Slashdot Mirror
What Can I Do About Book Pirates?
peterwayner writes "Six of the top ten links on a Google search for one of my books point to a pirate site when I type in 'wayner data compression textbook.' Others search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking around for suggestions. Any thoughts from the Slashdot crowd? The free copies aren't boosting sales for my books. Do I (1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell? Is society going to be able to support people who synthesize knowledge or will we need to rely on the Wikipedia for everything? I'm open to suggestions."
Gee whiz, my book is so popular its being copied rampantly by pirates, damn them.
In other news, the twenty dollar bill is also popular, protected by the secret service, and also being counterfeit on a regular basis.
Get over yourself.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
If you got sent to Catholic school you automatically got a better education than you would have in public screwal.
I don't think your lawsuit would go anywhere.
When copying data costs nothing and there is a strong demand for it, trying to force people not to copy is like trying to prevent a creature from reproducing. The problem is in the economic system; we take for granted that we can write once and sell multiple times so we hate that when people copy our work, but it's perfectly normal. The system must be changed in a way so that an author gets an amount of money according to the quality of his/her works and for how much time people show interest in them. That money should come from the State, which would get it from taxes. People paying these taxes would get benefits such as free books/music/movies, etc.
Yes, it would be somewhat like communism; I certainly don't expect brainwashed people to understand it without thinking of half eaten children leftovers or marching troops in the Red Square.
The problem is people think they have all kinds of ridiculous rights and entitlements. Sorry, no one anywhere has ever had a right to making a profit. Patents and Copyright are the public giving the creator the privilege of exclusive sales of the product of his creation for a limited time. If you can't make a profit from your idea in a reasonable time period, then that's your problem, and no one else's.
That is not the case. Especially not in the USA (I assume you more or less tried to citate US law here).
The truth is more or less:
The problem is people think they have all kinds of ridiculous rights and entitlements. Sorry, no one anywhere has ever had a right to making a profit. Patents and Copyright are the public giving the copy right owner the privilege of exclusive sales of the product of his creation for a limited time. If you can't make a profit from your idea in a reasonable time period, then that's your problem, and no one else's.
Besides my correction in bold, your comment is a sign of very limited insight. You basically demand that an author of a work has to make his profit/living shortly after he did his work. So ... in other words he can not place it into his basement and sell it later? If he sells it as a book, but 10 years later it could become a movie, he is out? When someone finally after the movie was a success thinks about making it into a musical, he is out? HELLLLLO? Are you nuts? With what right should anybody be able to "transform" an authors work into a movie a musical a DVD a CD a TV show without paying proper royalties to said author?
In the middle ages when no copy right existed authors starved because every moron just could reprint it as he wished.
Currently we have no real solution to the problem of creative works, as ppl like you have no clue about authoring and obviously no clue about: If you can't make a profit from your idea in a reasonable time period, then that's your problem, and no one else's. ... in europe you can not transfer copyrights.
either. Why the F**K do you want to treat intellectual work different from any other work? If I make wine, I can store it in my cellar and sell it when I want, if I write a book I have to make my "profit" immediately? Problem is not creators and their right regarding their "inventions". The major problem is the US copyright law where creators transfer their inventions to a publisher/distributor
Regards ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It's a book about data compression. It's TEN years old.
And you Sir, with all due respect, you are an idiot.
Can you give me 3 things, oki, that was asked tom much, lets make it ONE single thing. Can you give me one single thing that has changed in the last 10 years regarding data compression? What happend the last 10 years that you demand the author needs to update his book?
If the work of that author is good, then it deserves to be payed for. What is the damn difference if you pay a teacher to lecture you something or to buy a book and read it to learn something?
Finally: you demand the author has to update his book ... so he deserves sales. Do you have any clue what it costs to do that, besides the work "in typing"? As the author is likely an USA inhabitant and gave away his copyright to an USA publisher he basically very likely can not at all republish a new version of the book (at least not without consent of his publisher). If his publisher would be nice: the author has to write a new version, find a new publisher, get it printed, distributed and still needs some way (I assume that was his question) for making a profit from it.
Regarding the authors question you failed to give any insight.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
isn't this exactly what is the problem with copyright? People sitting on their asses, demanding to get paid, while blaming piracy for not getting money for some work created ages ago.
Fuck you. Stop talking about industries you know nothing about.
Go try making a living at this. Go try making any money at all as an author, a musician, an artist, or anything creative, THEN come back and tell us that it's all about "sitting on your ass and demanding to get paid."
The reality is exactly the opposite. Just because the law makes it possible for someone to sit on their ass doesn't mean that anyone ever makes money doing that. The reality is you have to put days, months, and years into creating work and you never know if you'll make a damn penny off it. You have to write, you have to paint, you have to perform, and then you have to go out and promote your work over and over again until someone comes along and pays you money for your copyrighted work.
Any other business, you would get paid while you were working. By relying on copyright, you work for free now -- to create something of value to society -- in hopes that someone will find it worthwhile enough to pay you later. It's one of the riskiest businesses out there, and it takes so much hard work and dedication that saying creative people "sit on their asses and demand to get paid" shows you know nothing about how these industries work.
This