which can completely and instantly be destroyed by the actions of a single company on a whim.
And, in fact, their actions of purchasing the book make it slightly more likely there will be another printing thus totally destroying their 'investment'.
Slightly more relevantly, this is a moot point, as very few books actually increase in price because they are out of print. They get incredibly hard to find, but still generally sell for less then their price when new.
Normal out-of-print books do not have a demand/supply imbalance...when they were in print, approximately the correct amount got printed in total. Unless the demand shot up (And they were never brought back into print for some reason), it is extremely unlikely they'd be valued more than they were originally. (Certain versions of the printing might get valued more, like first editions or limited collector runs, but that's not the same thing, and there's no way a ebook could reduce the value of one of those.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
If you didn't pirate it, would you buy it?
If you answered no, it's all right to pirate it.
If you can't buy it even if you wanted to, that's the same thing.
No harm, no foul.
If you're giving money to the person who is a creator, then you're doing a public service by empowering them to continue to create, but are not actually morally obligated to do so.
I am also a product of the '70s, and I agree with this statement you make. Although you are not morally obligated to empower them to continue to create, you are legally required to. And unfortunately, many deem this as a moral or ethical obligation. The legal requirement that is our current copyright law is a dowry for the content creator to continue to create AND distribute their works.
The main problem I see is that the content creator at some point fails to continue to provide distribution of the work. The second-hand market is completely immaterial to this subject. Copyright is when we, as The People, relinquish our right to disseminate information freely, as a dowry for the content creators to create AND distribute their works. If the creators of content fail, themselves, to distribute their works, then they have failed their own obligation to We, The People, and thus, there is no moral nor ethical obligation on our part to continue to waive our right over the information.
Copyright deals with the right to distribute, not the right of ownership. Nobody owns information. Copyright is simply there as an incentive to have creative minds create AND distribute their work. If they fail to do either, then there is no moral nor ethical obligation to continue to waive your right.
Even if the creator does create and distribute, there is still no moral nor ethical obligation, because the creator is not being deprived of anything tangible, but only "might haves", and "could haves", and such.
Out of print materials should be out of copyright anyway. Publishers stop selling a book because they don't expect to make a profit selling it anymore. Why should a company retain rights over a work they have abandoned by not printing?
...
No, you can't always get what you want.
But if you try some time,
you just might find
you get what you need...
Suck it up and either pay for the treeware book or don't read it. If you have to buy it used, that's a message to the publisher that they should consider a reprint or an electronic edition (yes, publishers watch the used book market for out of print books to determine if it's economically viable to do a new printing). If you have to pay more for an unused copy, that's because (as your question implies you also feel) people prefer new over used. You're paying extra for a copy that no one else has written in, torn, etc.
If that isn't good enough, do without. Just because you want it doesn't mean *anyone* is under any obligation to make it available to you. It isn't ethics; it's the free market, stupid. There are lots of books from those in current publication to those written by authors long dead that aren't available as an eBook. Just because you want one of those in an eBook format doesn't somehow justify pirating a copy; nor does it justify pirating the book in question.
Grow up and quit whining that the world doesn't give you everything you want.
Cheers,
Dave
BTW, the above lyrics sample is from memory which should be a hint as to which generation I fall into.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Good point. Another thing you could do along those lines would be to buy the physical book and then give it to someone else who would like to read it, but who wouldn't have bought it for themselves because they don't have the money for it. This results in a sale for the book store, a free book they wouldn't have been able to obtain otherwise for the third party, and a warm fuzzy feeling for you, knowing you've done all this without depriving anyone of any potential sales, reducing the number of existing physical copies of an out-of-print book, or, like you say, being wasteful.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
I think this position misses one critical question: What is copyright a right to?
Those wanting copyrights dependent upon market availability seem to take the stance that copyright is a right to profit, especially monetary profit on the open market. While this is certainly an arguable point, it's not the be-all end-all.
This argument falters if copyright is framed, not as a right to monetary profit, but as a basic right to control. Although many creators will use the standard avenues of for-profit publishing, with the same aims of wide dissemination and agreed-upon compensation, there may be edge cases, both known and unknown, where the right of control, currently granted by copyright, is more valuable to the creator than the right to profit.
A creator may wish to exercise the right to only be publish through certain outlets, or only through publishers with certain standards, either quality or ideological. The public does not, and should not, have immediate right to override the wishes of the creator, simply because the technological means are readily available. In a capitalist society that values individual means fairly gained by individual achievement, the gains of copy-rights should be upheld.
(Of course, this is not to trample on consumers' first sale rights, fair use rights, or personal use rights such as personal format-shifting. The flip-side of the coin is that when the author releases a copy of a work into the world, that transaction was a legitimate trade of some degree of control for some degree of profit.)
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
well, is it still the creator/publisher's market if the book is no longer in print? if their book is in print and you chose to pirate rather than buy used, then yes, you are depreciating the market value of the used book, which has a direct influence on the market value & demand of the new book.
however, if the book is out of print, then the publisher/author have already sold their entire stock of books. the market value of the used books are of no consequence to the copyright holders. they have already made all the money that they can (or are willing to) make on that IP.
in this case, i think the question would be, whether or not piracy impinges on the rights of non-copyright-holders. in other words, do you have a moral obligation to compensate a used book salesman for enjoying a book that they happen to be selling a used copy of. personally i think the answer is "no."
Copyright is an infringement on my right to free speech. Sharing knowledge does not diminish the original holder any more than lighting your taper from mine takes away my light. The public supposedly give up their free speech right in a limited and specific way for a limited time for the greater good. A large and healthy public domain of knowledge and culture being good for the public to build on, copyright is specifically designed to enlarge it by granting a temporary monopoly to authors so they could be encouraged by payment for their work. After a short period, the copyright lapses, the public domain is enhanced, and authors have to go on creating new works for more money.
The suppression of free speech was not given up to create a new class of fake property barons making all the money as the middlemen. Copyright was not supposed to be effectively permanent, the whole point was to improve the public domain, not bury it!
Copyright was a bargain between a creator and the public. Now it's an ever-extending new property right that benefits neither. I do not believe copyright in its current form to be an ethical restriction of free speech any longer, so I feel no ethical duty to respect it.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
That's what I and my 20 friends said when we raped that girl.
If they want money in their bank account, they can print their own. That's the fashionable thing to do these days. If they want food, they should secure that before they sit down to write.
I'm a computer programmer. My girlfriend is a painter and artist. We are both musicians. We are the people these copyright rules are intended to promote. And we don't want them, and we don't need them, and we think we'd be better off without them. So, if the guy can't put food on his table without copyright, perhaps it's because he's fucking doing it wrong.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
As a published author, I would prefer that people read my book than that they pay for it.
In the long run, this builds me an audience, which may also be monetarily worth more than a one-time payment.
If the book is not available... pirate it.
Death metal, a tiny musical genre that thrived from 1985-1995, has many classics out of print. Our solution at the metal site for which I write (the Dark Legions Archive, I'm a blogger) is to make FLACs available of out of print classics.
The reason is simple: it's better that the artists have a new listener, than that the potential listener is thwarted by the chaos of record publishing.
Technically, it is against the law. However, from artists, we have heard nothing but encouragement. There are now new generations, new fans and new life for their art. I don't think anyone can reasonably complain about that.
Futurist Traditionalism
Having worked as a bookstore manager, I can tell you people in the 'legit' book business do not look very highly on the used book business. The two really have nothing to do with each other at all, which is why you will never find stores selling both. The only reason the used book business exists is because books were around long before all our current license shenanigans, and the only reason the major media publishers have not managed to make selling a used book as illegal as selling a used mp3 is that the practice has long historical precedent. If they could, they would.
So speaking *ethically* ( not legally ), if you are concerned about giving to the author, don't imagine that a used copy from Amazon is any better at all. The extra demand does nothing as those sales are not tracked. Maybe writing to the publication house to say you wished it was back in print might make a difference, but it's doubtful. The author would no doubt rather you pirate the book and sent them a fiver. It would be more than they got in royalties anyway.
Iain