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Author Slams eBook Piracy, Son Outs Her As a Music Pirate
- pdx 16y agoI feel for the kid. I still grimace when I think of bragging to the game warden when I was 4, about how my dad caught a salmon with his bare hands. Of course, it wasn't fishing season, nor did we have a license. Even at 4, as soon as I said it, I knew I had screwed up. Luckily, everybody just laughed, as the game warden was a friend, but to this day, that slip of the tongue reminds me to think before I speak.
- WillyF 16y agoI never thought of it, but poaching is a lot like piracy. I don't think your intent was to make that analogy, but there are a lot of similarities.
- hvs 16y agoExcept that wildlife is a limited resource that needs to be protected from poachers. It's only like piracy if you think there is an unlimited supply of wildlife that anyone should be able to take as they like.
- WillyF 16y agoAs an avid fly fisherman, I completely agree; however, it's often very difficult for people to conceptualize that wildlife is a limited resource. How does my taking a fish that is a half inch under the limit really hurt anyone? What about an extra fish? Or fishing after dark when it's illegal? The negative effects are often extremely far removed from the initial act. That doesn't make it ok, but it does explain why many people who would never steal from a store will break all kinds of Fish and Game laws.
- wvenable 16y agoThis is tragedy of the commons -- if one person does it, there is no real harm but if everyone does it then there will be no fish left for anyone. A lot of people can conceptualize this but many others rely on the fact that other people don't break the rules. Music piracy is similar. Piracy works right now because there are enough people buying music and the margins are high enough that those legitimate buyers are supporting the pirates. Only at the point that creating music is unprofitable will piracy be affected (no more fish in the sea). I don't see that happening for a long time.
- chc 16y agoEven erstwhile pirates often buy music. In fact, studies have shown that pirates are actually the music industry's biggest supporters: http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-tons-more-music-than-average-folks.ars http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-... There are some devout pirates who simply will not buy, but I suspect they would not buy even if they had another option — these are the people who would tape songs off the radio and copy their friends' CDs. They're either people who just refuse to pay for things or too poor to pay for things. But you can't generalize this to "pirates."
- steveklabnik 16y agoThe zillions of unsigned bands wailing on guitars in every bar from Thursday to Sunday suggest that there'd still be plenty of music, even if there was no way to sell recordings.
- gnosis 16y ago"Only at the point that creating music is unprofitable will piracy be affected (no more fish in the sea)." Many (most) musicians/artists create music/art for the love of it. They make very little if any money doing it. Often, they even do it at a loss. It has been this way since long, long before the internet and filesharing existed.
- dantheman 16y agoTrue, but those breaking the fish and game laws may not be hurting anyone. They may disagree with the law. Especially because the fish and game laws only apply to public property. It'd be more analogous to going to a private reserve or piece of land and disregarding the owners regulations.
- tallanvor 16y agoAn ebook, mp3, or other digital object can be considered an unlimited resource, the creator of said object is a limited resource, and they do deserve protection. That said, authors and artists like the lady in the article are hurting themselves when they choose not to make their works available to people in the format they want, especially when it is very easy to convert those works into different formats, or at least easy enough that people are willing to do it.
- DanielStraight 16y agoThis is really an excellent observation. Thank you for sharing. One consequence, it seems, would be that a work would enter public domain as soon as the creator dies, since the only remaining resource (the digital work) is unlimited.
- tallanvor 16y agoThere definitely needs to be meaningful copyright reform. Having works of art enter the public domain upon the death of the creator seems pretty fair, although there should probably be an extension for cases where children under the age of 18 are involved. And, of course, there should be an absolute time limit on all copyrights in the cases where they're assigned to corporations.
- rmc 16y agoYes the kid 'outs' her, however she also digs her own grave and makes some points that can easily be used to justify book piracy. e.g. “Pirated handbags? Yes, I do buy them,” she said. “I feel that the genuine Prada bags have such an inflated price.” and “You have a pirated MP3 collection,” Jo added, helpfully. “We copied the first 1500 songs from one place and 300 from another.” “Yes,” admitted Ragbe. “There were a lot of things on the iPod.”
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago>“Pirated handbags? Yes, I do buy them,” she said. “I feel that the genuine Prada bags have such an inflated price.” I feel that lumping handbags in here is wrong. There's probably a trademark infringement as well with the handbags. But, whilst there is copyright infringement in the design does the design have an artistic quality or is it "just" a design. The fact that there is a skill and materials expense in producing the handbags gives it a different quality IMO. The important part with the handbags is the infringement of the Prada trademark whilst with the books and music it is the copyright infringement. A fashion designer would probably disagree?
- pmichaud 16y agoI sell e-books and they almost all get pirated. I don't care, I just focus on the people who want to pay for my stuff. No skin off my nose if they don't.
- markkat 16y agoSame here. A file that can be copied infinite times without cost is not worth much. I put 2 years of work into a book that gets pirated all the time. I have no problem with it at all. I think we would be better off reevaluating business models rather than suffering the effects of trying to preserve out-dated ones.
- matwood 16y agoThat's probably the best attitude to take since you can't ever stop the infringers. And if you do try to stop them you're only making it more complicated on the people who do want to buy your content. I buy lots of ebooks and music and the key for me is making it easy to pay for (Amazon and ITMS are great for this). I don't want to jump through hoops to give you my money. Contrast this with the movie industry who I think are setting themselves up in a way that's pushing infringement with all the rules around renting, buying, streaming, and NetFlix. For example, I see a commercial that a movie now 'in stores' so I check NF. If it's not there and I really want to see it, I'll check the iTunes and xbox marketplaces. When I can't find it there I wonder if they really want my money? They are pushing me to buy the movie, but I don't want to buy the movie I just want to rent it and see it once. I think they are pushing many potential renters to just torrent the movie because they have made it so hard to actually give them money. By this point I'm usually so fed up with looking for the movie I forget about watching it until it shows up on NF.
- WillyF 16y agoI think that humans have an inherent problem with seeing piracy as theft unless they are the victims. Theft in a traditional sense is almost always zero-sum, and piracy isn't. We weren't really built to deal with this. The closest thing that I can think of is having someone sleep with your spouse—it's kind of like stealing, but it's not zero-sum. And it's not illegal. It also doesn't help that our intellectual property laws have a lot of inconsistencies. If I steal your ideas for a startup, that's ok unless you have patented technology. But if I make a copy of something that I own and share it with a friend, that's illegal. Up until now there had never been a way to take a material possession and duplicate it at essentially no cost. I think that we have a long way to go before we develop strong cultural norms on how to deal with intellectual property.
- sudont 16y agoIdeas for a startup are just ideas. Music and books, regardless of form, are implementations and execution. I say that the actual execution of the idea is what's important. Code piracy's probably a better comparison. That said, as an artist I'm not too worried if somebody rips off my work to print for a personal hanging.
- nkassis 16y ago"The closest thing that I can think of is having someone sleep with your spouse" That's a pretty horrible analogy. It's not like you have a deal with the RIAA/MPAA equivalent to a marriage contract. The sole idea of that scares me. Also, if you ripoff your spouse and make her pay extra to get anything from you and only on terms that lets you control you forever, I think you deserve the cheating. You can go on exploiting your spouse like that and no expect issues. In retrospect, might not be such a bad analogy ;p
- raquo 16y agoI think most humans default to disregarding the other end of most relationships unless something urges them to.
- wccrawford 16y agoDuplicate it at no cost to anyone except yourself, I think you mean. It often does cost time and money to pirate things. And now that RepRap and similar 3D object printers are becoming more popular, they will continue to come down in price. It won't be long before printing physical items is a possibility, and then wholesale pirating of things that used to be protected by patents will start. And if you're having trouble imagining that happening, don't worry. It was just as hard to imagine music piracy before MP3s. It happened on a VERY small scale before that due to difficulty and media cost.
- rick888 16y agoThis still doesn't change the fact that piracy does hurt authors. The sad fact is that piracy is only getting worse. Even when you can get a song for 99 cents with no DRM or restrictions, music piracy is still rampant. I'm waiting for the next set of excuses. In '99, it was because music was too expensive and the artists were getting screwed (which is a funny excuse, because 1% of something is something, but 1% of 0 is 0). Later, it was because DRM made it too difficult to play music. This is why you don't negociate with criminals. They will just keep bleeding you dry. The music industry is learning this lesson at the expense of their profits. Now there is a new generation of kids that feel entitled to music, software, and movies for free. This is one of the main reasons why I no longer sell applications. I have converted them all to services. This way, there is no way someone can pirate it.
- mikecane 16y agoI'd still like to know how much piracy is due to friction. The First Friction being the inability to take cash and turn it easily into digital payments.
- arethuza 16y agoMusic piracy has always been rampant I can remember being a kid in the 70s and 80s and we all borrowed albums from friends and made copies on cassette tapes. Or at least all my friends did.... ;-)
- zacharycohn 16y agoI once had a polygraph interviewer tell me this exact same thing and "not to worry about small shit like piracy."
- alextgordon 16y agoThe sad fact is that piracy is only getting worse. Even when you can get a song for 99 cents with no DRM or restrictions, music piracy is still rampant. I'm waiting for the next set of excuses. I rarely pirate music but, if I bought all my music on Amazon or iTunes I'd be paying thousands of dollars a year. For a large subset of the population, this is simply an unacceptable expense. Hence: piracy.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- cafard 16y agoBogus Prada bags hardly seems to compare. Maybe if one took fancy dust jackets (Hennessey and Patterson, Musil, whatever) and wrapped them around Readers Digest condensed books one might have a comparable case.
- ctkrohn 16y agoOh come on. It's easy to call someone a hypocrite -- everyone agrees its wrong, whatever their other moral principles might be. The failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right. EDIT: changed "everyone agrees its wrong" to "everyone agrees hypocrisy is wrong"
- abstractbill 16y agoeveryone agrees its wrong Are you saying everyone agrees piracy is wrong? In my mind that's very much still open to debate.
- ctkrohn 16y agoNo, not at all. I certainly agree that piracy is open to debate. I meant to say that everyone agrees hypocrisy is wrong. If that's the most obvious reading of my comment, the downvotes make a little more sense...
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoEveryone agrees there are no absolutes. I think you'd find there are many people who find it acceptable to act contrary to how they expect others to act and moreover acceptable to pretend to be that which they are not.
- randallsquared 16y agoThe failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right. If you assume they're failures, they don't have much bearing. If, however, you assume that people's actions reflect their beliefs more closely than their arguments do, the fact of hypocrisy regarding a given belief suggests rather strongly that even the person making the argument doesn't believe it. When an argument's proponents don't even believe it, I think it's reasonably strong evidence that it isn't true.
- ctkrohn 16y ago
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- c0riander 16y agoThe problem most authors (artists) face is not piracy, but obscurity. Not condoning piracy, but simply an observation. (I'm skeptical that people who pirate the e-books would necessarily otherwise purchase them, so I'm always uncertain about estimates of "losses" like in this article. Many times someone will download it to just check it out, similar to flipping through it in a bookstore, which you don't have to pay for.)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- nochiel 16y agoI feel it is instructive that we remember Tim O'Reilly's incisive piece titled "Piracy is progressive taxation"[0]. It makes little sense to claim that an author/musician is losing money through piracy when the likelihood is that the [majority of the] pirated copies would not have otherwise been bought. Footnotes. [0] http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html
- T_S_ 16y ago.. no one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me. --Thomas Jefferson And so the progress of virtual goods has turned their producers into teachers. The consequences are still unknown.
- EGreg 16y agoAll I can say is: ha ha ha. And: we need to come up with a better system for selling intellectual art these days!
- xtho 16y ago> “Books are priced too high” I don't think he (the "pirat") has an idea of how much time has to be invested in the production of good books. I personally think that books are drastically undervalued and that people are not willing to pay enough for good books which has the consequence that they are either served well targeted bestsellers, which can be produced at that price, or junk. Big publishing companies and bestseller authors don't have that much of a problem selling their books at a lower price so that people are less inclined to download a pirated book.
- modeless 16y agoThe App Store has proven that most software is overpriced. If there was a book store with $.99 and $1.99 books, I think we would discover something very similar.
- cosmicray 16y agoThe question could be argued about if software was overpriced, or were there too many layers in the distribution chain that all wanted to make something off the software sale. The iTunes App store has collapsed the distribution chain. The OS X App store may do the same.
- ronnoch 16y agoYeah, that's one quote I just can't agree with. The amount of value I get out of a good book always hugely exceeds what I paid for it.
- relix 16y agoI don't think he means books in general, but ebooks, as compared to paperbacks/hardbacks. I recently bought a Kindle, and every ebook in the Amazon store, without exception, is more expensive than the cheapest paperback version available at Amazon. That's just ridiculous, and no matter how "close to zero" any marginal costs of a printed book might be - and I'd like some proof of that, because I find it hard to believe that handling, shipping, storage, printing, testprinting, typesetting, missed shipments etc, are so cheap - an ebook should never be more expensive than the same physical paperback.
- krschultz 16y agoI've seen the following argument a thousand times: "Well the marginal cost of a copy of [some digital good] is 0 so it isn't stealing!" That argument is actually completly irrelevant. I took a train the other night, and there were only 2 people in my whole car. The previous week it was packed. Both times I had to buy a ticket at the same price. If you don't see what that has to do with pirating music (or software, or movies, or TV), then you don't really understand economics. Everyone compares it to widgets where there is some fixed cost and some marginal cost, and suddenly the marginal cost is 0 so we should be able to have it for free right? Right? Wrong. The train has 0 marginal costs, and all fixed costs. Whether that train is empty or full, they pay for the conductor, the engineer, the maitanence and the gas. But you are expected to pay for your ride whether you are 1/1000th of the total population on the train or 1/20th. And if you don't pay, you are breaking the law. Stealing services. Digital goods are things with a high fixed costs (software developers, authors, directors, actors etc) and 0 marginal costs. There are plenty of other things out there with the same economic model and you are expected to pay for all of them. The only difference is that it is far easier to steal from content creators than service providers. So please correct everyone you see making that arguement. The fact that copying the music costs nothing really doesn't matter. It comes down to dividing the fixed costs by a certain amount of customers, or there simply won't be content creators anymore. Maybe the songs need to be 2 cents each, I don't know, but the fact is there are high fixed costs and they need to be covered somehow by someone. The lack of marginal cost just doesn't matter.
- chc 16y agoYou're repeating the big media newspeak. "Breaking the law" is not identical to "stealing." If you enter a place you are not allowed to be but do not deprive anybody else of property already in his custody, you are committing trespass and any number of other crimes, but you are emphatically not stealing. So please correct everyone you see making that argument.
- krschultz 16y agoAgreed, but what word would you use? We aren't trespassing when we use bittorrent. And I know people who have been attacked by pirates wielding guns onto their ships, so I just feel strange equating clicking on a link with a guy shooting a civilian with an AK47. So I equate it to "theft of services". Let's say I get a massage, and then I just walk out the door and don't pay for it. I have clearly stolen that person's valuable time. Which isn't a perfect analogy becuase they have finite time vs being able to make infinite copies, but either way someone worked hard with the intention of getting paid for it, and there are people out there depriving them of the money they would have gotten (and please don't say "but I wouldn't have bought it anyway! which is also crap, becuase most people are downloading music they would have bought, its just the nature of blockbusters vs the long tail). So I don't know what the word is, but it is definitely closer to theft of services than anything else I can think of.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- nene 16y agoWhat struck me most was this passage: In order to thwart piracy, she refused to allow her latest novel to be released as an audiobook since the format is popular with file-sharers and also denied the publication of Russian and Chinese versions. Isn't it like taping on the cover of the book: "Only for white"?
- rick888 16y ago"Only for white" hmm..so there are no whites in Russia? Most e-commerce companies where I've worked block both Russia and China due to massive piracy or credit card theft.