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."
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/modest-proposal-three-strikes-print
Let's see the "I don't believe in imaginary property" crowd come out with their memes — and see them getting a new one ripped out by people, who finally realize, that Intellectual Property is not just about stealing other people's MP3-recordings.
It is about everything, that's easy to replicate, but hard to design... Be it a book, a song, a shoe-design, or software program...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Lack of mobility mostly harms the immobile. It does reduce market efficiency somewhat, but it is nowhere near as harmful as ignorance. Ignorance acts as a multiplier to every other bad thing there is. Ignorance is the single biggest factor reducing market efficiency. If every human could access education without limits the world would be a much better place.
Infringing the GPL means treating someone badly who is being very nice to you. Under the GPL I can engage in endless commercial activity (therefore the GPL is a commercial license), I can share the software verbatim or modified, and I can run the program all I want for any purpose. I can't legally make that software proprietary; I can't restrict my users from doing what I was allowed to do because I must pass all those freedoms on to them when I distribute (GPL2) or convey (GPL3) the software.
Infringing proprietary software licenses doesn't work the same way. The proprietor isn't treating me nicely: they're offering to restrict what I can do with the software in many ways. Some proprietors even restrict my ability to run the covered program at all. With proprietary software when someone asks me for a copy, the proprietor puts me in a position of having to choose between alienating someone who has probably done me no wrong and breaking an agreement with the proprietor. As RMS points out, this is a tough choice because we shouldn't (in general) break agreements we have made and we have no justification for treating others unkindly when they've done nothing wrong to us. So breaking the license and sharing with one's fellows is the lesser of two wrongs here.
Ultimately the answer, therefore, is to never put oneself in that situation. One does this either by having no friends or by avoiding non-free software. Using only free software may mean doing some tasks differently or not being able to do some tasks until the software improves but it won't mean treating people unkindly and unfairly, nor will it involve breaking agreements we make via copyright licenses.
Digital Citizen