Book piracy: two perspectives

[charmingmonstrs]

The Millions interviews a book pirate:
Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the author of payment. I think most of the filesharing community feels that the record industry is a vestigal organ that will slowly fall off and die I dont know to what

Comments

[marthaness]

Wow, I've got to second the library suggestion. >:[[ Often people are shocked by the amount of free resources my library offers when I begin explaining it to them. I mean besides the basic common-sense things like BOOKS.

[lightcastle]

So a devil's advocate question.

What is the difference between me reading it on a pirated electronic copy and reading it on a library loan?

On a more serious note, the business model is mostly dead. Money was being made by controlling distribution, and distribution can no longer be controlled. How to make a new business model that pays people for their writing (or music) is the question.

[marthaness]

The library purchased the material and has the permission of publishing houses to loan it to library patrons, so I think that's better than reading a pirated electronic copy (from which no financial benefit goes to the originators of the material).

Maybe I'm partial to libraries because I work in one. But I'm also one of those curmudgeons who doesn't steal download anything, so that can't help my sympathies towards book pirates.

[lightcastle]

I'm terribly fond of libraries myself. (and librarians, who in my experience are quite awesome)

The question really is one of distribution, however. I'm not sure how we're going to get around the instant copying problem. Some artists are in better situations than others, of course. (Musicians, who can still do live performances.)

But yeah, this is going to be a problem. I mean, copyright law was originally an attempt to balance this idea that everyone should have access to ideas with paying the people who come up with them. We just need to find a new balance (which is easier said than done).

[hermdelica]

This gets around to my basic theory that selfishness is the core of human psychology

Even though there are always the "I want everything for free" people, there are a refreshing number who feel that they're part of a community and pay for things based on that philosophy. Those are the ones we focus our energy on.

[twiin]

People who want to pay for things are the exception, not the rule. There has been a low supply of music/books/media for the last two thousand years because it has been expensive and difficult to share music/books/media between people. The thing that's different now is that most people can get music/books/media at the price they want to.

[hermdelica]

I agree that the improved ability to share is a great thing, but "the price they want" is too frequently zero, which doesn't help anyone.

I see we have a lot of friends in common - we're playing in Ottawa in a few weeks. If you're there feel free to say hi :-)

[twiin]

That's kind of my point, though. To most people, the value of most stories or most songs very closely approximates zero. Downloading facilitates the transfer of stories and songs for that value.

[dunderbug]

This gets around to my basic theory that selfishness is the core of human psychology

I would like to hear this rant. As I think selfishness sometimes gets a bad rap, but hey if people weren't selfish sometimes we wouldn't do things like, pursue our own creative interests. But I think that's an 'over tea' conversation. Or maybe over booze. :)

As for Book Piracy. It sure ain't new. The interwebs has been torrenting tech manuals for years as pdfs.

I find piracy a hard argument to take sides on. For starters, it ticks me off when artists get ripped off, and there should be a line somewhere. But where? Downloading is not going away, and we've all used it in some way or another so I feel like arguing the right or wrong of it is a moot point. People will download the media they want, and pay for other media they want