The ethics of "free" e-books

[TrackerNeil]

Really? We're going to do the semantics of torrenting dance?

Exactly. If one is facilitating the torrenting, then one is basically doing the torrenting. A distinction without difference.

[sologdin]

purely deductive here, but perhaps even if author receives no royalty from library licensing fee, publisher nevertheless receives income from the text and is able thereby to remain active on it, which inures in the fullness of time to author's benefit.

[unJon]

Interesting article here on libraries and ebooks: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/2014/06/27/why-difficult-for-your-library-stock-ebooks/rrl464TPxDaYmDnJewOmzH/story.html

Note per this source that libraries do not pay any type of licensing or royalty fee for paper books. So glad we could clear that up.

It would plainly violate copyright law for publishers to put such restrictions on libraries for paperback or hardcover books. That is covered by the first-sale doctrine of copyright law, which says once somebody buys something, theyre free to do what they like with itdonate it, resell it, or in the case of libraries, lend it out.

Here is a Forbes article on the topic. Rather interesting and less biased than you'd expect from them. http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidvinjamuri/2012/12/11/the-wrong-war-over-ebooks-publishers-vs-libraries/

[TrackerNeil]

purely deductive here, but perhaps even if author receives no royalty from library licensing fee, publisher nevertheless receives income from the text and is able thereby to remain active on it, which inures in the fullness of time to author's benefit.

This makes sense.

Honestly, I feel like the various justifications for torrenting ebooks are really just exhausting ethical contortions to make acceptable something that just isn't a very good thing to do. ("I wouldn't have bought it anyway!", "I didn't take a physical copy", "Ebooks are too expensive", etc.) If you are interested in a book, don't spend time thinking of reasons why stealing it is OK; just pay for it, for crying out loud.

[unJon]

Tracker, think you weren't directing that at me, but for the record I'm totally anti-pirating and have never done it. My only post in this thread (I think) was to jump on the library fee tangent that I thought was ipse dixit.

ETA: Totally off topic, but I wonder if pro-pirating folks come down the same way on medical patents. Should modern medicine become a patronage model, it's easy to see the drop in R&D and corresponding loss of new drugs that would follow. (Hold aside the arguments that it already is to some extent a patronage model with the U.S. gov't the patron.)

The non-rivalrous good argument always falls flat with me because it assumes (to use game theory terminology) a one-shot game vs an indefinitely iterated game. Google prisoners dilemma and indefinitely iterated prisoners dilemma if you want an intuitively easy to grasp example of the concepts.

[Lady Winter Rose]

This makes sense.

Honestly, I feel like the various justifications for torrenting ebooks are really just exhausting ethical contortions to make acceptable something that just isn't a very good thing to do. ("I wouldn't have bought it anyway!", "I didn't take a physical copy", "Ebooks are too expensive", etc.) If you are interested in a book, don't spend time thinking of reasons why stealing it is OK; just pay for it, for crying out loud.

Maybe people who pirate books have good reasons not to pay? You are acting like you don't even understand about two first arguments, but maybe that's true since no pirate would say these arguments. Here's what wrong with your WORDING.

Third argument "ebooks are expensive" isn't very good, but you do NOT take ANYTHING from publisher by downloading a book. Ebook is still available to purchase to anyone and NOTHING is missing for the store. It's not a bubble gum that disappears in somebody's pocket after not paying for that gum. So "I didn't take a physical copy", isn't arguments pirates are using. They are saying publisher has ALL copies he produced.

Second, people WOULD ignore content they can't download and won't buy, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't brought them AFTER they downloaded and liked the book/game/music. Of course read/buy ratio isn't peachy, but published can't force anyone to buy the book/game/music. No download-> weak sales. Approved download-> works like promotion for good games.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

LWR,

But... what you seem to be missing is that making that copy without the permission of the copyright holder, and remember Tracker is an author and a copyright holder who has made his book available for free and asked (not insisted despite his right to insist) for donations and gotten nothing but complaints about asking, is a criminal act in most places to protect the right of the creater of the material copied. It doesn't matter that nothing phyisical was stolen. By copying the work you have diminished the overall value of the work.

Again, I do think copyright needs an overhall but that belief doesn't then mean there is nothing wrong with priates' attitude of entitlement with regard to digital copies of books.

[Larry of the Lawn]

LWR,

But... what you seem to be missing is that making that copy without the permission of the copyright holder, and remember Tracker is an author and a copyright holder who has made his book available for free and asked (not insisted despite his right to insist) for donations and gotten nothing but complaints about asking, is a criminal act in most places to protect the right of the creater of the material copied. It doesn't matter that nothing phyisical was stolen. By copying the work you have diminished the overall value of the work.

Again, I do think copyright needs an overhall but that belief doesn't then mean there is nothing wrong with priates' attitude of entitlement with regard to digital copies of books.

Well given that we now know libraries pay no 'license fees' on regular books, doesn't this create more of a grey area in the case of those who pirate? Particularly for hose that use it as a test to see if they want to buy the book?

Because regardless of copyright law, which for your average non-lawyer person is an obscure and distant concept, there is already a widely accepted and even revered institution serving the same function for real books that torrent sites do for ebooks: the library.

Eta: potentially trick question:

Would it be wrong to pirate Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book ?

[sologdin]

lotsa lefties probably have no problem with distribution under a copyleft rationale. i've got a buncha dave harveys and hobsbawms and chomskys that appear to be circulated as pdfs everywhere. for them, dissemination of the argument should have priority over personal remuneration.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Lari,

Well given that we now know libraries pay no 'license fees' on regular books, doesn't this create more of a grey area in the case of those who pirate? Particularly for hose that use it as a test to see if they want to buy the book?

Because regardless of copyright law, which for your average non-lawyer person is an obscure and distant concept, there is already a widely accepted and even revered institution serving the same function for real books that torrent sites do for ebooks: the library.

Eta: potentially trick question:

Would it be wrong to pirate Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book ?

Is Hoffman the copyright holder? Did he give generalized permission to take his book? If yes to both it's not a copyright violation because you have permission from the copyright holder to copy.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Lari,

Is Hoffman the copyright holder? Did he give generalized permission to take his book? If yes to both it's not a copyright violation because you have permission from the copyright holder to copy.

Thanks. Is it usually just the author that is the copyright holder or is the publisher usually involved too?

[Darth Richard II]

Huh what? Totally lost now. Downloading a book and not paying for it isn't stealing? It is? Sometimes it is?

[sologdin]

larry--

copyright is five or six distinct rights, not counting droit moral, which are a bit harder to alienate--which means we can split it out in a number if ways.

[Spockydog]

Huh what? Totally lost now. Downloading a book and not paying for it isn't stealing? It is? Sometimes it is?

Don't sweat it, Dick. This thread will be closed soon, hopefully it will be a while before someone starts another.

[unJon]

Huh what? Totally lost now. Downloading a book and not paying for it isn't stealing? It is? Sometimes it is?

It's not stealing. It may or may not be copyright infringement depending on the copyright holders grant of a general license.

[sologdin]

right. theft is asportation with intent to permanently deprive, which doesn't happen with infringement.

[SerHaHa]

I think it'll be impossible to ever enforce some sort of legal "ban" on torrenting epubs, regardless of how any of us feel. There will always be some new way to mask your IP addy, hide what you're doing, and so on.

The best way to combat people using creative material without cost or any benefit to those who created it is to get the pricing more inline and sensible. 32$ Canadian for a copy of GRRM latest WOIAF book in Canada on Kindle, only a few dollars cheaper than just buying the book. 8 to 12$ for a kindle version of any of the ASOIAF up here, nearly as much or even more than the cost of a paper back copy. Come on. No wonder people steal - sorry, borrow - the electronic version when the pricing is so out of whack. Personally I don't like reading on devices, my eyes are getting too old for it, but I can understand the movement of younger readers doing so.

Considering there is virtually NO cost involved other than the tiny bit of bandwidth and the commerce platform for charging folks, if publishers were to start charging 2$ for data copies of epub books, torrenting would be drastically reduced IMO.

This problem is systemic in all digital media in my opinion - I saw a lecture given by Ari Emanuel (the character Ari Gold is based on this real life agency owner), and he went on and on about digital premium content being stolen, and how he held San Fransisco (ie tech/net biz) to task for that - how about reducing the 8 or 9 dollar fees that iWhatever charges for a new movie, nearly the price of a solid DVD for just some data you can't even keep in many cases. Again IMO times have changed, and the pricing needs to be adjusted, or the piracy is just going to continue and get worse.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

SerHaHa,

Just because you can get away with something it does not therefore follow you should do something. The effort of authors, editors, copyeditors, and formaters deserves compensation. To say these things should just be "free" says that these efforts are unworthy of compensation.

[unJon]

SSE,

Don't you find the morality argument never really persuades those who don't already share a similar moral code?

Better to stick with the instrumentalist argument (IMO) that the authors, editors, copyeditors and formatters all making less money because of torrenting causes people to not go into those professions (or be unable to commit to them on a full time basis). Over time that means that potentially great books will never get written or published.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

Tracker, think you weren't directing that at me, but for the record I'm totally anti-pirating and have never done it. My only post in this thread (I think) was to jump on the library fee tangent that I thought was ipse dixit.

ETA: Totally off topic, but I wonder if pro-pirating folks come down the same way on medical patents. Should modern medicine become a patronage model, it's easy to see the drop in R&D and corresponding loss of new drugs that would follow. (Hold aside the arguments that it already is to some extent a patronage model with the U.S. gov't the patron.)

The non-rivalrous good argument always falls flat with me because it assumes (to use game theory terminology) a one-shot game vs an indefinitely iterated game. Google prisoners dilemma and indefinitely iterated prisoners dilemma if you want an intuitively easy to grasp example of the concepts.

No, it doesn't. The observation that "intellectual property" is intangible, infinitely reproducible and non-rivalrous, and the moral argument that property rights only properly attach to rivalrous goods doesn't assume anything vis-a-vis game theory. It is not a consequentialist argument.

And yes, I am equally (in fact, significantly more so) opposed to medical patents, industrial patents, etc. I am opposed to them regardless of the consequences of doing away with them, although I am unconvinced that the practical consequences of doing so would, ultimately, be negative. "Intellectual property" in creative works is the least significant use of "intellectual property" by far (what it protects has the least societal importance) - it just happens to be the easiest to violate.