eBook piracy, how common is it?

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Radio stations pay for the right to broadcast music. TV stations buy the programmes that they broadcast. In both cases, the creator is being recompensed for their work. As we've discussed earlier in this thread, authors even get paid a small amount if you borrow their book from the library (and libraries are a major source of book sales in the first place).

What I don't "get" is the attitude that it is somehow "acceptable" to consume a service without paying for it merely because it's technically possible to do so. The excuse "but I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so nobody's lost anything" is morally bankrupt, IMHO. It's no different from travelling on a train without a ticket and saying that "it's OK because the train was making the journey anyway and there were empty seats".

Sorry, but I cannot and will never accept the argument that "piracy is OK if you wouldn't have bought the item". I do accept, by the way, that it's morally (but not legally) OK to buy a book and then scan it for one's personal use, if a commercial eBook is not commercially available - in that scenario, the author is being correctly recompensed.

So all the people on this forum from outside the UK who listen to BBC Radio 7 are thieves then? I pay my license fee to fund the BBC, they do not. They get a product for free that I pay for. Nobody said "piracy" is 'acceptable', but it is the reality we are facing. We either understand that reality or we get lost in the stream.

Authors are already criminally underpaid by publishers, around the 7-15% mark on sales after their initial advance in the £2,000-3000 mark. There was a link on here recently (I think it was from Richard Herley's site) that showed the average first time author makes something in the region of £800 on their novel, after everything is taken into account. Add lacklustre promotion, dwindling advances and the dire state of publishing as a whole, and is it any wonder that more and more authors are willing to go the share now - maybe pay later scheme?

It just seems to me there are a lot of people about trying to sell horse-drawn carriages to Model-T owners.

[kazbates]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Totally agree. It is pure sophistry to try to pretend that taking away an author's income is anything other than theft, regardless of what the law might choose to call it.

I agree when it is knowingly done, ie. copying a book and then selling said copy to others, giving it to twenty friends as a Christmas present, etc. However, in the DRM world, buying a book from a legal distributor and then converting it for use on a device that would not have been able to use the original format is also illegal (here in the US at least). Does that make the person a pirate?

Kaz

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What I don't "get" is the attitude that it is somehow "acceptable" to consume a service without paying for it merely because it's technically possible to do so. The excuse "but I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so nobody's lost anything" is morally bankrupt, IMHO. It's no different from travelling on a train without a ticket and saying that "it's OK because the train was making the journey anyway and there were empty seats".

Next, we need to go after those who check books out of the library. The damn filthy pirates use the book without paying.

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Next, we need to go after those who check books out of the library. The damn filthy pirates use the book without paying.

But you do pay for the library, with your taxes.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Next, we need to go after those who check books out of the library. The damn filthy pirates use the book without paying.

But seriously, folks, the entertainment companies would love to do just that. They want a system where you can't format shift, where you can't loan to a friend, or transfer from one device to another. They want to introduce the economics of scarcity into products that by their very nature are infinitely reproducible. They want the cultural status-quo that they've been leeching off for the last 100 years to remain. Pro-tip: they haven't got a chance. DRM is regularly cracked, copies float about in the miasmic tubes of teh Internets like water in the stream. Culture is freed daily from the shackles of its Masters and controllers. The cat is out of the bag, Pandora opened the box, the wrapping paper is off the X-Mas present.

EDIT: Oh, and another thing worth mentioning is that if the big corps had their way, all those beautiful, classic books in the PD we all enjoy so much, they wouldn't be there. Nope. They'd be copyrighted forever, DRM'd to the hilt and accessible only by paying.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by lilac_jive

But you do pay for the library, with your taxes.

No, I don't pay for the library. The ones I frequent are in a different county.

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

No, I don't pay for the library. The ones I frequent are in a different county.

It doesn't matter if you go to a different one, it's still taken out of your taxes. You are paying for a library, regardless if you go to it or not.

[Lanik42]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Totally agree. It is pure sophistry to try to pretend that taking away an author's income is anything other than theft, regardless of what the law might choose to call it.

Theft is taking away, that is very true. However when you are talking about an infinitely reproducible product, that is when the definition gets blurred. Let me explain:

• Earlier, someone mentioned that owning a copy of a book did not give them the right to go into a bookstore and take a paperback copy without paying for it. Very true. This would be theft, as they have taken a physical item from the store - it is no longer there. It now cannot be sold, and cannot be replaced without some cost.
• On the other hand, an ebook is infinitely reproducible. If I were to copy a book that a bookstore is selling, they still possess the original that they wish to sell. They take no direct physical or monetary loss from the copying of the book. After I have copied it, they would still be able to sell it as often as they wish (or more accurately, as often as people are willing to buy it).
• That leads us to what is the essence of both sides of the argument - lost sales. Moejoe has covered this pretty well here:
  

  Originally Posted by Moejoe

  And we return to the argument of those who download and don't pay anything. Roughly divided into three camps of downloaders - Those who will never Pay, Those who can't pay, and those who will pay at some time in the future. Two out of those three can't be lost sales by definition, the third is a possible sale. Even the second might be a future sale when they have the money. Time and again we see that P2P sharing not only boosts recognition, but increases sales.

In general, I agree with Moejoe - the author cannot lose sales he would not have had, and the ability to discover new authors for free can only help the author. Of course there will be people copying the books - but the vast majority would either not have purchased it in any case (no lost sale) or would enjoy it and purchase or purchase future books because they enjoy a new author.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by lilac_jive

It doesn't matter if you go to a different one, it's still taken out of your taxes. You are paying for a library, regardless if you go to it or not.

The problem with your argument is that one does not directly pay for each library book one uses. Thus, the direct cost of a library book is the same as a pirated ebook.

Also, yes a copy was purchased for the library. But, for every pirated ebook out there a pbook or ebook had to have been purchased in order to be pirated.

[lilac_jive]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

The problem with your argument is that one does not directly pay for each library book one uses. Thus, the direct cost of a library book is the same as a pirated ebook.

Also, yes a copy was purchased for the library. But, for every pirated ebook out there a pbook or ebook had to have been purchased in order to be pirated.

I can't argue with that. However there are restrictions. A library book can only be read so many times, whereas a pirated ebook is infinite, basically. There are time limits on how long you can have a library book, as opposed to pirated ebooks.

I would be interested in seeing the average amount of individuals who take out a library book and compare that to a number for a pirated ebook.

[Lanik42]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

The problem with your argument is that one does not directly pay for each library book one uses. Thus, the direct cost of a library book is the same as a pirated ebook.

Also, yes a copy was purchased for the library. But, for every pirated ebook out there a pbook or ebook had to have been purchased in order to be pirated.

That is basically what I was going to say: The whole concept of sharing is that someone has purchased the book, and is now sharing it with others for free. Libraries purchase a copy of the book, and share with others for free. Hmm, I might see a bit of a parallel there

[Elfwreck]

I didn't answer the poll. I do not buy most of my books. (I won't buy ebooks with DRM.) I do not use P2P to get most of my books. I get a lot from here, from Feedbooks.com, from freebie/promo/CCommons releases. I expect to sign up for my public library's ebooks soon.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by lilac_jive

I can't argue with that. However there are restrictions. A library book can only be read so many times, whereas a pirated ebook is infinite, basically. There are time limits on how long you can have a library book, as opposed to pirated ebooks.

I would be interested in seeing the average amount of individuals who take out a library book and compare that to a number for a pirated ebook.

Yes, paper books do have several functional limitations. Those limitations are not intrinsic to the content of the book, but are a result the materials of which the book is made. An ebook is made of electrons. Just becuase an ebook is more durable does not mean that you cannot apply the same reasoning to both.


The point I am trying to make:
Durability is irrelevant to this discussion. Otherwise it would complicate the discussion when one pbook lasts 20 readings and another last 1k.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The vast majority of commercial eBooks are of comparable quality to printed books, as far as number of errors as concerned.

You obviously don't read the same commercial eBooks that I do.

[Moejoe]

If you want some stats, I just did a quick and dirty check of a torrent site to see how prevalent e-book piracy is. I chose first the ebook section, then the movies section to compare. In both secions I chose the "mystery" sub-section and then rated by highest number of completed downloads.

Mystery (ebook) - Dan Brown Book Collection - 29275 downloads
Mystery (movie) - The Davinci Code - 1979394 downloads

EDIT: I think I'm actually more worried by the taste of the downloaders than the stats