Re: Re: What kinds of Books are pirated and made into EBooks?

On 3/10/10, groovy_ahk <[email protected]> wrote:
> My thoughts?
>
>  You think stealing from authors is okay.

Copyright infringement is not theft, any more than posting a negative
review that convinces people not to buy the book is "stealing" from
the author.

Which doesn't mean it's okay--it's just not *theft.* And it's an
important difference--because the people sharing files are very aware
that they're not taking anything *away* from anyone else. They *might*
be costing the author a sale--but they might not. They might just be
providing entertainment to someone who "doesn't deserve it" because he
hasn't paid for it.

The moral issue of who "deserves" to read a book is very different
from the moral issue of theft.

>  Your behavior is wrong. When electronic files are "shared" a new copy is made each time.
> That means the COPYright is being violated.

Copyright is a limited-term monopoly on certain types of business
practices, created as an incentive to promote progress. When it stops
working for that purpose, it's broken. Where it is impeding
progress--locking orphaned works away from the public, preventing
creative remixes, keeping the history of our arts hostage--it should
be changed. And mass breaking of a law is one of the ways the public
has of informing the lawmakers (who are heavily influenced by
corporate interests) that they no longer consider this an immoral or
dangerous act.

>  As someone else in this thread mentioned, thieves have not yet set up a public database,
> informing us all which books they have stolen, how many of them were stolen, and the retail
> price of each. As such, there is no way to know how much money we are losing because of
> thieves.

There is no retail price for the Harry Potter ebooks.
There is a retail price for used Harry Potter physical books--most are
available for under $2. So someone who has an ebook copy might be
denying a store or a yard sale $2 per book. They're not necessarily
denying the author anything, because authors don't get royalties on
used books.

>  All we can do is thwart it when we find it. It's  a constant battle. And you are part of the problem.

There are other approaches besides "thwart it": provide incentives not
to do it. Provide content in formats the public wants, at prices
they're willing to pay, and copyright infringement will stop being a
problem.

Which doesn't mean it won't happen. There'll always be some starving
student willing to read books twenty pages at a time while standing at
the bookstore, and there'll always be someone willing to scan, OCR &
format a book to hand to a friend instead of shelling out $6 for a
paperback version. But those aren't the problem; they're not lost
sales.

Lost sales are the people who downloaded Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows on the day it came out, *in addition* to their two hardcover
purchases (one for self, one for the kids). Lost sales are the ones
who got a bootleg PDF because the Kindle version can't be read on
their Sony reader. Lost sales are the ones who read Cory Doctorow's
and Lawrence Lessig's newest books for free instead of buying
something from Kobobooks because their customer service screwed over
one of her friends.

Authors don't need to prevent free downloads of their books nearly as
much as they need to work on the real competition: inconvenience that
turns people to those downloads, and obscurity that prevents people
from seeking them at all.


>  Amy
>  http://www.crafte-revolution.com
>
>  --- In [email protected], "Bill C" <bczygan@...> wrote:
>  What are your thoughts?
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
"I follow Eris blindly in all things. That She is the Goddess of Chaos
simplifies this immensely."  -- Christian the Pagan


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