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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."
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
Come on Stephen, your books are pretty much the equivalent.
Right, because the most pirated artists are the poorest. I don't know how Metallica can pay the rent if another person torrents Death Magnetic. Most of the poor artists that actually can suffer from piracy are obscure so people don't pirate them.
Looking at The Pirate Bay's top 100 of audiobooks (because the e-books seem to be geek-only and aren't respective of the entire population, unless a crapload of people are annoyed with Vista and enjoy building the perfect PC) you find:
Harry Potter, self help books or language learning books from popular authors, dead authors (some recently deceased like Robert Jordan, others dead for years such as George Orwell), the Twilight Saga, etc. In other words mostly well-known books, or books in which pirating is not harming the authors (unless you get royalties in the afterlife).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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.