Saturday 2nd January 2010
Well yesterday’s post about book theft (sorry — I am determined to have a euphemism-free year) provoked quite a lot of interest. Thanks for the comments — for, against or somewhere in the middle. There were salient points raised in many of those comments too so let me try to address them in a few posts here because this is a big subject.
First… what’s wrong with ripping of ebooks when we all share books with friends and libraries share out books too?
I wouldn’t dream of stopping people sharing books with people they know. Or trying to ban the sale of used books. Or arguing against something like Bookcrossing. I don’t get a penny out of all those extra people getting the benefit of my work. But someone, somewhere bought the original book, and sharing physical copies is something that’s been going on for centuries, part of the way we enjoy and spread the message of the printed media.
Libraries are the same, and in Europe authors are rewarded for their popularity by getting fairly modest sums of money in the form of public lending right. I’ll be getting my own PLR statement later this month and will elaborate on that system when it turns up. It amazes me that there’s nothing similar in the US when most other countries have adopted something similar.
The problem with digital media is that sharing suddenly becomes an awful lot simpler and utterly without cost to those involved in ripping off the original. With a physical book you have to pass it on somehow and the item itself is pretty much impossible to duplicate. An ebook file can be copied with a click of a mouse and sent round the Internet to millions in seconds. That said, I still don’t object to books being shared among friends as digital files — something I think is built into the new Barnes & Noble ebook.
But cracking an encoded file and uploading it into the torrents is a very different thing. If you peruse the torrents you’ll find my ebooks out there and all of my audio books out there, from the Audible files as far as I can see. Someone has hacked the copy protection on them and, in the case of audio, uploaded entire works lasting eighteen to twenty hours of audio. I spent a year of my life working on those books. They cost me time and money. Hosts of people at my publishers, people who also have the right to be paid for their work, were involved. My talented reader Saul Reichlin spent a month working on the script and a week in the recording studio performing them.
What gives some thieving toerag the right to take all that work we’ve put in, steal it, then regurgitate for the masses? How can they possibly compare handing that to passing on a printed book to a friend?
The sites we’re talking about here are, naturally, lurking behind fake identities, based in countries where copyright laws cannot be enforced. Doesn’t that give you a clue that something’s not quite right? Doesn’t that make the high-minded arguments of the thieves — ‘You’re making enough money anyway’ — sound a little hollow? Torrents like these exist for the purpose of ripping off copyright material, be it music, video or books. The people running them want to make money out of that stolen material too. It’s why they do it. And anyone who goes to one of those torrent sites surely knows why they’re there — to steal something they ought to be paying for.
As I’ve said before I hate DRM. I also think the music industry was deeply stupid to come down in the heavy-handed manner it did with some individuals caught with pirated music a while back. But let’s not fool ourselves about what’s going on here. It’s a concerted attempt to make stolen material widely available for ‘free’ across the Internet, and make some money along the way for those involved. I don’t pretend to have the answers, though I’ll certainly try to throw out some suggestions here. But I do think a starting point is being honest about the problem and I wish people who steal things off the Internet would at least do us all the service of being frank about what they do themselves.
They can come up with an extraordinary number of excuses but the simple reason people thieve on the Internet is because it’s easy and they know they will get away with it.
Feel free to add your opinions below, for or against. I’m happy to carry the thoughts of people who disagree with what I say but if it’s nothing more than personal abuse — funny how coming out in public against the idea of theft upsets some people — it will get deleted.
Tags: Book theft, Writing
Good points but I don't think the publishing industry can afford to not worry about what's coming round the corner. Computer software has multiple outlets – direct, online, retail. Books have very few and they are narrowing all the time. The computer industry (through FAST in the UK) has done an incredible job of eliminating piracy in businesses, taking more than a few to the cleaners for illicit copying.
Books sell to individuals. We don't have that option.
I'll be putting up few final — for now — thoughts on this subject later today. Thanks for the interest!
We've been struggling with this issue in the computer industry since day one. In 1976 a youngster in Albuquerque by the name of Bill Gates sent a plaintive letter around to computer clubs whining that people were sharing paper tapes of his BASIC interpreter and that this was stealing. Some things we've found out:
1) Copy protection (DRM) doesn't work. There has to be a reader program to read the data and present it to the customer, and any reader program can be hacked to instead save the data in unprotected format. Copy protection is almost unheard of in computer applications today outside of computer games, and even there it is accepted that within a month of the release of a new computer game, the copy protection will be hacked and cracks will be circulating on the torrents, the goal with computer games is to get as many sales as possible within that first month after release.
2) Persuant to the above: We've found that most people who pirate the software after the first month of release would have never purchased it. The exception is business applications. That is why we have funded an industry group that goes in and audits businesses for license compliance, and have a “narc on your employer” hotline, but make no real attempt to do anything about personal software piracy. Oh, Microsoft still has their activation nonsense, but that's the pernicious influence of the ghost of Bill Gates, still hovering around all these years later.
3) And persuant to all of the above: We simply don't spend much time worrying about piracy in the software industry anymore. We know that it's out there. We know entire industries where it is rampant but where the operators are too small to make it worth our while to go after them. We just try to keep the honest people honest and take out the occasional target in an enforcement action in order to keep the honest people motivated to stay honest.
What to do about the kiddies who pirate your ebooks? Go after their arguments. Make them look un-cool. Form an industry group to go after ebook piracy and take out a few of the most prominent pirates. Everything that we've done in the software industry. Just realize that it will *not* stop them, any more than it stopped software piracy, and that nothing you do to stamp out piracy will increase your sales significantly because the majority of pirates would have never purchased your product in the first place. Taking action to keep honest people honest is the best you (as an industry) can do. At least, that's the lesson we take away from 30 years of software piracy in the computer industry, and as it is for us, I suspect it is for you.
Disclaimer: I wrote my first computer program in 1981 and formed my first software company in 1987, so I wasn't there for the very earliest days of the software industry's attempts to stamp out software piracy. But been there for almost 30 years anyhow, so this isn't *all* hearsay
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As I see it, there's not a whit of difference between stealing intellectual property and stealing physical property. Theft is theft. That's it. Any further discourse just serves to cloud the issue. Theft is theft.
Don't agree? Look at it this way. Your on-line bank details are compromised and your account emptied; the financial reward for all your efforts gone. In an instant. Electronically. With a lot of effort and inconvenience you may eventually get most of it back. Lucky you! That's a course of redress that's generally denied the author of a stolen ebook, a stolen audio track, video, etc. Theft is theft. End of.
On the contrary – it personalizes the crime, by describing more precise what the thief is doing, which in turn might result in guilt. Or it's just me being naive… Stealing a book is more anonymous than stealing David Hewson's work, like stealing from my neighbor is worse than stealing from a department store. Maybe just my twisted perception.
The raping example was a – failed – attempt to show what is missing here. Community pressure, that is. “Piracy” is not thoroughly perceived as being a criminal act, just as a minor nuisance; unlike raping. Like, over at my place, nearly everybody is happily committing insurance fraud. Legally, it is fraud. However, nobody would blame you for doing it. The same goes for downloading music, movies, books…
And again: the abstract vs. the concrete.
My, I sound like a zealot.
I'm quite happy with the term 'book'. That's what I and most authors think
we write, and what most of us feel is getting stolen. Does giving it another
name make someone who rips us off feel less guilty somehow? And yes. Theft -
of anything – is not like raping children. Not sure what point that proves.
2010/1/2 Disqus <>
How about works instead of stories?
I presume it is extremely difficult for a materialistic society to deal with immaterial goods by and large. Stealing another one's work is certainly neither morally nor legally acceptable. However, there are differences in how people perceive physical and digital goods. Hence piracy – stealing works. Most people don't bother, there is no formalized code how to deal with that. Not like raping children, is it?
Consider the baker again – normally you go there to buy bread. And that concept, of paying for an object, is ingrained in our collective mind. But by downloading a book, movie, whatever, you dont actually have an object. The concept of buying data obviously does not relate to real-world-objects. So, either we get that 'I buy a baker's work' – a process, not a thing – into peoples mind or we have to find another one for data, since I don't see any way how to expand the definition of an object to include immaterial data. I ain't no programmer …
Meanwhile, we get ripped off. True enough.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a solution come along whereby one fee buys
both paper and ebook. But I don't think the lack of that solution at the
moment is stopping anyone paying for what they consume right now.
2010/1/2 Disqus <>
Talking about euphemisms: the best description would be something like story theft. It is still impossible to download a physical object, like a book.
But thats the point, isn't it? Any digital file has at least this prime property – it can be multiplied. The term copied is misleading. If I have a file on my hard-drive and 'copy' it to another hard-drive there is no way to proof which might be the original, if any; there simply is no physical object to which the term 'original' might be applied to.
And this appears to be the root of all evil: we, our societies, are not yet able to cope with the disappearance of physical originals, the masters, and adjust both our code of conduct and the code of law to that.
Comparing story theft to ordinary shoplifting is comparing apples to oranges. If I steal a bread from a bakery the baker cannot sell that stolen bread to anybody else. If I download a file without paying, the producer of that file can still sell that same file.
Right, If I steal a bread, do steal the actual thing, the bread, but also the work a baker puts into creating that same thing. Unfortunately, if caught I get only prosecuted for stealing that bread – which was quite all right until the digital revolution came along, now that view of things has to and probably will change, but it will take time.
But right now there is another catch, which delivers the worst of both world to the average reader. If you are into my “I buy a story”-thesis and go out and buy a book, you only have the right, legally, to read that one physical assortment of paper; you cannot download the very same story onto your eBook-Reader. Which does not create the perception of actually paying for the work, not a physical thing, which in turn I think is necessary for any solution to the situation right now.
Hi Andrew – the second former colleague this thread has uncovered! I just don't think DRM will work I'm afraid. Some sad geek will always crack it because, let's face it, cracking software is easier than finding a girlfriend. Also it is such a pain – I just paid £32 to Apple to unDRM my iTunes because I forgot to unauthorise my last Mac before wiping it. We can't punish decent book buyers with that. Not that there are any easy answers elsewhere.
Couldn't agree more Robert – there are things that can be done and need to be done now before the world is flooded with ereaders. I hope to offer a few suggestions shortly. Thanks for the feedback.
Hi David,
Thanks for a great synopsis and analysis of all the key points raised in your blog yesterday. As an author myself I can't disagree with any of them but, as you and many others, recognise digitalisation, and hence piracy, is here to stay. The issue is how to minimise it – it cannot be legislated away.
In the music business MP3 files and players have basically totally replaced CDs and the traditional music “publishers” got caught with their pants down – doesn't help if you have your head in the sand either. eBooks will never totally replace the traditional hard copy book in the same way – they may cannibalize some sales and replace others (e.g. text books for children in the long run) but they will also expand the market in the same way that Amazon created more book readers.
I think that traditional publishers face similar issues to the full service airlines faced with new start up low cost airlines, i.e. people will still fly (nothing has replaced the airplane – yet!) its just that the way the service is priced and delivered is different. There is no doubt low cost airlines have expanded the air travel business so publishers and authors should be looking to do the same via ebooks.
The advent of the Internet, along with POD and eBooks, has enabled a whole new generation of “new” low cost publishers to emerge – ones who are focusing their marketing/merchandising strategies around the Web, e.g. caffeine nights. However, we are at the early stages of this shift and traditional publishers still have time to alter their business models before they are replaced (or seriously downsized) by more nimble and efficient low cost rivals.
As mentioned yesterday, one major step forward would be for publishers to adopt better (more aggressive) pricing and marketing strategies with regard to digital formats of their authors’ works. The problem is that many of them are stuck with old “infrastructure” – both physical and cultural, and so it is very difficult for them to adopt new business models because of their high cost base, addiction to traditional working practices and their “culture”.
These developments mean agents also need to change they way they think, work and manage their clients – how many agents really understand what is going on on the Internet (apart from Carol who seems addicted to twitter!).
On the legal front, most EU countries are now implementing the EU Directive re illegal downloads, mainly by forcing ISPs to cut off users who regularly download illegal files. I’m not sure how this will work in practice, bit like DRM, but it is at least a statement of intent and should dissuade some people from downloading illegal files.
In short there is no answer to the problem of digital piracy but there are things that can be done by all parties involved to minimise it.
Robert
David, greetings from the loony desk as was. I've been really interested by this discussion because until now I hadn't taken too seriously the threat of ereaders. Obviously, the prospect that digitisation would do for the book business what it has done to the music business is a terrifying one, and in the long run impoverishing for everybody. So far, I am with you. What I don't see is that there can be any alternative to DRM. I also greatly dislike it in principle, and also in practice. There's no doubt that it will be abused deliberately and that sometimes the schemes will break, losing what's locked inside them. But it seems to be the only way of maintaining scarcity in the market, and without scarcity, supply so far outruns demand as to bring the price down to nothing.
There is some hope that DRM will work better with books than with music, if only because a book is so much longer, and takes so much longer to consume, than a song does. So sharing them might be less casual. But I don't know how solid the DRM on audiobooks and etexts really is. Enlightenment welcomed.