Author explains why book piracy is not a victimless crime

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

11 minutes ago, Seli said:

That is because there are two interconnected issues. The actual losses in income to the actual downloads for any author is probably low. While the actual threat to livelihood to the authors from a culture that doesn't consider anything worth paying for is high.

Seli,

But the downloads are clear evidence of the danger.  Further, legally authors are entitled (in the true sense of the word) to compensation for each of those downloads even if getting such compensation is next to impossible.

[C.T. Phipps]

Well, it depends on how available the material is. If you could get perfect quality reproductions of the book in your preferred format via piracy for everything you want, how many people would think they'd buy the book?

just for honesty's sake.

[Errant Bard]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

It's obvious some of those downloads are lost sales.

What bugs me are the usual implications by pro-police-state-copyright-laws that :

1. Illegal downloading can be blocked (outside of their wishful thinking)
2. The laws introduced to try to block those illegal downloads are not worse than the illegal downloading
3. Those poor authors whose works appear in torrents would, in any real-world scenario, get more than pocket money if the very medium that makes downloading impossible to avoid was so heavily regulated that illegal downloading did not happen somehow.

 

[Altherion]

3 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Well, it depends on how available the material is. If you could get perfect quality reproductions of the book in your preferred format via piracy for everything you want, how many people would think they'd buy the book?

just for honesty's sake.

How is your scenario different from what we have now? A book is not like a movie -- unless it's somebody incompetent scanning pages (rather than sharing an existing publisher-provided copy with the DRM removed), the quality will always be as good as the legal version. If you know where on the internet to look or have friends that do, you can easily get large numbers of books today. In fact, depending on where you live, you can often get the books before they're released in your region. Despite this, people still buy books.

[C.T. Phipps]

9 minutes ago, Altherion said:

How is your scenario different from what we have now? A book is not like a movie -- unless it's somebody incompetent scanning pages (rather than sharing an existing publisher-provided copy with the DRM removed), the quality will always be as good as the legal version. If you know where on the internet to look or have friends that do, you can easily get large numbers of books today. In fact, depending on where you live, you can often get the books before they're released in your region. Despite this, people still buy books.

It's actually harder than you think as many books are not available, are hard to find, or don't work with an existing format. Inconvenience is what makes Amazon e-sales still good.

[Jon AS]

1 hour ago, C.T. Phipps said:

It's actually harder than you think as many books are not available, are hard to find, or don't work with an existing format. Inconvenience is what makes Amazon e-sales still good.

If a book is available in any one digital format, it is available in all of them, as it is dead easy to convert between different formats using very user-friendly, freely available software.

[Darth Richard II]

6 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Well, it depends on how available the material is. If you could get perfect quality reproductions of the book in your preferred format via piracy for everything you want, how many people would think they'd buy the book?

just for honesty's sake.

Well, I still buy CDs, but that might be because I'm old.

[JGP]

11 hours ago, Errant Bard said:

I don't understand how you can think that blocking poor people (the number of them rising lately) from accessing cultural assets for free just so one guy can get money he only earned by virtue of being born in the right family isn't bad for society, likewise.

If you are focusing on the idea of the shorter and hard deadline, well, heh, I don't understand how it's a favour to the creator to give him life-long free ride instead of an incentive to produce new stuff again (taking into account the time needed for artistic production of course). Maybe it's a favour to the person, who can coast along in life (I suspect it's the 1% of creators or less who can do that though, so the argument is not really pertinent to real life anyway, but it certainly would target a much bigger percentage of corporations), but it kills the creator (again, no I'm not asking for them to struggle, but to set a reasonable time limit, that would anyway match with the end of exploitation of a standard work, but would allow investment in new stuff from corporation instead of reusing again and again the same big old Mickey Mouse or Superman)

 

For the sake of the discussion: the novel I’ve been simmering over for a substantial amount of time had its root in the cartoon world, back when I was a classical animator [2D].

It began with just one drawing. A momentary and nonsensical comic relief type kid [his name was MacPeach] who would randomly show up on an island of cannibal pirates and hand out fruit to ward off scurvy, then promptly disappear. The pirates found this surreal because his appearances didn’t make sense considering where they were, and because he always managed to avoid being eaten by them-- so the kid developed a mythic aspect. The idea germinated for some reason and his story course changed and developed, to the point where I’d created an entire world around him and literally drew hundreds of character designs and scene settings, did some storyboarding, etc. I’d even had a Dreamworks’ animation director excited about it and we’d discuss it at length on the phone when he was back in LA. He gave me lots of advice and was going to help me pitch it when the time came. But, once he told me that the most I could expect on the production was an Executive Producer slot the idea cooled off on me. Yet as I was working on the script I developed a deep love of writing, so…

Creative evolution comme ca: brief character conception and 2D turnaround character design, then a creative broadening to animated series, then movie, and last to a novel.

Yet this beast of a project, that I’ve been laboring on for well over a decade, through subsequent career and life changes [marriage, children, divorce] yet still chipping away at it, say it goes big.  It’s not mine? My children shouldn’t benefit from this thing I’ve been developing since before they were born? That society, somehow, has more entitlement to this other baby of mine than they do? 

Nah, that’s bullshit.

Artistically speaking, it strikes me quite odd that anyone [or entity] think they should be able to benefit from something I created, like there's some kind of communal appropriation entitled to an enterprise of my mind.

---

 

I get the corporate angle. Really. Once, for whatever reason, an intellectual endeavor is out of the creators’ hands I believe that rules of a different set should kick in. I don’t, however, get the idea that successful intellectual properties stymy innovation or the suggestion that copyright chokes market share. In regard to the latter, specifically, that's the corporate zeitgest of the entertainment industry in general, seeking properties that already enjoy a measure of success and a built-in fanbase that they can tap via franchisement. Current copyright law enables it, sure, but doesn't create it.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 hours ago, Mandy said:

I love my books in my bookshelves, even if I prefer to read on my kindle (because I can access it from my cellphone, internet, whatever AND it keeps my place without dog-earring!)  I have a hard copy of my favorites and always buy them when I see them in used bookstores, as I've mentioned (and now feel super dirty about).

I *think* I'm a normal book reader. I go to conventions specifically to meet authors, and I'm part of book clubs and meet people from the internet because I talked about books with them, so maybe not.  Hell, what makes a normal book reader?  I suppose there are normal book readers but I'm not sure there are a lot of "normal" book readers of this genre.  Geeks tend to be fans.  Fans tend to collect and cherish their books.

:full body shiver:

Bookmarks.  Never dogear.  Bookmarks.  Anything can be a bookmark.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Mandy said:

I dog ear.  They're my books, try and stop me.

I just might.

[Darth Richard II]

*shudder*

As an obsessive collector, dogearing terrifies me.

[The Marquis de Leech]

I don't mind cracked spines (books are meant to be read), but dogearing is... wrong. 

[mgambino]

18 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

*shudder*

As an obsessive collector, dogearing terrifies me.

I once broke up with a girl because she dogeared my copy of Three Musketeers. 

[Darth Richard II]

HERETICS!

[polishgenius]

Dog-earing is abuse and while I can't stop you doing it I'm certainly going to judge you. So there.

[SkynJay]

2 hours ago, mgambino said:

I once broke up with a girl because she dogeared my copy of Three Musketeers. 

As was only right.

[TheRevanchist]

Interesting discussion, and here are my thoughts:

1) Piracy is wrong. Both ethically and legally, that is the case.

2) The numbers are inflated. The 16000 people downloaded my book, so I lost 16000 * price_of_the_book is a horseshit argument. There isn't a chance that near as many people would have bought that book. In fact, I would say that there is a good argument that the number of those who would have bought the book is far more closer to 0 than 16000. For the sake of argument, lets say that it is 1600 (feeling generous today). Still, there is some harm, but nowhere near as much as OP claims.

3) Piracy is not necessarily bad. I think that in certain cases, it can actually help the authors (similar to video games). Some unknown author writes a book which sells just some copies, but gets pirated a lot. Some of these pirates (thieves) go and buy his/her book cause they liked it, and even more buy his/her new book, which makes the author more popular and richer. Alternately, author writes a book which doesn't sell well, but gets a lot of illegal downloads. He/She doesn't write anymore.

4) E-books prices are ridiculous. Sure there is an argument that they cost just as much as a cinema ticket, and you spend 2-5 times the amount of time on reading the book versus watching the movie, but the cost of production are completely different. Seriously, 13USD for a kindle new book is nuts, and everything above 5USD for a book that is older than a few years is nuts too. I think that if the books will have a more reasonable price, then they will get sold more. It will be the same effect that steam had on videogames.

5) Related to the previous point - this seems to be more the fault of publishers rather than the authors. The authors get already just a small fraction of the money the book generates, so lowering the prices as it is, would be game over for most of the authors. But surely, there might be found a compromise that suits everyone.

I have downloaded in the past (both books and games), and now that I have money, I buy both books and games (in fact, I own now pretty much every book/game that I have ever played/read despite that most of them I haven't ever replayed/reread and neither plan to do so). And while I agree that piracy is wrong, I think that it is a more complex thing than discussing in black and white terms.

And to conclude this, I don't think that piracy is the same as second hand books, though the author doesn't get money from either of those. The main difference is on the scale.

[MisterOJ]

5 hours ago, TheRevanchist said:

And to conclude this, I don't think that piracy is the same as second hand books, though the author doesn't get money from either of those. The main difference is on the scale.

It might not be the same, but it is very similar I think. While the scale of people buying in a second hand shop vs. those illegally downloading is not even close - I think a rational person could argue that the actual harm done to authors is probably similar. Because while a small fraction of illegal downloaders would actually pay money for an ebook, 100% of those who buy second hand will pay money for a book. That's not really debatable is it?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

42 minutes ago, MisterSrna said:

It might not be the same, but it is very similar I think. While the scale of people buying in a second hand shop vs. those illegally downloading is not even close - I think a rational person could argue that the actual harm done to authors is probably similar. Because while a small fraction of illegal downloaders would actually pay money for an ebook, 100% of those who buy second hand will pay money for a book. That's not really debatable is it?

But there is no legal right to compensation for the sale of second hand books because no new copy is created.  You are throwing out this red herring repeatedly.  

[MisterOJ]

12 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

But there is no legal right to compensation for the sale of second hand books because no new copy is created.  You are throwing out this red herring repeatedly.  

I could care less about the legality of it. Copyright laws are antiquated and stupid and need to be reworked. I am only interested in discussing the ethics of the situation and about actual harm done to authors. If you don't think an author deserves to be compensated whenever someone purchases their work, that's fine and you have every right to believe that. I, on the other hand, believe that when a book is sold, the author of the book should be compensated. Period.