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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."
http://ebookshare.net/
Go to Usenet, get just about everything you could want. Build up a personal library of hundreds of texts that would match a (small town) library.
The book publishing industry will go the way of the music and movie industries, just a bit slower since reading text on a monitor is still not quite as easy as a real book.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
re:"Mr. Doctorow: "I really feel like my problem isn't piracy. It's obscurity.""
I think his real problem is he can't write. Might explain the obscurity.
... 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.
FTFA:
"The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys," Stephen King wrote in an e-mail message. "And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer."
Parent poster:
Go to Usenet
Sounds about right.
Mr. Doctorow: "I really feel like my problem isn't piracy. It's obscurity."
There, there, Cory. People are paying attention to you now. It's okay.
Back in his day they had this distributed network of his plays called Uyznettee. Only Uyznettee used horses as the transport. They would stick a small cannonball up the horse's backside for a "one." An empty horse was a "zero." Occasional errors occurred if a horse voided before the transfer was complete, but a parity horse took care of that.
A writer of trite, wanky fantasy who gets extremely litigious when someone borrows from her work as much as she borrows from others.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
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 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.
Honestly, lets all give up making unauthorized copies of books. I mean, when you do that, its almost like distributing them in a fully public medium, for free- readers don't have to pay a DIME.
Well, that, sir, is the worst form of terrorism. Certainly neither I nor our great US&A government could support an endeavor of such despicable intent.
Besides, you cant beat the independent authors industry- they're too powerful.
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.
They would stick a small cannonball up the horse's backside for a "one." An empty horse was a "zero."
Up the backside, huh? I guess that should be called "rear-to-rear sharing" then.
Oh no... it's the future.
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'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
"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!"
if I write a book and don't want it freely copied, I think I should be allowed to have that right
The problem is Rights aren't immutable and at least have to have some correlation to their being enforceable. Rights are a by product of society and when society changes our rights and obligations change as well. Unfortunately peoples opinions and expectations often suffer from 'lag', and for the really stubborn my not change at all, which will just lead to a whole bunch of pain - here's looking at you Ursula!
In general, I find the books I want to read either 1) get popular enough that they eventually drop down to a reasonable price, 2) are just popular enough that it's available without a wait at the library, or 3) is so obscure that I can buy one of the 30 copies that are actually still available for a couple of hundred bucks on Amazon.
Note that the one I would most be interested in an electronic copy of (legal or not), is the one that is least likely to have an electronic copy.
There are only a few books out there that are both popular enough that a good number of people want to read them, and yet not popular enough that buying the book is actually easier than hunting down the torrent or scanning yourself. Those writers will probably get hit hardest, and the gap between immensely successful writers and sort-of-successful writers may widen because of it. As an industry-wide problem though, I doubt it'll ever have the effect that it's had on, say, the music industry.
Guess which author these two quotes make me more likely to read?
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
Heh, reminds me of a story I heard about Ellison.
Ellison is notoriously short. Seems he was at a party and approached a beautiful young lady and (charming as ever) said, "What would you say to a little fuck?"
The lady looked down at the diminutive Ellison and replied, "I'd say, `Hello, little fuck.'" 8^D
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
For distributors and retailers, somewhere around 50% of the cover price, less any discount they offer.
For publishers... the value of a good editor is difficult to estimate. The same goes for a copyeditor and indexer.
As for the rest, I calculated that my publisher earned seven times as much as I did from my previous two books. This is after taking out the per-unit cost. Given that there was little editorial support, little marketing support, and production was a fiasco of heroics, confusion, and impossible deadlines, I'm not sure that said publisher provided seven times as much value as I did.
I'm not going to work with that publisher again. Now I have my own publishing company instead.
how to invest, a novice's guide
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...
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.
take a look at the price of classics that have long since been in the public domain, as they're not cheap either.
Here in the UK we've long since had several different publishers releasing whole rafts of Classic titles for 99 pence, which is little more than a U.S. dollar in todays' money. And they are well produced too . . .
Pages 211 and 216 must have been really good!
How we know is more important than what we know.
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?
Come on Stephen, your books are pretty much the equivalent.
You spell poorly and have low standards for material to look at while touching yourself, but you are NOT a troll.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised. I like Doctrow's work. However, it's more due to the subject matter and general concepts than the work itself. There are plenty of times I've felt something Doctrow wrote was more like story notes than finished story. But hey - still like his stuff. And I know who he is. ;)
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.
http://www.baen.com/library/
There are some pretty big name authors here as well as new authors who are trying to make it. You can read the dissertation by that commie Eric Flint about "Online Piracy".
Baen Publishing is noted for including a CD with some hardback novels that has free novels in it. Surprisingly enough they've not cried foul when digital editions of those CD's have ended up online.
http://www.webscription.net/p-162-freehold.aspx You can read a good friends book here.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
But does it feel like paper, can I casually flick to any page I want? Can I bend it, crease the corner of the page I'm reading or add a marginal note? Does the colour of the paper and it's smell tell me how long ago it was published? Can I look at the spine of an e-book and know the reading habits of the previous owner? Can I put it on my bookshelf when I'm done, have friends notice it and use it as a talking point? Reading books is an experience, it's not just about assimilating information. That is why we will always have paper books.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
Arsefuckers, I got her confused in my mind with Anne McCaffrey. LeGuin is actually really rather good -- The Left Hand of Darkness is a masterpiece...
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Here's the best writeup on the subject I've seen by an author, at the Baen Free Library. Worth a read.
Along web their webscription.net Ebooks website, Baen seems to have a good handle on this whole digital media business.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
He seems like a reasonable guy.
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 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.
http://inklingbooks.com/googlesettlement/googlesettlement.html
Because it excites them sexually? Man, I'm gonna get onto this copyright-violation thing if it's as good as licking your own balls...
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
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
One thing to point out about this is that the optimal strategy may depend very strongly on technological trivia that could change tomorrow. Right now, the average person has no easy way to take a pdf consisting of pages scanned from a novel and convert it into something more convenient for readers, like a plain text ASCII file. Similarly, the TV studios didn't have much to worry about until technology got to the point where a large number of people started to see the internet as more convenient than cable for watching TV shows.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of established authors seem to see free distribution as being in their own best interests. For instance, check out the list of titles available in the Baen Free Library. A bunch of these authors are extremely commercially successful, but they seem to be convinced that giving away texts for free in digital form will actually increase their sales of printed copies. And Ursula LeGuin arguably has more to gain from free internet exposure than, e.g., Mercedes Lackey. Try browsing the SF shelves of your local chain bookstore to see which author is better represented, and which one's books are oriented face-outward rather than spine-outward. Lackey probably sells more than LeGuin. I suspect that the reason Lackey makes some of her work available for free is more a generational issue than a matter of cold calculation of economic self-interest.
The plain, cold truth is that probably nobody knows how this will all work out in the end. People are just trying stuff to see what might work.
Find free books.
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]
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.