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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."
Actually, maybe offer the e-book for say 2$ and see how many buys you get. 50$ for a book might make people think twice before they buy, but 2$ for the book might actually generate more volume of sales for you. Those who pirate only do so either because they are not interested in buying the book at all, or they cannot afford it. But by making an authentic e-book version affordable you can increase volume sales because it becomes really cheap to buy. Replication of an e-book copy really costs no money unlike its dead tree counterpart, so instead of asking the question about how to control piracy, why don't you ask the question about why should e-books cost so much as the dead tree versions ?
You must be new here. Many of the worse case offenders live here. It sounds like you are pretty much damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you really think you can take on the pirates, good luck. If you figure out how, please don't tell the RIAA.
You're falling into the trap of noticing these two things:
A) Book sales are flat or downward
B) I found links to pirate copies
and correlating them in your mind without any evidence or proof that B is actually related A. Piracy is item #374273 in a list of 1,000,000 possible reasons why sales might be flat or falling. If you can't prove any real loss from B, then what's the point of wasting time/money pursuing it?
You seem to already have the negative caged-animal attitude that suing the shit out of everyone is your only option.
Considering this quote in the summary,
I'm open to suggestions.
I don't really think that's a very fair characterization.
Hey Peter, You don't suppose no one is buying the printed version because your website lists it as "out of stock"?
Here are the questions I'd suggest you ask yourself:
The downloaders are probably unlikely to buy your book at retail anyway, but they do bring you more exposure. Given that they are not costing you much income, how much time/money do you want to invest in pursuing them?
The people offering the downloads are probably working on the assumption that you/the publisher don't care. Often, a simple contact from the author/publisher will get the result you want, as they prefer the easy route.
My usual course of action is to ignore the downloaders. I usually drop the people offering the downloads a nice note saying that they're publishing my work, and if they'd send me half the money they made and stop it, I'd go away. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't but just go away. Those who continue, regardless, I see if the site is in the USA then send a DMCA notice. I also proactively work to ensure my own/publisher's sites are the primary matches for my publications.
Most importantly, I don't lose any sleep over it, or invest much time in it. It's not a big loss to me, and the intangibles I gain from it are worth more to me as a specialist writer. I figure an hour of my time is worth $25, and if it won't earn me $25 in royalties, chasing these people is time badly spent.
IMHO
"I am so sensible, sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.
At present, the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
On which side, indeed, should the public sympathy be when the question is, whether some book as popular as 'Robinson Crusoe,' or 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller, who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?
Remember, too, that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find, that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
So these laws finally went through, and the pirates are here. Surprise!
Consider voluntarily opting out of the over-zealous protections offered by current copyright law. For example, check out O'Reilly's Open Book project. Among their options are the Founders' Copyright, where works return to the public domain after 14 or 28 years (instead of the current lifetime + 70 years). Even better, given the technological revolution between then and now, consider even less restrictive licenses that would enable your customers to get even greater benefit out of your works.
Yes, this option requires that the public make some "nice distinctions" by recognizing that your works are (would be) more freely available than the typical work, and that they should correspondingly pirate them less. If you take this path, remember to proclaim your moral highground loudly and proudly, so that people notice. Also, encouraging your coworkers, fellow authors, publishers, etc., along the same lines and increasing the number of works so available will help the public to more often encounter and understand this issue, and again reduce the incentive to pirate your works.
I realize that the Wikipedia is very cool and much better than my books in many ways, but I don't think we're ready for it to be the only source of information.
No one claims Wikipedia should be the only source of information - in fact, Wikipedia explicitly disallows original research, and instead is meant to reference other sources. Even if you offered your "synthesized information" to Wikipedia for free, it most likely wouldn't be the appropriate place to put it (just as with any encyclopedia).
I'm not sure what your concern is with Wikipedia, as you seem to be repeating this point? I don't see how it's related to the issue of piracy for your book. If you mean that only free material will remain - well yes, it would be bad, not because free material is of poorer quality, but simply because of less material being available. Whether downloading copyrighted material results in less material being produced is of course a matter of much debate here on Slashdot.
But my point is, imagine a commercial software developer asking Slashdot about piracy, and then dropping a comment about "Imagine if we all had to rely on Linux!"? Yes, I think that commercial material is very important too (after all, I use Windows myself), but this comment doesn't come across well, and just reads as an insult to free information.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He could always flood the internet with incomplete electronic copies of the same file size. After downloading a few free copies of those people will get frustrated and buy the official e-book.
He could update his book?
It's 10 years old.
(Not posting a link here, as I will deny him the advertisement value)
With all due respect - 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. To hell with that.
There are a lot of people who talk about piracy. The publishers because they need someone to blame things on and the pirates like to make noise about how what they do really benefits society. I suspect the real truth is that it doesn't really do much of either.
You need to know that in our society you have people who pay for things and people who steal things. People who pay for things generally pay for things and people who steal things generally refuse to pay for things.
Years ago a some people I know got into the warez scene. For some reason and to this day I still don't understand one guy I know had $50 000 worth of software on his PC. He had no use for most of it and didn't even bother installing the larger part of his collection and most of it was for industries he neither understood nor had any interest in. He simply grabbed it so he could have a huge value of stolen software on his computer and he been forced to actually pay for it he would have dumped 99% of it.
It's the same with people in the town I grew up in stealing shopping carts taking them to a secluded area and bashing them open to get the dollar coins out. (yes I'm Canadian) Best they could be doing? $2 to $3 an hour. They would make better money collecting tin cans or working at McDonalds' yet they continue.
Do you honestly think that most of the pirates have any interest in programming compression algorithms?
In the same way the most pirated songs are also the ones with the highest volume sales so you should keep in mind that these are not actually causing much if any lost sales. The internet just makes it much more noticeable.
The few real programmers with an interest in learning about compression algorithms will appreciate the work you put in and want to reward you because that's generally what decent people do.
My advice to you is to grow thicker skin. I'm certain it would bother me if I were in your shoes but idiots will be idiots and no amount of lawsuits, technological fixes or attempts at guilt will change that.
Baen Books has been giving out free e-books for years now and because of the free e-books that these books sell for longer on the shelves and the hardbound versions sell more than the ones that don't offer the ebook.
Eric Flint has a commentary on baen's free library website here:
http://baen.com/library/
I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:
1. Online piracy â" while it is definitely illegal and immoral â" is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.
2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.
3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market â" especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people â" is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.
In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. He more or less virtually snorted and expressed the opinion that if one of his authors â" how about you, Eric? â" were willing to put up a book for free online that the resulting publicity would more than offset any losses the author might suffer.
The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. After all, Dave Weber's On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a "loss leader" for Baen's for-pay experiment "Webscriptions" for months now. And â" hey, whaddaya know? â" over that time it's become Baen's most popular backlist title in paper!
And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.
Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a "gesture of solidarity. "But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren't worried about the small cost â" once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug. )
Yes, he DOES know exactly what he's doing! Go do a Google search for one of the unique phrases in his post such as "selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle" and you will see that he has posted exactly the SAME message on dozens of message boards over the past month. Slashdot - News for nerds, stuff that mattersOthers search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking around for ...
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It's a book about data compression. It's TEN years old. If all he does is change a few words in the new edition, I hope it gets pirated by everyone who needs to read it, and I hope the ones who don't pirate it buy a used copy of the old edition. But if he truly adds value to it in an update he will solve this so-called "problem." I agree with the GP poster, this is exactly the reason copyright laws need to be reformed. What other job can you have where you can still get paid for some crap you did ten years ago? Methinks he doth protest too much.
Methinks the problem isn't piracy so much as that he is still expecting to get money for something that is already rendered obsolete by a newer better version, the creator of which is offing at a much better price (free).
This story should indeed be tagged Troll.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Does this apply to, say, works of fiction, too? If you were to write the Great Gatsby for our time -- a book that wasn't particularly well received when it first came out but whose appreciation grew over the years -- would you feel you had the right to get paid for it 10 or 20 years later when your book finally starts getting the recognition (and sales) it deserved?
It absolutely applies. There have been many many things that have failed initially because they were released before there time. It's one of the risks you take.
Or to put it another way, if I build and sell Widget A based on my patent, and for whatever reason it doesn't sell well at all, then when the patent finally expires another company builds Widget B which is almost identical and it sells really well, should they now pay me money for the patent?
There's a reason Patents and Copyright are supposed to be time-limited.
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.
Given how easy it is to publish, market, and distribute works these days, copyright should be shorter than it initially was, not longer.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
> Can you give me one single thing that has changed in the last 10 years regarding data compression?
I can, and it's a biggie.
Ten years ago, it actually made sense for an application to include its own built-in data compression subroutines written by the application developer. Today it does not.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You are correct. He's just making random assumptions, as most human beings do. I'm one of those who typically downloads something for free first, and then buys it if I like it. I wouldn't have to do that if the media companies offered refunds for junk titles, but since they don't, I use the "try before buy" approach to protect myself from wasting precious dollars.
If I were an author, I'd visit the top 10 pirate sites and just post a brief note. Something like, "Hello I'm the author. I hope you enjoy the book, and if you do please buy an official copy from amazon or other stores. Your legal purchase supports me, the editor, and everyone else who worked on this book, and help us feed our families. Thank you. :-)"
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Nonsense. It takes lots of time to write a book, often years. If I made such an investment of my time, I would hope that it would generate some income for several years, rather than just get swiped off PirateBay by spotty-faced freeloaders.
If I mow your lawn, then I get paid for mowing it and that is the end of it. A lot of jobs are like that. But not all. If I am your firefighter, I get paid each day, even if there are no fires. The day a fire breaks out and you need it controlled, you don't pay me anymore then you have done each day.
Doctors and such are slightly different as well, you don't just pay them for labor and material, you pay them for the cost they went through to get that education that made them a doctor. So their salary is not just the salary right now, but the salary they missed out on during their student years.
If I pay an engineer, I don't just pay him for the job right now, but for the ensurance that his work will continue to be solid long after the work has finished.
An actor I pay not just for the performance tonight, but for all the excersises.
A bus I pay not just for the overcrowded bus he is driving right now, but for all the empty ones in the off hours.
My rent for a house is not the total cost of the house, rather it is the cost of the house being build payed over several years.
AND THAT BRING US TO AUTHORS. The years of copyright are there because an author does NOT get paid his salary when he completes the book. Rather each book sold carries with it a small portion of his fee. In the days before current copyright an author was payed upon completion by the publisher and all sales after that belonged to the publisher. This is EXTREMELY risky for the publisher and easily leads to only those books being written for which someone is willing to pay the author his fee at completion or even during writing itself. Not all authors can work that way and if you value diversity neither would you want them all to work that way.
An author writes a book, then has to recover his salary he missed out on from the sales, sales that will NOT be instant on the day of publication. Do you really want books that might sell only 100 copies on day one to have to pay the author in full from their price? And then what reason would the author have to continue sales? That is the reason for copyright, to allow a content creator a period of time to recoup the costs of producing the material.
Copyright is no different from the rights of ownership that allow you to build a house and then rent if out over several years to recoup your costs and make a profit. If you want to get rid of it, it means the end of a lot of basic ways of doing business.
I myself have no problem with copyright (within reason), what my beef is with the RIAA/MPAA and the likes is that they wish to maintain their own roles of distrubtors/copiers and charge insane amounts of money for it while the content creators get peanuts.
Say a song writer charges 2 euro for a song, I got no problem with that. But if the RIAA charges that, it means the songwriter might end up with a nickle if lucky. THAT is the problem. Same with iTunes. If all the middle man were cut out the songs could sell for less and the artist get more. Win-Win, except for the leeches in the middle.
THAT is my problem with the current system, not the original idea of copyright. That is an essential if we want to allow content creators to make money from their work other then through a direct instant fee upon completion. If you want to be able to rent, you got to support propertly laws that allow this. And if you don't want to pay 20.000 for a book on compression, then you need to support copyright that doesn't mean this author has to look to single buyer for his work.
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