Author Slams eBook Piracy, Son Outs Her As a Music Pirate

http://torrentfreak.com/author-slams-ebook-piracy-son-outs-her-as-a-music-pirate-101213/

by lockem • 16 years ago

192 170 16 years ago

pdx• 16 years ago

I feel for the kid. I still grimace when I think of bragging to the game warden when I was 4, about how my dad caught a salmon with his bare hands. Of course, it wasn't fishing season, nor did we have a license. Even at 4, as soon as I said it, I knew I had screwed up. Luckily, everybody just laughed, as the game warden was a friend, but to this day, that slip of the tongue reminds me to think before I speak.

WillyF3• 16 years ago

I never thought of it, but poaching is a lot like piracy. I don't think your intent was to make that analogy, but there are a lot of similarities.

hvs• 16 years ago

Except that wildlife is a limited resource that needs to be protected from poachers. It's only like piracy if you think there is an unlimited supply of wildlife that anyone should be able to take as they like.

rmc4• 16 years ago

Yes the kid 'outs' her, however she also digs her own grave and makes some points that can easily be used to justify book piracy.

e.g.

“Pirated handbags? Yes, I do buy them,” she said. “I feel that the genuine Prada bags have such an inflated price.”

and

“You have a pirated MP3 collection,” Jo added, helpfully. “We copied the first 1500 songs from one place and 300 from another.”

“Yes,” admitted Ragbe. “There were a lot of things on the iPod.”

pbhjpbhj5• 16 years ago

>“Pirated handbags? Yes, I do buy them,” she said. “I feel that the genuine Prada bags have such an inflated price.”

I feel that lumping handbags in here is wrong. There's probably a trademark infringement as well with the handbags. But, whilst there is copyright infringement in the design does the design have an artistic quality or is it "just" a design. The fact that there is a skill and materials expense in producing the handbags gives it a different quality IMO.

The important part with the handbags is the infringement of the Prada trademark whilst with the books and music it is the copyright infringement.

A fashion designer would probably disagree?

pmichaud2• 16 years ago

I sell e-books and they almost all get pirated. I don't care, I just focus on the people who want to pay for my stuff. No skin off my nose if they don't.

markkat2• 16 years ago

Same here. A file that can be copied infinite times without cost is not worth much. I put 2 years of work into a book that gets pirated all the time. I have no problem with it at all.

I think we would be better off reevaluating business models rather than suffering the effects of trying to preserve out-dated ones.

ewams• 16 years ago

What mediums do you two sell your books through?

ronnoch2• 16 years ago

> I think we would be better off reevaluating business models rather than suffering the effects of trying to preserve out-dated ones.

What sort of business model do you think would be effective?

matwood• 16 years ago

That's probably the best attitude to take since you can't ever stop the infringers. And if you do try to stop them you're only making it more complicated on the people who do want to buy your content.

I buy lots of ebooks and music and the key for me is making it easy to pay for (Amazon and ITMS are great for this). I don't want to jump through hoops to give you my money.

Contrast this with the movie industry who I think are setting themselves up in a way that's pushing infringement with all the rules around renting, buying, streaming, and NetFlix. For example, I see a commercial that a movie now 'in stores' so I check NF. If it's not there and I really want to see it, I'll check the iTunes and xbox marketplaces. When I can't find it there I wonder if they really want my money? They are pushing me to buy the movie, but I don't want to buy the movie I just want to rent it and see it once. I think they are pushing many potential renters to just torrent the movie because they have made it so hard to actually give them money. By this point I'm usually so fed up with looking for the movie I forget about watching it until it shows up on NF.

WillyF3• 16 years ago

I think that humans have an inherent problem with seeing piracy as theft unless they are the victims. Theft in a traditional sense is almost always zero-sum, and piracy isn't. We weren't really built to deal with this. The closest thing that I can think of is having someone sleep with your spouse—it's kind of like stealing, but it's not zero-sum. And it's not illegal.

It also doesn't help that our intellectual property laws have a lot of inconsistencies. If I steal your ideas for a startup, that's ok unless you have patented technology. But if I make a copy of something that I own and share it with a friend, that's illegal.

Up until now there had never been a way to take a material possession and duplicate it at essentially no cost. I think that we have a long way to go before we develop strong cultural norms on how to deal with intellectual property.

sudont• 16 years ago

Ideas for a startup are just ideas. Music and books, regardless of form, are implementations and execution. I say that the actual execution of the idea is what's important. Code piracy's probably a better comparison.

That said, as an artist I'm not too worried if somebody rips off my work to print for a personal hanging.

nkassis• 16 years ago

"The closest thing that I can think of is having someone sleep with your spouse"

That's a pretty horrible analogy. It's not like you have a deal with the RIAA/MPAA equivalent to a marriage contract. The sole idea of that scares me. Also, if you ripoff your spouse and make her pay extra to get anything from you and only on terms that lets you control you forever, I think you deserve the cheating. You can go on exploiting your spouse like that and no expect issues.

In retrospect, might not be such a bad analogy ;p

raquo• 16 years ago

I think most humans default to disregarding the other end of most relationships unless something urges them to.

wccrawford• 16 years ago

Duplicate it at no cost to anyone except yourself, I think you mean.

It often does cost time and money to pirate things.

And now that RepRap and similar 3D object printers are becoming more popular, they will continue to come down in price. It won't be long before printing physical items is a possibility, and then wholesale pirating of things that used to be protected by patents will start.

And if you're having trouble imagining that happening, don't worry. It was just as hard to imagine music piracy before MP3s. It happened on a VERY small scale before that due to difficulty and media cost.

arethuza3• 16 years ago

Can you actually think of any examples where "printing" 3D objects that are protected by patents is likely to be a problem in the foreseeable future?

duke_sam• 16 years ago

It reminds me of some welfare recipients claiming welfare should be cut for others. As long as it's someone else benefiting from an action it's ripe for cutting but if I'm benefiting then it's justified.

metageek• 16 years ago

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904

>"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."

>"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"

>"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."

>I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"

>Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!

Tycho3• 16 years ago

I disagree, it's the same as any other situation where people act unethically just because there's low risk of getting caught.

People steal items from hotel rooms, catch a train without buying a ticket, hack cable TV circuits, use others' unprotected wifi, keep a 20 when they were expecting a 10, insure items after they're damaged, etc etc. My last two flatmates have left without paying their share of the utility bills and ignored my messages. None of this is piracy but it's similar behaviour.

A lot of people just have no spine and only the threat of prosecution keeps them in line. Which makes it hard to swallow any of these elaborate justifications of media/software piracy.

hxa72418• 16 years ago

There is a fundamental difference: copying, in itself, renders no such harm as normal property infractions. Consider the underlying necessary facts. If you take a material object from me, you have deprived me. If you copy that object, you have done no such harm. The 'harm' of copying/infringement depends solely on the laws. If we didn't have the laws there wouldn't be the harm.

People know this unconsciously. A few million years of evolution have made us want to communicate. People copy because of the natural tendency to do something that is good for all of us.

hxa72418• 16 years ago

You seem to be suggesting we should learn to submit to IP and its restriction on copying. This would be a sad and very wrong direction.

We should have cultural norms that encourage and support both production and copying -- they are both good, and mutually reinforcing. And we should build commercial systems around that, not warp our innate moral sense to fit some arbitrary market arrangement. If certain corporations don't like it they are the ones that need to reform themselves.

rick8887• 16 years ago

This still doesn't change the fact that piracy does hurt authors.

The sad fact is that piracy is only getting worse. Even when you can get a song for 99 cents with no DRM or restrictions, music piracy is still rampant. I'm waiting for the next set of excuses.

In '99, it was because music was too expensive and the artists were getting screwed (which is a funny excuse, because 1% of something is something, but 1% of 0 is 0). Later, it was because DRM made it too difficult to play music. This is why you don't negociate with criminals. They will just keep bleeding you dry. The music industry is learning this lesson at the expense of their profits.

Now there is a new generation of kids that feel entitled to music, software, and movies for free.

This is one of the main reasons why I no longer sell applications. I have converted them all to services. This way, there is no way someone can pirate it.

mikecane• 16 years ago

I'd still like to know how much piracy is due to friction. The First Friction being the inability to take cash and turn it easily into digital payments.

arethuza3• 16 years ago

Music piracy has always been rampant

I can remember being a kid in the 70s and 80s and we all borrowed albums from friends and made copies on cassette tapes.

Or at least all my friends did.... ;-)

zacharycohn• 16 years ago

I once had a polygraph interviewer tell me this exact same thing and "not to worry about small shit like piracy."

alextgordon• 16 years ago

The sad fact is that piracy is only getting worse. Even when you can get a song for 99 cents with no DRM or restrictions, music piracy is still rampant. I'm waiting for the next set of excuses.

I rarely pirate music but, if I bought all my music on Amazon or iTunes I'd be paying thousands of dollars a year. For a large subset of the population, this is simply an unacceptable expense. Hence: piracy.

carussell• 16 years ago

"My time is worth it. Take comfort knowing that it's okay for me to do this, because I've gone ahead and assessed that yours is not. Cheers."

rmc4• 16 years ago

I'm waiting for the next set of excuses.

I use an operating system (Ubuntu Linux) that doesn't support the main digital music download software and live in a country (Ireland) where choice is limited.

There are easily a billion people who can't legally purchase mainstream american music.

flawawa2• 16 years ago

Then don't. You don't have to. Listen to the radio. Record the radio (in many countries that is legal). Listen to Youtube or streams. Listen to free music!

psadauskas• 16 years ago

In high school and college, I pirated plenty of music, because I was dead broke. Now that I'm older, and have a job, I'm buying a lot of the music that I downloaded 10 years ago. $1 a song is still too much, but when Amazon has digital albums for $5, I'll buy a few.

I've always gone to shows, though, to support the local artists as directly as I can.

rick8887• 16 years ago

"$1 a song is still too much"

too much??! really? $1 is hardly a lot of money for a good song.

I also forgot to mention that we now have the ability to preview almost any song before buying with services like Grooveshark.

prodigal_erik• 16 years ago

It doesn't hurt them. It fails to help them, which isn't quite the same thing. What we need is a way to compensate creators that doesn't require damaging the social utility of their work.

rick8887• 16 years ago

"It doesn't hurt them. It fails to help them"

This isn't true. When you don't attempt to prevent piracy, people think it's okay. They then feel they are entitled to getting your stuff for free...and the value will approach $0 (because nobody will be willing to pay you anything). This is already happening.

It's very similar to currency. A $100 bill is really just ink and paper. If society didn't believe it was worth this much, it wouldn't be.

cafard• 16 years ago

Bogus Prada bags hardly seems to compare. Maybe if one took fancy dust jackets (Hennessey and Patterson, Musil, whatever) and wrapped them around Readers Digest condensed books one might have a comparable case.

ctkrohn3• 16 years ago

Oh come on. It's easy to call someone a hypocrite -- everyone agrees its wrong, whatever their other moral principles might be. The failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right.

EDIT: changed "everyone agrees its wrong" to "everyone agrees hypocrisy is wrong"

abstractbill• 16 years ago

everyone agrees its wrong

Are you saying everyone agrees piracy is wrong? In my mind that's very much still open to debate.

ctkrohn3• 16 years ago

No, not at all. I certainly agree that piracy is open to debate. I meant to say that everyone agrees hypocrisy is wrong.

If that's the most obvious reading of my comment, the downvotes make a little more sense...

randallsquared• 16 years ago

The failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right.

If you assume they're failures, they don't have much bearing. If, however, you assume that people's actions reflect their beliefs more closely than their arguments do, the fact of hypocrisy regarding a given belief suggests rather strongly that even the person making the argument doesn't believe it. When an argument's proponents don't even believe it, I think it's reasonably strong evidence that it isn't true.

ctkrohn3• 16 years ago

I actually disagree that people's actions reflect their beliefs more than their arguments. I suppose these are fundamental assumptions that you can't really present much evidence for either way, but I do think that people try to hold themselves to standards that they can't often achieve. To take a simplistic example: suppose I'm trying to stick to a rigorous diet, but I lapse every so often. Does this mean that I really don't believe the diet is important? Or if I'm trying to learn a new programming language in my spare time, perhaps I'm not as studious as I'd like... but that doesn't mean that the language isn't worth learning. It just means it's hard, and people tend to give in to laziness.

c0riander• 16 years ago

The problem most authors (artists) face is not piracy, but obscurity.

Not condoning piracy, but simply an observation. (I'm skeptical that people who pirate the e-books would necessarily otherwise purchase them, so I'm always uncertain about estimates of "losses" like in this article. Many times someone will download it to just check it out, similar to flipping through it in a bookstore, which you don't have to pay for.)

nochiel• 16 years ago

I feel it is instructive that we remember Tim O'Reilly's incisive piece titled "Piracy is progressive taxation"[0].

It makes little sense to claim that an author/musician is losing money through piracy when the likelihood is that the [majority of the] pirated copies would not have otherwise been bought.

Footnotes.

[0] http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html

T_S_2• 16 years ago

.. no one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me. --Thomas Jefferson

And so the progress of virtual goods has turned their producers into teachers. The consequences are still unknown.

EGreg• 16 years ago

All I can say is: ha ha ha. And: we need to come up with a better system for selling intellectual art these days!

xtho• 16 years ago

> “Books are priced too high”

I don't think he (the "pirat") has an idea of how much time has to be invested in the production of good books. I personally think that books are drastically undervalued and that people are not willing to pay enough for good books which has the consequence that they are either served well targeted bestsellers, which can be produced at that price, or junk. Big publishing companies and bestseller authors don't have that much of a problem selling their books at a lower price so that people are less inclined to download a pirated book.

ronnoch2• 16 years ago

Yeah, that's one quote I just can't agree with. The amount of value I get out of a good book always hugely exceeds what I paid for it.

relix• 16 years ago

I don't think he means books in general, but ebooks, as compared to paperbacks/hardbacks.

I recently bought a Kindle, and every ebook in the Amazon store, without exception, is more expensive than the cheapest paperback version available at Amazon.

That's just ridiculous, and no matter how "close to zero" any marginal costs of a printed book might be - and I'd like some proof of that, because I find it hard to believe that handling, shipping, storage, printing, testprinting, typesetting, missed shipments etc, are so cheap - an ebook should never be more expensive than the same physical paperback.

modeless• 16 years ago

The App Store has proven that most software is overpriced. If there was a book store with $.99 and $1.99 books, I think we would discover something very similar.

cosmicray• 16 years ago

The question could be argued about if software was overpriced, or were there too many layers in the distribution chain that all wanted to make something off the software sale. The iTunes App store has collapsed the distribution chain. The OS X App store may do the same.

krschultz3• 16 years ago

I've seen the following argument a thousand times:

"Well the marginal cost of a copy of [some digital good] is 0 so it isn't stealing!"

That argument is actually completly irrelevant.

I took a train the other night, and there were only 2 people in my whole car. The previous week it was packed. Both times I had to buy a ticket at the same price.

If you don't see what that has to do with pirating music (or software, or movies, or TV), then you don't really understand economics.

Everyone compares it to widgets where there is some fixed cost and some marginal cost, and suddenly the marginal cost is 0 so we should be able to have it for free right? Right?

Wrong. The train has 0 marginal costs, and all fixed costs. Whether that train is empty or full, they pay for the conductor, the engineer, the maitanence and the gas. But you are expected to pay for your ride whether you are 1/1000th of the total population on the train or 1/20th. And if you don't pay, you are breaking the law. Stealing services.

Digital goods are things with a high fixed costs (software developers, authors, directors, actors etc) and 0 marginal costs. There are plenty of other things out there with the same economic model and you are expected to pay for all of them. The only difference is that it is far easier to steal from content creators than service providers.

So please correct everyone you see making that arguement. The fact that copying the music costs nothing really doesn't matter. It comes down to dividing the fixed costs by a certain amount of customers, or there simply won't be content creators anymore. Maybe the songs need to be 2 cents each, I don't know, but the fact is there are high fixed costs and they need to be covered somehow by someone. The lack of marginal cost just doesn't matter.

chc4• 16 years ago

You're repeating the big media newspeak. "Breaking the law" is not identical to "stealing." If you enter a place you are not allowed to be but do not deprive anybody else of property already in his custody, you are committing trespass and any number of other crimes, but you are emphatically not stealing. So please correct everyone you see making that argument.

krschultz3• 16 years ago

Agreed, but what word would you use? We aren't trespassing when we use bittorrent. And I know people who have been attacked by pirates wielding guns onto their ships, so I just feel strange equating clicking on a link with a guy shooting a civilian with an AK47.

So I equate it to "theft of services". Let's say I get a massage, and then I just walk out the door and don't pay for it. I have clearly stolen that person's valuable time. Which isn't a perfect analogy becuase they have finite time vs being able to make infinite copies, but either way someone worked hard with the intention of getting paid for it, and there are people out there depriving them of the money they would have gotten (and please don't say "but I wouldn't have bought it anyway! which is also crap, becuase most people are downloading music they would have bought, its just the nature of blockbusters vs the long tail). So I don't know what the word is, but it is definitely closer to theft of services than anything else I can think of.

potatolicious• 16 years ago

> ""Breaking the law" is not identical to "stealing.""

You are technically correct (according to Futurama, the best kind of correct).

But you're also repeating the digital-communist newspeak also. "Piracy is not stealing" is not identical to "Piracy is not wrong". I realize that's not the position you're trying to push, but bear in mind that "Piracy is not stealing" is way too often used to justify piracy itself, as if mere infringement makes it morally acceptable, but stealing is not.

Associating piracy with stealing is problematic, technically incorrect, but is not entirely without merit.

Similarly, dissociating piracy from stealing is problematic but not entirely without merit.

The "I'm just copying your couch" argument that the internet likes to make is about as sensical as the "You wouldn't steal from a store would you?" that the MPAA/RIAA like to make. Both are attempting to use weasel words to justify their own position.

tjr6• 16 years ago

I've worked on numerous music recording projects. In many cases, I did everything by myself. In one case, I hired (and learned from) some of the very best in the industry, and between my partner and I, incurred approximately $20,000 in costs... and had an awesome time doing so.

But even when I do everything myself, I'm using high-end equipment and software that I've paid thousands of dollars for. It's not free of charge for me to be able to record music. And even if I were to deem those to be irrelevant sunk costs, to assume that my recordings ought to be free of charge just because they easily can be copied suggests that my time and expertise is worthless, if nothing else.

[Edit: of course, I'm just some random guy on the internet, and certainly not nor attempting to be a full-time musician. I'm presently content to make money building software, and any income that results from my music is just a bonus. Full-time musicians surely feel even more strongly about such matters.]

krschultz3• 16 years ago

Exactly. I'm not a muscian (I'm freaking terrible at anything involved with music), and I have no stake in this game. But software development is the same freaking business model, but for some reason we don't collectively take a stand against piracy.

endtime4• 16 years ago

I don't think many people make only the case that the marginal cost is 0. But when the marginal cost is zero, and I wouldn't have bought the thing anyway (e.g. Photoshop), and when it's a non-scarce good, I really struggle to see the harm.

neild• 16 years ago

It's astonishingly easy to convince yourself that you "wouldn't have bought the thing anyway". The best way to be sure that you aren't lying to yourself is to not pirate things.

wwortiz• 16 years ago

From the article:

>“Books are priced too high,” said Berntsen when justifying his work. “One of the reasons why the pirate world is so big, is that publishers take crazy prices for something that isn’t even in physical form.”

This is actually one of the better arguments in favor of piracy I have seen, though I'm sure most people don't see their pirating this way, pirating books isn't really the solution, and it is quite a bit misguided.

The specifics of digital books is a little bit different from music, you do have those fixed costs but the argument is that the marginal costs make up for it. What a good amount of people don't realize is that with many books the marginal costs are actually pretty close to zero so an ebook doesn't really cost that much less to make.

My personal problem with digital books, which I avoid by going to used book stores (So I guess I'm not really supporting anyone other than the book store), is that some publishers think there should be a convenience charge to the customer in order to obtain a digital copy, I believe in no way should an ebook cost more than the cheapest copy (be it paperback or hardback) available from the same store new.

jokermatt999• 16 years ago

>My personal problem with digital books, which I avoid by going to used book stores (So I guess I'm not really supporting anyone other than the book store), is that some publishers think there should be a convenience charge to the customer in order to obtain a digital copy, I believe in no way should an ebook cost more than the cheapest copy (be it paperback or hardback) available from the same store new.

Which, if you think about it, seems totally backwards. A paper or hardback book can be sold secondhand, and some of the value recouped. With an ebook, there's no way to resell and regain some of what you've spent. However, if you aren't discussing reselling, this is kind of a moot point.

todayiamme• 16 years ago

Yes, you're right. The more I've thought about it over time the more I realize that your point is right, but the problem isn't the rational cost over here; it is the perceived cost of the good.

People pirate things, because to them in their minds, emotionally, it isn't like stealing. After all, who are they stealing from? It's extremely hard to put a face on an entity like a record corporation and it's just that psychologically people can't relate to or grasp the concept at work over here.

Our sense of morality is closely tied with our sense of empathy, but when there is nothing to empathize with what happens then? The central problem with the systems we now create is that our brains still look at it emotionally, while being unable to grasp at the true consequences of them intellectually. Think about the stock market; it operates on rational principles and belief, but now do you think anyone truly understands it? All that's left is messy human belief in a system no one truly understands. In shorter terms, we've created a recipe for disaster.

I think that all of the problems we see today is a symptom of our short comings as a species. I really wish I knew how to solve this, but then again I have faith that someone else will. ;)

InclinedPlane4• 16 years ago

There are still a fixed number of seats on the train (or plane). If someone "steals" a seat then that's a seat that someone else cannot have. This is dramatically different from the case of digital media where there is no similar impact.

For music piracy the only cost is the potential lost sale of the music to the "pirate".

Edit: to follow up, I'm a music pirate and proud of it. In my experience there are three types of people who pirate music. There are casual pirates who occasionally download the most popular songs of the day. There are hardcore pirates and digital packrats who refuse to pay for anything they don't absolutely have to and download music they might not even like, just to have it. And there are music lovers who have an insatiable hunger for lots and lots of music and enjoy discovering new music. From a financial perspective for the artists piracy is not generally a serious problem. Casual pop-music pirates generally download only songs that are already mega-hits, and the artists have been compensated thoroughly from. Hardcore anti-business pirates aren't necessarily a significant impact on artists because they wouldn't have paid for the albums they've pirated regardless.

The really interesting aspect comes from the 3rd category of pirates. Music lovers may "pirate" music but they also buy music too, and being exposed to more music means only that they end up buying more music (and going to more concerts), which is nothing but good news for those artists. Some of my favorite music I've discovered only by first pirating it, and in many cases this has lead to supporting artists financially (through album sales, merch, and concerts) that I never would have known about and never would have given a dime to previously. I can't see that as anything other than a good thing.

The current hypothetical non-piracy model for music is broken, and it always has been. There is too little variety on the radio and 30 second or 1 minute clips of songs don't cut it. Sometimes you just need to borrow an album and listen to it a few times before falling in love with it. This is the way it has always been. There's always been borrowing and copying in music, but the internet has made it infinitely more effective and so cast the issues into much sharper relief.

There is an even more important point at play here. And that is that a train line can prevent you from sneaking onto a train without a ticket fairly easily, but it is nigh impossible to put the music piracy genie back into the bottle. Music piracy is going to happen. The technology makes it too easy now, and there is a cultural desire for it. There is no choice to stop it, the only choice is to figure out how to live with it.

P.S. Some people might enjoy listening to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdRAQWp73S4

P.P.S. http://www.gemm.com/item/GEINOH--YAMASHIROGUMI/ECOPHONY--RIN...

(perhaps this is an experiment?)

xenophanes4• 16 years ago

The fixed seats on train is only relevant if it fills up. So just imagine the case where it doesn't totally fill and consider his point again and you should see the parallel.

tjr6• 16 years ago

The current hypothetical non-piracy model for music is broken, and it always has been.

I agree with that. My main concern is not people who make unauthorized copies of music and then later buy copies; I personally think that's great, and ought to be somehow legal. I am concerned about people who make unauthorized copies of music with no intention of ever paying for it and just flat out don't care because they don't feel it's worth paying for, even though they clearly see it as something of value, since they listen to it.

The huge difficulty is, how can you reliably discern between these classes of unauthorized copying?

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

If someone "steals" a seat then that's a seat that someone else cannot have. This is dramatically different from the case of digital media where there is no similar impact.

True, but:

a) when you sneak onto a train and get a free ride, it only works once. If you make a habit of this, you'll probably get caught. If you download a song illegally for free, you can listen to it for the rest of your life unless you lose or delete the copy you have.

b) the exclusion of another passenger in any case only becomes significant when the train is full. If the train is half-empty, you're riding for free but nobody else is worse off because there's an abundance of seats. Of course you have a tiny negative effect on the fuel consumption of the vehicle, but that's much less important than the principle.

c) In any case, when you ride without a fare your offense is against the train operator. You don't get sued/prosecuted by the passengers who had to wait for the next train. The issue is not whether or not there was a seat available to someone else, but whether or not the service provider received the due cost of the ride/song/whatever, which cost is levied for market availability rather than for availability to an individual buyer standing in line behind you.

Now I quite agree with you that there are so many economic incentives in favor of digital piracy and such perverse incentives for the publishers' preferred way of doing business, that something has got to give and that's why we're seeing such upheaval in the media industry. I just think that one a philosophical level the argument isn't as clear-cut as you are suggesting.

rjprins• 16 years ago

It's not all about costs. In music there are many people who love to write and record songs for fun. This devalues music regardless of costs. In fact I think most music in itself is practically worthless. It's the face and name of musicians which are worth money, usually because of successful marketing.

For books it's a little different. Few people write long stories for fun and it's much harder to write a good book then it is to make a good song. Thus, there are not that many good books around and their value is higher. In this case, I would say copying is bad.

However, my own opinion is that the world just has to adapt to it's own developments. Copying is easy? Writers get less money for their books? Then writers will have to change their profession. Sometimes markets shrink or disappear.

tjr6• 16 years ago

Few people write long stories for fun and it's much harder to write a good book then it is to make a good song.

Probably. It might be more equivalent to compare a book with a whole album, or a chapter with a song. I'm not sure what quality of music you have in mind, or what quality of book, but I don't think writing good prose is of necessity significantly more difficult than producing good recorded music.

Sometimes markets shrink or disappear.

Certainly. But when markets disappear because the producers in the market say "I would like X dollars in exchange for this product" and the consumers say "No, we'd rather violate copyright law and procure your product free of charge", it seems to me that something is going on beyond the simple disappearance of a market.

Consumers still want recorded music, and written prose, and all sorts of things that are easy to copy. Many of them just don't feel compelled to give the producers anything in exchange for their work [if they can avoid doing so]. Their work must have value, or else the consumers wouldn't want it.

T_S_2• 16 years ago

Arguments about marginal cost of production don't matter when the cost of enforcement is high. The issue of piracy ultimately comes down to whether agreements are enforceable. In the long run society won't help people enforce the unenforceable. If we come up with some form of technological fix that "knows" when an agreement has been broken then piracy will dwindle. Otherwise these laws will eventually be taken off the books, like adultery and other former crimes.

That's not meant as an ethical argument. Simply a forecast.

Charuru• 16 years ago

"Well the marginal cost of a copy of [some digital good] is 0 so it isn't stealing!"

Many things DO work by this model.

ie, art. Someone may pay for the 1st copy of a Picasso at 100 million dollars (the copy that actually required talent to make), but everyone else gets it at the marginal cost, free.

makmanalp• 16 years ago

I agree with all of this, but what bothers me is that the record industry is using a form of reverse pie fallacy in which they claim that they would have had X amount of sales, if only those darned pirates hadn't stolen the music. A more sophisticated (but still fallacious) version goes: Album Y has been pirated Z times, therefore we lost Z * (retail price of the album).

This is blatantly wrong. They do not know that they would have sold X albums if it weren't for pirates. Furthermore, if a person pirates an album, it does not mean that they would have bought it if they couldn't pirate it or if they were more ethical.

The people I know who horde large amounts of music do it exactly because it doesn't cost them - if they had to pay for it they simply wouldn't have even close to that much music. They wouldn't go and buy all the same albums. They also wouldn't be enthusiasts at that scale.

tl;dr: Fallacies exist on both sides.

aaronkaplan• 16 years ago

You're attacking a straw man. Here are some arguments that people do sometimes make, and that somewhat resemble your straw man, but are less ridiculous:

- Making a copy of a file isn't stealing because it doesn't deprive anyone else of the good.

- When vendors claim that X pirated units of a product whose retail price is Y amount to X*Y of lost sales, they are full of shit, because this assumes that all the pirates would have bought copies at full price had piracy been prevented.

- If the product were reasonably priced I would buy it, but it's not, so I steal it. This is the argument of the 19 year old in the article, and probably the one you're reacting to, but it's not the same as your straw man. Your straw man says, "it's not stealing," whereas the real person says "yeah, it's stealing, but it's stealing from thieves, so it's morally acceptable."

I don't mean to advance any of these arguments personally, just to point out that they're arguments that some people actually make, unlike the one you so convincingly refute.

jessriedel4• 16 years ago

For some deontologists, one key difference is that (they claim) you have a natural right to how your physical property is used, but you do not have a natural right to how your intellectual production is used. Rather, intellectual property is a device created by the state to foster intellectual production. One consequence is that right to your shoes never expires, but patents only last 17 years.

So trains are fundamentally different, because to ride one is to use someone's property against their will, and so you violate a natural right. When you pirate music, you are only breaking laws. Although breaking the law might be considered immoral, it is for a fundamentally different reason. There are definitely more cases where people think it's acceptable to break the law, especially if there net utility to society goes up. Examples of this would be

(1) parking in one of many handicap parking spaces at night when there is negligible chance that they will all be filled

(2) pirating music that you would not buy if you had to pay for it (you sincerely claim!).

pessimizer• 16 years ago

I can't seem to pick out the argument that you're making here, other than that it begins with an assertion that no one who "really" understands economics can dispute it.

I'm going to guess out loud at it, and hopefully somebody will jump in and help me.

1) In the case of goods or services with minimal marginal costs and large fixed costs in proportion to total costs, you are expected to pay for them.

2) If you don't pay for them you are breaking the law.

Therefore, the argument that if marginal cost is zero on some digital good, then [something number 1] isn't stealing is completely irrelevant to [something number 2].

I'm sure that "something number 1" (referred to as "it") is related to free riding, due to a shared metaphor, and I'm going to assume that it is "a use of that good or service without paying," again due to the metaphor, where a single person took a single train ride without paying.

Does "something number 2" = "whether a use of that good or service is illegal or not"? Because that seems to me to be setting up as a straw man a question that no one is asking, then begging the question with an answer that is identical to your second premise.

RK• 16 years ago

Without commenting on IP piracy itself, I don't think the train analogy works for the additional reason that it certainly costs less to transport a train with (say) zero people than a train at full capacity. Fuel cost is probably the biggest issue.

Others have already pointed out that a train has a finite capacity, unlike copies of digital media.

ugh• 16 years ago

That’s a negligible difference, irrelevant as far as this discussion is concerned. The marginal cost of an additional passenger on a train might no be literally zero but compared to the fixed costs it very nearly is.

kedixed• 16 years ago

There are two sides to the market though as well. What the music industry wants you to pay, and what you think you should pay. The music industry would like to get every penny it can from you, as would any share-holder based profit seeking company. It used to be able to dictate what we pay via the cd hard format industry.

Paying $30 for a CD with 12-19 songs, and not all songs being equal, it seems that there would be some dissatisfaction with the price per product.

You could view the current pirating activity of the general public as a back-lash to this long lasting penny pinching business. Couple this with the celebrity high-life led and promoted by the musicians and record industry, I for one don't want to be lining the pockets of these rich people. When I only get paid the equivalent of $30/h before tax, why the hell should I spend several hours of my time working in order to support the lives of richer people. Producing a remixed version of an old 80's song and adding the words 'dirty beat' does not mean you deserve several cars and houses and gold teeth. Its the fight club generation that does all the hard work, so we are going to take what we can from the corporate overlords.

Pirating will lessen when the market properly reflects the actual value of these products, and the industry embraces the ease of the digital format. Online subscription services should allow several cds worth for $5/month. If they are worried how easy it is to copy mp3's, then find ways to make the actual music a by product. Offer sneak previews to new albums, and discounts on concert tickets and merchandise. Imagine if I was one of 50 people to attend a private gig of some awesome band. It would make a lot of other people sign up as well.

arjn• 16 years ago

I agree in general but IMO its even simpler than that. If you are taking someone else's work that they asked you to pay for, then you are STEALING. Its plain and simple.

nene• 16 years ago

What struck me most was this passage:

In order to thwart piracy, she refused to allow her latest novel to be released as an audiobook since the format is popular with file-sharers and also denied the publication of Russian and Chinese versions.

Isn't it like taping on the cover of the book: "Only for white"?

rick8887• 16 years ago

"Only for white"

hmm..so there are no whites in Russia?

Most e-commerce companies where I've worked block both Russia and China due to massive piracy or credit card theft.

Author Slams eBook Piracy, Son Outs Her As a Music Pirate

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