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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."
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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EdelFactor
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....
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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".
... 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?
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.
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That's what I and my 20 friends said when we raped that girl.
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.
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