Slashdot Mirror
Novelist Blames Piracy On Open Source Culture
joeflies writes "CNN published an article entitled 'Digital Piracy Hits the e-Book Industry.' It quotes the following statement by novelist Sherman Alexie: 'With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away. It terrifies me.'"
The article also points out a couple of interesting statistics for a "slumping" industry beset by piracy: "Sales for digital books in the second quarter of 2009 totaled almost $37 million. That's more than three times the total for the same three months in 2008, according to the Association of American Publishers," and "consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."
from someone that doesn't understand technology?
Wikipedia says much of his writing comes from his experiences growing up on the rez. Maybe a talk with Cory Doctorow would change his mind.
Maybe if the consumer didn't feel ripped off, exploited, and raped by every business and company they have to deal with we'd be more receptive and less possessive of whatever goods we happen to come across. Half the damn stuff in my house I don't really own, I license or lease or rent it or whatever. Damn right I like the idea of open source and control.
Almost every aspect of open source/creative commons etc. requires attribution, and even pirates don't bother removing credits. Your 'artistic ownership' goes nowhere.
It's simple: don't offer your unfounded opinion.
Clearly people pirate books they wouldn't have bought... I know one kid who has like 4000 ebooks, he's probably read two of. Also, making them "more" digitized doesn't matter. When there's one digital copy, there's 10,000,000. They are right about one thing, making them easier to buy (and part of easier means less copy protection) will mean they will sell more.
Just look how iTunes completely stopped selling anything when they started offering non-copy-protected books - oh wait, they didn't.
I just checked the kindle store; He has five books available there.
I then checked amazon.com and found pages and pages of paper books of his.
Now, why would people pirate his books?
Perhaps because they aren't legally available in ebook format?
There's really no critique of open source here. He said "open source," but he's just throwing the term around without knowing what "open source culture" is. He clearly means something along the lines of "peer-to-peer" culture.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
ebook readers buy more paper books than other readers, and this is a suprise ?
Someone who is willing to spend 200-400 dollars on a e-reader is already a heavy reader, practically by definition. As much as I love my e-reader, there are a bunch of books its not good for - photo books, textbooks (no, A4 pdfs on a Sony e-reader are not a good option.) And for my favourite authors, i'll buy the hardback and get it signed by the author, and then lend to friends.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
Gosh... books have been free to read for a very long time. It's called a library. So if authors and publishers are worried about piracy of books why don't they cut libraries off? Gimme a break. There are many ways to use the digital mediums ease of distribution to make money/protect artistic ownership. Publishers should consider giving away a very basic digital version of a book, could even make it time sensitive. It would be very cool and very useful to have a world wide public library. Perhaps that seems unreasonable to police... but the reality is people can get whatever written material they want without buying it from a Borders store... and that isn't because of "ebooks". been this way for a very long time. The great books will be purchased by enough people to make money (my gosh, how many copies of LOTR, the Bible, etc. does everyone own... and those books are very easy to get for free!)
Sounds Familiar, just like when people complain that the publishing industry has become like the movie industry, controlled by a select few.
like when people complain that books cost too much. sound familiar,,,,.
too many writers are having to turn to self publishing because the publishing industry is trying to play OPEC/MPAA.
when my favorite writers put out a book i buy it. they just don't as often as i'd like and the new writers that are getting fronted i'm not impressed by.
Haven't books really been open source all along anyway? They're not always copyright free, but anyone can read them.
I don't see what open source has to do with it. People, in general, like getting something for nothing. Most people could care less about copyright. If anything, the open source movement educates people about copyright. The first thing people always ask is 'how can this be free?'.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Comparing ebooks to physical book sales is obviously stupid, because Amazon can't track how many physical books I bought at local chains, or the used shop downtown.
The loss of something isn't inherently bad. That a change terrifies someone you might respect does not make it bad.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I mean, i started reading my totally illegal ebooks, like, 6-7 years ago. So, what is this all about?
You will be assimilated.
Resistance is futile!
...consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers.
Consider how many sources exist for buying bound books, Amazon not being a particularly great one, and how many sources there are for eBooks for Kindle, especially for the technically un-inclined. That's a whopping selection bias!
Hey mate, spare a sig?
..for bank robberies. Lets pass a bunch of laws making it illegal to drive, then banks will be safe.
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity - of artistic monopoly -- goes away. It terrifies me." There, fixed that for you, Mr. Alexie.
he keeps on using internet for everything. he doesnt object to being linked in forums/content sites using open source scripts for their engine, he doesnt object to using google, which not only uses numerous open source elements to power its operation but also provides open source back to the community, he probably is thrilled when someone gets to buy his books by finding him the through the searches google provides, and many many more.
well, see, mr novelist, apparently you either dont know zit on what you are writing about, or just one of those who want everything self-centric.
if you want to prove otherwise, drop your usage of ANYthing that includes open source. including google, any and all links it provides to your novels/ebooks, any potential traffic/sales you get from forums/sites using phpbb and the similar open source engines. and then lets talk. else, youre just another bastard to us.
Read radical news here
You know, I'm always. . . impressed. . . by the ability of the 'news' media (and people in general) to turn things around completely ass-backwards. The anecdote that the CNN story leads off with is about the Dan Brown book "The Lost Symbol". The book sold millions of copies, but was pirated over a hundred thousand times in the first few days. To me, that says "9 out of 10 People willing to pay for stuff they *could* have downloaded for free". The *real* story, which CNN apparently wishes to ignore, is that the vast majority of people are honest, and wish to pay the authors whose books they like, *instead* of pirating. The *real* story is the pirates are the vast minority of people. Of course, that doesn't generate page views.
As for Sherman Alexie . . . why do I care if he (she?) is terrified? People get terrified about all sorts of irrational things. Many children are terrified of the dark. Why do I care if someone is irrationally terrified of something?
... and charge for support.
Enough said.
The people I know and work with in the open source community are probably the most piracy conscious people I know, mostly because of jack holes like this guy. It bugs the hell out of me that people always tie open source and piracy when in fact, there could be nothing further from the truth. I'm the first one to pay for things like GAMES for Linux, or quality e-books because I want people to produce more of them! And honestly, there's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for your work.
I think ultimately this has nothing to do with Open Source and everything to do with people wanting something for nothing, and if they can get it, they'll take full advantage. Likely the tie to Open Source comes from the fact that people who are extremely cost conscious are going to prefer Open Source products because they align with their pricing criteria (The same way illegal copies of products align with their pricing criteria)
-Runz
Or did I miss the law that proclaims artistic ownership to be illegal?
In HS and many MANY college sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies, etc. his books are required reading. So he's not hurting either way.
What is really humorous to begin with is... is this even news? FTFA, "...Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books." Uh, e-book piracy has been huge for the last 6-8 years if not more (newsgroup book flood posts, anyone?) I've been reading/collecting e-books for some time when I'm in a hurry and don't want to sit in the uber-long lines at Barnes-and-Noble or equivalent, but guess what I do? I either pay the little extra money to have my e-book print and bound professionally if I use it a lot or I just find the real book online for the cheapest price. The point I am making is there is a nostalgia associated with having a tangible book to flip through, bookmark, come back to reference, read again, read to your kids for the first time, etc. That's why I have (and the rest of the good world) has shelves full of tangible books at home.
Since we're on the topic of e-readers, like the Amazon Kindle, let's look at their target audience and why people are using them in the first place: Convenience, timeliness and information readiness. If I can use my e-reader to subscribe to my favorite XYZ newspaper and have it 'digitally' delivered to my kitchen table next to my hot cup of coffee, why the hell would I walk my ass outside in the snow to go pick it up off my driveway because the lazy delivery boy didn't want to put it in my delivery box? Same goes for wanting to buy that favorite/popular/just-released book and you don't want to stand in line at midnight to get it? Doesn't mean you won't go buy the hard-copy later on if that literary piece happens to be something you enjoyed enough to have as a tangible keepsake on your bookshelf, does it? And to end it, how many of those people are going to crack their Kindle with 'Swindle'? A few, but not the majority, because I don't mind paying for convenience, timeliness and information readiness once in a while.
As usual this person makes the very false assumption that 100,000 downloads equals 100,000 lost sales, when in reality it is more likely that close to 100,000 people who would have never bought the book are now reading Dan Brown when they never would have otherwise. This will most likely result in increased sales for Dan Brown in the future as these people ask others "have you read ...", and those people who haven't opt to buy the book and read it, just as happens in the music industry. You can't count someone downloading something they would never have paid for otherwise as a lost sale, and the kind of free advertising they are getting would be otherwise extermely costly.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I kind of find it funny that they're complaining about text books being pirated. After all they've been charging far too much for them for a very long time, and it's ridiculous since the people they're trying to screw over are students. If your parents aren't rich and paying for everything for you at school, you have to work to pay rent, food, bills and for classes/tuition, and a lot of those students can't get loans if their parents aren't on the up and up, so it's practically criminal that the text books would cost that much for how cheap they are to print.
Novelists can't be trusted. It's always a story with those guys. Like Al Gore and his triffids, or Michael Crichton's genetic engineering alarmism -- nothing to see here. Pure fabrication. I'm pretty sure if we want to know the truth about piracy we have to dig really deep into the back part of the Bible...somewhere between Muhammed and the passages about Neo.
These stories are free but worth money.
I have never even heard of this guy except when he talks about how evil ereaders are.
What are the odds that Sherman Alexie is simply making a controversial statement to gain publicity?
Prior to this article, I'd never heard of him. Given his statement, I doubt I'll every buy any of his work but his statement has gotten his name air-time.
linquendum tondere
ownership is a selfish term that will only hold humanity back
Perhaps Sherman Alexie would like to pay a license fee for their continued use of the idea of artistic ownership.
Yes, my desire to steal the occasional shitty movie after all the crap the MPAA has pulled, is driven entirely by the fact that I like to share my code with others to use as well.
Sheldon
"Goes away"? Goes away from what? When was the idea of non-physical, mass-market licensing of intellectual property well established? When has there ever been consensus on this subject?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Not long ago I wanted to buy an ebook (just published. I went to Amazon and they wanted the hardcover price for the ebook. $25 for an ebook, just plain silly. So I went to barnes&noble, they offered the ebook for $10, similar to a paperback. So I tried to buy it.
Aaaanndd.. an error came up saying that I could not buy this book from the area I was in (not USA). I looked around some more and did not find a european distributor for the ebook. Lot's of companies had the hardcover, but no ebook. I checked if I could order it from amazon (I had no intention of completing that !!$25!! transaction) and same thing. I was not allowed to buy the bloody book.
So I went to my friends at thepiratebay and got the book. I needed to do some conversion to get the text to display properly on my device, but it worked. The legal alternatives, which I tried to follow, simply did not work. Maybe there was a way to get the legal options to work properly, but the way to get customers to do the legal thing is to make that EASIER than the illegal way.
On iTunes I am guaranteed to get good quality files, on TPB I am not. Simple.
Here in sweden the streaming service Spotify has changed the game. It's just so easy to do the legal thing that illegal downloading went down. Do the same with movies, books, programs.. basically everything else. Make the legal way the best and easiest way, and people will come.
As for Cory Doctorow, I do wish that he gave me some way of giving him money for the digital copies I've gotten from him. I don't want to buy a paper version, and I don't want to donate a paper version. I just want to pay the author (and editor and all those involved) for his/their work.
this currently works best with movies and songs but they need to look at how popular the torrents for a piece of media is and go from there.
Day of release (or sooner) lots of fully working torrents: Great
Day of release a few fully working torrents : very good
week of release torrents that work : good (but not by much)
month of release torrents can be found: not good (real sales will be down badly)
if you work at it you may find a couple torrents: Bad (this is box office disaster territory)
no torrents : Bad very Bad (you may break even on the ROM/iTunes market)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Open source licenses rely on the same system and are just as taxpayer-funded as "all rights reserved". There's a lot to criticize in his statements, but misleading data (as in the summary) or extremism like yours doesn't serve the cause. We-have-a-right-to-everything-for-free is not going to convince the general public, politicians and courts that copyright reform is necessary. The focus should be limited copyright terms (12 years is what I've read maximizes the public benefit) and strong fair use rules. If we want to get there, defending piracy and ridiculing artists isn't helpful.
Fleur de Sel
and why do we care about his opinion? It's trivial to find an "expert" who will give you any opinion you want.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Piracy: the measure of people who are interested enough to try your product but not interested enough to buy your product.
" Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."
Whenever I hear something like this, I always feel like there is either a will to mislead or a statistical idiot on the other end. This would be much more impressive a statistic if it were statistically controlled for income.
I think it is a reasonable presumption that Kindle owners are wealthier (or have more wealthier relatives) than the average person. If they have the money to put $ 259 on a Kindle, they probably have the money to buy more paper books as well.
There are 3 times that people pirate:
1) When they can't afford it.
This is -never- a lost sale.
2) When they can't get it in the format they need it in.
This is a lost sale because the creator does not look after the needs of his audience. If it's not available via piracy in the format they need, it's still not a sale for the creator. It can only because a sale if the creator suddenly realizes the need and fulfills it.
3) When they have absolutely no respect for the property of others and just want everything free.
This is only a lost sale if piracy can be absolutely eradicated, since this person will always choose to pirate it, even if it's more work... AND if the first 2 don't apply.
The number of people that fit #3 that doesn't fit #1 and #2 is vanishingly small. It would require a perhaps that is morally bankrupt. They exist, but there just isn't that many of them. (They get in the news all the time, though, so it seems like there are a lot more than there are.)
So yes, piracy does, in a few cases, mean a lost sale. But for the most part, it just indicates that the creator doesn't know his audience, or that there was no chance of a sale in the first place.
Personally, my shelves at home are covered in things I bought that I would not have even known about if it weren't for piracy when I was young and broke. It's probably too much for individual authors to have a holistic viewpoint about piracy, but I know that anime companies in Japan understand it. Most of them turn a blind eye to piracy and use it for free advertising. Some of them eventually turn that eye back and ask the pirates to stop, but this is only once world-wide distribution starts. By then, the free advertising is over with and they've gotten about as much as they can from it. Notice that I say 'ask' and not 'take legal action', too. Because in that world, the pirates (for the most part) respect the companies as well. It's been that way for decades now and shows no signs of falling apart.
I'd have said that was one of the main things you kept with Open Source. The Open Source software I've originated has had fairly modest user bases but I've remained the lead developer. The main way I think I'd lose artistic ownership is if somebody took over and developed / maintained the software better than me - in which case they'd deserve it.
Quite upsetting to see open source associated with piracy, etc but I can see how for somebody a) not necessarily as tech-literate as us and b) working closely with people in an intellectual property industry which is suddenly seeing an influx of strange new concepts, it might seem like they're part and parcel of the internet (and in some sense they are, they're just rather different things anyhow!).
The idea that a corporation ( and it is corporations who are behind this - the artists receive 10% of the purchase price if they are very lucky) can hold the public to ransom over an artefact which has become so widely known and appreciated that it has been transformed into a part of the common culture, is despicable.
There is a vast difference between a struggling author having his work pirated and consequently being prevented from earning a living, and a work known by everyone, for which the author has already earned a substantial income, being withheld from those who cannot afford to pay the tax.
The images of the twin towers in flames, the famous publicity shot of Marilyn Monroe standing over the grating, the films I saw in my youth and the books which were held out to me as classics, and which I was forced to read (albeit gladly) are mine just as much as they belong to the corporations which 'own' the various copyrights.
There is a point at which a creation becomes so widely read or watched, that it ceases to be the possession of just one organisation and an eternal source of revenue for them.
The politicians who connive with big business to impose these 'taxes' are the real culprits in all this. They are crooks and fraudsters who legislate to legitimise their thievery. Vote them out. Organise and stand for office yourselves. You can do better.
He didn't make any such assumption. You can't put words into people's mouths then complain that they're wrong!
Artistic "ownership" is an abuse of the term. You can own physical property, such as a painting or book, but you can't "own" an idea or concept, and then morally prevent others from using their own property as they see fit. Intellectual property is a government sanctioned abuse of property rights. Such an innovation must be opposed on principled grounds.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity - of artistic monopoly -- goes away."
I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity). It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers .etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.
Take the iPhone for example. The materials that go into making an iPhone and those that go into making your average run of the mill phone are certainly not different enough to justify the price difference. The real difference is in the design - I.e. pure information with effectively no-limits to the amount it can be copied. Yet another company can't just use that information without Apple's permission - I.e. they can't just go off an make their own iPhone. Is this "taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity" bad?
Or take Windows or any other peace of commercial software. It's purely information so the fact that I'm not free to copy and use it as much as I want must be "taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity". Is this bad?
The point is that making this information takes very real time and effort, whether it's designing a phone (or car or whatever), writing software, making a movie/song, or in this case writing a book. So what is so wrong with people having the right to demand payment for allowing people to utilise (Be it for entertainment, business or whatever) the information they have worked hard to create?
Now I'm not saying there shouldn't be limits to this right. But it seems that a lot of people just shout "Artificial scarcity" at anyone who raises their voice against piracy or whatever.
Now as for this guy, I think correlating the open source movement and piracy is stupid. People pirate stuff because they want things for free and the risks are so low. That's human nature, with or without the open-source movement.
There is one problem with your argument. Libraries pay to have books on their shelves, they don't just get them for free. So it is apples to oranges.
In many countries libraries pay a fee to authors each year in order to compensate them for the lost sales.
TFA states:
Where do they get these numbers from? Do Rapidshare release download stats? Is there some secret BitTorrent download counter/tracker these people have access to? This has got to be a figure someone has just pulled out of their ass.
...because I prefer the convenience of electronic purchasing (vs. going to the store or ordering on line and waiting for delivery) and reading (my books are on my iPhone and always with me). I have never pirated a book either electronically or with a copy machine. If authors wish to sell to me they had better have their books in electronic format. I suspect I am not alone.
What would you propose as a replacement? See we have an interesting quandary: We like creative works of all sorts. A massive part of our entertainment comes from this and these days we even need it for other things. So we want people to be able to work on "virtual goods" as it were. Well, these people still need to eat. They need physical goods to be able to do their work. That means they need to get paid. So what do you do about that? There is our current system, where we declare virtual goods to work like real goods. You have to pay for each copy you want. This works pretty nicely in a capitalist economy. It encourages people to make works that others want, allows them to support themselves doing so if they are good, gives more rewards the greater the demand for a work is and so on.
So, let's say you do away with that. You say "Information scarcity is artificial, from now on, all information can be copied freely." Ok, how then do the creators of it eat? What do they do to make money? Their works are no longer viable. This means they have to get other jobs, their creative works can only be a hobby. The "Well just sell support!" that is often parroted for software doesn't work at all in these other areas.
You run in to the very real problem that we want people to spend their time creating works that are nothing but information. However, if you want them to do that, you need to pay them. So if you want to eliminate the concept of IP and have all information be unrestricted, you've got to come up with a system for how to compensate the people who spend their time making it.
And proprietary (e.g. MS Windows) prevents piracy. I think I understand what this guy's saying.
Let us tear him a new one, it is easy.
Actually, there have long been digital books, and they have long been pirated. It doesn't stop people from making a profit selling them. Also, paper books have long been digitized, then pirated digitally. They seem to still sell. This article: (-1, Sensationalist) And, I might add, it straddles the line between ignorance and fraud. It left poetic license behind several states ago.
This is based on a retarded notion of what open source means. I'm not talking about the OSI definition or anything; but in any case, it remains true that both Open Source and Free Software are powered by copyright! And even the BSD license, which retains copyright notices, explicitly retains the idea of artistic ownership. In fact, that's all it does. Wikipedia asserts that Alexie considers e-Books "elitist", but that obviously makes him some kind of asshole. Here's precisely why: computers are free. You can get a shitpile computer which can certainly handle reading an eBook for literally zero dollars. Freecycle, craigslist, places like this here Slashdot... People are giving away working computers every day. And people who can't even afford the obscene $4+ price for a used paperback, let alone the egregious $8 and up for a new one (god forbid the $20+ for a hardcover) can consume eBooks for free, both legally from sources like Project Gutenberg and illegally from... well, you know. All the usual spots.
Thus, Sherman Alexie is one of the following: Either a fucking idiot flapping his yap when he has no understanding whatsoever about the technology, i.e. a petrified luddite, or a hypocrite assaulting new media because he is afraid that if everyone (including the "disadvantaged") has free access to media, he won't be making any money any more. The simple truth is that there are thousands upon thousands of books available for free in one way or another. This quote (which I picked up from Wikipedia) should set most of you at odds with him immediately: ...many of my detractors fail to see one of the negative meanings: the audience decides which source material is or is not "open." He thinks eBooks are elitist because they bring power to the masses? Very clever.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Reminds me of buying PC games several years ago. I'd buy the thing, it would install install install then crap out and tell me that it wouldn't install because I had a *gasp* CD burner. I'd have to download the no cd patch every damn time. INcreasingly, the games would die during the install itself. So I started downloading the pirated versions of the games that I had bought. I eventually stopped buying games, just downloaded them. I switched over 100% to Linux later on.
I recently bought a new laptop that came with Windows 7 Home Premium. There are a couple of games that looked like fun, so I figured that I would dual boot. Had to download an ISO for exactly the same version that I legally have a license to as computers do not actually come with discs anymore. Now Windows is telling me that my activation key is not valid. I've re-entered it several times but still a no go. The laptop is from Lenovo and I got it from Newegg, neither of which are shipping fake keys I'd bet.
I'm wiping out Windows as soon as I'm done playing the games I paid for on the OS I paid for.
I am sick of the bullshit I have to deal with in the proprietary world of software.
Well the thing is that a non-trivial amount of people on Slashdot aren't software engineers or the like. Many of them are unemployed college student types. They've never had a real job, or have had nothing but a menial job. They haven't really given their position much thought, it is just a kind of general parroting of the "Information wants to be free, man!" slogan without real consideration. They've never had to support themselves so the consideration of how one does so hasn't really entered their mind.
in all of this is "Do writers get the same royalties when a e-book is sold as they do when a paper book is sold ?". If so then the fact that three times as many books were sold is good news for them. If not then it just points out that it's the publishers who are ripping them off. Of course it's bad news for the paper and printing industries but wonderful news for those who dislike the role of publishers as gate keepers and those who wish a copy of books that have gone out of print.
I can understand that writers are worried about this new threat.
Now millions of people can easily get books for free without paying anything for them.
It's like a gigantic library of free books!! Nobody will buy books if they can get them from a library, right?
The conspiracy theory about open source on the other hand, is just to stupid to comment on.
A computer is a tool, but I am not. I use Linux
Well I could actually, but it turns out it wasn't necessary, since I actually read and understood the article. Your mileage clearly varies. (The article is wought with statements based on this assumption, by the way. I just picked one from the actual author, lest you come back and say "that was merely a quote which he made no effort to debunk!")
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Enough Said.
This guy seems to be in the business of making money, instead of the business of writing. Writing is just a tool, money is the end. Hence, his opinion, however undocumented it may be.
I don't know if you've ever read a Dan Brown novel, but I can certainly state from first hand experience that after doing so, I'm now far less likely to buy any of his other works.
Let's be honest here, how many people do you know that really had "that idea" of IP ownership? How many talk about "licensing" Windows and how many "buy" it? How many "license" a book and how many "buy" it?
And that set in with the open source movement? My dad, who can't tell a toaster from a netbook and would think of a medical condition hearing about "open sores", is the proud "owner" of a very extensive dead tree library. And it's his firm belief that he "owns" those books, the idea that these books don't belong to him never crossed his mind.
So let's be sensible here. The idea of intellectual property never made it into public conscience. And until recently that was very much in the interest of the same people that now bemoan it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This person makes the very false assumption that, when someone tells you and another friend that they read this great book for free but didn't care enough to actually buy it because they expect you to, that you will actually buy it rather than also downloading it because you don't consider yourself inferior to that person. Even though both of you may have otherwise bought the book had you not heard about your friend getting it for free.
No, 100,000 downloads doesn't necessarily equal 100,000 lost sales. It's more likely to mean 300,000 people who expect the rest of the world to support their interests financially because they can't be assed, and they have a superiority complex. That's 300,000 people who have no moral issue with getting something for nothing while everyone else has to pay. And worst of all, it's 300,000 people who are unfortunately allowed to vote.
Actually I have read one of Dan Browns books, but I pirated it from the library ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Lost sales? If I borrow the book from the library, chances are I wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
Exactly. Companies need to stop trying to build up borders within the internet. The internet itself is one territory, it should be treated that way and people should be able to buy things from any website.
Of course! The point is, to the end reader they are free! (right, i know, taxes or some other funding provides the resources for the library)...
The author and publishers that are fearful of people pirating their books are irrationally afraid of ebooks and not afraid enough of libraries, based on their viewpoints.
Another point - It's just not sexy or good PR to tell the libraries to take the books out of circulation. ;) It is good buzz to yell at Amazon.
Essentially Google Books is attempting to be what I suggest. I think Google Books will eventually succeed and authors / publishers will get a cut of revenue from advertising and/or subscriptions.
The folks that are trying to kill of digital distribution or cripple it will never win with books. Never in the history of mankind has trying to limit distribution succeeded. The only way to make money in content is to give people BETTER ways to get at content - higher fidelity experiences (movie theaters) OR easier and easier access (itunes, pandora, magnatunes).
One last point that I didn't want to get mixed up in... people generally pay for GREAT content. It's the produces of SWILL that complain the most about piracy. The only way bad content can make money long term is by bait and switch, forced distribution... The business of bad content isn't content, it's arbitrage. Piracy really hurts arbitrage and that's what people are complaining about. Again, go back to my examples of LOTR, Bible, add to those Charles Dickens, Plato, etc. etc. these books are STILL routinely top sellers even though you can EASILY get ecopies, print copies and what not for free.
Lost sales? If I borrow the book from the library, chances are I wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
You might also not have ever encountered the book you borrowed! libraries are great discovery mechanisms... that's why we still have STACKS and don't all just sit at the CPU pinpointing exactly what we want.
Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers
Not to mention that we've already discussed how Amazon sold more e-books over Christmas than it did physical books. Piracy is killing the publishing industry like its killing the movie industry.
Where the hell are the boats?
Serenity now, insanity later.
"consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."
Of course, they mean people who own an e-reader buy more books from the MAKER of that e-reader, not in general. I'm sure people without Kindles don't exclusively buy books from Amazon.
I can see why you posted as an anonymous coward. Hypocrite.
Amazon sells on the order of 100M books per year, and has on the order of 100M unique customers. That means the average book sales rate is just one book per customer per year. So Kindle owners are only buying three books per year? That's not something to shout about!
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If anything, the 'open source culture' is a welcome opposition to the 'I had the idea, it's all mine ... mine !' egoism that we experience now. I think, humanity made it this far this fast, because they shared their knowledge.
Most scientific knowledge was open to everyone to use and build on it formerly. Now people try to keep everything for themselves and hinder other people to use it by patenting ideas, processes. They even do it with stuff that is not even their work, but that some mathematician has invented like 100 years ago and gave everyone originally for free. Suddenly someone uses this stuff in some application and claims it as their invention. It's sickening me.
So yes, if the 'open source culture' is working against this, great.
Alexie's comments were in a Colbert Show interview. I saw the show, which is on Hulu if anyone is getting peppy about researching this. I saw him speak at the Seattle Center a few days after the Sept 11 attacks. Sherman Alexie's entire schtick and world view is backward facing. No wonder a domain of inquiry residing more in the 21st century than in the 18th is frightening to him.
As usual this person makes the very false assumption that 100,000 downloads equals 100,000 lost sales, when in reality it is more likely that close to 100,000 people who would have never bought the book are now reading Dan Brown when they never would have otherwise. This will most likely result in increased sales for Dan Brown (....)
First of all, the author doesn't make that assumption. With that said - I think everyone realizes that 100 000 downloads do not equal 100 000 lost sales. However, I think everyone also realizes that some of these are lost sales. 100? 1000? 10 000? Noone will ever know for sure. And I do not believe that the "this will most likely result in increased sales for Dan Brown" will apply at all... it is just someone trying to justify their illegal downloads. The reasons I believe this are:
For unknown bands, bands on tour (not the top ones, as everything will be sol out anyway) etc, some illegal downloads might help. But for the top artists, movies, authors etc, this is nothing but a loss (the size of which is not "X illegal copies times RRP")
CNN was good twenty years ago, but decades of the TV news industry paying people dirt at the local level, salary cuts, job cuts, and the rapid demise of newspapers has resulted in most of the best and brightest picking other industries and avoiding journalism like the plague. As a result, you get people at the local level who are terrible at thinking on their feet and asking the tough questions.
And eventually, those people at the local level bubbled up to the highest levels. It was inevitable. I spoke about this problem more than a decade ago in front of a group of major industry players. It was obvious then where things were going. Now that they've gone, it's just about too late to fix it, so the best and most trustworthy sources of news are Comedy Central and blogs. It's all so very depressing.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Personally I'm just afraid of being locked out of my own collection (losing it overnight as with kindle, unable to transfer to new laptop/reader, unable to copy passages out of it for fair use or search/index it using my software, etc). Now that iTunes and Amazon offer unprotected music it's a great place to shop (I prefer amazon as it doesn't require bloatware in a VM to download, but iTunes often has better bitrate). Thing is that I'm not big on music, and most of what I like is free legally or I already have.
I really wish someone would do the same for books. As long as piracy provides a cheaper, more convenient, and higher quality product (all of which are currently true) how can legitimate distributors hope to compete? Well they can't win on price, but there's no excuse for not winning on convenience or quality. And that would be enough to win me over, despite my not having a lot of money. Offer a better quality, DRM-free product, with an easy buying process, at a sane price, and you'll have my business.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
It's the "why should I have to pay for it" attitude that creates piracy. The common rational is anything that is digitized or even can be digitized should be free and if they pay it's strictly for the cost of the CD or DVD. It's kind of like saying if I buy a car I just want to pay for parts and assembly but not designing the car. Or with drug companies I'll pay for the actual cost of producing the drug but not for the research involved in creating and testing the drug. A nice idea but the end result would be no new cars and no new drugs. Perfectly happy with the current stock so why expand? Where should we have stopped? With cars the Model T and with medicine leeches and blood letting? Innovations cost money and new media whether novel, music or movies cost money to produce. It's not all about distribution costs which most seem to want to reduce it to. We've already seen a drastic reduction in new material, fewer studio films and the record labels mostly back top stars. Hey all that wonderful free stuff on the net! Personally I haven't found more than a couple of new groups worth listening to in the last ten years and most of the no budget video films are unwatchable crap. I can count on one hand the exceptions and have several fingers left over. Most novelist spend 6 to 12 months working on a novel when you include rewrites and revisions. Three months would be extremely fast and I know few decent writers that can pull it off for anything more than 250 to 350 pages. Can you aford to work for 6 months of the year for free? How about 12 months? Also editors cost money and so does artwork. Novels are actually a good bargain if you wait for paperbacks. Add up the time it takes you to read one and it's a far better dollar value than movies or video games. Even hard covers are better dollar for hour. There has to be a middle ground between over charging and paying nothing. If it can't be found then we face a bleak future of less and less entertainment where youtube is the height of entertainment and all the good movies have been made and all the good books have been written. I can get by watching classic movies and reading classic books. It's the tweens' that will suffer from not having a new Twilight novel or the next Harry Potter. Scifi films have used this analogy from Omega Man to 28 Days Later of no more new films being made resulting after an end of civilization. We could see that happen without the world or civilization coming to an end. It simply isn't possible to make money at it any longer so they give up. Also all these people doing it for free trust me are doing it in part hoping to be discovered so they can make a living at it. Take away that incentive and most won't even try.
Unfortunately the average person has very little idea what the term "open source" actually means. It's a technical term that's vague to them. These are the kind of people who probably also aren't clear on the term "operating system," etc.
I've seen both positive and negative misinterpretations flying around. The usage in TFA seems to be open source == piracy, or maybe open source == free as in beer. If you really parse the quote from the article in terms of the actual meaning of "open source," it doesn't make any sense. Actual quote: "With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of [artistic] ownership [...] goes away." Meaning: "People on the internet are used to being able to see the original programming instructions used to create their software, and with that culture, the idea of [artistic] ownership [...] goes away." It obviously doesn't make any sense. It also doesn't make sense when you consider that open-source licenses like BSD and GPL can only be enforced because the original authors own the copyright.
There are also people who see "open-source" as a feel-good term, like "green," and they apply it inappropriately because they want some of that goodness to rub off on them. For instance, I went to a symposium in August here in California where the results of Schwarzenegger's Free Digital Textbook Initiative were announced. Participants included open-source types from Curriki, CK-12, and Connexions, as well as teachers, politicians, IT folks, hardware vendors, and textbook publishers. The only traditional publisher that submitted any books to the initiative was Pearson, and all they submitted was a consumable workbook, not actual textbooks. Pearson's rep referred to its workbook as "free and open-source," but in fact the workbook is not open source in any sense. (It's distributed in a non-editable format, and it's not distributed under an open-source license.)
It's unfortunate that we haven't ended up with terminology that's more understandable to the average person. We had people like RMS advocating the term "free software," and others like Eric Raymond pushing for "open source." This had to do with an ideological agreement within the free software/OSS movement. The problem is that neither term is easy for outsiders to understand. "Free software" simply implies free as in beer to most people. They equate it to "freeware," i.e., low-quality, closed-source Windows software that you download from someone's Geocities page as a .exe file. "Open source" isn't understandable to most people, because they don't understand the distinction between source code and executable code.
Find free books.
Alexie is a Native American. Those people have no sense of ownership anyway. Their tribes roam from book to book. It wasn't until the white man arrived with his culture of printing out books and putting his name on them and getting all upset if the Indians took them off the shelf and didn't return them within two weeks that the trouble started.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
There are a number of other things they should really correct for, e.g. an illiterate person is unlikely to spend money on Kindle *or* books. However the statisitic is at least enough to show that kindle owners don't just use pirated content. Or just free content either for that matter.
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but there really needs to be a higher profile public education campaign to teach the masses that Open Source isn't about piracy (i.e. taking someone's IP without permission); it is about IP that is freely given. The very foundation of the GPL (and other Open Source licenses) is copyright law, and the fact that the legal owner of that IP can give it away (possibly with strings attached).
The rise of Open Source is completely orthogonal to the piracy issue.
This guy is just absolutely nuts. Biggest Luddite I've ever seen.
-chris
The main difference is that a physical book can only be used by one person at a time, whether it is purchased by the reader or borrowed from a library or a friend.
The situation is comparable to software server licenses that have a maximum number of connections - any number of different people can use the software, but only a fixed number at a time.
A downloaded work without DRM can be shared with any number of people, if copyright restrictions are ignored (and they often are).
Nobody is saying that copyright is bad (well, not me at least). But copyright, thanks to you in the USA*, is now basically indefinitely.
Copyright is a balance act, benefiting the creator and ripping of the public culture
* because of you exporting the idea of an indefinitely copyright to all Europe and rest of the world. In addition to the ridiculous flight safety laws. Thank you very much America.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
If I trespass on your property and build something from your materials, I don't own the result, even though it's "my" creation. Buf if I design something, then I can legally prevent you from building that thing out of your own property; in effect, I usurp some of your (and everyone else on the planet's) property rights.
Your main argument seems to be that because someone put a lot of work into something, he is entitled to get money for it. Why did he put a lot of work into something in the first place? Perhaps because he knew he had this artificial scarcity and taxpayer-funded policing of people. OK, but that doesn't give us a reason for having it in the first place, before anyone was expecting such policing.
It seems the only justification is "because we haven't come up with another model to fund the large initial investment in creating a design". I think initially people accepted this, because the monopoly was of a fairly short duration, short enough that it was worth the benefit of this new funding model. But that's long gone, and the public domain has been shafted.
In this case, I believe that no one has an inherent right to someone else's content, any more than I have a inherent responsibility to buy product at the advertised price. Both are choices. Does the content provider want to sell content want to sell content at a price I wish to pay, and do I wish to pay that price, or is there something of better value.
The thing about books, and your story, is that many publishers and writers are a point that music and movies gave up long ago. That alternative forms of distribution is bad. In particular, books can be published with as much DRM protection as movies, so the risk is not high. Moving to ebooks will ultimately mean that printing presses are much less needed, but then publishers have to ask themselves if they are in the printing press business or book business.
Of course ebooks are going to be easier to steal, so the price must come down. And it will harder to rip artists off with loss and reject cuts. And the publishers will have to figure out new ways to drive sales.
OTOH, if every popular book is going to be on the net the day before the book officially released, then we are going to see the very capitalistic phenomenon related in this story. It is more expense to acquire than to steal, so steal it is. And for people who do not believe this, recall the recent MS Word injunction. MS realized it would be cheaper to steal and pay a settlement if caught than to buy a proper license. So this, as a capitalist firm, is what they did.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Great point. I mean unless you count that his entire article is wrought with quotes making that assumption, and he makes no attempt to correct it. I guess he could disagree with them all but never state that in his article. It happens all the time, an author presenting only one side of an argument and it's the side to which he doesn't agree.
You are the one making assumptions. I have no reason to "justify" behavior in which I do not engage. I do like to actually understand what I am reading and assess if the claims hold water. In this case they don't.
A: Plenty of poeple in the world still ask the question "Who the hell is Dan Brown"
B: Maybe I heard of him, but I haven't given him any thought lately. Most people have heard of Ford Motor company. You might want to inform them that they are just throwing their money away advertising, because nobody explained that to them apparently.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I agree on the absurd pricing. I got a Kindle for Christmas, and even though I'm in the US, I haven't paid for an e-book on it yet. I've searched for several I'm interested in, but they're either not available as an e-book, or their price is comparable to a real paperback book. Sometimes, the paperbacks are cheaper than the e-books, like if you buy a set of 3 in a series.
So for now, I have several public domain books (http://www.freekindlebooks.org/) I can read.
If Amazon wants the Kindle to be a real success, they better make it easier to get into the buying e-books market. It doesn't make sense (to me) to pay the same amount for an e-book as a real book.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
and the Baen Free Library.
'Nuff said.
While I am not in the same position as you, your post touches on the other issue with E-Books: Cost.
I absolutely refuse to pay $25 for an E-Book. That is ludicrous. Complete rape.
I will pay $1 for a book, maybe $2 and that would be severely pushing it. I will not pay $5, $10, $25 for an E-Book. Sorry, but no. There is virtually no cost to distributing an E-Book. There is no paper, ink, shipping, storage, typesetting, etc... there is simply pressing a button to make a copy.
That's all a book is worth to me. If a book costs more than that, I am being ripped off and I won't pay it. When is the publishing industry going to get it through their heads that overcharging by a factor of 25 is unreasonable and people aren't going to pay it indefinitely. They get pirated because they overcharge. I started to buy music again when Amazon started offering DRM free MP3s for a buck. I think 99c is still a bit overpriced, but it's within the realm of reasonability and thus I pay for my music. The same will go for books... but until then, I hope places like the Pirate Bay continue to exist to the benefit of the world at large.
Open source licenses rely on the same system
They rely on the same system to counter the effects of the system. Without the system they would not need the system.
The focus should be limited copyright terms
Limiting copyright terms is ultimately futile. As long as copyright works as an artificial scarcity it damages the economy, and as long as it's implemented as a privatized taxation for you're basically not going to get it to stick at whatever number of years you want it stuck at. The incentive to increase it will always remain among the profiting stakeholders and the parties paying for the transactions will not be represented as long as the system cost is not accounted for.
The exclusive right to control copying is what needs to be done in with. If you want to fund creators out of what is the equivalent of state funds, then just fund them out of state funds (with funding gathered out of, for example, a vat system on content carrying copies). Tie it to number of copies made or something if you want economic effects equivalent to today, altho actually recognizing it as a transfer system has more interesting possibilities (what number of years maximizes public benefits is grossly generalized), more appropriate targets would be amount of payout to author per year, perhaps capped, perhaps scaled per work for a number of years, etc, to create an incentive for maximizing productivity. That would also dissuade from the non-core activities such as marketing, lobbying, partying and distribution, as those would not, and should not be funded out of creator incentives.
If we want to get there, defending piracy
Piracy is unavoidable and well on the way to being utterly uncontrollable. Further, in light of the media lobbyists attacks on freedom and democracy denying them revenue by any means necessary has become an ethical obligation. Whether it's making sure all your friends and relatives have access to any media they could desire to prevent them from providing funds to the media lobbyists, or to provide random strangers with copies they may desire, both are socially responsible things to do in the face of efforts such as ACTA.
And really, having 'reasonable' dialogue has gotten us well on the way towards multi-century copyright where artists and creators barely get the crumbs falling off the table (and far lower part of revenue than in any other state-run transfer system). You may want to update your idea of what 'helpful' means in this case.
Was it to take advantage of copyright laws or in response to them?
Dan Brown doesn't sell other products, so one can't say that he'll sell concert tickets, t-shirts etc instead
Not to sure about that. Didn't they just make a movie of the sequel to DVC?
Hello everyone,
I need a little help from the slashdot community. I am interested in reading some of this author's works, but they don't seem to be available for the Kindle yet. Please take a few moments out of your day to help me by clicking on the link on each of this author's books that indicates a desire to have the book available on the kindle. Here is a link to his author page on Amazon to get you started.
Thanks a lot for your assistance. I look forward to reading these books on my Kindle very soon now.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I find Alexie's comments sort of ironic, given the historical take of land ownership by Native Americans vs the invading Europeans. (Sherman Alexie's writings focus around the lifestyle of modern Indians in the Pacific Northwest. Great stuff, by the way)
Nobody has a right to profit off their creation. Be careful where you throw around the word "right." Rights are things we protect, but I don't think you mean we should protect the profits of any particular industries. ;)
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity - of artistic monopoly -- goes away."
I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity). It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers .etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.
It's worth noting that grandparent does not criticize artificial scarcity, just calls it what it is in order to contradict the novelist's claim that it is a form of property. Whatever grandparent's opinion on the value of copyright may be, the statement that it is not like physical property under US law is correct.
I rather like copyright, particularly as I'm an aspiring novelist, but I have no illusions that it's a type of property or that my novel should be "mine" forever should I be fortunate enough to get it published. I recognize that copyright is just a limited right that I'll get to exercise for a long span after the work is released.
Let's see, I buy books with Amazon's Kindle at the *Amazon* store. I can buy real books at the book store, the drug store, the grocery store, the gas station (you'd be surprised), the garage sale, the library's old book sale, eBay, and of course Amazon (and other e-tailers) - and that by no means is an exhaustive list.
It stands to reason that the *availability* of other sources might has something to do with the amount of books a given customer buys at Amazon / physical vs. digital. Just sayin'
Illiterate? Write for free help!
"Half the damn stuff in my house I don't really own, I license or lease or rent it or whatever."
And the other half you pirated?
Take the iPhone for example. The materials that go into making an iPhone and those that go into making your average run of the mill phone are certainly not different enough to justify the price difference. The real difference is in the design - I.e. pure information with effectively no-limits to the amount it can be copied. Yet another company can't just use that information without Apple's permission - I.e. they can't just go off an make their own iPhone. Is this "taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity" bad?
Given the conditions you've laid out - yes. If the materials for a new iPhone are no more expensive than those for a cheap generic - the difference in price is entirely due to the difference in once-off design costs - then why are we making the cheap generics? It would be more efficient for us as a society to do the phone design once, and well, then to produce only copies of that well-designed phone.
We tolerate this inefficiency, caused by patent and copyright laws, because it encourages people to produce new phone designs, artistic works, etc. The artificial scarcity that they introduce is bad - we just hope that it's outweighed by the good effects.
As a software engineer, I don't. I get paid by the hour or by the project. I couldn't care less what happens with my work afterwards.
Most of my work is on custom internal applications and not things sold on the shelf. You can pirate it all you want, but it's not made for you, so you're unlikely to find it useful, and even if you can use it you'll still need to pay somebody to adjust it to your needs.
I've written open source software for money. It's easy. Customer says "I want this software to be able to do X". I look at it, negotiate with the customer, do the work and get the money. Modification gets released under the license of the original project (was GPL2). Maybe some other programmer somewhere will get money in the future for building on my work, and so on.
Yes. I'd like to have companies competing to make the best phone possible. For that purpose, it'd be best if any company could create a phone with any design it wanted, without being restricted by patents.
Yes. Attempting to keep it from being copied imposes a cost on society that I think we'd be better without.
I'm not against work being paid for, I simply think work is something that should be paid for at the time it's performed. A programmer can charge by the hour/project, a musician can charge for creating a song, and so on. Then we don't need the entire messy copyright thing.
Almost every aspect of open source/creative commons etc. requires attribution
Not only that, Eric Raymond argues in The Cathedral and the Bazaar that one motivation for writing open source code is to earn the esteem of your fellow coders. For that, proper attribution is crucial. Not only don't we disrespect artistic ownership, we want our peers to respect ours.
and even pirates don't bother removing credits.
In fact, pirates add their own credits to stuff. Have you ever seen an anime video with "Fansubbed by SuchAndSuch" or "Ripped by SoAndSo" banners? Or downloaded the newest film released by aXXo?
Everybody wants fame and esteem.
(Not everybody wants it as much as $other_thing, or are willing to do the things it takes to earn it, but we all like to hear "you are important to me" and "I love the things you do for me")
Your 'artistic ownership' goes nowhere.
I disagree---it doesn't go nowhere, it goes the other way.
On top of that, the open source culture around software may decrease piracy.
Back before I discovered gaim (now called pidgin), my favourite multi-protocol IM chat client was Trillian. Before I discovered the GIMP, I used Paint Shop Pro. And so forth. I won't link to scan-ins of my receipts; you might steal my serialz or something ;)
By allowing people to share freely, and by the fact that Free (as in talking beer) software exists that solves most of most peoples' software needs, there's less need to pirate non-FOSS software.
I don't think he's right. At least I have made a good argument for why he might be wrong. But really this is a question of fact, so to settle the matter we really ought to collect some evidence. What would be good evidence?
How about this experiment: pull people into your psych lab, teach them about open source and free software ideas and ideals, then let them back out into their lives. Some months later (1? 3? 6? 12? More than once?), pull them back and ask them how they feel about copyright infringement and how much copyright infringement they did.
As controls, pull in some other people and talk to them about something unrelated. Pull them back in on the same schedule as the others. Compare the answers of the two groups.
Maybe you want to divide the copyright infringement questions into different types (software, music, films, books, other). And maybe you want a baseline measurement from when you first pull them in; maybe even both before and after talking about FLOSS.
Wouldn't that settle the matter? Because, as far as I can tell, all we have now is biased opinions---including my own, I'm just thinking more clearly about his bias because he disagrees with me. Don't you just love human nature? ;)
There's an article up at the LA Times about Peter Drucker. If you don't know, Druker was an economist who said things like:
The enterprise exists on sufferance and exists only as long as the society and the economy believe that it does a necessary, useful, and productive job.
As pointed out above by noidentity and others, people who have risen in the economic hierarchy thanks to institutions built by the people for the people owe their success to society's edifices as much as themselves. Sure someone may be a talented corporate cost-cutter with the nickname "Chainsaw" or a writer nobody has ever heard of, but they would be flipping burgers if it wasn't for the artificial man-made constructs of incorporation and copyright.
There's an implicit Ann Rand-ian quality to Alexie's thinking: progress for all depends on the special qualities of a few geniuses who naturally deserve the good life. Putting aside the fact that most admirers of Rand ignore that her elite characters all had a social conscience and gave back, few people who claim to be rainmakers stop to consider where they got the water that makes the rain.
But that's all background really, the issue that Alexie is talking about is the economic value of what he does. That value is assigned by society and I think it's fair to say that the generation growing up doesn't see as much value in it as he does. And they may have a point. Upsetting as it may be to artists, would the world fall apart if it was even harder to make a living doing what they do? Did Avatar give us free electricity? Feed Africa?
The artistic community might also want to ask itself if copyright had not been extended to ridiculous lengths and more books that people actually want to read were in the public domain, would that have prevented a lot of piracy? Experience has shown that where legal alternatives exist for people to get what they want they will chose those alternatives. I don't think too many people explicitly know how many works they have been denied by copyright reform but I think they can sense it.
The conflict we have now exists because this generation's instincts clash with the status quo. It remains to be seen whether or not the interests represented by Rupert Murdoch`s media machine can keep the lid on things.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
I buy all my books used, mostly ebay for less than $3 each. I paid about $300 dollars for $4000 worth of books. Maybe if they didn't price their books at $50-75 each people would buy more. If I have to pay $75 I would rather download the rfc or online documentation and struggle for a few weeks learning it that way. I bought one pdf book (jogl) but actually have trouble reading books on the computer, I prefer a physical book.
My couch, bed, carpeting and most of my furniture is pirated. You got me. Please don't turn me in!
Blar.
I don't see how piracy is much different than being friends with a book addict who has mountains and mountains of books ready to lend you more than you could possibly read in a lifetime. I've bought very few books because when I walk into the store there are tons of books to choose from and I am not about to randomly judge a book by its cover and pay money for something I don't know if I'll like. Sure I could read book reviews by various publications but its much easier and cheaper to have my friend lend me everything after he has read it and told me what is good. I sure hope he doesn't get a Kindle anytime soon though or my source for free books will dry up quick!
Nothing unusual to see here, folks, move along... it's just your garden variety ideological spat between what's-mine-is-yours cooperation-minded soci... errr, mutualists and dog-eat-dog competition-minded pi... errr, capitalists - the latter represented here by some hare-brained self-important writer.
Sherman, why don't you go to a Linux convention, a LUG group or any other open source forum. Bring a bunch of your books and have an open discussion with the people who are 'stealing' your works. If you were to educate yourself about us as we do about you, I think you'd find a whole new audience. Can I steal a bogus line from a large software vendor? "Get the facts!"... and maybe sell some books!
One other thing that I'd like to point out is that the ubiquity of the products of that same large software vendor is directly related to piracy. If so many copies of Windows and Office had not been pirated early on, there would not have been the nearly universal adoption of the product as a 'standard'.
In short, Sherman, a little piracy will spread the word about your works far faster than putting your head in the sand and using up trees. Speaking of which, do you mind terribly if I loan my friends a hard cover copy of one of your works? If they enjoy them, they might buy something else and spread the word even further.
*** Don't be dull.***
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/01/ebook.piracy/ - the posted link having been removed.
"Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times". And I thought 95.5565% of statistics were made up on the spot.
I've also been known to read the books on the bookstore shelves. One summer I decided to spend my lunch hours that way - if the comfy chair was empty, that is. Oh, I bought a few for my shelves or as gifts, too.
But Open Source is about telling Microsoft and Apple etc. not to steal from academic or public-minded engineers. It only stands to reason that one of the big players will take the chance to stick in a slur that is totally wrong but might sway an uninformed opinion. What Open Source does is keep the source code from vanishing when the software support disappears. This is what is good for everybody about it - everybody except for that company that does not want you to use this year what they sold you last year, but instead to purchase this year's product that comes with this year's strings attached - and still no source code. Open Source totally allows a company to license, from the author, software to be used in a commercial project.
Copyright for authors gives them a similar reward. Once you publish, you get your reward, and once the copyright expires, the public gets to keep your work, in the open, for everybody.
...that the same country that told him to go take a hike when he complained about Americans printing copies of his book without paying him royalties is now battling so hard to prevent on-line piracy. What goes around, comes around I guess.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity).
"The right to profit of your creation" doesn't necessarily imply "artificial scarcity", that's just one of the (many) models we've found for it.
It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers .etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.
Not really. Most of the world's code never sees the light outside the company that wrote it, so even if the whole model of "artificial scarcity" were to be outlawed tomorrow, the software engineering field wouldn't be affected much in terms of employement.
And yes, all the examples you mention are bad. There are ways to finance innovation without restricting others' rights, they may not work for everybody, but neither does the "artificial scarcity" model and we at least are fed up with its restrictions already.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Because if you get enough clueless, misinformed and 'terrified' people running around acting stupid, you end up with rights restrictive legislation like the DMCA.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So if authors and publishers are worried about piracy of books why don't they cut libraries off?
They would very much love to do so. Problem is, they legally can't.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Well, these people still need to eat. They need physical goods to be able to do their work. That means they need to get paid.
I have bought four guitars, two amps, cables, effect pedals, a saxophone and a clarinet, pooling together summer job wages, birthday gifts, savings of allowances, et cetera. I've been in a recording studio twice; I've performed on the local town square once, and at several events locally. Back when I was a kid (~14-18yo) and didn't have any real money.
Musicians want to play. Actors want to act. Writers want to write.
The publishers acted as quality assurance; they did searching and pruning, so we could have the best art. You know what also does that? A moderation system (/.). A review system (amazon). A simple counting mechanism ("most downloaded this day/week/month/year").
None of them are perfect. So aren't the studios. And some artists already choose a life of material poverty in return for wealth in terms of self-expression and self-actualization.
Exactly why is it that the people's need for art can't be satisfied well enough this way? Some amateurs are really good. Oh, so we'll go to the theatre and look at people rather than go to the cinema and look at screens, because making films is rather resource-intensive (i.e. expensive). Or we'll watch more shorts and/or more animated films. Won't we still be entertained?
I have a hard time trusting numbers both collected and analyzed by a party who has a vested interest in proving only one conclusion.
There's lots of room for number fraud when you have one expanding market that impacts another but the market is owned by the same entities. How often do you see the net total adjusted for the current economic situation? Are the book markets actually loosing money? It's hard to say we don't have that data. We have the bits and pieces of that data which would lead us to one conclusion.
Now... if you'll excuse me, I have to go pirate some conspiracy novels.
1> Lower cost of distribution and reach means:
-- lower barriers to entry
-- more artists can produce & reach their market
-- hence more supply.
-- it also means more demand due to lower costs, easier consumption (think straight to itunes > iphone model)
2> More supply means less insane profits for what used to be the 'media conglomerates'
3> More demand (for quality content) ensures the artists making the right content win. And the ones who don't lose. That's why Hollywood had the best year last year - yet the hit:flop ratio still didn't improve much.
but I have no illusions that it's a type of property
That's very odd, seeing as it is a type of property. You do realize you can sell your copyrights to someone else, right?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Without the system they would not need the system.
Without the copyright system, how would licenses such as the GPL ensure that the software remains Open Source, and is not misappropriated? I don't recall the authors of the major Open Source licenses saying that their goal was the abolition of copyright law.
If Open Source doesn't need the copyright system, then why don't they just declare the works to be Public Domain? that would be the same as having no system.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Nobody is saying that copyright is bad
You might want to try reading slashdot sometime.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I know this guy used the phrase "open source" completely wrong, but lets just ignore that really quickly. My immediate reaction was "bullshit, I was in to piracy way before I was in to open source." I'm actually far more responsible with intellectual property now that I'm in to the whole open source thing. Instead of "stealing" software I can't afford I just track down an open source alternative (that's usually better). I no longer pirate closed source software, I just avoid it whenever possible. I haven't pirated any software since I switched to open source, so clearly OSS *prevents* rather than promotes piracy... for me anyway. The title of the article suggests that open source leads to piracy, but, as we all know, correlation =! causation. Piracy and open source are both based on a recognition of the failures of IP. Many technologically astute members of my generation (those raised with the internet at least starting as teenagers) grew up in a culture of "share everything"/"everything is free" and therefore often reject IP as absurd. Our kids didn't need to know all the good mp3/warez sites, they've grown up with broadband, youtube, and instant access to everything. The article could have as easily been labeled "Novelist, who completely fails to graps technological and cultural developments, complains about kids on lawn."
when in reality it is more likely that close to 100,000 people who would have never bought the book are now reading Dan Brown when they never would have otherwise.
So, in summary, you're saying that piracy is a very bad thing, and must be stopped at all costs?
... and then they built the supercollider.
At most, one could present the argument that it's not the open source culture, but instead the Internet itself, which by its nature involves sharing, might be to blame by providing everybody with constant access to an enormous quantity of information, and for those that have too little self-control to care whether or not a copyright holder is fairly compensated for any individual copy of something, a ready means with which to satisfy virtually any of their desires for access to it. Of course, the irony there is that when it's worded like that, you see it's not the technology at all... it's actually just the people.
And again, the people who seem to genuinely care about open source _don't_ tend to approve of piracy.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have absolutely no problem paying good money to have copyrighted work in media that suit my needs.
My only objection is when some cretinous little parasite comes along and tries to tell me what I can or cannot do with those media. At least 95% of the time those parasites have played little or no part in making the work good for "consumption", and they channel precious little of the revenue back to the artist.
I forsee a time when writers will offer their work online, bypassing the middle-man altogether, and I won't be sorry. Those marketroids will have to be replaced by aggregators of reviews in order to get the work to sell, but that isn't a bad thing, just different. Seems a simple and effective business model, which given the huge number of works (and customers) could be made viable. Publishing houses might be relegated to printing and binding comparatively limited numbers of copies of the work as required, which should also be viable given that sufficient negative reviews would restrict the work to a digital-only format. They won't take the money they did before, but the redistribution of revenue favours the artist and the consumer, which is fairer.
Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."
Which is completely unsurprising since the Kindle is expensive, meaning that the only people who would buy it are those who just have to have the newest coolest gadget, and those who read enough books to make the amortized cost of the Kindle worthwhile. Since the Kindle is relatively expensive, and since it makes it a hassle to use books that aren't bought, I'd expect that most people who buy it are well enough off that it's worth their while to buy books out of convenience rather than pirating. In other words, Kindle owners are a self selected sample of people who read lots of books, and are well enough off to pay for books rather than pirate them.
So, the fact that Kindle owners buy more books is more or less meaningless, and stating it here is the sort of scientifically careless reporting that is endemic to journalism. Most sources, I figure they just don't know any better, but I expect better from Slashdot than this.
No, let's say prosperous people: They have always fear about things or just ideas potentially cutting their money. I have to admit, that they are the ones, that really lose more than gain through the open-source movement.
Unfortunately they are also those most headlines in the news are from. For nearly everyone else --- and therefore the society on the whole --- the open-source movement is a huge benefit.
Napster is the reason. Young people today have no respect; they're all Cartmans. Napster was what got these kids on the internet in the first place, because these kids saw how they could save allowances for E and get their music for free. Thus borne the culture of music, movies, and software for nothing.
NAPSTER is the root cause of what we law-abiding netizens suffer.
As for Cory Doctorow, I do wish that he gave me some way of giving him money for the digital copies I've gotten from him.
Well, you could just videotape yourself giving Mickey Mouse a blowjob and send it to him. I'm sure he would appreciate that more than money.
An entity can take a public domain work, make changes, and copyright the result preventing others from using the changes. This possibility doesn't exist when no copyright law is enforced. The GPL prevents this eventuality.
It's actually a rather brilliant hack for those who believe the copyright system is a detriment to society. The more things that are GPL, the closer you get to a non-copyright society.
Whether you think that's a good thing is up to you, but you can't help but respect the logic of it.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
"consumers who purchase an e-reader buy more books than those who stick with traditional bound volumes. Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."
If you have a Kindle reader, you mostly have to buy your paid-content from Amazon -- there's not a lot of alternate choice. Whereas the fact that I may have bought four books from them in hardcover last year tells them nothing about the three dozen I may have bought from Barnes & Noble, Borders, Powell's, etc. in the same time period. This is not a legitimate extrapolation.
Get off my launchpad!
"Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."
Peraps thats because kindle books ONLY come from Amazon but others can be brought at many outlets ! (Idiots)
An entity can take a public domain work, make changes, and copyright the result preventing others from using the changes. This possibility doesn't exist when no copyright law is enforced.
Actually it does. The company could do the same thing, and DRM the modified software for the same effect (arguably, an even worse effect).
The GPL prevents this eventuality.
How can it do that without copyright law?
It's actually a rather brilliant hack for those who believe the copyright system is a detriment to society.
What evidence do you have that the GPL was written because "copyright is a detriment to society"? I thought is was written because closed-source software was considered detrimental to software users.
The more things that are GPL, the closer you get to a non-copyright society.
That doesn't make any sense, because the GPL requires copyright to work. So, more GPL software doesn't bring us any closer to a copyright-free society.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I buy used paperbacks at the local book store for $3.00 - $5.00. An e-book reader costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $300.00, and the Kindle books run $5 - $10.00 (or more) on Amazon. In my opinion, adding this much expense to reading is a perfect example of price gouging. I put price gougers in the same category as pirates.
I would also ask Mr. Frisch how he feels about libraries, used book stores, and people who give read books to family and freinds? My opinion is that all three of these practices are perfectly legal, and socially acceptable, yet no royalties are passed on to the author. Authors have never, and will never receive a royalty for each copy of their work. I would also guess that since digital books cannot be resold in used book stores, checked out from the library, or given to friends after reading (I'm assuming DRM attempts to prevent this), that authors would receive a higher percentage of royalties on digital books.
Based on the people I know who read, books are less of a target for piracy. I do not know one single person who reads on a regular basis, and also has the skill set or desire to pirate e-books.
Even if e-books are being pirated, shouldn't the blame rest squarely on the DRM? It's common knowledge that many types of encryption have been cracked, so only a fool would put trust in such a faulty mechanism, right? The commonly known reality is that any copyrighted electronic work stands a very high chance of being pirated, encryption or no, so why aren't the E-Book vendors held accountable for distributing copyrighted material with faulty copy protection?
Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."
Well duh! That is because I can buy books from multiple sources, but kindle books only from Amazon. I buy more paperbooks than ebooks.
Exactly. I discovered Jasper Fford by accident at a library -- picked a book at random, read the first page and then got it out on loan. I have since purchased some of his work.
It is the same with file sharing -- it is a discovery mechanism. The people who buy stuff will buy it; the ones that don't (or can't afford to at the time) won't.
And if you like an artist, you are more likely to buy more of their work.
Dang it man! Can't you read??!!! I said that Slashdot User #862676 is a very bad comedian and must be stopped at all cost!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
From whose ship did you rob them from, you pirate?
(Images of Johnny Depp floating in my head.)
Some lady with NO RELEVANT EXPERIENCE went to my website, copied a page, re-wrote it and posted it on ehow.com with me as the sole reference, just so she would get "points" or what every it is on ehow you get for writing. How annoying is that?
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
Well said.
The anime/manga point (with fan subbing) is an interesting point -- that part of the community opens them up to a more world-wide audience. And that audience is then likely to buy more anime/manga than they would have, having been introduced to it. It is also a niche market which (aside from successes such as Spirited Away) is not as successful commercially in the UK, US and elsewhere than other products (especially for less well known/obscure anime/manga).
Did you then buy the physical book so that the author could get paid?
Some authors have even gone as far as to shrug off e-book technology altogether. J.K Rowling has thus far refused to make any of her Harry Potter books available digitally because of piracy fears and a desire to see readers experience her books in print.
While it's Rowling's option to try to force her readers to 'experience her books in print', I'd point out that our population is aging - the ability to 'create' a virtual large print edition is going to become more and more important. Not to mention the space savings from not having loads of books, the resource savings of not printing them, all that.
I'll also state that her 'piracy fears' are actually encouraging piracy. Most pirated e-books aren't cracked digital editions, they're scanned/typed in version from the dead-paper edition. Thus, if you want Rowling's works in an electronic version, you're stuck pirating, much like how movies/music weren't legally available purely electronically.
If I remember right, book before last was available within about a half hour of being released in stores - an enterprising group of people typed and proof-read the book into an e-book version in that short of a period of time. So NOT offering a electronic version did jack to prevent an illegal copy being available.
I've switched mostly to e-books - a lot of them from Baen. They're doing fine with unrestricted e-books and outright giving a number of them away.
Guess what Rowling - not releasing your ebooks hasn't caused me to buy paper copies, it's make me simply not read your works. I've stopped pirating as I aged.
I don't read AC A human right
The idea that an author or inventor "owns" their work is a fiction. All you ever get is a temporary monopoly on making copies of it. From day one, people can modify it, make fun of it, satirize it, and burn it if they like. It's temporary because copyright is actually intended to encourage reuse of content. That is, increasing the public domain is the objective of copyright law, and the temporary monopoly a means to that end--a necessary evil.
Many of the greatest works of human literature, art, and music were created before copyright. Not only did they get created, they frequently reused prior works liberally.
And there is no reason whatsoever why we should change that; in fact, if anything, we should reduce copyright and patent terms because they clearly are not working right.
Open source is merely reminding people of what copyright and fair use were actually intended to do: encourage creation, distribution, and reuse of content.
Hi there.
I'm a software developer, currently employed. I don't care about the copyright status of what I produce, as I can earn money in any case.
Most programming work isn't of the software sold in shops variety, but of the custom coding for a client kind. It doesn't matter to me how many copies of my work exist, as I don't earn money from royalties, I get it from performing the job I was hired to do (which is for instance improving a program to support X). The clients generally don't have much of a reason to care either, as they have specific needs, and don't sell the software I work on.
I have been hired to work on GPL2 licensed software, and it worked just fine for me.
So here you have an example of somebody who has absolutely no problem with "Information wants to be free, man!" as you put it.
Hello, the '80s are calling and want their news back.
"I will pay $1 for a book, maybe $2 and that would be severely pushing it. I will not pay $5, $10, $25 for an E-Book. Sorry, but no. There is virtually no cost to distributing an E-Book. There is no paper, ink, shipping, storage, typesetting, etc... there is simply pressing a button to make a copy."
The bulk of the "cost" of the book is not in those things. It's the same model with music and movies. Bestsellers subsidize the failures. And they try to make a large profit.
Ultimately, you pay $25 for ebook for the same reason that you pay it for the hardback, for the convenience. You want it now. If you don't want it now, you are not their target demographic and thus do not matter to them.
Personally, I think you have a skewed sense of pricing between mediums. You equate a book to a music single. I would equate a book to an album or movie. A short story would be more equivalent to a single. In short, what you want is never going to realistically to happen. You can create a single in a day. You can't do that with a book. One has a greater production cost.
Nobody has the right to profit. If you build a snowman, you can't complain that nobody pays you for it even though it does improve the landscape. You have the right to try to profit, but society has no obligation to bend backwards for you.
Die Gedanken sind frei
My thoughts freely flower
I think as I please
And this gives me power
No scholar can map them
No hunter can trap them
No man can deny
Die Gedanken sind frei
I know many people who make their living off of software (one of the piratable kind, one of the software-as-a-service kind and some others), and are heavy pirates (and, for your information, also buy a considerable amount of content as well). So no, not everyone who disagrees with you is a college student.
" ... Novelist Blames Piracy On Open Source Culture. ..."
In related news, everyone blames Novelists for the current culture.
http://www.copyright.gov/docs/203.html
Section 203 of the Copyright Act permits authors (or, if the authors are not alive, their surviving spouses, children or grandchildren, or executors, administrators, personal representatives or trustees) to terminate grants of copyright assignments and licenses that were made on or after January 1, 1978 when certain conditions have been met. Notices of termination may be served no earlier than 25 years after the execution of the grant or, if the grant covers the right of publication, no earlier than 30 years after the execution of the grant or 25 years after publication under the grant (whichever comes first). However, termination of a grant cannot be effective until 35 years after the execution of the grant or, if the grant covers the right of publication, no earlier than 40 years after the execution of the grant or 35 years after publication under the grant (whichever comes first).
So no, you can't sell your copyrights, you can only lend them out for 35-40 years.
You won't be catching me buying anything of his, that's for sure. Good job turning off those who are even vaguely informed on the matter.
There’s a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose
a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They
have no respect for property or laws. What’s more, they’re powerful and
organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press.
I’m speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers.
These people don’t believe in copyright law. Copyright law says that
when you buy a book, you own it. You can give it away, you can lend it,
you can pass it on to your descendants or donate it to the local homeless
shelter. Owning books has been around for longer than publishing books
has. Copyright law has alwaysrecognized your right to own your books.
When copyright laws are made—by elected officials, acting for the public
good—they always safeguard this right.
But ebook publishers don’t respect copyright law, and they don’t believe
in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you
“buy” an ebook, you’re really only licensing that book, and that copyright
law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license
agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal. (Of
course, the button on their website says, “Buy this book” and they talk
about “Ebook sales” at conferences—no one says, “License this book for
your Kindle” or “Total licenses of ebooks are up from 0.00001% of all
publishing to 0.0001% of all publishing, a 100-fold increase!”)
I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright
law’s guarantee of ownership in your books.
Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers
Was that before or after they bought a Kindle? I'll bet you the type of people who would buy an ebook reader in the first place were already much more likely to buy books than other customers.
I'm not a bird, I'm a super-advanced flying stealth dinosaur!
The consumer may feel ripped off when I charge $1000 for a logo. But when you spend hours of work that can't be used again or transferred to anyone else, it's just paying the bills.
Well, in Canada, we have this: http://www.arcco.ca/ .
Artist-Run Centres support artists, in part, by paying artists fees, thus allowing them to explore approaches to creating cultural dialogue (of which "entertainment", with all it's loaded cultural assumptions, is a subset) that don't require a salable product (such as installations, performances or other non-permanent works). There are other approaches, this is just one that I'm directly familiar with.
And someone had to buy the book/ebook in the first place to pirate it, the only difference is the number of people that read the copy.
In 15th century monks, who wrote books by a pen, did not like an appearance of the printing press.
Printing press changed not only the way the books are produced but it changed the whole industry, it changed what kind of books were produced.
More than that, it changed the whole society, it caused decades of reformation wars. It produced a new civilization.
We are looking at about the same thing. The Internet is of about the same magnitude. Some will try to forbid it, try to control it, the same as happened to the printing press. But the world will be changed beyond recognition. It just takes time. Printing press was invented in 1440, but the reformation started only in 1517. And the reformation wars lasted more than 100 years after that.
Uh, I have a desk that I built myself that is a direct copy of something I saw in a furniture store. EXACT copy, spent about 10 minutes measuring it out one day in the store, left and built it myself. Turns out doing so was about 40% cheaper.
Wouldn't that be pirated furniture? I made a copy of an existing product using my own resources. Just like copying an mp3.
If, as an author, I was guaranteed that I could not choose my publisher, and for a limited time how my works were published, I wouldn't become an author. I would discourage anybody else from writing as well. Copyright has a place in society, and does not hurt the economy. The people making speculative works have a right to be paid for them if the risk of writing those works - risk in time, effort, and money - finds a market for them.
The crazy copyright terms we have today, sure, they're messed up. I think life of the author or 25 years, whichever is longer seems about right. (If a parent dies, his works can support his kids for a bit.) Works for hire, make them 25 years like patents. If somebody said no, that's too random, make it a straight 25-50 years instead, that would be okay too.
Many people only purchase things from legitimate sources, but what happens when every source becomes legitimate? Also, if every source is legitimate, how can I easily tell which sources are actually paying the authors, assuming I want them to receive money for their work? When I can purchase a book from the author's publisher legally, or go with an equally legal pulp book producer who gives nothing back to the author? What about making legitimate downloads, for money or not, legal from day one? None of this will benefit anybody in the least. Sure, for a short while we'll have a boon of stuff that's already published. Eventually; however, your free gravy train of content will dry up. Maybe musicians will continue to work bars and do shows, but authors don't have those venues. Movies don't either. (And why would a theater pay Hollywood for a film if they can display it for free?)
Our current system is not perfect. It wasn't perfect when the founders put it into place way back when and limited to 14 years. It was an acknowledgement that, even at the time, the overhead of allowing a limited monopoly so that authors could get paid for their works was an acceptable compromise to have those works produced in the first place.
The presence of an e-reader in someone's case may also be interpreted as "my owner can afford both the price of me, and the time to read books" I don't think authors need to worry about this trend, but folks who are more concerned with buying groceries than e-books should. There's a bar being set, where reading is becoming a privilege. And reading is a right.
if I design something, then I can legally prevent you from building that thing out of your own property; in effect, I usurp some of your (and everyone else on the planet's) property rights
You must be kidding right? I'm free to walk into any furniture store, take a detailed look at a chair or table or whatever, then go home and build an exact copy in my workshop and there is absolutely NOTHING you can do about it.
Not property, but a government-granted temporary privilege.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Alexi is a superb public story teller as well as a novelist. He goes out of his way to instigate situations so that he can build a story around it later. He related a story at the Press CLub in DC of speaking at the same affair where Bill CLinton claimed to have a Cherokee grandmother. When it was his turn Alexi (a Cour D'alene indian) started with the obvious slam to Clinton "Some of us don't need to have a Cherokee grandmother." He claimed to fear reprisal the entire night, noting CLinton's large size. But when CLinton finally engaged him, instead of beating him said "You know somethin'? You're fuckin' funny." He related other stories along those lines.
My money says he's done the same here, instigating a situation wherein he can develop a fear of an outcome only to have it turn out not to be negative, and definitely be worth the telling.
Got to admit, it's a slick gimmick. What less would you expect from a writer who has a book out that has its own soundtrack in the absence of an intervening movie.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
... What a heap of drivel by a bunch of cry-babies.
I have virtually unlimited access to media through piracy, be it books, music or movies & series, yet i own hunderds of cd's & dvd's, and a bunch of books too, if i like it, guess what? I frekking buy the thing! And i'm not talking about mp3's, avi's or ebooks (whatever those are stored in), but fysical hard copies on CD/LP, DVD & dead trees.
I refuse to pay money to download a stupid file though, the only one getting a dime from me for downloads is my ISP, because i need to get online.
Off Topic:
Since 1 Januari we in Belgium also have to pay a tax on digital storage media such as external hard drives, usb sticks, sd cards & whatnot that serve to 'compensate piracy', and the money is devided amonst the most 'popular' artists of that period, and you don't want to know what i think about those 'popular artists', trust me on that one,
Sounds like you live beyond your means. Stop borrowing money for stuff like that and you will feel like the powerful consumer again.
Well the thing is that a non-trivial amount of people on Slashdot aren't software engineers or the like. Many of them are unemployed college student types. They've never had a real job, or have had nothing but a menial job. They haven't really given their position much thought, it is just a kind of general parroting of the "Information wants to be free, man!" slogan without real consideration. They've never had to support themselves so the consideration of how one does so hasn't really entered their mind.
Got a source for that? Or did you just make that up, because it supports your current view?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
no, I did not. My goal with getting the ebook in the first place was to get in MY preferred format and avoid having a dead tree version which I then have to lug around next time I move. I also try to avoid the environmental cost of book production and shipping, so I'm not going to order a hardcover book and throw it out.
I'm not saying that I did the moral thing, just that I was actually trying to find a way of buying the book in a format which should already be ubiquitous (and is available..in selected areas), but the authors publisher is so scared of piracy that the easiest way of obtaining the book is through piracy... sounds stupid? Sounds that way to me too.
I had taken my credit card up, had tried to purchase the book and was met with a "not available in your area" message..
I HAVE however written the author a letter on the matter. Sadly though, it's probably his publisher who makes these calls.
well there's an image in my head which I did not want ;)
Nahh, Cory's ok. Respectful to his readers and seems like a nice guy, plus his stories are fun, good imagination and decent technique.
I hadn't heard of the "author" before, and by time I wake up tomorrow morning, I'll have completely forgotten about the tedious prat.
Now THAT should terrify the poor thing a LOT more!
Anyhow "Sherman Alexie"? "Alexie Sherman" sounds better...
The comment by winwar here below/above me is pretty much correct.
The bulk of the cost of a book is the publicity, editing and writing, in that order.
I can write a big book, but without an experienced editor for feedback and assistance it will never be a great book.
Without publicity of some sorts even a great book will never become a known book.
Think about publicity, just book signings by the author mean sending the author across the country. This runs into thousands of dollars in the first few cities. That cost has to be recouped somewhere. That is the price of doing business and getting your face out.
Dropping text onto the internet will only get a handful of readers at the best.
Then there's distribution.
You're right. Server space is cheap these days.
RELIABLE server space is not. Especially if you need a good e-commerce system as well. If you want to buy your own e-commerce system then you're looking at big bucks, as well as getting the credit card handling all down and that crap.
If you go through a bigger vendor like amazon they probably take between 30 and 50% of the price as a service fee.
That means out of $10, you have $7 left to pay for all other expenses. Your publisher will probably take around $3-4, sales tax will take between $1-2 and you have a buck or two left. A regular deal gives authors around 15-20% of the price as their salary. Cut the price of the book and you cut the salary. Of course, an ebook is cheaper to manufacture and transport, but that's just not the big cost, as you see. That's usually 1 or 2 dollars. As there is still SOME cost with an ebook (storage, backup, work on formats etc) let's cut that down to 50 cents.
The ebooks price should then be around $7.50
A lot of publishing expenses are recouped through hardcovers, which can be sold at a higher markup. Ebooks might then be a little more expensive at the start of a books run. Lets say around $10, giving the publisher $1.50 extra per book.
Sounds fair to me.
Baen with Webscriptions and its Free Library has been making e-books in multiple formats available for years. They've found that after an author puts a few books into the Free Library the sales of that author's backlist (including the freely-available books) rise. I suspect that they get more sales & readers for Webscriptions as well - if I can buy individual ebooks for $6 or the entire set of releases for the month (up to 4 "frontlist" new publications plus some backlist) for $15, I might as well cough up the couple of extra books and see which writers I like.
fencepost
just a little off
Yeah, I agree. This is a two way interaction between the creator/seller and the consumer.
Some understand it. In music I would say that Trent Reznor (Nine inch Nails) gets it. What he's been doing is offering his albums for download in good quality with cover artwork and all that stuff for a VERY low fee, or even completely free. Then he offers you very pretty packaging, with really nice extras. Beautiful objects which are in some cases nice even if you have no idea who he is. Also cool concepts, and interesting music ideas (limited edition pressed vinyl of one album, pressed in thicker vinyl, and a hardcover photobook in the same size. Of course also both CDs as well as a bluray with the music in above CD quality and....
you get the picture..
Value added. You pay, he gives you nice things. Both are happy.
I didn't get the superduper limited edition vinyl, because I didn't have the money at the time. So i bought the next nicest set. And that is very nice as well.
Piracy is not something to worry about. One extra value which is often overlooked is the good feeling of supporting the future of the people whose work you love. That is also worth a lot. People want to be honest because it makes them feel good.
I think that "more convenient" is the biggest issue there
I just came back from Supper and had to return to this.... would be nice if the tables were turned. If authors published serially in magazines then everyone would be happy, even the e-book retailers, since they support magazine subscriptions. With copies of each chapter in each magazine, there would be no incentive to hot-copy the content, and readership would be even more broad. And though the per-copy profit may be lower the chance to franchise a movie or two off of a good story line would be worth it.
I am writing stories and poems and open source is the most important requirement for the software i use. There is nothing in open source that endangers my work as a writer and poet. There are people, who misunderstand open source as being the b ase for piracy. But those people, who steal software or texts or any other work, they just take something to hide their doing behind others so it's not them stealing but a whole community. If there wasen't open source the would take something else. I think of those people stealing microsoft software and telling people that was an act of self defense against the rich.
cb
Without the system we have public domain, ie. open source code is copied, modified and released as a closed source binary with DRM and no source code. This is better how?
Err, duh. Copyright exists to promote "the advancement of science and the useful arts", it is inherently "economically harmful" because it was created as a trade-off — artificially inflate the value of individual copies in order to promote the creation of such works in the first place. It is a counter to the tragedy of the commons, that individuals acting in their own interest will drive something into insignificance (make any sort of widespread publishing impossible). In short, the economic harm was accepted as a conscious exchange when the concept was invented as the inventors felt it promoted things which were more important then money. [That money exists to serve rather than be served, what a novel concept!]
The time limit on copyright exists to enrich culture (the other side of tragedy of the commons where authors operate in their own self-interest at everyone else's expense). Reducing the length is the only way to restore balance. Frankly, the issue copyright addresses (making it possible for creative individuals to dedicate all their time to enriching society rather than having to flip burgers on the side) hasn't gone away. Sure, the works would still exist but there would be less of them and less variety; people like to claim Sturgeon's Law but the reality is that just because something isn't popular doesn't necessarily mean it's crap, just that it has a very narrow market. *[I'm not denying that crap exists and gets published but remember that Fanfiction is generally crap and tonnes of that get published every month without the authors of it getting paid so the claim that removing copyright would reduce the amount of crap is unlikely to pan out]
Well, we agree on this point. Copyright is still artificial scarcity regardless of its justification, as such, it is constantly locked in a dance with 'pirates'. Personally, I don't much care about individual copying, as long as piracy isn't actively endorsed then there isn't much reason to be pissed about it. It is really only the bootleggers who sell pirated copies that need a massive kick in the balls.
>As for Cory Doctorow, I do wish that he gave me some way of giving him money for the digital copies I've gotten from him. I don't want to buy a paper version, and I don't want to donate a paper version. I just want to pay the author (and editor and all those involved) for his/their work.
This. I've encountered the same problem on Last.fm. I only pay 3$ a month for unlimited music, so I figured I might contribute something like an extra 20-30$ a month to the artists I stream most during that period.
But while most of them give their music for free on collective sites like 8bitpeoples.com, I've found no way to give targeted donations to certain artists which I enjoy most, save from following the last.fm link to "buy on itunes/amazon"... but how much will iTunes/amazon collect, and then their publishers, and then who knows what else... so so far I've avoided donating while I work out the problem. Why do artists not provide us with a way to give them straight, targeted, pure-profit donations?
The CNN story quotes Ana Maria Allessi, publisher for Harper Media at HarperCollins: "we have to be vigilant in our punishment ... but much more attractive is to simply make the technology better, legally." How does one become vigilant in punishment ?
Does anyone speak English ? This from an editor ?
When I was a kid, there were a lot of people I knew who believed they should be allowed to copy anything they wanted for free. My parents would attempt to copy videotapes they rented, by hooking one VCR up to another. I also remember them copying children's records from the library on to 8 track tape.
The D&D nerds at school had a photocopy club going, where they would sell photocopies of modules to the other kids. (This is how I got my first copy of Tomb of Horrors, only later did I decide it was immoral and replace it with a legit copy.)
I only knew one other kid with a computer. My library of computer games consisted of birthday, christmas, and carefully saved up for games. His consisted of "copied floppies."
Later, I got involved in watching fansubs. This was before you could download video fansubs off of the Internet. You'd send a fee to cover the video tapes and shipping, and the fansub club would send you video tapes with the fansubbed shows. (To be fair, I only did this once, and tended to stick to actual US releases from legitimate companies. Sigh... which means I have tons of old video tapes that would require me to hook up a VCR to watch.)
Oh, when I went to college the second time, for Computer Science, I rented a room in a house with some Thai people. They never had anything original, from Microsoft Windows to the latest DVDs everything was sent to them from relatives in Thailand from the pirate markets there.
What did I learn from these experiences:
1. Casual Piracy is a way of life. As long as it is easy enough for an ordinary person to do with no complex knowledge it has been done for as long as it has been possible.
2. However, primitive DRM like Macrovision thwarted my parents (ET came out all fuzzy when they tried to copy the tape), I'm sure that Infocom feelies thwarted would be casual pirates of their games, and so on.
3. There's no philosophy about it. My parents were religious types who impressed on me from an early age that sex outside marriage was wrong (this had no effect on me in the long term, and as a teenager it was sadly easy to remain celibate). When I, a child, tried to explain that copying tapes was wrong, they got irritated with me... they just didn't care. It was the same with every other casual pirate I knew.
Sherman Alexi is a fool. People don't need some kind of moral philosophy to allow them to pirate, they just don't care. They care possibly about being caught and punished. DRM can make it easier to by the thing rather than pirating it.
Open Source, of course, is not the same as a Free Software philosophy. There's no such thing as "open source" with fiction, the concept of "open source fiction" is nonsensical. As to the Free Software philosophy, that's a complex idea. It's certainly true that people like Stallman think that we'd be better off without copyright. However, I'm pretty sure that most people don't liken utilities like operating systems and driver software to novels. It's perfectly possible to have a Free Software philosophy and to be opposed to piracy of fiction.
It's now easy to pirate books. Only the first obsessive who goes to the trouble of scanning it in (or hand typing it in) has any hard work to do. Once that's done, piracy as is simple as finding your favorite torrent source an searching for the book.
And this is why books are pirated, because it's easy and many people don't care about artists rights. It's along the lines of jaywalking or dropping gum-wrappers in the street. In other words, it's a crime many people commit without caring about it in the slightest. (No, I'm not justifying littering or jay-walking here, just making a point.)
That's an extremely naive view. Sharing digital content over the internet was happening with or without Napster. IRC and Usenet were used to share files before Napster was a twinkle in anyone's eye. What changed was better video and music compression, larger hard drives, and more people on the internet.
Time makes more converts than reason
Isn't this a golf sight? Stop thinking so much and hit the ball.
Right. I'm a published author, and the last tech book I wrote (some 1,200 pages) took about a year of researching, writing, checking for typos, layouting, rechecking, updating... etc. to complete. Equating this to one song is inappropriate, IMHO. Considering that a typical author gets some 12% to 14% of the publisher's (not seller's retail) price, you can imagine that writing any book that is not a bestseller is a matter of love anyway. Still... that the grand-parent poster considers this a $1 work is really discouraging. He may as well "pirate" it if that's what he thinks it is worth.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Your being sarcastic but the answer might actually be yes. AFAIK, architectural designs can be copyrighted. You can't just build a house exactly like the ones in the drawing.
Then you have all the connector designs used with that "disposable" furniture. Some of that stuff is patented. If you want to connect it together exactly like the 'Ikea' crap in the stores, than yeah, you probably are "pirating" something.
Sadly, yes, you may have been pirating something.
Amazon reports that Kindle owners buy, on average, 3.1 times as many books on the site as other customers."
Or rather, the folks who buy the most books have switched to eBooks.
Also, anybody have any numbers on folks copying/scanning/sharing paper books? 'Cause I'd bet there's quite a bit of that, as well. A little easier if the publisher digitizes it for 'em, but probably not game-changing.
Sherman Alexie is an idiot. I saw him on the daily-show, acting like a moron because no-one would come to his book signing.
Sometimes I wish that Obama really was a Socialist or Liberal.
People have short memories. Obama's not that far left of Bush Sr.; if Bush Jr. hadn't been such a wacko, nobody would be calling O anything left-er than a centrist.
The CB App. What's your 20?
the movie industry claimed a 10.1% increase in ticket sales this year. making over $1.62 billion this year. piracy has nothing to do with slumping sales on stuff that's willfully put on the internet, by the people who are bitching about piracy cutting into their bottom line.
Sherman Dyslexie, eh?
Cute....
Read http://baen.com/library/palaver6.htm for a factual demonstration that e-books increase *hardcover* sales of the *same titles*. Next time Sherman Alexie's speaking at Powell's, I'll do the math with him and 'splain a few things.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership — of artistic ownership — goes away." Somebody need to tell him what open source is and that the fact that source is open does not have anything to do with ownership! If the guy is hinting at people are getting accustomed to getting stuff for free, again he needs to be told that most of the stuff in open source is not really free in many ways. (Many major contributions are from people who are employed by various MNCs and they get paid, In most cases, your contributions need to be given back to the community -- another form of paying for what you use --, You use a software and make it a success -- You pay the owner by making him famous...). Besides, the owners of OSS have a different mind set. They get 'paid' in ways these proprietary guys can't understand. So, my dear friend, here is my correction "With the closed-source market culture on the Internet, which promotes piracy, the idea of ownership — of any ownership — goes away." You make it, open it for reasonable cost, then there will be people to buy it.
We all know that nobody bothered to write books or other works until the development of copyright. It was a waste of time, and everyone realized there was absolutely no reason to write if you couldn't guarantee that a lucky hit could provide you financial security for the rest of your life, plus 70 years more for the family.
It's amazing that our culture actually managed to rise to the level that it did before we figured this out.
"The right to profit of your creation" doesn't necessarily imply "artificial scarcity", that's just one of the (many) models we've found for it.
I'm wondering what other models you know of and what their strength's and weaknesses are compared to a limited period of control over your creation. I'm not asking this to argue with you. I'm generally interested about what other models exist which offer sufficient profit incentives to get people to produce information (Be it books, movies, software whatever).
Starting with Peanut Press and Palm OS device then Fictionwise and Palm, WM, and now iPod and B&N, Amazon Kindle Format, I have purchased over 2000 books in the last 12 years. I used to be an avid library user, but it is so convenient just to buy the book and read it on my device that I don't go to the library much anymore. The most popular books are often not in stock at the library, you have to put a hold on them and wait your place in line before you get your chance to read them. Then because it's a new book you get 7 days to read it. At $9.99 for a best seller and if you wait a little the price is less I'll pick e books any day.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
But do would want to drive across a bridge built by an engineer who designs them as a hobby on weekends [and other examples]
Since I put my life at risk, I'm thinking maybe I wouldn't (note that listening to bad music won't kill me---if you were aiming for an analogy to transfer a conclusion, here's where it breaks down).
On the other hand, if hobby engineers can become competent enough to design a bridge as safe as those designed today by professional engineers, the fact that the engineer doesn't get money for his work wouldn't hold me back. I would want the design to be reviewed by someone competent, money or not.
unless they had been tested and screened by qualified professionals who are usually trained and paid well for their work.
Professionals tend to be paid, sorta' by definition. I'm really worried about competence, not money changing hands.
Now, I don't know how you'd motivate hobbyist engineers to become competent and have them motivated enough to do the socially beneficial works.
All I'm saying is that I see that thing happening in the world of music.
Again, I think you're right that some amateurs are really good. But without incentives, I think the quality and number of people who devote themselves to artistic production will decrease.
Yes. How much will it decrease? How much value is lost? How much value (of a different kind) is gained by being free to share the music with your friends?
[on teachers] We can see the results in the American educational system. Do we want to encourage that trend in artistic production as well?
The difference here is that you can be stuck with a bad teacher. You can't really be stuck in the same way with a bad musician---you just listen to someone else.
Maybe if everybody started doing e-learning, they could study under their favourite teacher. Then again, unless the teacher is only recording lectures (in text, audio or video), or rather if you expect the teacher to spend some time per student, there's a limit to how many people can be taught by the same teacher.
There's no such limit to how many people can listen to the same musician. You just grab the mp3s off the net and start listening.
There is in live performances due to physical rooms not being infinitely big; but there's nothing stopping people from charging admission fees for live performances in order to allocate the limited resource (space).
Your analogies break down for this reason: music (and books and films) is information whose value is realised by copying it and the consumer observing (hearing, reading, watching) it. It's easy to not consume, it's easy to change your consumption.
Medicine, bridges, teaching doesn't have this property. If there's only one bridge across the Thames, you can't really choose a different engineer. Your choice in teachers is limited to those who teach in your area and/or your willingness to relocate or commute. And medicine with nasty side effects is hard to undo. You can't stop having taken it, and stopping taking it might not be enough.
There's a good reason why I don't extend my argument to where I haven't seen evidence that it could work well enough.
Whether I have seen enough evidence and is being fair in my reporting is a different matter; I think someone qualified [probably a professional :)] should gather evidence in a rigorous and scientific way about what good copyright policy would look like.
Piracy happens when sellers and buyers fail to agree on pricing. Greedy bastards ask too much.
Thank you, Dave Ramsey.
You mean like this? Started by Baen, now also has books from
I should clarify I'm mostly interested in nonfiction and textbooks. But I'd heard of a few of those actually.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Casual Piracy, what does it mean?
It means for now, you live in the wonderful world of free because of the existence of a capital based market in which the "producer" produced based on the fact that one could eek out a living from such an activity. This capital market based on capitalism is repsonsible for the vast majority of advances that have "enabled" your world to move forward and bring you to where you are now.
Tomorrows world is a Randian nightmare where production will simply be the sole domain of more centralized organizations because large, bureacratic and centralized organizations such as govts etc. will be the only entities to have the means to actually produce and as we all know, it leads to less innovation, creativity and hence freedom.
Ultimately, as you all frequently acknowledge here, centralized power leads to corruption of all things.
And who is to blame, all of you who think you are entitled.
Sure Open Source is great, if it remains a voluntary moevment but as we all know, it is not and is currently killing the individual producer beyond the large organization you loathe but your too intellectually dishonest to acknowledge. You simply think you are killing the RIAA etc. Your not, your killing far more and to put it more plainly, you are effectively killing your own industries, the very ones you exclaim to be moving forward by legitimizing the business model of FREE dumbasses!
Free and Socialism only work when it exists in the shadow of capital based markets, it cannot exist otherwise and its only a matter of time until the vine dies.
Enjoy the demise!!!!!!!
Open Source is not at all the problem here. IT IS ALL SANTAS FAULT! Just think about it hegives away all those presents for free. IT IS ALL HIS FAULT!
I guess when the ownership of slaves went away that also frightened a lot of people as well!!!!
I thought that Rapid files were deliberately anonymized and the only way to map content to something real was by links from blog or some other info site. I have used rapid in the past for a few things, but not for a long time.
Btw, how long does this -1 penalty of yours last for? I had a quick look at your comments and it goes back into early 2008. That seems a bit harsh: what on earth did you do to get that?
Aha! You're guilty of Printcrime! You're goin' to the slammer, bigtime!
Right. I'm a published author, and the last tech book I wrote (some 1,200 pages) took about a year of researching, writing, checking for typos, layouting, rechecking, updating... etc. to complete. Equating this to one song is inappropriate, IMHO. Considering that a typical author gets some 12% to 14% of the publisher's (not seller's retail) price, you can imagine that writing any book that is not a bestseller is a matter of love anyway. Still... that the grand-parent poster considers this a $1 work is really discouraging. He may as well "pirate" it if that's what he thinks it is worth.
Technical books are different. When I wrote that, I was more thinking of works of fiction. I do not apply what I wrote above to non-fiction books that require more than imagination to write. I was thinking merely of the entertainment value of a book. A technical book or reference book is worth more than a buck.
While I do see equating a book more to a whole album and I would agree with that... I still am not going to pay exorbitant prices for them. A paperback costs $5 - $7 typically. An ebook should cost less. If they are making a profit, and a hefty profit at that, at $7 a book, with the cost of physically moving, printing, etc... the book, they can cut that cost in half and still make a profit.
Now, how much the author gets from the publisher is another matter entirely and does not matter to this particular thread, since if the author got more from the publisher (or eliminated the publisher entirely, which is perfectly reasonable given the Internet), then the cost per book should also come down.
Hell, even your technical book would be a the equivalent of a best seller if you sold it for $4 and only 200,000 people bought it.