Author here. One of my books was pirated and wide spread some time ago within the community I'm in. My income dropped almost immediately, I am loosing $Xk worth of sales every month. Not motivated to write another book.
The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free? I spent almost 2 years on writing the book. I hope you have a good answer.
The entire framework we have for paying authors is through distribution cost. Now we have zero distribution cost!
The entire business model you are relying on for income has been completely broken for 30 years.
You aren't losing sales. You are missing them. They aren't being taken away from you, they are passing you by. The result may be the same for you personally, but it's still a critical difference.
You - and every other author - need a new framework to attract income. I have no idea what that would look like, or even if such a thing could exist. I do know, however, that pretending the old system can still work in the digital age isn't fixing anything for anyone.
You just kind of handwave the whole problem away. Why aren't authors paid for the work they do? You can that like it isn't true and that it cannot be true.
>You - and every other author - need a new framework to attract income. I have no idea what that would look like, or even if such a thing could exist.
So basically you're deciding the entire industry of book writing is broken and needs to be entirely re-created BUT you also don't know how or what it should even look like. But until then we should all just be okay with pirating the work of others and thereby robbing them of their means of living, because it has been decided that the old system is beyond functioning.
> You just kind of handwave the whole problem away.
No, that's what copyright does. It demands we all play the game, then it's totally unprepared for that not working out. Someone used a computer and an internet connection to share data without paying me money? shocked Pikachu face
I'm at least admitting there's a problem. Just because I don't have a solution does not mean I don't understand the problem. Not all problems are that easily solved.
If I did have a solution, I would be implementing it. After all, a solution to that problem would be one of the most valuable contributions to society I can think of. At least one of the most highly valued.
> So basically you're deciding the entire industry of book writing is broken
I didn't decide. I was speaking descriptively, not prescriptively; something the copyright industry seems rather unfamiliar with.
> But until then we should all just be okay with pirating the work of others and thereby robbing them of their means of living, because it has been decided that the old system is beyond functioning.
It's not a matter of being OK with it or not. We can't compel every person to follow the rules. We've been trying that method for 30 years, and it's been blowing up in our faces the entire time.
The reality is that copyright is a false promise. We can't force people to add a monetary transaction to the distribution of information, when information can be distributed anonymously at next to zero cost.
You're so worried about the ethical implications of piracy, but what about the ethical implications of the false promise that is copyright?
We are telling authors every day that they can make money selling books, but that is only true occasionally, by chance. We have no way to guarantee that will happen. We can't attribute every successful book sale to copyright enforcement, because we know copyright enforcement is broadly failing.
It's time to stop treating this like a game of good vs evil, and recognize the failure of the game itself. Even if that means recognizing that we already lost.
You talk about wanting to find a solution, so I'd like to share where I think one might be found. Not that I've found it, I just think I know where to look.
The problem with books is that we live in a partially post-scarcity society. Star Trek envisioned post-scarcity everything, but we live in a partially post-scarcity society: Food, pure metals, clean water etc. are all still scarce, but anything that can be digitized is not. Books can be digitized, so they are subject to post-scarcity economics, but most of the author's needs are subject to scarcity economics.
What bridges the these two economies, and where I believe the answer can be found, is in attention. Attention is scarce, but it is also necessary to consume anything in the post-scarcity economy. It exists in both worlds somehow, and I therefore believe it's closely related to the problem of how an author can get paid.
Your logic doesn’t make sense to me. Pre-digital, a book could just be shared with a friend one at a time (unless you wanted to xerox the whole thing which I’ve seen but it’s always low quality).
Pirate Bay does that at scale—millions of “friends”, and all at the same quality. It’s unsustainable to authors. Don’t tell the authors to find “a new framework”.
What do you expect them to do? Force users to sign up for a weekly subscription and email out individually DRMed copies of the chapters each week?
Unless you can actually propose a good idea with the mechanics of why it works for both parties in economic terms, don’t go around shaming the authors.
> Pirate Bay does that at scale—millions of “friends”, and all at the same quality. It’s unsustainable to authors. Don’t tell the authors to find “a new framework”.
I'm not telling authors to find a new framework. Such a thing doesn't exist. I'm not even sure it could exist.
And that sucks, because authors need a new framework.
> What do you expect them to do?
I don't. I have zero expectations.
> Unless you can actually propose a good idea with the mechanics of why it works for both parties in economic terms, don’t go around shaming the authors.
I'm not here shaming anyone. I'm just being honest. This system is broken. We're all looking at the same shattered pieces. It's wild that I'm the only one here who isn't pretending everything is OK.
> Pre-digital, a book could just be shared with a friend one at a time (unless you wanted to xerox the whole thing which I’ve seen but it’s always low quality).
Post-digital, a legally purchased book can be shared with no friends, none at a time.
> Your logic doesn’t make sense to me. Pre-digital, a book could just be shared with a friend one at a time (unless you wanted to xerox the whole thing which I’ve seen but it’s always low quality).
Sure, but books also had a much higher value due to a relative lack of competitors. Books now have to compete with a plethora of free media available on YouTube, forums, blogs, etc.
Some of them may be of lower quality, but it's hard to beat free. Lots of us have taught ourselves skills via free resources that we probably would have had to pay for at one point.
It's much harder to charge for knowledge than it once was.
Well, post digital era we still buy/rent games, video and music.
I don't see why something similar couldn't be done, pay monthly and you can read whatever your want, and what you read depends on where the money from your subscription goes. And as distribution costs are lower, higher % of it should go to the writers. Hell, amazon could just do that, except of course they wouldn't give a fair cut...
At zero cost to try new authors it could possibly be a good way for more niche stuff, you can just page thru any book that you want with no cost but time
> What do you expect them to do? Force users to sign up for a weekly subscription and email out individually DRMed copies of the chapters each week?
There is actually one guy doing it on patreon but he already have YT audience for music gear reviews (book is about electronic music ideas and tips). So it is possible, just kinda hard as you already need to have publicity.
It's only a problem is he's unmotivated and he wants to write. If he just decides not to write then, it's pretty simple for him to move not. Not so for the readers who pirated his first book, found it expanded their minds and now are hungry for more by the same author.
That might be frustrating for his would-be readers, but in the same way that it’s frustrating to me that there aren’t many great small flagship smartphones. It’s a bummer, but I’m not going to genuinely complain that I’m being wronged because there aren’t enough people out there willing to buy a small phone.
I am happy to complain that we as a society have limited ways to reward people who share knowledge that we all benefit from. The answer, if you ask me, is to levy a tax and let citizens decide where the money goes via quadratic voting.
royalroad.com has thousands of stories in various subgenres of fantasy that are available for free.
The business model is, the author builds up a substantial number of pages/chapters, begins publishing on RR, when they reach a big enough readership they launch a patreon which is typically 20-50 pages ahead which their patreons can read.
Once they have a couple of books worth of material, they remove the first books worth of content from RR and publish it on Kindle Unlimited, which is an all you can read service for about $8 a month from amazon. They then move onto audible versions at a later date assuming all goes well. Physical books are a complete afterthought btw.
The readership doesn't care about typo's, grammer or editing or prose they just want the story.
I expect this will become a fairly standard model in multiple genres going forward.
I read a lot on RR too and support a half dozen authors on patreon. But I've also seen those authors complaining when their work gets pirated from RR or patreon and put elsewhere. It's a good model but I don't think it is any more immune to loss of earnings from piracy then the models that have gone before.
Definitely a fan of this model. Anecdotal, but I recently subscribed to AMC+ because the pirate streaming site I was using didn't have the latest episode of a show I wanted to watch. I could have waited a literal day, or gone to a torrent tracker, but paying the $9 was just easier and shows support for the show.
I agree that this is a huge problem to be solved, but I don’t think it excuses piracy in any way.
On another note, one emerging new framework is patreon. Instead of paying for printing/distribution, you’re paying the author directly to continue writing.
Over 3/4 of the media I pay for is creative commons, redistributable, non-commercial, no-modifications, attribution licensed. (The other 1/4 is streaming video, music, etc, which is not CC licensed.)
I am 1%-5% of some of the CC artists' income. I'm probably < 0.000001% of the income for the corporate media sources I pay.
> The entire business model you are relying on for income has been completely broken for 30 years.
Many people have their lives depending on that business model. They just cannot realize that such system is dying, if not already dead. It's a false hope dictated by self-preservation.
The same could be said about software. Broken from birth I guess. Music too. Movies?
The main difference with books is how easy they are to distribute. The other forms take up more space and are not as trivial to leave at an end point to be picked up. Music and movies also have big interested who might sue you. Software was easier to copy - you would rather have my .exe than my .zip of hacked up SaaS code that won't work next year.
To answer what the next framework would be like. I think it would be crappier than just selling the book, and support fewer people. It would be bad for the reader too. Often the act of paying for a book makes it more valuable - the emotional investment in it means you will finish it and make use of it.
> The entire framework we have for paying authors is through distribution cost.
This isn't true through. The price in funding creation of the book (there is value on having the author focus exclusively on writing the book rather than finding time while doing a full time job), editing, marketing, etc.
It's like saying the price of a phone is simply a tally of the cost of each individual component, where you have to factor in engineering, R&D, etc.
The price of a phone is paid when you buy the phone. That's when and where the transaction happens.
If that transaction doesn't happen, then none of the other things you mentioned get funded.
You can't get the phone without a transaction happening. It's a physical object, so moving it has a distribution cost.
You can get the contents of a book without doing a transaction. You can share the contents of a book just as freely as I'm sharing this comment.
Because there isn't a transaction happening, there is no source of income. There is no time or place to ask readers for money. Money isn't even involved in the first place; neither are goods or services - apart from a trivial amount of bandwidth.
Treating arts like they are singular objects to be made only once (or services to be performed once) doesn't work anymore. Now they are instances. They can be recreated or performed for free. By anyone. Anywhere. At any time. Without anyone else watching.
You simply can't hijack every instantiation to involve a transaction. You can never stop the signal.
>You simply can't hijack every instantiation to involve a transaction.
IMO, you shouldn't hijack someone else's work to make it free. If the person creating it wants it to be distributed freely, they have the option to make it so.
> You can't get the phone without a transaction happening.
This is also the case (not always) for a book, because the creation has a cost. Again, the author can choose to make it free, but they should also be free to charge a fee for it. It's pretty arrogant to take that choice away from them.
I'm not taking anything out hijacking anyone. I'm not here to talk about whether piracy is or isn't moral. Believe it or not, that's totally irrelevant.
The cold hard truth is that an author can't choose to make their book free, because they can't choose to make it - the book itself - cost.
Books aren't individual objects anymore. They cost nothing to reproduce. They cost nothing to redistribute. Any value we assign to a book can be infinitely diluted by anyone at any time, because it's free and instantaneous for them to make new copies and share them.
It's pretty arrogant to tell authors that copyright will provide any guarantee to protect their income. It doesn't. It can't.
It's pretty arrogant to blame the death of copyright on piracy. Piracy is not the cause, it's the result. It's not the knife, it's the open wound.
This point of view ignores the fact that books have a cost to create, unless you think they just wave their hands and the content comes out fully formed.
> It's pretty arrogant to tell authors that copyright will provide any guarantee to protect their income. It doesn't. It can't.
> It's pretty arrogant to blame the death of copyright on piracy. Piracy is not the cause, it's the result. It's not the knife, it's the open wound.
I have made no comments about either of these subjects, so I don't see how it is relevant.
When secrets are written down on paper, then it's hard for people to share them without buying more paper from you. Sure, people can copy the paper and publish it for free, but convincing them not to is still a scalable solution. Printing takes work. At least, it did when copyright was invented.
When secrets are published on the internet, anyone can publish them again for free. Worldwide. Instantly. Literal billions of copies if they feel like it. There's no holding that back. It's not remotely scalable.
> The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free? I spent almost 2 years on writing the book. I hope you have a good answer.
My answer to this is that authors (and other creatives) should have a right to recoup the costs (including time) of their efforts, but currently the time period for doing so is ridiculously (too) long.
In the US, the original copyright term was 14 years, and if the author was alive after the end of that there was another (optional?) 14 year extension:
Those are good arguments against the length of the copyright, but not copyright itself. I assume the author got their book pirated in short time (shorter than 14 years) after release.
I don't think most piracy is early Mickey Mouse cartoons; if the argument for piracy based on copyright length was sincere, I'd expect to see almost exclusively older works pirated, but that's not what's most popular on the torrents.
Oh for sure the setting has evolved plenty from the early days, but that inherent conflict of resource guarding vs access is what drives a lot piracy.
Other angles on the same continuum:
- You cannot pay a reasonable amount to a single provider and expect to watch the television shows your friends talk about.
- You cannot go back and re-watch your favorite television show on a streaming service where you originally watched it, as their catalog dropped it last year.
The flipside: why should people everywhere in the world be asked to give up a large portion of their discretionary income to get access to educational materials that can be reproduced at zero marginal cost? What is the loss to society as a whole when we make pointless time sinks like Netflix and social media free but college textbooks unaffordable to many?
The internet allows us to give everybody on the planet access to world-class educational materials at practically no cost. This is so obviously a good thing for society as a whole that we should strive to see this future materialize. Yes, some authors will lose income, but society as a whole gains greatly when we fight artificial scarcity.
For what it's worth, I think authors should get compensated by some other means, especially when they write great books. But artificial scarcity isn't the answer, it never is.
(The current model is also unfair to authors because book sales follow a power-law curve where a handful of authors take practically all the winnings)
I can see the production cost of a fantasy genre book being high with every new book but textbooks not that much. Maximum you're asking some TAs to review your book and paying them with a thank you note on the first few pages of the book.
And to put more perspective into this conversation right now Disney+ subscription costs $79 per year, O'Reilly subscription is $499.
I don’t understand why people seem to think that having a monetary incentive to do something taints it somehow. Rewarding good behavior is half of justice. If someone writes books that many people really like, they’re doing a good deed and in my view should be rewarded.
Another thing you might find in your dreams is a world where people can live a comfortable life without working. I’d like that world, and I’m sure a lot of good art, music, blog posts, etc. would come from it. But I don’t see why you’d actively want people who produce those things to not be rewarded for it.
If you agree that allowing more people to have access to certain information is a net good, and that a adding financial barrier to access reduces the amount of people that can access it, then you agree that making information contingent on payment is strictly negative.
The problem is that under our current "make money or die" societal model, if you optimized for net good you'd end up starving on the streets.
Good art tends to sell for little to the artist, only becoming valuable once some rich person decides they want to sell it as expensive. The good artist does it as "the starving artist"
Similarly, it's big corporations like Spotify that benefit from music copyrights. Musicians make their money by selling your tickets
I have screenshots from the billing system, and I can easily prove that.
> It's easy to attribute low sales to piracy, when in fact people do not buy books, period.
The fact you're saying "period" means you're not ready to listen, but like to stick to your point of view. This will only affect your ability to see the truth.
> I have screenshots from the billing system, and I can easily prove that.
Unless the billing system tells you explicitly "you see the lack of people here compared to last month/year/some other time period? well, we actually possess the technology to find out who these potential people would have been, so we reached out to them and asked if they were going to buy your book. they all said 'yes, but not anymore, since I can now pirate it' and that's why your book stopped selling as well as before", how can you be sure you were going to make that money?
You misunderstood them. "Period" does not refer to the entire argument, as in "no one can change my mind", but to the sentence "people do not buy books", as opposed to "people do no bus books because they [...]"
Not necessarily. Wouldn’t most book sales (especially in small niche interest groups, which is what this sounds like) be expected to come very quickly after the release date and then drop off very quickly?
Yes, there might be other variables affecting it too, but a blanket statement of "Piracy doesn't reduce sales" when it's primarily studied in the higher volume form of video game sales which are often pirated immediately after release and thus the effect is not clearly visible is not a good argument either.
I feel blanket statements are generally not a good fit for serious discussions. We have to keep asking the questions that will guide us closer to better data.
I can't imagine the only good studies being on games. I'm sure similar studies for other forms of entertainment/art exist too. Games are also harder to pirate, and has its own problems that are virtually non-existent for books.
And if we were to go down that route, we can further divide the affected people into publishers, authors, book stores etc. and only then can we figure out how the moral compass of each of us is really adjusted :)
Big movie studios/publishers making billions of dollars? Hard to feel sorry for them.
Indie authors/studios? I definitely have a soft spot for them.
The porn industry became easily pirated. They pivoted to live shows and pay per minute (micro-currency tokenized payments), which can't be pirated and is easy to pay for (buy blocks of tokens).
Now, the recorded shows are effectively advertising for the live shows.
This was the case for a while, but OnlyFans kinda debunks that, no? It has been the biggest source of income for modern creators, and they generally don't do live streams (outside of like Twitch). Piracy is a very common problem for them.
It is still the most profitable and popular form of distribution though. You do have to fight the DMCA battles, but when it's your income you're gonna do that. That doesn't prove your point.
Disclosure: I am anti-copyright and am dating someone whose primary income is OF. I'm hyperactive in pirate communities but still fight for my partner's content.
Information deserves to be free, but creators should still be paid for their work. Adult content barely f*king qualifies as "information".
You're not "losing" anything, you just have expectations that aren't compatible with reality.
> The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free?
Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the food on your table?
> I spent almost 2 years on writing the book.
Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give you the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing information. Writing books isn't profitable anymore? Don't write books for living, do something else. That how the rest of us lowly peasants get by when we invest our time into something that flops.
I generally agree with this particular point, but not with the overall sentiment. Which is that this is the author's problem and he should just suck it up.
It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality books are an asset for society, and we all should be interested in finding a solution. Not necessarily by enforcing unenforceable rules from previous centuries. But we need something else that works.
A society in which only those with too much time on their hands write books is an intellectually poor one. We need authors who spend full time on producing high quality books, be it on non-fictional educational topic or on fictional entertainment. No worlds-best-expert is going to sit down and spend years of their life compiling a well-written book on a subject, just as little as Tom Cruise is going to shoot the next Top Gun for free (and the rest of the production company as well). We need to find a way, otherwise education will be stuck with outdated material and 5min ad-ridden clips on youtube by non-experts. (No offense, there are lots of experts on youtube, but there is a lot of crap out there too, and a 5 min clip on quantum entanglement just can't compete with a proper book. Whoever disagrees with this has likely watched too many such clips and never consumed a good book.)
> It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality books are an asset for society, and we all should be interested in finding a solution.
That is a real problem, but copyright is not an attempt to solve that problem. Copyright is an attempt to limit the distribution of information throughout society, supposedly to make content creation more financially rewarding. Piracy, on the other hand, is an attempt to increase the distribution of information throughout society, and supposedly makes content creation less financially rewarding.
The problem you describe is real, but neither copyright systems nor piracy (at least according to the popular naive descriptions I provided) are an attempt to solve it. They’re both just choices about whether the distribution of information throughout society or the financial rewards for content creation are more important.
Of course the author is losing something, someone stole his intellectual property and distributed it for free. It's not your responsibility to put food onto someone's table, but it is your responsibility not to steal it. Immoral acts do not become moral because they are easy to commit.
It’s amazing the lengths people go to justify self serving bullshit. The apologetics in this thread are no different than the ones made 20 years ago for stealing music and software. Indie software only escaped because the sass model made piracy hard. Music is in terrible shape and its only saving grace is that it’s also a performance medium.
If piracy makes it so that it doesn’t make much sense to produce novels, it’s the world that’s poorer. Justifying that because it happens or because it’s easy is nothing more than the naturalistic fallacy.
Copyright infringement is not theft. You can't "steal" "intellectual property" because there's no such thing, it's a misnomer.
If you learn that a trillion aliens from andromeda were reading your book right now are you horribly upset and graciously harmed by this blatant copyright infringement? What if they instead land and take all the worlds water? Note the difference between the two scenarios?
That's not a metaphor. Copyright infringement/ ip violation is not theft. When an item is stolen, you lose it. When your copyright is infringed, you may not even know it happens.
A lot of defenders of copyright often liken ip violation to theft. I remember a famous campaign where I'm from saying "piracy is theft". This is misinformation and fallacy. Copyright infringement is not theft, and there is no reason it should be treated as such
1. Taking food off someone's table was a metaphor.
2. If you're making the argument that theft is limited to tangible things, well, you're entitled to that belief, but generally the consensus is that intangible property is still property. Money is property.
3. If you're making the argument that zero marginal cost items are not private property, that's an extremely radical position that I doubt you actually endorse after thinking about the incentives in a society where that was the dominant view.
The most legitimate argument for large scale copyright theft is eminent domain style seizure on the grounds that it benefits society. I would even endorse a weak version of that argument in narrow, well defined instances. And do. Copyright should expire, and it should definitely be harder to extend. And it should be possible to seize copyright from estates where the creator is no longer living, in certain circumstances, or at least expand fair usage in some graded manner.
That's not what's being argued about though, what people in this thread, and what people who steal music and software used to believe was that those products weren't really property and so they could take them. It's flimsy justification for bad behavior.
> If you're making the argument that theft is limited to tangible things, well, you're entitled to that belief, but generally the consensus is that intangible property is still property. Money is property.
The argument is not about tangibility. If you steal someone's virtual money, they still cease to have it.
> If you're making the argument that zero marginal cost items are not private property, that's an extremely radical position
On the contrary, I'd argue that allowing people to literally own numbers is absurd.
Your entire argument boils down to the idea that musicians shouldn't own distribution rights to their work and that sass software licenses should be free. It's a stupid position to hold that falls apart immediately.
So yes, either you're under thirty and haven't thought it through or your ability to reason about this stuff is limited.
> Your entire argument boils down to the idea that musicians shouldn't own distribution rights to their work and that sass software licenses should be free.
Not really. It's about copying not being the same, in benefits and drawbacks, as stealing. If you want to engage in good faith debate, you should acknowledge the difference.
Copying datas/ideas is easy, beneficial to many and not at all clear to always be harmful to society.
I'm being pretty good faith about this, I just don't appreciate people who can't read.
The theoretical benefits to society from distributing people's IP for free is that people who otherwise couldn't afford the money for a book or song or piece of software are able to use it.
Of course, it becomes impossible to support yourself as an indie producer of (software/music/literature/etc) in a world where your work can be taken for free. That reduces the number of people who can participate in the creation of that sort of thing to hobbyists and large businesses that are capable of protecting their IP through other avenues.
Getting rid of intellectual property rights is a short sighted exercise and all you end up doing once you've run through the trove of contemporary and historical IP is impoverishing the world to a much greater degree by destroying incentives for creators to create new things.
The only solutions that I've heard defenders come up with is some version of <hand waving> "it doesn't matter, people will still produce art" Yeah, people will produce, but like 1/10th what they could if they can't make a living off it or aren't trust funders.
Current copyright is life of the author + 70, which is too long. Still, even in that situation, those who wouldn't otherwise have access to those books will eventually get it for free as works enter public domain. If you want to argue that we should drastically reduce the length of copyright, I'd agree with you. But pretending that IP theft doesn't matter is naive.
In your line of argumentation, if we enforced the ban on copying books, songs, movies perfectly, we would get much more of them.
Is this what we want though?
We are flooded with bad quality books, songs, movies, and it is hard to find something worth the time of a consumer who expects quality.
This flood of rubbish is apparently immensely profitable, even while all the copying is going on.
Why would high penalties for copying increase the average quality of production? There would be even more money in the business, attracting even more rubbish production.
If it's not possible to make a living at a vocation, all you will get is amateur participants. Even the most talented will have to find other things to do with their time in order to support themselves.
Contrary to the above sibling comment, amateurs do not often produce better art than professionals—promising amateurs learn their craft as professionals and tend to produce their best work mid-career. This conflicts with the lay understanding of creative endeavors, of course.
> If it's not possible to make a living at a vocation, all you will get is amateur participants.
Any examples? Do you believe the widespread availability of stuff on the internet makes it not possible to make a living writing software, books, TV show scripts or creating music?
> But pretending that IP theft doesn't matter is naive
I agree with you in the sense that distributing stuff on the Internet for free may cause lower revenue of the author than there would be without that. But the author and distributor should be aware of the Internet and its tendency to copy what is of interest and execute marketing/selling strategy to make it work anyway. Many do.
This is the "it's easy to steal so it's okay" argument, which I addressed up thread in a sibling comment about the dynamics of IP on the internet.
Yes, the conditions are as they are. Literature by dint of being pure text is probably in deep shit, but that's not what we're talking about—we're talking about whether the wide scale tragedy of the commons that is zero-friction IP theft is on balance, a bad thing.
No, it's the "internet is the platform for sharing" argument. Copying, sharing work of others is not, in essence, stealing that work. It is sharing that work, maybe illegaly, but then it is illegal sharing, not stealing.
2. No, that’s not the argument I’m making. If someone steals the money on your bank account, you still lose a quantifiable amount of that money. Your private property is being taken. If someone infringes on your copyright, they have infringed on your right to exclusivity to the content, but they have not stolen any of your property.
Note that here, I’m not making a judgment of value. Copyright infringement is a crime under the law of most countries, and it is definitely bad in some systems of values.
But it’s just not stealing. Something can be a crime without being thievery.
As a comparison (not metaphor), say somebody organizes a barbecue in your lawn while you’re absent, without your authorization. They bring their own stuff, they don’t damage anything, and when you come back you don’t even realize they were here.
Did they commit a crime? Yes, they infringed on your property
Did you lose money? Maybe. It may be so that they would have paid you money to use your lawn if they had no choice. Or maybe they wouldn’t have had that barbecue at all.
Did they steal something of yours? No. Their crime is trespassing, not thievery.
3. That’s closer, but distorted.
First, I never argued that copyright should be abolished. You are arguing on a weaker version of something I did not even mention. The only thing I was commenting on was that your argument for it was based on calling ip violation thievery, which it is not. Most modern systems of values consider thievery wrong, thus you create an emotional response to copyright by likening the two. But that is not a correct argument because copyright infringement is not thievery.
> and what people who steal music and software used to believe was that those products weren't really property and so they could take them. It's flimsy justification for bad behavior.
Those products didn’t exist before they made illicit copies themselves. If I make a fake Louis Vuitton bag for myself and wear it, I did not steal it. I certainly infringed on the designer’s IP, but my crime is counterfeiting, not thievery.
> that's an extremely radical position that I doubt you actually endorse after thinking about the incentives in a society where that was the dominant view.
Now that’s the interesting part. Now that we have admitted that copyright infringement is not thievery, ie not innately morally wrong in at least some systems of values (and I’m pretty sure it is actually a very recent notion), we can ask ourselves the right question: does it have a positive impact on society? The answer to that is mixed:
- It creates incentives for artists and people who transmit knowledge
- But it also creates inequality in access to culture / knowledge
- And it creates counter-incentives for people to access culture and knowledge. Thus making individuals less learned and knowledgable
No doubt that the first effect largely compensates the 3rd, and that globally it has a good effect on society. Remains that it is not optimal at all.
But can we create a better system of incentives? That’s the real question. My take on that is "probably.".
"Steal" has many meanings and only some of them involve the loss of the thing stolen.
The Oxford American Dictionary provides several examples (I'm using "___" to indicate indentation in the following) that illustrate the range of what can be stolen:
1 [with object] take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it: thieves stole her bicycle | (as adjective stolen) : stolen goods | [no object] : she was found guilty of stealing from her employers.
• dishonestly pass off (another person's ideas) as one's own: accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying.
• take the opportunity to give or share (a kiss) when it is not expected or when people are not watching: he was allowed to steal a kiss in the darkness.
• (in various sports) gain (an advantage, a run, or possession of the ball) unexpectedly or by exploiting the temporary distraction of an opponent.
• Baseball (of a base runner) advance safely to (the next base) by running to it as the pitcher begins the delivery: Rickey stole third base.
2 [no object, with adverbial of direction] move somewhere quietly or surreptitiously: he stole down to the kitchen | figurative : a delicious languor was stealing over her.
• [with object and adverbial of direction] direct (a look) quickly and unobtrusively: he stole a furtive glance at her.
noun [in singular]
1 informal a bargain: for $5 it was a steal.
2 mainly North American an act of stealing something: New York's biggest art steal.
• an idea taken from another work: the chorus is a steal from The Smiths' “London”.
• Baseball an act of stealing a base.
• Basketball & Hockey an act of taking possession of the ball or puck from an opponent: point guard Kaleb Joseph finished with eight points, four steals, and seven assists.
PHRASES
steal someone blind
___informal see blind.
steal a march on
___gain an advantage over (someone) by acting before they do: stores that open on Sunday are
stealing a march on their competitors.
steal someone's heart
___win someone's love.
steal the show
___attract the most attention and praise.
steal someone's thunder
___win praise for oneself by preempting someone else's attempt to impress.
[from an exclamation by the English dramatist John Dennis (1657–1734), who invented a method of simulating the sound of thunder as a theatrical sound effect and used it in an unsuccessful play. Shortly after his play came to the end of its short run he heard his new thunder effects used at a performance of Macbeth, whereupon he is said to have exclaimed: ‘Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!’.]
"Taking food off the table" was a metaphor. Your statement makes even less sense if you weren't referencing that. You're saying, in effect, that zero marginal cost items are not property. That's a radical position that I would be surprised if you actually endorse after you think about it.
The parallel between SaaS and live music is pretty interesting. Seeing a play in a theater (as the un-pirate-able version of a movie) also fits in this category. Service instead of product, essentially.
I'm struggling to extend the analogy to books, though. The mental image of a kindergarten teacher reading a book and holding it up for the class to see the illustrations is a bit weak... perhaps theater serves as the post-movie and post-book medium alike.
Exactly. The form of the novel is tied to text and text is fundamentally east to distribute because it is information. The problem is structurally tough.
Gotta agree, I never understand the hard work argument regarding worth. Just because someone works hard doesn't mean it's a profitable endeavor. I worked hard at startups that failed, it doesn't mean the startup has to be worth anything.
The book market shows people DO buy books, just like OP said. Clearly their book was worth something. Just because people will take it for free instead doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have paid for it.
Did the startups fail because people were stealing intellectual property? (For example, by illegally obtaining trade secrets, such as proprietary source code.) Or did they fail because they were unable to create offerings that customers valued above the cost to produce them?
Until the United States economy no longer recognizes intellectual property rights, this is a critical distinction, whether we're discussing books, music, or proprietary software and hardware designs.
I used startups as an example, what I'm really criticizing is the notion that simply working hard means something is valuable, which it's not. I could have just as easily used the example of rolling a boulder uphill. Don't extrapolate the a analogy onto the original book argument, they are not connected when I wrote it.
I think that gets the causality the wrong way around. I've heard plenty of people express similar sentiments without (so far as I can tell) being Marxists.
More likely: it sticks around as a tenet of Marxism because it's a thing many people find intuitively plausible. "I did all this hard work, so I should be rewarded" is a pretty natural thing to think.
> "I did all this hard work, so I should be rewarded" is a pretty natural thing to think.
Is it really? I rolled a boulder up and down a hill all day, pay me.
"Nobody asked you to do that and nothing productive was accomplished. Nobody will pay you for that."
But I worked really hard! Labor creates value, therefore I am entitled to payment.
Whether you're rolling a boulder or writing a book, your labor hasn't created value unless you've actually produced something other people subjectively believe to be valuable. The subjective theory of value is common sense. The labor theory of value is obvious bullshit. It might fool children but for an adult to believe it requires brainwashing.
The miscommunication in that case is that the person doing the boulder-rolling/book-writing/startup-programming genuinely thought they were providing value to society. Your example picks a ridiculous non-valuable labor. To understand their point of view, imagine something that you would consider valuable, but which goes generally unrewarded. To get you started: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, volunteering for a fire department, cleaning an oil spill, rescuing animals, planting trees to reduce man-made erosion, ...
Choosing to write a book that nobody wants to buy is no different from choosing to roll a boulder up a hill. You better be in it for fun because you're not doing anything of value to anybody else.
If you want to volunteer for homeless shelters or something, then you can sleep sound with the knowledge that what you're doing is worth a great deal to people who can't afford to compensate you for it. But writing books nobody wants to buy is not that sort of selfless act of charity.
Read my parent comment. Labor does not equal value by how most people define it. If I can labor for a task that people don't find valuable, like rolling a rock uphill, that means people intuitively feel some sort of subjective theory of value that's not connected simply to how hard someone worked. Hence, LTV does not make sense and we must find a different theory of value. Now, you can disagree that capitalism is not such a theory, but you ought to be able to agree that LTV ain't it, chief.
You haven't said anything about land, only about labor, so your sentence does not follow. You’ve made a case for why labor inputs might not be directly related to market price, but that says exactly zero about land?
Why are you talking about land? This thread is about the labor theory of value, LTV. Are you talking about the land value tax, LVT? Those are two very different things.
You are completely missing the point of this thread. Even if we morally agree with all your points, the claim is that less books will get written and that that's bad for all of us.
To rebut this, you need to either argue that this won't happen, suggest an alternative incentive for books to get written, or maybe even disagree that this result is bad.
Let's get real. Even in the era of Internet and easy copying, zillions of books are being made and sold for money, profitably. The number of books being printed has no end. This situation is harmful to society, because good quality books are hard to discover and check (in a bookstore, on a piracy site) because they are drowned in the pile of rubbish that is wasting our time.
Making books less profitable would suppress the production and make the quality stand out. A net positive for humanity.
> Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the food on your table?
If someone wants to release his book for free he can do it, we have a law that protects those that do not.
> Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give you the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing information.
He doesn't deny anything to anyone, as I said before if someones wants to write books for free he can do it and he can share it with everyone. You deny his right to get paid for his work.
The law protects against somebody else making money. It is not very effective in making readers pay the author.
> You deny his right to get paid for his work.
I think he (and me) is saying there is no such right in general. There is only "copyright" - the right to distribute the copies, or sell the license. But there is no right to get paid.
Not at all. The point is sound - the reader is not responsible for paying the author, not even if the reader read author's work. The buyer is responsible for paying the author. If the author can't hack it and get buyers(often the buyer in this sense is the distributor), then the author should find a different occupation.
> The point is sound - the reader is not responsible for paying the author, not even if the reader read author's work.
What a convenient way to make oneself feel comfortable living a moral-free life. Like as if this changes anything for the end result that someone stole something, and someone else has to foot the bill for that. You’re arguing off the premise that „the distributor is big anyway, so stealing from them doesn’t hurt anyone”. And the premise that it won’t hurt the author. It appears worthy of consideration that there may be a lack of fantasy here on your part.
Oh, the moral card. Morals are highly context-dependent and vary across the population and social classes. There is no consensus on the idea "reading books without paying for them is immoral". It may be - if the person reads all books by some author, can afford to pay, but never does, then it does smell like bad behaviour. But not everybody behaves like this.
Most books I download and read are some scholarly or technical stuff, where I read maybe one or two pages that interest me and then never open the book again for a year.
I could never get all the books from stone-walled library or buy them all. But fortunately I do not have to, they are all available in the Public Library called the Web, and using this is beneficial to me, and harmless to anybody else.
> you just have expectations that aren't compatible with reality
Guessing certain types of readers are more likely to pirate than others. The reality you're describing is one in which pirating readers have fewer books written for them. As someone who doesn't pirate books, I'm reluctantly fine with that. My authors will get compensated and write. Others' authors will find something else to do; they can make podcasts or whatever.
World 1: zero copyright infringement. Everyone pays. No one pirates.
More people write books. (as will be more money in it)
World 1.1 Pays your bills. Doesn't make you rich.
More crappy books.
More high quality books.
World 1.2 Can make you rich.
Many people will write purely for financial reasons.
Some people will be doubly motivated - financial and professional success. They can focus solely on their area of interest, and creating content for it knowing they can also achieve financial success with it.
More books written by companies.
More crappy books.
More high quality books.
World 2: Not one person on earth pays. Every single book has to be for free.
The fewest books produced.
Hobbyists or retired people only.
People will write for passion. Not necessarily the most qualified people.
World 3: Somewhere in between (our world)
In-between.
Look at youtube which is close to world 1.2. There certainly is a TON of crappy content. However, there's also very high quality, professionally produced content in there. No financial incentive means few of those high quality ones would be there.
I would try by saying every author is a compiler (as in, a collector of sources). They use someone else's ideas, either as building blocks or as a subject. The rules for when and how the people down the chain should be compensated are arbitrary. For a long time it wasn't a problem anyone cared about in societies (the pre-copyright era), then we got sort of a "verbatim" standard, but we're seeing more and more how silly it always was with better tools of automatic rephrasing.
Publishing books in the current model is like planting flowers in a public space, with seeds you've just taken from a bunch of other people's houses, and then requiring people who walk there or look at the flowers to pay you. I mean, we should be encouraging caring about the commons in some way. But the creators or copyright holders for cultural creations don't inherently have the power to dictate the schemes they like.
It isn't that there is no original work in using the existing sources. Just more stuff is, by necessity, re-used that created (otherwise people wouldn't understand you), and the exact boundary is arbitrary.
Given the choice, many people would rather get something for free rather than pay for it. Rather than simply admitting that there is something at least a little immoral about benefiting from someone else's work without paying for that work, they come up with elaborate rationalizations.
There's a sort of virtue in embracing the intellectual honesty of saying that you took that work because you wanted it and had the means. Call it the Genghis Kahn justification.
Even if the work is completely derivative, someone still put significant effort into compiling and organizing it. And their immorality of taking the work of others doesn't obviously justify the immorality of taking theirs.
The point is, it wasn't immoral of them to "take the work of others" to begin with. This is how culture works: mythology, classic stories like the Arthurian cycle, fables, lots of classic literature etc. came to be by just taking the stories and characters people liked and doing whatever the next artist wanted. (Today's equivalents are all owned by Disney, for example.) This is also how science and philosophy functioned for ages.
The worldview holding the modern copyright system to be the moral reality is the elaborate rationalization, ingrained into people by the interested parties. You can research the history of copyright law if you want.
This is a separate issue from caring about compensating and nurturing the artists, which is often what people who are mindful about this stuff do. Just not necessarily inside the "traditional" framework.
> Rather than simply admitting that there is something at least a little immoral about benefiting from someone else's work without paying for that work
But there isn't anything immoral about benefiting without paying. At least under consequentialist utilitarianism, one of the main doctrines in ethics.
And why would there be? Someone benefits but no one else loses. If someone has planted a try by the road and I relax in the shade for a few minutes, have I done anything wrong? If I admire a fine bit of architecture have I done something wrong? If I pause to watch the kids playing in the playground have I done something wrong?
> Rather than simply admitting that there is something at least a little immoral about benefiting from someone else's work without paying for that work
You've got it backwards. The onus is on you to provide a convincing argument that sharing documents without paying directly the authors is immoral.
If the document is useful and popular, then I see no immorality in sharing it without paying the author. For paper books, the readers do not pay the authors directly either, they pay the distributor the agreed price. In other cases, this agreed price is the marginal cost of file download.
I think this is the wrong question to ask. To me, the answer is rather obvious: because knowledge and culture costs nothing to spread and benefits everyone.
The actual issue is about getting paid for work. I would ask another question to address that instead:
why does getting paid for author's work require limiting access to it?
I'm fine if you want to share my book with your friend or with a group of friends. However, library !== the entire world.
Moreover, libraries buy book(s) so they can share more copies if there is a demand.
Without authors getting paid for their work there won't be any books at all, except books from those authors who are willing to write them for free of charge. But I assume you don't like online libraries with free books online for some reason.
In many places in the US, anyone can get a card to a library.
So, if everyone had that knowledge, it actually would mean the entire world.
In the county I have my card with, they give a card number over the internet without any kind of address validation, so anyone willing to lie about their address can get a card there. I'm sure that's true for countless counties.
> Without authors getting paid for their work there won't be any books at all, except books from those authors who are willing to write them for free of charge.
You mean except for authors who are willing to write them without charging each reader for a copy.
On an annually recurring license. So the taxpayer doesn't just buy hundreds of books no one asked for and will never read, he buys them ten times over.
In what country do libraries work like that? Not in America. In America, libraries do not pay annual licensing fees for books. A book is purchased or otherwise acquired, and then lent out as many times as the library pleases. When the book wears out, the library may rebind it and continue lending it.
This is covered by first sale doctrine. After the library owns that book it is theirs and neither the author nor the publisher is entitled to anything when the book is lent.
It's not a huge amount... minimum $50/book/year, maximum $4,500/book per year, but I suppose it's significant if you have, say, 20 books, each bringing in the maximum.
Damn, I'm glad the American library system isn't held to such asinine rules. I can buy a second hand book from a shop that pays nothing to publishers, donate it to a library for free, and the library is now allowed to lend that book as many times as they please, never having paid anybody a single cent for that right.
You propose to peel back the first sale doctrine, stripping rights from consumers and give even more privileges to corporate publishers? Terrible idea.
That's not what I'm saying, please don't reply like this it's very tiring and against the guidelines. I'm saying it doesn't make sense that the authors and the publishers don't get any money after the book was bought once and then it can be borrowed an infinite number of times. The libraries should pay some sort of fee to compensate them. It doesn't reduce your consumer rights, you can still borrow the book from the library. You can still donate it to the library. You can still lend your book to your friends and family without paying for anything. That's how it works over here in the EU (I don't know how every library system works in each EU country), not exactly a place with less consumer rights than the US.
> I'm saying it doesn't make sense that the authors and the publishers don't get any money after the book was bought once and then it can be borrowed an infinite number of times.
Why not? That's how everything else works, at least in the US. e.g. my local hardware store will rent to you a variety of tools (which they also sell) or even trucks. They don't need to compensate the manufacturer for each rental; they just buy it like anyone else would. Even Netflix got their start buying DVDs and mailing them to customers to rent. As far as I know they have no requirement to pay ongoing fees or establish a licensing deal to do that (and apparently they have better selection for dvd rentals because of that).
In both this and a traditional library, one person buys the book and then a bunch of people read it for free. What are you saying is the difference between those scenarios?
They’re limited to a certain number of loans before the library has to buy another license, or a per-checkout fee. Physical books have about a 50 to 100 checkout lifetime and ebook licensing is similar.
There are quite a few different purchasing and lending models libraries use today. Outside of the big 4/5 publishers, many publishers will sell ebooks to libraries using a sim use model (pay 1 subscription fee and checkout as many times as possible over the period), and some will even let the library buy in that model perpetually.
NPR did a good and brief piece on digital lending economics which also talks about how those economics are different from physical lending. Libraries license materials, and the license for a physical book will typically last as long as that book can be circulated(basically until it falls apart).
I've started going to the library more often(and using Libby for e-reading), they might not have the exact book I want, but there is always something I am interested in there.
> Libraries license materials, and the license for a physical book will typically last as long as that book can be circulated(basically until it falls apart).
Libraries buy books, which are then covered by first sale doctrine. When a library book falls apart, the library may rebind it and continue lending it.
You are relying on unenforceable government incentives (copyright law) to create an income for yourself. Find a way of commercialising the information in your head that makes it technologically difficult to propagate without yourself being paid. Books aren't the answer if you want $$$.
Copyright law is actually enforceable though. At least enforceable enough to keep book piracy more inconvenient than Kindle for most people of any means.
I wasn't able to find your book in any pirated source. Do you think you're losing at least 50 sales per month from piracy since you sell the book for a suggested price of $20 each?
The only book you ever published is https://leanpub.com/rubyisforfun/ which, according to the website, has 460 readers, despite being available for free.
Not only are you not losing thousands dollars worth of sales a month right now, you also never were, even when it wasn't available for free.
I would probably reply to your statements (that you believe are true), but first you have to learn how to be nice :) Plus, not only your communication is broken, but also your ability to make your way to final and correct conclusions. But don't worry, it's a common thing today, you're definitely not unique here
Are you actually losing $Xk worth of sales every month due to piracy though? I remember this author with a wildly influential book inside a small online community. He too claimed that due to piracy he suffered great economical loss. He posted a detailed account of this on his blog and i delved on it a bit and I came to the conclusion he was delusional. For sure piracy dented his revenue, that was without the shadow of a doubt. But the major reason that he lost revenue was due to the fact that a book, as with many products, has a lifecycle and he wasn't considering that as a factor at all.
His book was considered "the bible" of that subject, but it was also starting to become old and the community was becoming more established. At that point there were tutorials, youtube videos, other resources talking about the same thing, explaining concepts of that book and so on. So while, in the beginning a user strictly needed to buy the book to have access to those niche information, now info were more readily accessible (even the reddit wiki had basically the same stuff in it). So buying the book was more of a choice ONLY if the user wanted to dive deeper into the subject. All the rest of potential users that a few years back would have bought the book due to the "monopoly of information", now weren't interested in it anymore. Even more established community users only recommended the book as an advanced thing for people that wanted to go to the next step. That's quite an evolution for a product that is guaranteed to lower sales.
Besides this, the community was still relatively niche and this means that doesn't have a huge influx of new users. This means that over time people won't buy his book because the only people interested in it already have it.
The product lifecycle was clear from the data and kinda textbook behavior, with the product having surpassed it's mature phase and been declining. On top of this, for sure piracy further made things worse.
The point is that the author was convinced that piracy was the only reason revenue was dropping. He was convinced that his book (being influential et all in the community) would give him constant revenue potentially forever. That was delusional and so was his analysis.
Are you entirely sure that piracy is the only thing to blame? Maybe that's just one factor in a more complex situation and writing another book is specifically what you need to do. The previous one was successful, you have a brand and an audience to leverage. That's valuable and, maybe you just need to develop a new product because the old one is, well, getting old.
You are really losing a huge personal branding opportunity.
Alternatively: people now trust you, there is some way to monetize that for sure such as organizing events, conventions etc. Make them pay a bit more than you would to recoup the cost of piracy.
In the end it's the strategy used by the GOAT. Bill Gates knew he couldn't fight piracy and also it just charged Fortune500 companies a tad more so they'd essentially subsidize pirates all over the world. Ranging from PirateBay to CD sellers in Subsaharan Africa
- first as an author, want to be read, the more people read your books the better.
- second as a human, you need an income.
Imagine a charity (it could be government taxes as well) paying you proportionally to how much your books are read and providing the books for free to the readers.
What's wrong with that?
You will have more readers and you'll get paid for writing books (according to their popularity).
Do you really want to sell your books? (and get less readers)
Or do you want instead to have as many readers as possible and get paid for that?
I don't have a good answer for you but I believe that we are transitioning to a new form of society where content creation is very hard to make money from. However, as a society we are richer than ever because of this new technology so I propose the following:
* People should receive grants to create things. The grants should come from the value we create as a society with new technology
* The money should be taken from those who benefit from the internet traffic, i.e. large tech companies. Money should be taken from Google and Apple and given to content creators. That is because without content, Google and Apple would not exist
* We can already say that ads do this a little, but it's not enough. And ads are annoying and unsustainable and they also encourage slimy practises such as extreme SEO optimization
* Therefore, I propose a heavy tax on the largest tech companies, especially CEO salaries. That money should go to a government trust and content creators will get an income whenever they produce something people like
* For example, it could be made available for free but yet the author will be compensated. How much and how to measure its worth still needs to be figured out.
I'm sorry but, you can't claim something as a loss if you never had it in the first place. The RIAA's members tried the same propaganda and it didn't work then either.
I've published a few short stories and made $27.00. Like 99.999% of authors cannot live off of writing. It's like acting. If you include all the actors the average yearly salary is like $2,000. Some fields are just like that, and I'm not convinced that there's anyway to change that for either career. Nor am I convinced it should be. With programming I'm not paid for the work I've done, I'm paid for the work I continue doing. Why is writing supposed to be any different? Because publishers like it that way? They pay the author once, and get paid for 120 years?
And honestly as an author my biggest issue isn't that I'm not making much money, it's that almost no one is reading my work. I didn't do it for the money. And if I could charge less than $1 on amazon, I would.
This is obviously not the situation under discussion. The book wasn't released before he earned any money on it.
He clearly states "My income dropped almost immediately", which makes it clean that he was earning money from it, and that a specific event—the piracy—coincided with a drop of "$Xk worth of sales" per month.
The analogy being drawn is to losing a job and consequently losing the income you would have earned from it. You've switched from "you never had that income" to "you never had that job".
Thanks! I was wondering specifically about how the logic of “you can’t claim something as a loss if you never had it in the first place” meant that you can never lose a job or source of income, but it sounds like that’s not really what they meant in the post I was replying to.
No, the notion that you can lose something you never had is the silly obtuse take.
It's like saying "I lost a Tesla because Elon Musk hasn't given me one." It's a pathos appeal by trying to paint the speaker as a victim to generate enough sympathy that you stop reasoning logically. Claiming to have lost money you never had is exactly as absurd when you eradicate the appeal to emotion embedded within it.
It’s exactly what happens when someone who’s experienced the “biweekly paycheck lifestyle” hits it big on a non-salaried income source and expects the music to keep going forever.
YouTube videos that hit ~1M views famously rarely keep up the pace beyond a week or a month. Hard to find data, but what I’ve heard is that after a year or two, looking back, most popular videos get 75-85% of their views in their first month after release.
Unless you have a contract to be regularly paid $X, or constantly put out new and engaging content, you really can’t get mad when your income peaks and then nosedives.
You're rather inaccurate though. Not sure if you're talking about "Ruby for fun", but anyway:
- you wrote it for your own son;
- you're distributing it now on CC BY 4.
So, no, we're not at risk of losing good books from good authors, there are more incentives than just money.
Fun little story goes here, I used pseudonym when I first registered my Facebook account ~10 years ago or so. I later tried to change the handle to my real name, but Facebook didn't let me do that - moderators though my last name isn't real. So I ended up using a couple of names because of that.
Plus, I bet your googling doesn't work quite right, until you translate these names correctly.
I'm happy you found one, but there are 2 more to go. I'll give you a hint though:
* The one you're looking for is about computer security (that's why pseudonym worked fine)
* The book cover was done by the same artist
I almost revealed my second identity, but if you ever find the second name, please don't post it here.
I think there's a distinction between vocational materials (your book is one I should absolutely have to pay for - which is why many places of work have an education budget) and literature. I don't quite know what, though.
Exactly this, thanks for highlighting this here! I find it astoundingly upsetting that the people who run this pirated library ask for donations at the bottom of the linked page (of course in Bitcoin), citing they can only keep the library online if they’re getting paid for it… what arrogance!
Like they cannot see that they’re inserting themselves in between the readers and the authors, whom they effectively try to steal the money from. Authors of course can also only continue to write books if they’re getting paid for it. It’s truly parasitic behavior.
I’m sorry this happened to you and I share your pain. :(
I find it unlikely that people who pay for technical books were ever going to be your customers. There could be other explanations - maybe once people could flip through your book without paying for it they realized there wasn't any value there for them? Maybe you had sales for a while and then they dropped off like sales do.
I don't think people have the right to spread work that isn't theirs, but i also don't think you can assume the book will always make the same amount of money, or that book pirates were ever your customers.
Knowledge and information want to be free, know that by trying to control its spread -- such as by trying to profit from it -- you are fighting that principle. And it is a fight that you will lose.
By the same token, you should have no privacy, because knowledge and information (about you) wants to be free, and you will lose that fight. I don’t think that’s a sensible argument.
Used to be that people had to find innovative ways to adopt their business models to new technology. But not authors. They can just say "show me how I would earn money" and that justifies IP rights. It is your job as an entrepreneur to find a working business model.
To answer the question: Because just spreading information does not violate anyone's rights.
Ownership as a concept does not make sense to apply to non-physical things.
The vast majority of the writing I consume is free or donation supported and I personally donate around £1500 a year to a range of authors after having read and found their writings useful.
This is a far superior model to paying in advance, you get access to far more writing and the authors get paid.
> The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free? I spent almost 2 years on writing the book. I hope you have a good answer.
Oh interesting question. I could probably answer but need some information first. What % of revenue went to you and what % went to the people who printed the book, chopped the trees, made the pulp, delivered the books across the world, etc? My guess is probably 10-50% to you, and the rest to the others. Am I close? That's probably fair.
Now, what % of your proceeds did you send to the creators of the letter "A", the letter "B", et cetera? Or did you use a different alphabet that you yourself created?
Was the book written in American English? If so, what % of your revenue are you sending to the widows and orphans of American soldiers killed in the wars who died protecting our freedom, language, and values?
Once I get those data points I can probably answer your question.
Internet will copy whatever is valued. You had wrong expectations. Moral indignation is not going to help you. If you can't make a living writing and selling books, let go and think of a different thing to do.
Can you tell how much would you normally make on a book, ie what’s the expected amount of money for those two years? I wonder if it could be made back by eg Patreon instead of traditional copyrights?
Turns out other countries still haven't gotten the point of public libraries. Once you own a book, it's your property. You don't have to pay a fee to lend out your own property. This is how it works in America, where free public libraries were invented.
Not comfortable sharing for PTSD reasons. However, if you're interested, some people reached out back to me with apologies. For example (auto-translated to English):
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Good day. Roman, my name is Alexander. Once a book was stolen from you and posted on the net. People then divided into two camps, some sympathized, some did not, for various reasons. I belonged to the second category. I wasn’t happy, but at the same time I didn’t sympathize. I considered that price too high, and then for some reason it seemed to me that the book itself was not for the sake of being useful, but solely for the sake of profit. Although, even then I believed that work should be paid.
Then I released a few comments, I don’t remember exactly the content, perhaps boorish, I don’t think so. You then blocked me in the Telegram and chat, said, for the lack of empathy on my part or something like that. I think you misunderstood me, and perhaps I expressed my thought incorrectly. After that, I left a couple of caustic comments on the forum.
I somehow forgot about that situation, but then I came across your videos on YouTube and remembered. Thoughtful. Damn, I myself got into similar situations, which made me so hooked on that price list ...
In general, I was wrong and I apologize if I somehow offended you. Of course, you have the right to ask as much as you like for your work, and the buyer has the right to agree to the conditions or refuse.
And you assume that the only reason anyone would want to advocate for the freedom of information is because they don't like to spend money, which is also untrue.
For example, there are many research papers posted on sci-hub, which would otherwise be kept behind an expensive paywall by academic journals. This includes research that was conducted using public grants.
For those of you who play PC games, how many times have you felt cheated by the hassle a game's DRM or the built-in 'phone home' featured caused on your experience?
How about being electronically denied access to trying to repair your own vehicle, even while fully acknowledging that it would invalidate any warranties and responsibilities on the manufacturer's side?
Some of the laws and regulations impacting intellectual property are quite simply dysfunctional.
Talking about recent works, released in the past few years getting pirated specifically:
First is the unfairness of the system. Disney and other publishers have lobbied to push copyright up to the ridiculous life + 70 years using their political power. Publishers collectively have a totally ridiculous entitlement to governments being compelled to spend public money on enforcing their monopolies. So if you're say living in poorsville, you have no realistic opportunity to wait for your book to be published for free, because any work that is copyrighted during somebodies lifetime will be copyrighted until they're dead. Sure there's libraries but if your book is obscure enough it may not be available in one.
The second reason I'll give is accessibility. If your book isn't offered in a free electronic format from a library, and somebody is blind, and they can't afford the kindle, they're out of luck. The publishing industry has no problem being exclusionary towards disabled groups so long as it enables a better profit model, pirates on the other hand are totally inclusive and scan everything making everything OCRable.
So besides accessibility/fairness arguments, I'll also bring up that paying for books is a really shitty way to support authors. I paid $250 for physical books this week. Am I a hero to authors? Not at all. Maybe $200 of that went to the estate of some authors and most went to the publishers. $50 of it went to authors maybe closer to scraping by, for whom piracy can mean not putting food on the table, it means having to give up authorship. However of that $50 maybe $5 went to such authors. So I paid $250 and gave $5 to authors who really needed it. Does this prove I give a shit about authors? I think it proves that I don't, if somebody cares about authors they'll pirate the ebook and directly donate $250 to them.
Finally there's the issue of how books are secured. Frankly the legal methods for acquiring books are frequently broken and bad. DRM that auto-deletes books from people's devices is an abomination. Waitlists for ebooks are the stupidest thing I have ever seen in my life. A huge reason people use zlibrary is their local library has broken software and it's like 8 steps to download something. Most of the money is in Amazon, so that's what gets funding to make the ebook/audiobook experience as seamless as possible for the wealthy of the world.
My proposal to fix all these issues would be for public libraries to require public ID authentication to download books, for copyrights to essentially ignore copyright, and then based on which books are being downloaded to compensate authors out of a public fund. This would not come with any enforcement efforts to shut down pirate sites (due to censorship/privacy concerns and concerns with the library's software being broken, not everybody has to use the library just a good number of people do), the libraries would essentially act as a voting system to direct monies to different authors which you could also use as an e-book distribution mechanism. This makes the availability of books for the wealthy contingent on them financing books for the poor, the disabled, and compensating authors.
Until such a day happens, if somebody pirate $100 of a books and donate $30 to some random author I think they're a better person that somebody who buys legally. We're in times where lawlessness enables the most ethical option available, so you know, maybe the law is screwed up.
I would add one more point, as a general policy you might want people to read more not less.
If ebooks can be distributed at no cost why make people pay for reading? It makes no sense.
This cannot be the right way to incentivize and provide income for writers.
I think Zlibrary and scihub (for scientific publications) are heroes: how do you think poor people get access to books? How do you get access to books when you are poor in a poor country?
For billions of people this is the only access to books. Otherwise they wouldn't read... What a loss for human kind!
Probably you shouldn't write a book in this age if you are motivated by making a profit from book sales.
Or you need to find a different business model other than revenue from sales. If you have an audience of a few thousand people, especially in a narrow professional field, you can monetize it.
Book will help you to establish your authority. Then, you can use this authority to make profit. Sell courses, lections, offer consulting services, etc.
The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free? I spent almost 2 years on writing the book. I hope you have a good answer.