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Copyright Infringement of Books
Maximum Prophet recommends a NY Times piece on the growing phenomenon of unauthorized digital versions of copyrighted books showing up online. The problem has been growing exponentially, fed in part by the popularity of reading devices such as the Kindle and the iPhone. The article features the odd photographic juxtaposition of Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin, who take opposite views on electronic editions, authorized or not. Ms. Le Guin: "I thought, who do these people think they are? Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?" Mr. Doctorow: "I really feel like my problem isn't piracy. It's obscurity." "Doctorow, a novelist whose young adult novel 'Little Brother' spent seven weeks on the New York Times children's chapter books best-seller list last year, offers free electronic versions of his books on the same day they are published in hardcover. He believes free versions, even unauthorized ones, entice new readers."
Nope. There are genre giants that end up making less than the waiter at the local Dennys.
This all boils down to the fact that they are relatively obscure and service a
relatively small market. Furthermore, their publisher eats up most of the gross
revenue of what actually gets sold and distribution costs need to be recovered.
Unless you are Stephen King, a few pirates will probably benefit you in the end.
You're probably obscure enough that pirates really can't do any harm.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why do artists always keep complaining? Write good books, make good music, make interesting movies, and the money will flow in, piracy or no piracy. Write crappy books, make more crappy pop songs, and make boring as heck movies and your income will dry up. Piracy or no piracy.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I was going to say:
"Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?"
Because they can.
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I'm sure Cory is right that, at the moment, electronic versions entice more readers. However, that's because currently there aren't so many electronic versions of popular recent books. So if you're reading e-books, you're quite likely to find Cory's work, and perhaps start reading more of his stuff. But what happens when the market is flooded with e-books? You read your favourite authors and Cory gets nothing if you haven't already found, liked and are prepared to pay for his writing.
If you write something and let it loose upon the world, you no longer have control over it.
The sooner that "artists" get over their Napoleon complexes, the better.
The only real relevant question is how can we ensure that artists
are encouraged to create and contribute to the culture they have
drawn from themselves. Letting them run around like little Napoleons
is ultimately counterproductive.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
From TFA: "Until recently, publishers believed books were relatively safe from piracy because it was so labor-intensive to scan each page to convert a book to a digital file. What's more, reading books on the computer was relatively unappealing compared with a printed version."
I spent a few minutes looking for a legitimate, for-sale e-book version of The Left Hand of Darkness; there isn't one.
So the publishing companies are simply repeating the mistake of the record labels: being slow to release legitimate downloadable versions of their product while bemoaning the demand for a product they refuse to produce.
Cry me a river...
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
"I thought, who do these people think they are? Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?"
The People. The ultimate holders of authority. If they decide to amend the Constitution to abolish your and everyone else's copyright, they can, so I suggest you show them some respect.
Also dear author, it's a *privilege* not to have your books copied, not a natural right. Learn the difference. You can control your property and lock your book inside a vault where none can see it, but you have no right to control other people's property or how it is used.
And finally that privilege is a *temporary* privilege. Eventually all your works will fall into public domain, just like Mark Twain's works. The arts are meant to be free, not locked-up forever.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
There seems to be an inherent gut-level bias against the notion of somebody getting something for nothing. Even if it turns out good in the end. No matter how many people testify that releasing free copies of their work has actually increased their net income, people like Ms. LeGuin can't get away from, "Mine! Mine! Let go!"
We had it - it was a 17-year copywrite period within which authors & composers could reap the exclusive benefits of their labor. Once Congress started endlessly extending that period it was inevitable that "the people" would push back.
What is it now - creator's life plus 75 years or some such ridiculous period? And they wonder why copywrite is getting violated more and more...
>>>their publisher eats up most of the gross revenue
If I was a new author, I'd skip all the middlemen and just publish directly to the net. $1 per book downloaded. Even if I was only read by 1% of the internet, I'd still have a successful career.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You don't get to make this choice for other authors. If you want to write a book and distribute it freely, go ahead. You don't have the right to give other people's property away just because you would want to share yours.
Freedom is about freedom of personal choice; it is not about being forced to give something away because somebody else thinks it would be a good choice.
It might rather suggest that the optimal strategies for authors differ, depending on their market, level of exposure, and similar factors.
If you are a well-established author, as LeGuin is, whose works are a standard recommendation for young adult fiction(one of the largest book markets out there), the value of additional exposure is likely to be lower than the cost of would-be-buyers downloading instead.
If you are not a well-established author, or are well established only in a comparatively narrow niche, as Doctorow is, the value of additional exposure might well be substantially higher than any loss in sales.
Another difference might be with target market. Someone trying to appeal to children or teens, a tech-savvy but fairly cost sensitive(and often credit-cardless) demographic, might worry more about piracy, since if downloading or copying from a friend at school is easier than whining for mom's credit card, they lose a sale. Someone trying to appeal to twenty-something techies with online buying power might not face the same hurdles.
Now, it could simply be the case, as you suggest, that one author is right and the other is wrong; but it is, I think, reasonable to suspect that authors in different places might have different optimal strategies.
It's pretty clear that society at large increasingly has no problem infringing in copyright.
Rather than industry trying to change society's view of copyright isn't it about time society got together and changed copyright to something that fits its views?
You spell poorly and have low standards for material to look at while touching yourself, but you are NOT a troll.
Sigh. Please learn what "force" means. Hint: it involves guns and courts and jails. No-one is telling authors they must "give something away because somebody else thinks it would be a good choice" or they will be thrown in prison. However, authors are saying they have the exclusive right to make copies of their books and that other people should be imprisoned (after refusing to pay hefty fines) if they dare try to step on that exclusive right.
You simply cannot make a freedom argument for copyright.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I still don't understand the "Because it can be done easily is is my right to do it" attitude of the pirate defenders. It's still stealing I don't care how you want to characterize it.
"he sells an order of magnitude less books than LeGuin."
I doubt LeGuin sells many books today.
Even in LeGuin's heyday, I doubt she made more than a middle-class living selling books. Let's look at Jerry Pournelle, arguably just as successful as LeGuin. I wrote in a magazine for an editor who knew Jerry quite well, and he said that only a handful, literally less than 10, of scifi authors made more than a middle-class living selling scifi. Jerry was not one of them (meaning he made a middle-class living). He did okay, but I suspect the reason he wrote for Byte magazine pimping himself to get free computers is precisely because he wasn't making that much money selling books.
Now all that said, I agree with part of Ursula's principle: This is *my* book, I'll decide if I want to release it or sell it, or bury it.
Where I disagree with her is I think she has that right. For 17 years. Then it's everybody's. Time to write some more books. The Lathes of Heaven was a great book, a SciFi classic. It should be readily available to whomever want it at this point.
But let's be real, Ursula hasn't been relevant as an author is decades.
Simply put, it's a lot easier to find and use pirated eBooks than buy legitimate ones. Oddly enough, a few days ago I went hunting for places to get legit ebooks without DRM locking it into some proprietary format that may become obsolete some day.
I couldn't find anything beyond the Baen Free Library, a pretty paltry selection of "multiformat" ebooks from Fictionwise, and Project Gutenberg public domain stuff. I even did a lot of asking around, and started a thread for it on a pretty big site, but had no luck finding anything beyond what I already mentioned.
I'd love to get legit eBooks, but I'm not going to support DRMed ones. As this very article shows, it's futile to DRM books, because it's easy enough for dedicated pirates to scan the paper books and spread the results around via filesharing.
What needs to be done to fight piracy is what's been being done with digital music distribution: have stores with huge selections comparable to brick-and-mortar, sold at reasonable prices* with no DRM or a form of DRM that's flexible enough to not interfere with normal usage. (Though preferably there shouldn't be DRM at all.)
*The legit, DRMed versions tend to be very overpriced from what I've seen. The vast majority of the cost in publishing is materials, so there's something wrong with charging the same amount (or even a couple of dollars cheaper) for a text file as a paperback or hardcover. I'm not saying they should be $1, but I should think $3-$5 is an awful lot more in line with what people would expect to pay for eBooks than what most outlets are charging.
Fair use? We're using computers, which do copying for even the most trivial operations, so we have to throw the idea out and look for something else.
Which is exactly why we need to extend the concept to computers en masse. The current laws are impossible to enforce without a police state. Which one would you want?
One of the general problems is that as soon as a computer is introduced to a subject area, all precedent is forgotten, chants of "That's different!" are heard repeatedly, and we humans must relearn every social lesson that we so laboriously worked out over the centuries.
Yes, but that's not a bad thing. The lessons our ancestors learned are different from today's. Our ancestors didn't have instant and truly anonymous speech from 10000 miles away in a country with no extradition treaty. Our ancestors didn't have access to so many types of entertainment competing for their attention span it's humanly impossible to even know about them all. We need to learn our own lessons about the Internet, because we're the ones who experience it.
If you lean too much on tradition you'll end up like Hungary in WW2: a Kingdom without a king, lead by an admiral without a fleet, in a country without a coastline, fighting against enemies we have no problems with, with countries as our ally we do have problems with.
I have absolutely no ethical qualms about downloading the electronic version of a book I've purchased in dead-tree form. I paid for the words presented in text form. Whether I read them on paper or a screen, it's the same performance of the same work. It's like ripping my own CDs so I can load them on my MP3 player except someone else did the ripping. In fact, I don't even have many of my physical books or CDs on hand. They're tucked away in boxes at a relative's house. (A relative who has a lot more storage space than me.) I ripped all my CDs years ago and haven't touched the physical media since. If I want to read a book I own (and I know which books I own), I download a pdf, prc, rtf, doc, html, etc. I haven't resold or disposed of any of them so, legally, I still own a copy and nobody's using the physical copy at the same time that I'm using the electronic copy. But I'm sure what I'm doing would piss off some copyright holders.
If I owned a kindle, you can bet I'd use my ethical loophole to bypass their $10/title charge for most books. I'd rather pay $5-7 for a paperback and download a "pirated" electronic version. Heck, even if they only charged $2/title for ebooks, I'd still download a pirated version after paying my $2 so I could be sure I'd have access to the product after the DRM screws me 5-10 years down the road.
Copyright holders and IP distributors need to clue in to the fact that reproducing information is cheap and easy. They can't legislate away that reality. Produce a quality product at a reasonable price and it'll sell. Try to charge more than people feel an easily-reproduced product is worth and they'll steal it or ignore it. Refuse to provide the product in a form that they want or make the process too cumbersome and they'll bypass you entirely.
Ever notice in Anne McCaffrey work, that often the twenty-something woman ends up with the 50-60 year old man? Creepy.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
Kind of interesting that someone who had a bestseller a year ago is more open to the idea of digital publishing than an author that hasn't written much worthwhile since the 70's. Don't get me wrong Le Guin is far more prolific writer but if part of the crowd that grew up without the technology we have today and have refused to embrace the times.
The irony will be that as online publishing and ebooks become more and more prevalent the technology frightened authors like Le Guin will disappear into obscurity by their own efforts to protect themselves and you can bet they will whine about that too.
If things continue as they are a huge gap of world literature from the "copyright reform" era will simply vanish.
I do think its rather sad that in a genre like science fiction and fantasy there are people without the foresight to see a day when dead tree's will no longer be practical reading material.
You're quite wrong. The book belonged to you (period), until the moment when you published it. Note the root of that word, pub- , it's very important.
From that moment in time, the book became part of public culture, progressively less and less yours and more and more a part of the public mind as its community of readers expands. And eventually, when it passes into the public domain, the work will not be yours at all, despite the fact that you will still be its author. See, there's a difference.
For a writer, you're curiously unaware of the relationship between a written work and the minds of readers. A book isn't the paper it's written on, but the words and ideas contained within. When a person reads your book, those words and ideas are inevitably donated to that reader, every last bit of them (the paper is irrelevant). Dwell on that a while, because you don't appear to have absorbed the implications.
For each person who reads your work, your "codified super insightful knowledge" (as you put it) becomes ever less exclusive, and if you are really popular then your exclusive hold over that knowledge drops close to nil: your work has become part of popular culture, and gained a momentum of its own. You are then no longer its owner but merely its author, and your earnings from it will be far more a product of the work's cultural significance than of your publisher's marketting. It will no longer be a "product", but an element of culture with earnings as a side effect.
You might wish to reflect a little on this essay from Baen: http://www.baen.com/library/ . As long as you are at war with your readers, I predict a future of hand-wringing and unhappiness.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Ms. Le Guin: "I thought, who do these people think they are? Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?"
This is really ironic, coming from the author of the following (great!) book.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
This is 1) a logical fallacy called argumentum ad populum: something is right because people do it; 2) a logical fallacy called a strawman (the Coward never proposed solving the piracy problem with police state measures); 3) a logical fallacy called a non sequitur (advocacy of a police state doesn't follow from the statement that piracy is wrong); 4) an incomplete "analysis" of the reason for copyright; Score: 5, interesting on Slashdot.
Congratulations.
What was happening before IP rights came along was that originators would keep what they'd created secret until they were in a position to get a sponsorship deal up-front, or to make a lot of money very fast through some other means (like having a printing-and-distribution deal whereby they could flood the market with their own official product before the rip-off merchants had a chance to get their copies ready). In the case of classical composers, they'd keep their work secret until they got a commission for a big public performance, at which point they'd dig something suitable out of their chest of part-finished manuscripts, cut it or build it up to the desired length, polish it and hand it over. Some people marvel at how some great works of classical music were supposedly written from scratch in a few weeks, to order - and of course, they weren't ... some of those works had perhaps been tinkered with for years, but were never completed and performed until the composer's patron asked for something new for a high-profile performance ... because that was the only way that the composer could make money from their work. Until that point your "protection" was keeping kept your stuff secret until the last possible moment. If the chance to cash in never came along, then you'd hang onto the thing to keep it safe, and perhaps end up taking it to your grave.
The point of introducing IP was that you could now show your stuff to other people, and allow society to see and evaluate your work, and in return for sharing, society would go some way to protecting your right to profit from what you'd done. It meant that you didn't have ten companies all developing the same device in secret, with none of them bringing it to market until the time was right for "quick-burst" profits. You weren't properly protected if you didn't share, but once you'd lodged a public patent or published a book, everyone knew that the thing was yours, and society would reward you for sharing by trying to stop you being badly ripped off.
That was the deal. Share and be protected.
(Before someone else mentions it, yes, I appreciate that the US phenomenon of submarine patents violated that deal ... and that's why those patents should have been declared void, on the grounds that the filers were negligent in not upholding their end of the deal.)
"Libraries of record" should have exemption from any copyright rules that prevent them from making copies of published works for archival and/or preservation purposes. I think that the Library of Congress already has such an exemption, and last time I looked the British Library were campaigning hard to get UK law updated to provide a similar exemption (which should have been there but seemed to have been missed due to an oversight). It's not difficult to write clauses into copyright law that makes "preservation of works" a priority, and law-makers tend to be sympathetic to the argument when its put to them. The need to preserve works really isn't a sensible argument for scrapping the whole copyright system.
If the Library of Congress wants to scan your book and deposit microfiche and electronic copies of it in nuclear bunkers scattered around the US to preserve it in case of social upheaval, my understanding is that that's probably absolutely fine under US copyright law, without their having to ask anybody's permission or pay anyone any money. No problem.
Eric Baird
OK there are so many holes in the whole copyright argument, mostly because it an archaic system used to solve a problem we used to have many many years ago. It has been modified and altered to try and keep up with modern times, but it hasn't been able to keep up, partially because industry is constantly lobbying it to stay in the dark ages so that can squeeze a little more profit.
You can pretty much say the same thing about the music and movie industries. None have tried to actually plan into the future.
Also there are some gray areas. Used Book store, Radio, Movie Rental places, heck throw in Game Rentals to grab another industry.
Though really what makes me mad is being asked to spend 50$ on a book. or 13$ for a softcover, and making me wait over a year for the freaking privilege of buying it at 13$. Don't even get me started on the price difference for US/Canada, it is criminal and discriminatory. Canadian currency was worth MORE than US, and we were being asked to pay 30% on top of that... Because yeah, that won't make your consumers furious.
Anyway I am a AVID reader and read a LOT. I buy almost exclusively used. I refuse to spend and waste my money. It actually makes me feel sick when every once in awhile I don't want to wait and shell out the big bucks for the book. The only other time I buy new, is when someone gives me a gift card for Christmas or something, as then I can rationalize it as I am not spending my money, only someone gave me a lavish gift.
Anyways I emphasize with Le Guin, and I have read many of her books, and enjoyed them (all used). However do not turn your gaze upon your readers and consumers, and think the fault is there. The fault is in an industry that has not kept in touch, and is horrible in every sense of the word. I remember hearing about an insider tell all about how truly messed up the distribution system is and the relationships between agents, distributors, retailers, and all the rest.
Don't look at me and point the finger in blame. Fix your own bloody system so it works.