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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."
... there is really so much competition for peoples time these days it's little wonder companies like to blame lack of sales on piracy.
I'd really like someone to add up all the hours it would take to experience x's book or y's product and they'd soon begin to realize it would take someone an ENTIRE LIFETIME not even to get through a fraction of what is out there.
I usually only buy books that I think are worth something over the long term. People have way too many options today to fill their time. Also with the advent of the net discussing and sharing insights, any book that is published quickly becomes out-dated.
One thing I hope electronic books allow is real-time updates to books so that they can stay fresh, with a wikipedia like revision system that tracks version and revision history (for those that need it).
Personally electronic books when done right (when the software gets there) will allow copying and pasting a whole bunch of different things that you can't do with a real book. Both will have their place I think.
I'm a two-bit, small time computer book author with just one book to my name so far. I love seeing my book get pirated. It's sold reasonably well for its niche (approaching 10,000 copies) but for the second edition I pleaded with my publisher to allow the e-book version to be free. Of the, say, 10,000 copies sold, only a couple hundred have been of the e-book edition, and I'm convinced that the wider exposure a free e-book would gather would result in increased print sales. When Seth Godin gave away the free PDF of his Ideavirus book, it led to me buying his various other books in print throughout the years. Doctorow is right that obscurity is a bigger hurdle than piracy, but I'm pretty convinced that even big name authors could benefit from extended reach thanks to freely distributed content.
My argument rests on people preferring paper to e-books, and I think they do. I sure do. Sadly, big name publishers tend to disagree, despite a number of convincing social media experiments, but over time perhaps change will happen.
I'm not a big fan of either one, but there's just no comparison between the two. Le Guin's works just have incomparably more depth and experience behind them. She's won two Hugos, and also managed to not only finish undergrad, but earned an ivy league Ph.D. in anthropology as well... as opposed to her "competition". (Please, don't bother "pointing out" that a Ph.D. outside of the hard sciences is worthless. It's not. Heinlein wouldn't dedicate a novel to a soft-minded pseudo-thinker...)
Doctorow is a small-fry gimmick writer compared to le Guin, and he knows it. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se. Doctorow's ideas and attitude are important; as they said about McLuhan, "even if he's wrong, it matters." But purely on authorial merit... please.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Books have been roughly the same for the last 200 years, since the printing press revolutionized how books were copied. Music, on the other hand, has changed maybe once a decade since audio equipment and the radio were invented and became widespread.
I think that people who read books, a small market to be sure, is made up mostly of people who go to a library to find out if they like something and, if the book is good enough, then go to Amazon or Borders or B&N and buy the book. I know that's what I do, and what a lot of other people do. Yeah yeah, anecdotal evidence, citation needed and all that, but I don't think the ebook reader is going to change the business any more than audio books did.
First off, the events they're talking about in the NY Times article actually came to a head in September 2007. It looks like a reporter dusted off some old notes simply because the Kindle is starting to get a lot of press, so it seems relevant now. The article doesn't really depict clearly what the controversy was about.
There's a guy named Andrew Burt, who has published a little science fiction, and had gotten elected to a middle-level position in the Science Fiction Writers of America. He noticed that scribd.com had a whole bunch of copyright-violating scans of books. He did an automated search of scribd's catalog, and based on that search, and without much consultation with anyone, he sent scribd a slew of what appeared to be DMCA takedown notices. The trouble was that he wasn't very careful, and, e.g., he got them to delete some fiction by Cory Doctorow, who actually wanted it on scribd as a form of publicity. IIRC, DMCA takedown notices are also supposed to be sent by copyright owners, and signed under penalty of perjury, but Burt's notices were sent without consulting the copyright holders, and were factually inaccurate in many cases; I think he ended up claiming that they weren't DMCA notices, but scribd apparently thought they were. Doctorow got very angry, and publicized his anger on his web site boingboing. Doctorow also published a very short piece by Ursula LeGuin on boingboing, without her permission, which made her furious. Burt ran for president of SFWA after this, and lost. The whole thing exposed a generational divide between older and younger SF authors. The older ones typically were suspicious of the internet, and saw it as a threat. The younger ones typically saw it as a way to publicize themselves. An old-timer named Howard Hendrix compared authors who gave their work away online for free to scabs, resulting in an ironic response called International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. Here are some representative opinions on the whole thing:
So first off, this isn't really a controversy about whether copyright should exist. The positions of all the different parties are quite similar on that issue. Scribd, Burt, Doctorow, LeGuin, and Hendrix are all pretty much in agreement that it's a bad thing to violate authors' copyrights. What they disagree on is mainly whether the internet presents more of a threat, or more of an opportunity.
Another thing to understand about this is that scribd is just a tool, in the same way that bittorrent is just a tool. I've posted some of my own nonfiction on scribd, simply on the theory that publicizing my work is always a good thing. However, just as The Pirate Bay has an extremely heavy presence of pointers to copyright-violating torrents, scribd also has a huge amount of copyright-violating stuff. Maybe the percentage is lower, but it's still a huge presence there. It's the classic situation where the web site is willing to devote x amount of effort to policing itself, but various people would like them to devote 10x (similar to Craigslist and prostitution).
Find free books.
I still don't understand the "Because it can be done easily is is my right to do it" attitude of the pirate defenders.
Easy. You're criminalizing a big chunk of society, who are actually decent people. Because it's so easy to do it, there's no moral backlash, no higher ethics forbidding it like murder. How could it be illegal to use the internet you paid for, after all?
Do you really want to ruin university students' (read: theoretically the best and brightest of their age range with the most promising future ahead of them) lives because they downloaded some music to go with the exam material? Do you really want the police state needed to enforce these laws today?
Copyright was invented to protect those who owned a printing machine from each other. You don't think those rules should apply today, do you? And if you're worried about the author, ask them next time how much of the retail price they get to keep. They'd be better off if you sent one of them $100 and pirated for the rest of your life.
And if you're still brainwashed enough to defend copyright, google up all the ancient Greek works that were destroyed, and only their copies survived.