Actually, most of the authors I know want to be able to write, and to feed their families, simultaneously. And that means getting paid for their work.
Even in our current model, that's no easy task, but if we weaken copyright any further, it will get harder. (Yes, that's my opinion, but I've been working on models for self-published authors and for small indepedent authors, trying to figure out how to make it work, for many years now, so it's not utterly unrelated to objective facts.)
If you do something to me that reduces the amount of money I make from my work, that IS something like stealing.
Whether or not you count it as the same thing depends upon your definitions, but it sure is a close relative.
Most pirates claim that, although they want a copy enough to take it, they don't want it enough to pay for it if they couldn't take it. So, they continue, there's no harm to the artist or writer. I'm dubious, very dubious.
More importantly, though, I think we need some social norms that make taking copies of someone else's work unacceptable. It's possible to cheat on tests, but most of us don't. It's possible to take a great deal of unsecured physical property, but most of us don't. And not because we might get caught, but because it's wrong. We need to extend THAT kind of DRM over books, music, art, and video.
Or so I think.
Google didn't offer to share anything with anyone associated with creating the content until it was sued. By publishers among others.
Google's interpretation of evil isn't the same as mine, in the case of intellectual property. They have no compunction about taking away the ability of authors, artists and publishers to benefit from the hard work of making books. And that can't end well for any of us.
Book publishing is very different from the music business. For one thing, it's very, very rare to make much money as a publisher. For another, there are already nearly 100,000 mom and pop publishing companies in the US alone.
For a third thing, on a typical "trade" book (that is, one that you would find in a general bookstore, in large format paperback, or as a hardback), the author makes about the same amount in royalties as the publishing company gets for overhead and profit combined. A complete spreadsheet would be too long to go into here, but the basics are:
Discounts given to retailers and wholesalers: 50% of total
Royalties: 12.5% of total
Preparation (same for ebooks as print, basically) about $5,000 to 15,000 per title
Printing: 5 to 15% of total
Distribution (customer service to retailers, order processing, credit and collections, warehousing, etc.): 10 to 15% of total
Marketing: 5% of the total.
Add those up, and you can quickly see where the money goes. Often the total is negative, although for blockbusters, it's very, very positive. Those books carry the freight that allow the rest of the list to be published. And of course, no one can really predict which books will break out and go 6 months or more on the lists.
It's certainly true that not every pirate would buy a copy, if they couldn't take one. It is equally true that SOME would.
Most of the posts on this topic tend to be waaaay too polarized and absolute, and suffer from over-generalization. In my opinion. (And I work in book publishing, so I do watch them.)
No. A hard copy that was legitimately purchased can be donated or sold.
The difference is that no one is making new copies. When you make a copy of an ebook you legitmately own to share with someone else, then you're infringing.
Just a note -- in book publishing, at least, the major victims of piracy AREN'T the corporations, but the authors. And I can attest that very, very few of them are making a living wage to start with.
Greed? Not so much.
Now, you may argue from the Baen's Bar experiment and others that free ecopies increase pbook sales, but that's a special case that won't necessarily generalize to the vast majority of books (because they're non-fiction, non-trade). And it leaves out what we do when ebooks replace paperbacks, which I think will happen within a decade or two.
I think you're assuming a lot of things which may not be true.
If I have any rights to the Intellectual Property I create, one of them should be the right to control how it is offered, and where. You may want to get something (legitimately or otherwise), but that doesn't obligate me to sell it to you. Just as I'm not obligated to sell you a computer system across borders.
In the case of music and other IP, the sellers almost certainly have purchased only limited rights themselves. They CAN'T sell across certain borders without getting into hot water.
FWIW,
I love my Kindle, and still read quite a bit on it.
Still, it's not perfect. I would like the 2.0 to have:
--an onboard hyphenation and justification engine, so that the text would lay out better, even as you shift the font size.
--water proofing. I like to read in all sorts of places. Plus I have a child-- stuff gets spilled on EVERYTHING.
--the ability to buy a service plan so that I could use it as an email device, along with the limited type of web access that I currently have.
--better browsing for books. I often find that it's not trivial to find something to buy.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time anything fell into the public domain?
Yesterday -- all the works of anyone who died on June 21, 1939 became public domain then.
Actually, most of the authors I know want to be able to write, and to feed their families, simultaneously. And that means getting paid for their work.
Even in our current model, that's no easy task, but if we weaken copyright any further, it will get harder. (Yes, that's my opinion, but I've been working on models for self-published authors and for small indepedent authors, trying to figure out how to make it work, for many years now, so it's not utterly unrelated to objective facts.)
If you do something to me that reduces the amount of money I make from my work, that IS something like stealing.
Whether or not you count it as the same thing depends upon your definitions, but it sure is a close relative.
Most pirates claim that, although they want a copy enough to take it, they don't want it enough to pay for it if they couldn't take it. So, they continue, there's no harm to the artist or writer. I'm dubious, very dubious.
More importantly, though, I think we need some social norms that make taking copies of someone else's work unacceptable. It's possible to cheat on tests, but most of us don't. It's possible to take a great deal of unsecured physical property, but most of us don't. And not because we might get caught, but because it's wrong. We need to extend THAT kind of DRM over books, music, art, and video. Or so I think.
Google didn't offer to share anything with anyone associated with creating the content until it was sued. By publishers among others.
Google's interpretation of evil isn't the same as mine, in the case of intellectual property. They have no compunction about taking away the ability of authors, artists and publishers to benefit from the hard work of making books. And that can't end well for any of us.
Book publishing is very different from the music business. For one thing, it's very, very rare to make much money as a publisher. For another, there are already nearly 100,000 mom and pop publishing companies in the US alone.
For a third thing, on a typical "trade" book (that is, one that you would find in a general bookstore, in large format paperback, or as a hardback), the author makes about the same amount in royalties as the publishing company gets for overhead and profit combined. A complete spreadsheet would be too long to go into here, but the basics are:
Discounts given to retailers and wholesalers: 50% of total
Royalties: 12.5% of total
Preparation (same for ebooks as print, basically) about $5,000 to 15,000 per title
Printing: 5 to 15% of total
Distribution (customer service to retailers, order processing, credit and collections, warehousing, etc.): 10 to 15% of total
Marketing: 5% of the total.
Add those up, and you can quickly see where the money goes. Often the total is negative, although for blockbusters, it's very, very positive. Those books carry the freight that allow the rest of the list to be published. And of course, no one can really predict which books will break out and go 6 months or more on the lists.
It's certainly true that not every pirate would buy a copy, if they couldn't take one. It is equally true that SOME would. Most of the posts on this topic tend to be waaaay too polarized and absolute, and suffer from over-generalization. In my opinion. (And I work in book publishing, so I do watch them.)
Extortionate? You can get ten ISBNs for less than $300. Given that it takes about $20,000 or more to launch a trade book, that's peanuts.
If you think authors get ripped off, you should see what the profit margins for publishers look like!
No. A hard copy that was legitimately purchased can be donated or sold.
The difference is that no one is making new copies. When you make a copy of an ebook you legitmately own to share with someone else, then you're infringing.
Just a note -- in book publishing, at least, the major victims of piracy AREN'T the corporations, but the authors. And I can attest that very, very few of them are making a living wage to start with.
Greed? Not so much.
Now, you may argue from the Baen's Bar experiment and others that free ecopies increase pbook sales, but that's a special case that won't necessarily generalize to the vast majority of books (because they're non-fiction, non-trade). And it leaves out what we do when ebooks replace paperbacks, which I think will happen within a decade or two.
I think you're assuming a lot of things which may not be true.
If I have any rights to the Intellectual Property I create, one of them should be the right to control how it is offered, and where. You may want to get something (legitimately or otherwise), but that doesn't obligate me to sell it to you. Just as I'm not obligated to sell you a computer system across borders.
In the case of music and other IP, the sellers almost certainly have purchased only limited rights themselves. They CAN'T sell across certain borders without getting into hot water. FWIW,
I love my Kindle, and still read quite a bit on it. Still, it's not perfect. I would like the 2.0 to have:
--an onboard hyphenation and justification engine, so that the text would lay out better, even as you shift the font size.
--water proofing. I like to read in all sorts of places. Plus I have a child-- stuff gets spilled on EVERYTHING.
--the ability to buy a service plan so that I could use it as an email device, along with the limited type of web access that I currently have.
--better browsing for books. I often find that it's not trivial to find something to buy.