Book theft myth no 3: Technology can fix it
3 Jan
Digital book theft stems from technology. So why can’t technology fix it? Because human beings are too human. And technology is basically stupid.
The means to encrypt and lock digital media exists. Unfortunately it’s always, always insecure and the people it affects — and annoys the most — are the decent ones, the readers who buy your books legally and wouldn’t dream of ripping you off. Someone cracked DVDs, and they were supposed to be impregnable. Same went for iTunes copy protection and, recently, the coding used to stop Kindle ebooks being shared around.
The truth is there are just a bunch of sad muppets out there who see copy protection as a challenge and will while away their sad little lives until they’ve found a way round it. After doing that they’ll just run it across every piece of commercial work they can — it doesn’t really matter what it is — and upload the results to a torrent site run from some distant country beyond the reach of lawyers.
Why do they do this? I suspect because a lot of them simply hate the creative process. By denigrating the work of artists, authors, actors and musicians they make themselves feel equal: I can’t write or play or act, but I can damned well make sure you don’t get paid just because you can.
You could spend a fortune and a lifetime fighting these idiots and still they’d come back for more. It’s an obsession, and for some of them an evangelical mission. They really do believe that intellectual property — the idea that artists own their own work and have a right to be paid a little by those who use it — is an affront to the world of the web, where everything is supposed to be ‘free’.
One of the commenters on an earlier article here asked, ‘What the difference between a book and a painting? Artists don’t get paid every time someone walks into a gallery and looks at their work.’ Well the difference is this. A painting is unique, and sells to one buyer on its uniqueness. The artist makes his or her living out of its individuality. A book is a mass-produced commercial item made to be sold, hopefully, in its thousands. If you want to justify your theft of books by comparing them with paintings you really are desperate indeed.
The problem of digital book theft may stem from technology but pathetic arguments like this demonstrate to me very clearly that the real issue is cultural. It’s the plain fact that millions of people are quietly coming to believe that anything that can be downloaded from the Internet is OK provided you keep quiet about it. That what happens between you and your computer is secret, private, nobody else’s business. That’s why dumb men who’d never have gone into a porn shop and bought paedophile magazines now find themselves in jail after going out on the web and downloading filth they’d never have touched if it weren’t for the Internet.
And that’s why people who wouldn’t dream of stealing a bar of chocolate from a supermarket will happily download books, video and music with a commercial value of hundreds of dollars while telling themselves they’re not doing anything wrong.
Any attempted remedy for book theft, then, has to be cultural too. Let me produce one more article on this subject which hopefully raises a few ways in which the tide can be, if not turned, at least kept back a little.
Tags: Book theft, Writing
Anything that is displayed on a computer has to be decrypted into a human-readable format. At that point it can always — *always* — be captured and put back onto disk in plain text. It simply is impossible for technology to solve this problem, a fact which the music industry has reluctantly admitted by finally releasing iTunes from having to use DRM. As for the people who do this sort of thing, you are not in the computer industry so you do not know them. I do. The majority of them are very creative people who view it as a puzzle. They don't see the effects of what they do, or care about the effects, it's all about the game of cat-and-mouse with them. Apple comes up with another way to prevent unlocking the iPhone, they come up with another way to unlock the iPhone. Adobe comes up with a new DRM scheme, they come up with another way of bypassing Adobe's new DRM scheme. It's all about the game with them, and the only way to deal with it is to make it no fun anymore by taking all your balls and going home.At which point you have piracy — something which we've faced in the computer industry since the beginning. What we've found there is that if we add *just* enough technological measures to keep honest people honest, but not enough to impair their usage of the program or be any significant challenge to the hackers, we capture pretty much as much money as we're going to capture from the market. Piracy will still occur, but what we've discovered is that after the first month after release, it makes little difference in the bottom line — the majority of the pirates would never buy our software anyhow, they're pirating it just to pirate it, not because they have any real interest in it. Our industry association makes occasional license audits of businesses, and does the occasional raid based on a tips line, but that's to keep the honest people honest, not because it has any real effect on the piracy “scene”. The “real” pirates could collect rocks, or Tickle Me Elmos, or whatever, but choose to collect pirated “warez” instead. Whatever. They wouldn't buy them anyhow, so for the most part we don't bother with them, and instead focus on keeping the honest people honest.Regarding intellectual property: I think part of the problem with the reason why arguments about “intellectual property theft” don't resonate with many people is that we're monkeys with too-large brains and delusions of grandeur, and property isn't intellectual for monkeys, property is physical stuff, things you can see and touch. A book — a bunch of paper with ink on it — is property to monkeys. The actual text within the book, well, our forebrains can intellectualize it as property, but our monkey brains can't see or touch it, so it doesn't seem like it's *really* property. And bits and bytes inside a computer… they're not physical. And talking about “stealing” them… well, again, we can intellectualize it as theft in our forebrains, but our monkey brain simply doesn't see it as theft. Theft, to a monkey, is when you remove some physical object from the monkey's presence so that the monkey no longer has access to it. What physical object has been removed from what monkey's presence to constitute this “intellectual property theft”? The argument simply doesn't resonate with our monkey hindbrain, and thus people reject it out of hand and decide that pirating software (or ebooks in your case) is okay.Which is why I've personally gotten away from using the terms “intellectual property” and “theft” in reference to piracy. The terms “property” and “theft” are too closely intertwined in our monkey brains with physical objects that you can see or touch, and our monkey brains simply aren't capable of conceiving of non-physical property or theft of non-corporeal objects. That's a hardware limitation of our monkey hindbrains, not something amenable to hacking, it's like asking a Commodore 64 to run the Unix operating system, the hardware simply isn't capable of doing so. Instead, I talk about copyright and infringement. The right to copy a work gets us around that “property” word with its monkey hind-brain implications. Infringement gets us around that “theft” or “stealing” term with its monkey hind-brain implications. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly on the right to create copies of an artistic work, intended to compensate me for the work I put into creating the work. Infringement is when you infringe upon my Constitutionally-granted monopoly on creating copies of my artistic work by making your own copy without my permission, thereby denying me some of my compensation for creating the work. It's wrong and you shouldn't do it. This is the intellectually honest argument to make, which is why it baffles me that it's never made in these discussions.
Let's not get too totalitarian here, but stay reasonable. What goes on between you and your computer IS private, despite every democracy in the world now believing they have the right to force people to divulge their records. What goes on between you, your computer and other individuals makes it not private by definition. The trouble with your example is that the sickos of the world are not predating on their computers, but on other people.Everything on the internet SHOULD be free — free as in speech, free as in open, free as in independent of taxation by privileged deals between record producers and the government — but not free as in beer. No, we don't need lots of controls that haven't worked or a government registry of IPs (not when any idiot can get an untraceable pay-as-you-go mobile internet SIM when they want to work mischief.) We need the same ability to have communities of responsible individuals who are excluded when they don't act responsibly. But the internet is defined as a playground rather than a community — individuals don't feel they have to follow any morals or rules.Perhaps you've seen this tagline: “No trees were killed in the sending of this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.” That's the current attitude to the internet. No victims — it wasn't really stealing, it wasn't really bullying, it was just a harmless bit of fun. Just a number of electrons were inconvenienced. Perhaps because the flipside of the common internet anonymity and shallow contact is that people no longer treat the other individual as a person, just an internet handle.Anyway, these principles of privacy and freedom are not the problem. The problem is the confusion in society over personal responsibility and where “everybody's doing it” ends and the need to act like a responsible individual in a society that functions the way it does due to the collective result of the behaviour of all those individuals begins.