# Pirate Philosophy



## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

There's another thread today asking "have your books been pirated" so I didn't want to take that thread OT.

Instead I have a different issue.

I was notified today by a google alert for my second book. I checked the alert and it brought me to a forum where someone had posted a request for my book in any format (mobi, epub, pdf, doc). This site has its own form of currency and the poster was willing to pay 30 units of this currency for the book.

I think there are a number of things flattering about this request 1) The poster is asking for the 2nd book in the series, which means they read the first book (which is perma-free on all the main sites) and liked it enough to seek out the 2nd book. 2) the poster only has 64 credits which means that they are willing to "pay" half their credits for my book.

I almost responded to the posters request with an offer of the book myself (I've given away plenty of copies via smashwords to reviewers that have never reviewed it, what's one more to someone that's already a fan?) but I decided to hold off to give me time to think about it. There is really only one thing that makes me hesitate. If I supply this poster with a copy of my book and am "friendly" to piracy will I lose control of the monetization of it. Not in a legal or binding way, I'm not worried about losing copyright but will the steady flow of purchases trickle and cease? the ultimate question is:

Are pirates never going to buy the book and are paying customers never going to pirate the book? (Does piracy really have no impact on independent book sales?)

This particular site raises a different question because it's not _necessarily_ a pirate sharing site. It's very close to being a "used book store". If I went into a used bookstore in another country that used a different currency and saw a copy of my book there for sale would I be annoyed that it was pirated? I don't know if the owner bought the book or stole the book but he's going to sell it for money that's going into his pocket and that's totally legit.

[I think I've decided on my response. I'm going to contact the poster and offer them a copy of the book in exchange for a review (A deal which is no different than any of the book review sites.) But I look forward to all of your opinions on this situation and this topic.]


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

NathanWrann said:


> This particular site raises a different question because it's not _necessarily_ a pirate sharing site. It's very close to being a "used book store". If I went into a used bookstore in another country that used a different currency and saw a copy of my book there for sale would I be annoyed that it was pirated? I don't know if the owner bought the book or stole the book but he's going to sell it for money that's going into his pocket and that's totally legit.


Stop there. The difference between a physical product and a digital product is that if I sell the physical product, I am now deprived of it. So if I buy a book, and then sell it to someone else, I no longer have the book. With digital books, if I buy the book, and then make a copy and give it to someone (which is in fact what technically happens), I STILL HAVE MY COPY. If I buy the physical book, I can only ever sell it to one person. A digital file can be duplicated countless times without depriving me of the product.

This is the fundamental difference. When I buy a book, I am buying the means of reading the book, not the content of the book itself. I do not "own" the author's words. I own a license to read it (either by virtue of owning the physical book or licensing the digital copy). *I never gain the right to copy or reproduce the author's words. *

So, yes, it is 100% a pirate site. It is making illegal copies of digital products and trading them.


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## dalya (Jul 26, 2011)

Traffic on my website tripled once my books appeared on a popular bittorrent website. I also got a nice little influx of fans on my Facebook page.

I want a swimming pool. That is all.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> So, yes, it is 100% a pirate site. It is making illegal copies of digital products and trading them.


Duly noted.



dalya said:


> *Traffic on my website* tripled once my books appeared on a popular bittorrent website. I also got a nice little influx of *fans on my Facebook page*.
> 
> *I want a swimming pool*. That is all.


What are '3 Things With Little Value', Alex?


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

dalya said:


> Traffic on my website tripled once my books appeared on a popular bittorrent website. I also got a nice little influx of fans on my Facebook page.


But did you get an increase in SALES? It's great the little thieves joined your FB page so they can know when the next book will be available to steal I suppose.  

I prefer fans that don't steal from me. Fans that won't pay for books are like boyfriends that sleep around. Sure, you got a man...but is he really any good for you?


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## dalya (Jul 26, 2011)

NathanWrann said:


> Duly noted.
> 
> What are '3 Things With Little Value', Alex?


I cannot buy lunch with their love, but I still like it. Author needs to be read or she faaaaaades away.

But back to the money: I'm assuming they're telling their friends, both pirates and non-pirates. It can't hurt with the word-of-mouth. Unless they have zero friends. In which case, I hope my books bring them much-needed joy.



Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> But did you get an increase in SALES? It's great the little thieves joined your FB page so they can know when the next book will be available to steal I suppose.


If they're on my FB page, they can wait 30 days until my next freebie day and get it in mobi format.

My sales are sorta increasing over time, though it's a roller coaster of fun with the promo days.

My point about the swimming pool is this: I say, let's not worry about the relative morality of pirating and who has what copy and has a theft happened and is it okay, etc., and focus on getting our swimming pool. Being an unknown self-pubber, is having my books on a filesharing site going to help me get my swimming pool? My guess is yes. Therefore, I do not consume my number one resource (time) worrying about it, looking for it, or threatening legal action.

ETA: If I ruled the world. I suggested to some pro-pirate friends that it would be funny if anyone under 18 could fileshare whatever they wanted, since they likely wouldn't have credit cards. Then, they turn 19 and have to pay. My friends thought this was hilarious, and not a bad idea. I'm keeping it in mind for if/when I rule the world.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

dalya said:


> My point about the swimming pool is this: I say, let's not worry about the relative morality of pirating and who has what copy and has a theft happened and is it okay, etc., and focus on getting our swimming pool. Being an unknown self-pubber, is having my books on a filesharing site going to help me get my swimming pool? My guess is yes. Therefore, I do not consume my number one resource (time) worrying about it, looking for it, or threatening legal action.


My books have been pirated since I started publishing a decade ago.

I do not have a swimming pool.

I don't know any author that went from "unknown" to bestseller on the weight of pirate support.

And I don't worry about threatening legal action, either. Because I don't consider them lost sales because pirates were never going to buy the book anyway. They are just entitled little pissants who want other people's work without having to pay for it. The only time I DO take action is if I find my book being sold illegally, because now someone is taking legitimate paying customers who don't realize they are buying a pirated copy away from me.


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## Krista D. Ball (Mar 8, 2011)

If it's the site I'm thinking about, those "credits" aren't all real money. Many were earned by providing pirated books to others. 

Also, an author replied to one of those threads and, yeah. It just became an entitlement bash. Oh wow, I am so poor that I can't afford books because I got laid off, but I really, really love reading on my Kindle.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

Krista D. Ball said:


> Oh wow, I am so poor that I can't afford books because I got laid off, but I really, really love reading on my Kindle.


To which the proper reply would be "WOW! I'd love to be able to read on a Kindle, but unfortunately because nobody buys legal copies of my book I can't afford one."


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## dalya (Jul 26, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> My books have been pirated since I started publishing a decade ago.
> 
> I do not have a swimming pool.


You have poked the hole in my faulty logic. 

I have a friend with a swimming pool and she has not even finished her first novel. So, there's that too.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Konrath says—let’s not dance around the name of the originator of the idea—that piracy and sales go hand in hand because piracy of his books has increased along with sales. I say he’s mixing causation and correlation—like Walmart tracking its success by the amount of shoplifting at its stores: 

"How are we doing this month, Bill?"
"Well, we opened two new stores."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever, but has shoplifting increased?"

The other myth says “they wouldn’t buy it anyway.” Oh well, then. If the guy won’t buy it, you might as well give it to him for nothing. That makes sense. 

I understand if people can’t justify the time it takes to track down pirate sites. But the ho-hum attitude makes you wonder why you should be the only sap who pays for their books.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

WHDean said:


> Konrath says-let's not dance around the name of the originator of the idea-that piracy and sales go hand in hand because piracy of his books has increased along with sales. I say he's mixing causation and correlation-like Walmart tracking its success by the amount of shoplifting at its stores:
> 
> "How are we doing this month, Bill?"
> "Well, we opened two new stores."
> ...


Konrath was hardly the originator of the idea.

Long before Konrath mentioned the matter there was this:


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## Louis Shalako (Apr 13, 2011)

I've had good luck getting unauthorized sites to take my book down upon e-mail request. What happens is that I give them away for free, and they think it's free forever. But at some point I set a price, and then they are competing against me with my own book.

Try to appeal to their sense of fair play. There's a site that isn't so good, it may not be the one under discussion. In some ways it's flattering. Someone stole my book. It must have value. Some believe pirating helps with name recognition and author awareness. I think it's the price of doing business, no better and no worse than shoplifting or pilfering by employees.

They wouldn't steal it if it wasn't worth having...right?


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Louis Shalako said:


> ...They wouldn't steal it if it wasn't worth having...right?


Some people would steal a hangnail if they got the chance just because they could. Some people will pirate because they place no value in your book, not the other way around. Some people will steal your book and give it away out of spite. Sales and pirating likely increase simultaneously because as your popularity grows, you become a more attractive pirating target, not the other way around. People like to pretend that "pirates would never buy my books anyway" because then they have an excuse to not get off their virtual asses and do something. There is nothing, NOTHING, good about pirating one's content, and ebook popularity grows, so will piracy if authors continue to cultivate a "que sera, sera" attitude about it. And the more it grows, the more it will bite all of us in the ass.

When you see a hole in a dam, you plug it right now, because if you don't, it will continue to grow until it becomes a flood. Then it's too late to stop it.


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## AndreSanThomas (Jan 31, 2012)

I have a few basic philosophies in my life.  One of them is that I don't help other people abdicate their responsibilities.  They may do it anyway, but I'm not going to help.  

Translating that to this scenario, I wouldn't help them steal my book or anyone else's.  They may steal it anyway, I may not be able to plug all the holes in the dike, but I'm not going to actively participate in it.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

There are varying opinions on whether or not piracy helps sales. Obviously, the redoubtable Mr. Gaiman thinks they do. 

The FACT is that neither side can definitively prove it one way or the other. I tend towards the "you don't lose sales and may gain" position but I'll admit I can't prove the case. All sides simply base their positions on opinion because there simply is no proof one way or the other except anecdotes such as those Mr. Gaiman tells in that video.  

However, calling people names or accusing them of being too lazy to "get off their virtual *sses and do something" might not be the best way to go at the argument.

And would you really walk up to Neil Gaiman and say that to his face, I wonder.


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## dalya (Jul 26, 2011)

As soon as I'm out of Select, I'll probably load up some of my books myself, if I can figure out how. DERR. Ha ha, of course I know how.

I'm also going to do some POD books soon, so I can sell some bits of paper too.

I am going to pick out a swimming pool now! I think kidney shaped, and just a little dunk pool, not laps or anything.

@Nathan - I think it's cool you'd offer a copy, though the person might suspect a trap. You could also mention the date of an upcoming promo day, if you have one.


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## Cheryl M. (Jan 11, 2011)

JRTomlin said:


> Konrath was hardly the originator of the idea.
> 
> Long before Konrath mentioned the matter there was this:


  Swoon. 

Neil Gaiman makes me...happy. I could be in the worst mood ever and I'd only need see a book, watch "The Doctor's Wife" or hear his voice.

I hold no shame for being a hopeless fangirl.  Sandman rocked.


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## SBJones (Jun 13, 2011)

Digital piracy is a form of word of mouth.  Word of mouth sells books.  Have you ever been lent or read a book you did not pay for, like it, and go on to purchase other works by the same author?


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

dalya said:


> @Nathan - I think it's cool you'd offer a copy, though the person might suspect a trap. You could also mention the date of an upcoming promo day, if you have one.


I PMd them on that forum and told them to PM me back and if they agreed to my terms (an honest review of book 1 and 2) i would send them a smashwords coupon code. If they don't agree to those terms then best of luck to 'em. (and if they agree to the terms and don't leave reviews then they will have to live with the weight of 1,000,000 pounds of guilt-monster bearing down on their back until their face is flush against the floor and they can hear the heart beating beneath it.)


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

I'm getting ready to order one of the 87th Precinct books.

Does this mean I have already purchased and read the first book in the series?

Nope.

If someone steals my car, would I feel flattered that the thief likes my taste?

Nope.

If the thief says he would like to steal my car, but he doesn't have enough gas money, would I chip in gas money?

Nope.

Why should I feel sorry for a thief who wants to steal bread from my table.


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## Claire Ryan (Jun 7, 2012)

I'm getting tired of saying this, but time for an unpopular fact...

*It. Is. Not. Theft.*

It is infringement. The two are not one and the same. And you can keep calling it theft and stealing, but you are plain being inaccurate. You can say that they're taking money away from you, every time, and you'd be wrong.

One downloaded copy does not equal one lost sale. If the RIAA and MPAA (the guys who've thrown millions at this already) can't prove it, then your gut instinct counts for nothing.

Please, please just step back from this and look at it from a business perspective: you will never, ever prevent piracy. You will never, ever convince someone to buy your books by guilting them into it. Believe me, the movie and recorded music industries have been trying for years and they have failed.

The only sensible course of action is to swallow your outrage and ignore it, because anything else may provoke a negative reaction, or try to make use of it for marketing and audience research. But every time you rage against it, call it stealing, and condemn the filthy pirates where your readers can see, you're sending out a message that you hate them - because I can guarantee that every last one of them has downloaded something at some point and justified it to themselves. The number of truly innocent people are so low as to be irrelevant.

Go ahead and think whatever you like about it in private, but don't let your personal feelings cloud your judgement here, and be realistic about what it truly is and what effect it has. And the truth is this: no one seems to know for sure whether it affects sales or not. There are too many variables to account for, and not enough data as far as I'm aware. I don't know of any study that conclusively proves that piracy has a significant negative effect on sales, though I'd love to read one if anyone's got any links, and this is what should really count above all else in business.

(For the record, I am completely unconcerned with piracy of my own work. Don't know if it happens, don't care.)

*prepares the fire shield for incoming flames*


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## AndreSanThomas (Jan 31, 2012)

Claire Ryan said:


> I'm getting tired of saying this, but time for an unpopular fact...
> 
> *It. Is. Not. Theft.*
> 
> ...


I don't necessarily disagree that it isn't worth getting too worked up over in most cases, however, the "guys who've thrown millions at this already" are starting to make headway.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/John-Wiley-Sons-Wins-Lawsuit-Against-User-Who-Shared-WordPress-for-Dummies-278805.shtml

One of the interesting things about this is that they were fined for infringement and for counterfeiting. So, split all the hairs you want over the words, it's still variations on the same theme.


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## Claire Ryan (Jun 7, 2012)

AndreSanThomas said:


> I don't necessarily disagree that it isn't worth getting too worked up over in most cases, however, the "guys who've thrown millions at this already" are starting to make headway.
> 
> http://news.softpedia.com/news/John-Wiley-Sons-Wins-Lawsuit-Against-User-Who-Shared-WordPress-for-Dummies-278805.shtml
> 
> One of the interesting things about this is that they were fined for infringement and for counterfeiting. So, split all the hairs you want over the words, it's still variations on the same theme.


I'm not splitting hairs here. Theft has an actual meaning in law, and so does infringement. The two are not one and the same, and they are not variations on the same theme. They are handled differently, and rightly so.

And come on, you really call this headway? How about all those other lawsuits that they won... that had no effect on rates of piracy? How about those laws in Sweden and the UK, for example, blocking the Pirate Bay - that had no effect and even increased traffic to the site? Oh, I'm sure that that one person has been suitably chastised and will never pirate again... and the Internet at large sees nothing but a big publisher victimising a few little guys. So let's have a big cheer for Wiley - they just spent the lawyers' fees less $7000 to buy a shedload of bad PR.

The RIAA and MPAA have thrown millions into various prosecutions and managed to do nothing but make a lot of lawyers very rich. The rates of piracy haven't even been dented by the conviction of a few people, and they still can't show that it has a real effect on their profits. All they've really managed to do is make millions of music and movie fans despise them on a very deep and personal level, to the point where those same fans feel even more justified in pirating their work.

Lawsuits against pirates are fool's game. There is no way to win completely and it's a colossal waste of resources at best. It isn't any kind of headway.


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## Jeroen Steenbeeke (Feb 3, 2012)

That said, I don't really care about piracy. I think most of my digital editions have a disclaimer along the lines of "if you pirated this book and liked it, tell all your friends to buy it".

Hell, if my book were to show up in the Pirate Bay, I'd respond with something along the lines of "OMG I made the Pirate Bay! This is the happiest day of my life!"


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## Owen (Aug 24, 2011)

Honestly, I'd be more worried if I were never pirated. The piracy issue is not black and white though. In the digital world, we have created infinite supply. We're still working out what effect that has on demand, and our only response seems to be aggressive copyright legislation. Like it or not, filesharing is the world's most succesful distribution method. It is here to stay, not because its users want everything for free, but because it beats everything else in terms of convenience, choice and speed. 

In the future the artists that survive will be the ones who can embrace it, not the ones who spend their time fighting windmills.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

SBJones said:


> Digital piracy is a form of word of mouth. Word of mouth sells books. Have you ever been lent or read a book you did not pay for, like it, and go on to purchase other works by the same author?


I already explained the HUGE difference between physical books and digital product. So go read my first post.

Something I learned a long time ago selling vacuums door-to-door, people hang out with people like them. People with good credit tend to hang out with people with good credit. People on welfare tend to hang out with people on welfare. People who only pay cash tend to hang out with people who only pay cash. Most of us do not stray far from out comfort zones unless we do so on purpose, which takes effort.

So tell me, a person who pirates books is most likely to hang out with A. a person who pirate books or B. people who hate piracy and support authors by purchasing legal copies?

Digital piracy is not a form of word or mouth. Word of mouth is only good if it spreads to people who actually buy books.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

1. Don’t knock me for not citing Gaiman; knock Konrath for not citing him.

2. The difference between theft and piracy is moot outside the law. From an ethical or moral standpoint it's all taking something without payment and then profiting from it. (And, yes, pirates profit from infringement because they trade their pirated wares for other pirated wares—people forget this.)  

3. No doubt anti-piracy measures are ham-fisted. I’ve got a few complaints about it myself. But claiming you have to steal something because it’s hard to buy or expensive is pure rationalization. If you’re going to steal, just steal. Don’t make the rest of us sick by pretending you’re righteous in doing it.

4. Gaiman and other pro-piracy writers want it both ways. They want the (hypothesized) word of mouth gained from piracy while free riding on the efforts of others to prevent it. Not only that, but they’re apparently willing to allow respect for all our property rights to be eroded because they might derive some marginal benefit from it. That makes those of us who pay look like suckers.

5. So, I’m calling their nuanced and sophisticated post-modern bluff. If you don’t want to do your part against piracy because you might benefit from it, I see no reason to pay for your books. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Neil.


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## Owen (Aug 24, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> I already explained the HUGE difference between physical books and digital product. So go read my first post.


Yes, but what people don't seem to take into account is that the difference between digital products and physical products means that the digital product has absolutely no market value because you have infinite supply. Copyright legislation as it applies to digital works, ethical or not, is a means of artificial restriction to create demand. It's a totally unsustainable situation.



> Something I learned a long time ago selling vacuums door-to-door, people hang out with people like them. People with good credit tend to hang out with people with good credit. People on welfare tend to hang out with people on welfare. People who only pay cash tend to hang out with people who only pay cash. Most of us do not stray far from out comfort zones unless we do so on purpose, which takes effort.
> 
> So tell me, a person who pirates books is most likely to hang out with A. a person who pirate books or B. people who hate piracy and support authors by purchasing legal copies?
> 
> Digital piracy is not a form of word or mouth. Word of mouth is only good if it spreads to people who actually buy books.


Sure, if you put everything into artificial little boxes, but what about someone who really enjoys horror novels, pirates some and buys others depending on the circumstances who then recommends a book to someone they meet on a horror forum who really enjoy horror novels and buys lots on a weekly basis.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

OwenAdams said:


> Yes, but what people don't seem to take into account is that the difference between digital products and physical products means that the digital product has absolutely no market value because you have infinite supply.


So the lack of a physical form means it has no market value? When you buy an ebook, you don't buy just a line of code. You are compensating the author, artist, editor, proofreader, and everyone else involved for their time. Or do you mean to say that unless a physical product is produced, people do not deserve to be paid?

Either you believe people deserve to be paid for their efforts or you don't. Do you believe I have the right to expect compensation for my efforts? Or are all creative people under a moral obligation to be starving artists so as not to impose a financial constraint against people who claim they can't afford to pay?



> Sure, if you put everything into artificial little boxes, but what about someone who really enjoys horror novels, pirates some and buys others depending on the circumstances...


What circumstances justify stealing a book? You are not entitled to something on the fact that you breathe or exist. Why should your circumstances be more valid than my circumstances? What about people whose only source of income is their writing? Do their circumstances not count? Or is it acceptable that they have to do without because you don't feel you should have to pay for their books?

Had a guy in my gaming group once who I discovered was a pirate. He downloaded RPGs from a torrent site all the time. One day he asked me if he could use this feat he found in a book he downloaded (illegally). I happened to know the publisher personally and knew the guy was going through chemo. So I asked him "How do you feel knowing you stole from a cancer patient?"

He got embarrassed. Said he didn't know. I said, well, that's the point, isn't it? You don't know. Pro-piracy people talk all the time about "circumstances" and "what about poor people?" Well guess what? I AM TALKING ABOUT POOR PEOPLE. I'm talking about my fellow publisher who was fighting cancer and wondering how he was going to afford to pay for his treatment. I'm talking about my friend who self-publishes in order to supplement her Social Security. I'm talking about my friend who publishes erotica under a pseudonym so she can afford to pay for her college textbooks because both of her parents are laid off from their jobs.

So no, I don't really care about a pirate's circumstances. I care about the circumstances of the content creators who depend on their income. I think people have the right to profit from their own hard work. I think if you can't afford something, you have no right to take it. It isn't yours. *You didn't create it.* It isn't yours to decide who gets to have it.


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## Owen (Aug 24, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> So the lack of a physical form means it has no market value? When you buy an ebook, you don't buy just a line of code. You are compensating the author, artist, editor, proofreader, and everyone else involved for their time. Or do you mean to say that unless a physical product is produced, people do not deserve to be paid?
> 
> Either you believe people deserve to be paid for their efforts or you don't. Do you believe I have the right to expect compensation for my efforts? Or are all creative people under a moral obligation to be starving artists so as not to impose a financial constraint against people who claim they can't afford to pay?


No, you're missing my point by quite a bit. The ethics of the situation are totally irrelevant to the reality of the situation which is that digital products have infinite supply.Whether the creator deserves to be compensated or not has very little bearing on the discussion because piracy is a symptom of a massive societal shift in how we distribute, and how we value, the media we consume. Furthermore, they can be distributed instantly and efficiently for almost no cost. I'm astonished how many people don't get just how monumentally huge this is to the way content is shared, and how it will be shared in the future. The piracy issue is the tip of a very large iceberg, shouting "piracy is theft" and making grand statements about what a creator deserves and what is ethical is futile because in the next 10-15 years the whole debate will seem ridiculous. It will be settled in the only way it can be. Railways that offered exceptional service didn't deserve to go out of business when the car came along, but a lot of them did. When you're dealing with a new technology that makes such fundamental changes to the way we live, legislating ethics against that behaviour is futile.



> What circumstances justify stealing a book? You are not entitled to something on the fact that you breathe or exist. Why should your circumstances be more valid than my circumstances? What about people whose only source of income is their writing? Do their circumstances not count? Or is it acceptable that they have to do without because you don't feel you should have to pay for their books?


You're putting words into my mouth, and I think you misunderstand what I mean about circumstances. I did not mean extenuating circumstances, rather that they have criteria for pirating/buying. I never said their were actions that justified piracy, I said that we're dealing with a shift in societal behaviour that is inevitable and that legislating against it is unsustainable. I am not entitled to a free book just because I can not afford to pay for it, I agree completely. But a creator is not entitled government support in sustaining an outdated business model either.



> Had a guy in my gaming group once who I discovered was a pirate. He downloaded RPGs from a torrent site all the time. One day he asked me if he could use this feat he found in a book he downloaded (illegally). I happened to know the publisher personally and knew the guy was going through chemo. So I asked him "How do you feel knowing you stole from a cancer patient?"
> 
> He got embarrassed. Said he didn't know. I said, well, that's the point, isn't it? You don't know. Pro-piracy people talk all the time about "circumstances" and "what about poor people?" Well guess what? I AM TALKING ABOUT POOR PEOPLE. I'm talking about my fellow publisher who was fighting cancer and wondering how he was going to afford to pay for his treatment. I'm talking about my friend who self-publishes in order to supplement her Social Security. I'm talking about my friend who publishes erotica under a pseudonym so she can afford to pay for her college textbooks because both of her parents are laid off from their jobs.


Sure, but it goes both ways. A person is not entitled to pirate because of their circumstances, and a person is not entitled to have a successful business because of their circumstances. And that's before we mention that the massive strawman. The "couldn't afford to buy it anyway" argument is not an ethical argument, but a response to the claim of lost sales.

Plus, sorry to repeat myself, but the ethical arguments on either side are completely and totally irrelevant to this issue. The times they are-a-changin'



> So no, I don't really care about a pirate's circumstances. I care about the circumstances of the content creators who depend on their income. I think people have the right to profit from their own hard work. I think if you can't afford something, you have no right to take it. It isn't yours. *You didn't create it.* It isn't yours to decide who gets to have it.


Sure, and I agree with you completely. It does not change the fact that copyright legislation on digital works, intended to enforce ethical behaviour, are artificial restrictions intended to create artificial demand, and that the situation is unsustainable.


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## Claire Ryan (Jun 7, 2012)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> So the lack of a physical form means it has no market value? When you buy an ebook, you don't buy just a line of code. You are compensating the author, artist, editor, proofreader, and everyone else involved for their time. Or do you mean to say that unless a physical product is produced, people do not deserve to be paid?
> 
> Either you believe people deserve to be paid for their efforts or you don't. Do you believe I have the right to expect compensation for my efforts? Or are all creative people under a moral obligation to be starving artists so as not to impose a financial constraint against people who claim they can't afford to pay?
> 
> ...


I'm gonna say this again: trying to guilt people into buying has already been proven to not work. And there's a psychological shift at play here, as Owen says - people know, consciously or not, that the cost of manufacturing more of a particular digital file is effectively zero. They don't care how much it cost to make the original nor what the circumstances were of the creator. They don't care about the value that's been sunk into making it. All the moralizing in the world isn't going to change this.

And WHDean?



WHDean said:


> 4. Gaiman and other pro-piracy writers want it both ways. They want the (hypothesized) word of mouth gained from piracy while free riding on the efforts of others to prevent it. Not only that, but they're apparently willing to allow respect for all our property rights to be eroded because they might derive some marginal benefit from it. That makes those of us who pay look like suckers.
> 
> 5. So, I'm calling their nuanced and sophisticated post-modern bluff. If you don't want to do your part against piracy because you might benefit from it, I see no reason to pay for your books. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Neil.


Dude, you have not done the research.

You're wrong on Gaiman. He wasn't free-riding on anything - he came out against SOPA and other legislation like it. Remember that? Remember how pretty much the entire Internet rose up to stop it, because it was so incredibly bad? That was one of those efforts to stop piracy.

He and other writers like him don't want to 'do their part' against piracy because it doesn't bloody well work. Not lawsuits, not outrage, nothing. It's a waste of money and breath and usually gets you nothing but hatred. And those same efforts frequently threaten things that are far more important than making money, like free speech, or the sovereign status of other countries - or they pander to big corporations while f*****g over the actual creatives.

I can't be on board with this. Feel free to not buy any of my books as a result. But you ain't calling anyone's bluff here.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

OwenAdams said:


> No, you're missing my point by quite a bit. The ethics of the situation are totally irrelevant to the reality of the situation which is that digital products have infinite supply.Whether the creator deserves to be compensated or not has very little bearing on the discussion because piracy is a symptom of a massive societal shift in how we distribute, and how we value, the media we consume. Furthermore, they can be distributed instantly and efficiently for almost no cost. I'm astonished how many people don't get just how monumentally huge this is to the way content is shared, and how it will be shared in the future. The piracy issue is the tip of a very large iceberg, shouting "piracy is theft" and making grand statements about what a creator deserves and what is ethical is futile because in the next 10-15 years the whole debate will seem ridiculous. It will be settled in the only way it can be. Railways that offered exceptional service didn't deserve to go out of business when the car came along, but a lot of them did. When you're dealing with a new technology that makes such fundamental changes to the way we live, legislating ethics against that behaviour is futile.


Like so many, you're dissimulating by conflating the fact that people can easily pirate material with the moral and ethical fact that it's theft. We're not ignorant about how digital media work; you're rationalizing theft by pretending that the ease of theft justifies it. Nor is media unique in this sense: a lot of things are easy to steal. People just don't do it because it's wrong.

I've heard all these rationalizations before. They're not new and you're not enlightening us unenlightened folks who just don't understand. Like all the others, you're inventing a justification for the theft of other people's property.


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## Casper Parks (May 1, 2011)

JRTomlin said:


>


I agree with him...​


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## Owen (Aug 24, 2011)

WHDean said:


> Like so many, you're dissimulating by conflating the fact that people can easily pirate material with the moral and ethical fact that it's theft. We're not ignorant about how digital media work; you're rationalizing theft by pretending that the ease of theft justifies it. Nor is media unique in this sense: a lot of things are easy to steal. People just don't do it because it's wrong.
> 
> I've heard all these rationalizations before. They're not new and you're not enlightening us unenlightened folks who just don't understand. Like all the others, you're inventing a justification for the theft of other people's property.


Actually, I'm explicitly not discussing ethics. My point is _not_ that piracy is ethical, but that it is only the visible tip of a huge shift to how our society approaches consumable media. At the end of the day, it is a massive sociological iceberg that _doesn't care_ whether we find it ethical or not.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

OwenAdams said:


> legislating ethics against that behaviour is futile.


Under this logic, laws against pedofilia should not exist, because the technology that allows pedofiles to share images of the abuse they perform is so advanced it is futile. And while we're at it, we just as well remove all the laws from the books that prevent ID theft, because the technology is so advanced that you can't fight it anyway. In fact, all laws against hacking should just be scrapped, since it is futile to stop it.



> I never said their were actions that justified piracy, I said that we're dealing with a shift in societal behaviour that is inevitable


Nothing is inevitable, and such is a defeatist behavior. If we presume that something is inevitable and therefore not worth fighting for, women never would have gained the right to vote and we'd still be drinking out of separate water fountains.



> Sure, but it goes both ways. A person is not entitled to pirate because of their circumstances, and a person is not entitled to have a successful business because of their circumstances.


Expecting people to pay you instead of just taking your product isn't entitlement. If my business fails because nobody wants my product, that's my fault. If my business fails because everyone wants my product but choses to steal it instead of pay for it, then yes, that IS the role of government. I would expect the government to step in just as much as I would expect the police to show up if my store was robbed.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

Claire Ryan said:


> I'm gonna say this again: trying to guilt people into buying has already been proven to not work.


I know, because pirates have no shame. This is why we need laws.

And I'm not trying to guilt people into buying. I'm saying that if you want a product, pay for it. Don't steal it. I'm not sure why this is such a hard concept. If you don't want my books, don't buy them. If you do want my books, pay for them. This is very, very simple.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Claire Ryan said:


> And WHDean?
> 
> Dude, you have not done the research.
> 
> ...


1. The "it doesn't work" line is nonsense. Laws against murder don't work either: they've been around since time immemorial and people still do it. In fact, the set of all people who have wanted to do it likely corresponds to the set of all people who have, so the effect of the law at preventing any individual murder has been zero. So why not do away with murder laws? For the same reason we enforce every other law: it represents and reinforces the cultural and social rejection of the act, which in turns goes into the formation of normal, non-murdering people. It's a virtuous cycle, in other words, where you either support and encourage something because it is right, or you permit it because it's not wrong. There's no throwing your hands up and saying, "Oh, nothing can be done!" Your choices are endorsement or rejection. There's no in-between position.

2. Gaiman and the others are free riding. You said it yourself: he and others want to avoid the bad press of cracking down on piracy because it might hurt paying sales. In other words, they don't want pirates of other people's stuff to avoid buying their books because of what they've said about piracy.

ETA: By the way, I said from the get-go that anti-piracy legislation is a long way from the bees' knees, but that it's irrelevant to the rightness or wrongness of piracy.

And the fact that pirates will do it anyway doesn't mean that I have to give them to comfort of their consciences in doing it by pretending that's okay because everyone else does it.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

OwenAdams said:


> Actually, I'm explicitly not discussing ethics. My point is _not_ that piracy is ethical, but that it is only the visible tip of a huge shift to how our society approaches consumable media. At the end of the day, it is a massive sociological iceberg that _doesn't care_ whether we find it ethical or not.


Yes, you are talking about ethics. You're claiming that people's ethics are changing. They now see theft as acceptable. You're dressing it up in palaver about sociological change, but that's what you're saying. And you're using the alleged social change in ethics as a justification for piracy. That's the part I'm objecting to: you're argument is no more sofisticated than "everyone's doing it, so it's okay."


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## Owen (Aug 24, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Under this logic, laws against pedofilia should not exist, because the technology that allows pedofiles to share images of the abuse they perform is so advanced it is futile. And while we're at it, we just as well remove all the laws from the books that prevent ID theft, because the technology is so advanced that you can't fight it anyway. In fact, all laws against hacking should just be scrapped, since it is futile to stop it.


That's a really bad analogy. As far as pedofilia goes, (along with murder, rape and all similar crimes you could have mention) we're dealing with crimes committed by a fraction of the population that have hugely traumatic physical and psychological consequences that aren't even comparable to copyright infringement. I have nothing else to say to that, it's a completely ludicrous point to make. Secondly, the other crimes you're talking about have absolutely no relevance to the point I made, they are not the result of societal shifts or technological obsolescence. Unpreventable is not the same as inevitable, hacking and ID theft are unpreventable crimes committed by a small percentage of serious criminals. Piracy is a widespread behavioural change, you're actually going to illustrate this perfectly in my next point.



> Nothing is inevitable, and such is a defeatist behavior. If we presume that something is inevitable and therefore not worth fighting for, women never would have gained the right to vote and we'd still be drinking out of separate water fountains.


It's not a defeatist attitude to say it is inevitable, it is a prediction based on just about EVERY major shift in the way a society thinks. Like, for example, women's rights and desegregation. We could have been as defeatist as we liked, maybe women's lib or racial equality would take a little longer, but they were also inevitable. And guess what? The iceberg of social equality didn't care if people thought it was ethical or not. The growth in education and the passage of time rendered it inevitable in that same way that the creation of digital media and the widespread acceptance of the internet renders the filesharing distribution method inevitable. Surges in technology, education, exploration or even adversity prompt societal shifts that are unavoidable and irreversible. That's not defeatist, it's the way society works.



> Expecting people to pay you instead of just taking your product isn't entitlement. If my business fails because nobody wants my product, that's my fault. If my business fails because everyone wants my product but choses to steal it instead of pay for it, then yes, that IS the role of government. I would expect the government to step in just as much as I would expect the police to show up if my store was robbed.


If the government were capable of preventing all filesharing, would these hypothetical businesses become more succesful? Maybe for a little while, but eventually people will move with the technology and the businesses that don't meet the customer's expectations will collapse. Hence, even if the laws stay on the books, the principle is unsustainable.


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## Claire Ryan (Jun 7, 2012)

WHDean said:


> 1. The "it doesn't work" line is nonsense. Laws against murder don't work either: they've been around since time immemorial and people still do it. In fact, the set of all people who have wanted to do it likely corresponds to the set of all people who have, so the effect of the law at preventing any individual murder has been zero. So why not do away with murder laws? For the same reason we enforce every other law: it represents and reinforces the cultural and social rejection of the act, which in turns goes into the formation of people. It's a virtuous cycle, in other words, where you either support and encourage something because it is right, or you permit it because it's not wrong. There's no throwing your hands up and saying, "Oh, nothing can be done!" Your choices are endorsement or rejection. There's no in-between position.
> 
> 2. Gaiman and the others are free riding. You said it yourself: he and others want to avoid the bad press of cracking down on piracy because it might hurt paying sales. In other words, they don't want pirates of other people's stuff to avoid buying their books because of what they've said about piracy.


False equivalence much? Murder isn't piracy. The effects of murder are actually know; the effects of piracy are not.

Call it nonsense if you like but that does not change facts. And the facts are this: any effort I know of to put a dent in piracy has failed, and usually failed miserably. Frequently, those same efforts threaten things like free speech or are a terrible deal for creators.

You keep stating this thing, about them free-riding... they could just say nothing if they wanted to avoid bad press. They're not. They're coming out against anti-piracy measures because of what I just said - they frequently threaten things like free speech, or are a terrible deal for creators.

I don't care if you feel that that's a bad thing, but the facts as they stand do not change just because you want them to. If you've got some other, better idea for stopping piracy that hasn't yet been tried by companies with millions to throw at the problem, then let's hear it. But right now, two things are apparent: the effect of piracy on sales is unknown, and the effect of lawsuits, bad legislation, DRM, and moral outrage are known (to whit, bad PR, wasting money, no actual increase in sales). From a purely business perspective, 'doing your part against piracy' is a terrible choice, all ethical considerations aside.

If making good business decisions makes me pro-piracy, then let me just get my parrot and eyepatch.



Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> I know, because pirates have no shame. This is why we need laws.
> 
> And I'm not trying to guilt people into buying. I'm saying that if you want a product, pay for it. Don't steal it. I'm not sure why this is such a hard concept. If you don't want my books, don't buy them. If you do want my books, pay for them. This is very, very simple.


Look, this fundamentally misunderstands the psychological aspect of it. Pirates do have shame - they've just rationalized that making a copy of this one file is harmless, same as if they were making a copy of a Word document they wrote themselves.

You can tell them not to because it's wrong, but again, companies with a much bigger budget for communicating that particular message have already spent years wasting their breath on it. So we know it plain doesn't work. You can't change their behaviour with moral outrage, apparently. Although I'd like to know if there is a particular psychological play that could work, it hasn't been found yet or the RIAA and MPAA would be all over it.


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## Owen (Aug 24, 2011)

WHDean said:


> Yes, you are talking about ethics. You're claiming that people's ethics are changing. They now see theft as acceptable. You're dressing it up in palaver about sociological change, but that's what you're saying. And you're using the alleged social change in ethics as a justification for piracy. That's the part I'm objecting to: you're argument is no more sofisticated than "everyone's doing it, so it's okay."


No, you're not quite getting what I mean by "tip of the iceberg" and "piracy is a symptom of societal shift."

(I can't quite believe I'm having to say this again, but...)

I'm explicitly *not* talking about ethics, I'm *not* even talking about ethics changing. I'm *not* saying everyone is doing it, so it's OK.

I'm saying there is something new coming that we can't see yet, because it has to, because the consumer has changed so much in the last twenty years. Whatever shape it takes, creators and customers will find an arrangement that suits them as they always have. Piracy, ethical or not, is the sign of the wind changing.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

WHDean said:


> Yes, you are talking about ethics. You're claiming that people's ethics are changing. *They now see theft as acceptable*. You're dressing it up in palaver about sociological change, but that's what you're saying...


Copying isn't theft, it's infringement.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Claire Ryan said:


> False equivalence much? Murder isn't piracy. The effects of murder are actually know; the effects of piracy are not.
> 
> Call it nonsense if you like but that does not change facts. And the facts are this: any effort I know of to put a dent in piracy has failed, and usually failed miserably. Frequently, those same efforts threaten things like free speech or are a terrible deal for creators.
> 
> ...


It's not a false analogy because it isn't an analogy. No "equivalence" is being made between murder and piracy. The murder example is offered against the claim that the futility a law is a justification for abandoning it. That makes your response a red herring-in case you needed the technical term.

You're holding perfection as a criterion of success. But perfect success is a false standard for laws. Piracy will never be eliminated anymore than any other crime will be. It only has to be attenuated and made socially unacceptable.

So again, if your not against it, you're for it because everything depends on the social acceptance of piracy. You said yourself in your response to Julie that pirates rationalized it to themselves. They can only do that because people allow them their rationalizations. That's the only reason the facts "stand as they are."


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## Kent Kelly (Feb 12, 2011)

If digital files have zero value, why do people want them?  

Demand, regardless of infinite supply, implies value.  (Insert snark re: paper money off of the gold standard here.)


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

Interesting discussion, but why do people keep calling piracy theft? It is infringement (Dowling v. United States). Settled law, folks. Get it right.



Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Something I learned a long time ago selling vacuums door-to-door, people hang out with people like them. People with good credit tend to hang out with people with good credit. People on welfare tend to hang out with people on welfare. People who only pay cash tend to hang out with people who only pay cash. Most of us do not stray far from out comfort zones unless we do so on purpose, which takes effort.
> 
> So tell me, a person who pirates books is most likely to hang out with A. a person who pirate books or B. people who hate piracy and support authors by purchasing legal copies?
> 
> Digital piracy is not a form of word or mouth. Word of mouth is only good if it spreads to people who actually buy books.


Since unbiased statistics on this are next to nonexistent, I can only share with you my experience.

I've received a total of 13 emails now from individuals admitting that they pirated my works. 11 of these individuals emailed me asking if there was a way they could now compensate me.

I always respond to these Emails the same way. I say that I understand that times are hard, that it 'is never too late to buy a legal copy,' that indies 'sink or swim on word-of-mouth,' and that they could help the most by spreading the word about my titles.

Here one pirated version of my first book: http://www.demonoid.me/files/details/2774229/

Examine Edit #2 in the 'details' section.

You can form your own conclusions, but I'm not planning on filing any take-down notices.

B.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

OwenAdams said:


> No, you're not quite getting what I mean by "tip of the iceberg" and "piracy is a symptom of societal shift."
> 
> (I can't quite believe I'm having to say this again, but...)
> 
> ...


Look, I'm not being that hard on you because I'm assuming your being sucked in by this nonsense is unintentional. But your words say, "It's okay because everyone is doing it." Wrapping it up in sociological change and "new ways" and the rest is boilerplate. People don't see piracy as theft because they can get away with it.


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## Cheryl M. (Jan 11, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Under this logic, laws against pedofilia should not exist, because the technology that allows pedofiles to share images of the abuse they perform is so advanced it is futile. And while we're at it, we just as well remove all the laws from the books that prevent ID theft, because the technology is so advanced that you can't fight it anyway. In fact, all laws against hacking should just be scrapped, since it is futile to stop it.
> Nothing is inevitable, and such is a defeatist behavior. If we presume that something is inevitable and therefore not worth fighting for, women never would have gained the right to vote and we'd still be drinking out of separate water fountains.


No, actually the point is to try enforcing the laws we have instead of trying to make new ones that won't work any better than the ones we already have. It's like the war against drugs. More laws aren't going to make drugs go away. Enforcing laws efficiently will. But we don't because it...wait for it...costs too much money. So they're token efforts to make those "against" piracy feel better. It doesn't actually do anything.

If they want to do anything about piracy, they should start actually prosecuting the pirates downloading the copies instead of trying to make more laws we don't need and in the end, just making themselves look bad for attacking a 14 year old kid for downloading Metallica CDs. Start writing tickets and applying fines. People will stop pirating when there are real consequences. It's not hard to find out who's doing it. The IP addresses are all readily available. Instead they want to go after the hackers making the sites. Never works that way. Mobsters go to jail for tax evasion, not murder. Same concept.

It's not an either or proposition. Just because we know that what's happening right now is futile, it doesn't mean anyone thinks it's okay, and that's the line that keeps getting drawn. It has nothing to do with whether or not anyone agrees and everything to do with what we're doing now doesn't work.

By the same logic you use, it would mean that we should just make drugs legal because we can't stop them from making it. Well no, that's not what anyone is saying. But we all know that the war on drugs clearly isn't working. Doing the same stupid crap over and over again is the definition of crazy. Making practical laws that are effective isn't nearly as hard as trying to take down the entire drug industry. Start where the laws are effective and make punishments fit the crime. You don't stop drug trafficking by going after the people trafficking them. You stop it by making the consequences of getting caught not worth the risk while AT THE SAME TIME following through on the effort to catch people buying it. If we know the risk of getting caught is low, the consequences are effectively inconsequential. If the risk of getting caught is high, then less people will be willing to even get started in the first place. But we don't have the funds to apply that kind of follow through because instead of putting more cops on the street, we spend billions of dollars on fruitlessly going after a couple of kingpins that eventually go to jail for tax evasion, if they go to jail at all.

There are two separate arguments here. You're arguing that those that believe antipiracy laws are futile also believe that laws in general are futile. It's not a valid argument and you know that; at this point there's no logic, only passion fueling, the argument.

What others are saying is that what we're doing now isn't working and to continue to pretend like it is is just as futile as the act itself. It's not inappropriate to say it's not working. Find a better way. Finding a better way isn't that hard. What's hard is pleasing the masses that want overreaching results immediately with steep consequences. To justify steep consequences you have to go for those enabling the crime. To go for those enabling the crime requires money. That leaves little money to actually enforce what we have. Sending a person a ticket in the mail for 3x the cost of what they downloaded is not that hard or expensive comparatively. It's also more likely to deter piracy but without consequences, there is no deterrent. Why should anyone stop pirating if they don't think they're going to get caught? You want people to police themselves? In the history of humanity that's never worked.



> Expecting people to pay you instead of just taking your product isn't entitlement. If my business fails because nobody wants my product, that's my fault. If my business fails because everyone wants my product but choses to steal it instead of pay for it, then yes, that IS the role of government. I would expect the government to step in just as much as I would expect the police to show up if my store was robbed.


But no one disagrees with this. That's the fundamental problem here. No one wants to acknowledge that just because we say piracy is inevitable that it doesn't mean think it's okay. That's the biggest problem these types of things have. It's all made to be black and white when it isn't. It's no different than the argument between self-publishing and trade publishing. No one wants to have a reasonable conversation. Instead everyone wants to call each other names and stick words in other people's mouths and tell each other what the other person is "really saying" when all it does is fuel more angst.

People should spend more time LISTENING and less time TELLING OTHERS WHY THEY'RE WRONG. They'll usually find they aren't that far off from each other. Discussion and discourse isn't nearly as easy as arguing but it's a lot more effective.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

WHDean said:


> 1. Don't knock me for not citing Gaiman; knock Konrath for not citing him.
> 
> 2. The difference between theft and piracy is moot outside the law. From an ethical or moral standpoint it's all taking something without payment and then profiting from it. (And, yes, pirates profit from infringement because they trade their pirated wares for other pirated wares-people forget this.)
> 
> ...


Konrath had no reason to "cite" Gaiman. He was giving his opinion not saying who shared it. He didn't say it was an original opinion. That was you. Sorry that you haven't followed the history of the issue. That video has posted here probably a hundred times. It's no news. Neither is Eric Flint's (which you can read over at Baen's Library in Snippets) which considerably pre-dated Gaiman's.

And I am just so sure they are horribly upset at your "calling their bluff".

Now I tell you what... find some EVIDENCE that piracy hurts sales. Present it here.


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## Owen (Aug 24, 2011)

WHDean said:


> Look, I'm not being that hard on you because I'm assuming your being sucked in by this nonsense is unintentional. But your words say, "It's okay because everyone is doing it." Wrapping it up in sociological change and "new ways" and the rest is boilerplate. People don't see piracy as theft because they can get away with it.


You're not being hard on me at all, you're totally missing my point because you think I'm coming from a position that I'm not. My position on the ethics of piracy is this: *The ethics of piracy are irrelevant, because piracy is a teeny tiny part of a bigger change that will bring bigger, more important issues. 
*

You think I'm arguing that piracy is ok, I'm not. Look, let's say for the sake of argument that piracy is wrong and that there is no debate from anyone and everybody has stopped downloading things without the permission of the copyright holder.

Things will get better for copyright holders for a little while, but it won't be long until the problems attributed to piracy return because (and again) piracy is a symptom of societal change. Before you try and put a spin on what I'm saying again, this does not mean this piracy is ok (we settled that, remember,) what it means is that the appeal of piracy, and the spread of piracy is due to more than the draw of free stuff. People will always be happy to buy stuff, but they have changed how they want to buy stuff and we, as content creators, will have to adapt to that. The societal change that is coming down not mean widespread unauthorised copyright infringement, it means a complete change to how we legally distribute content.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> It will be settled in the only way it can be. Railways that offered exceptional service didn't deserve to go out of business when the car came along, but a lot of them did.


Henry Ford built cars because he got paid for them.



> I'm gonna say this again: trying to guilt people into buying has already been proven to not work. And there's a psychological shift at play here, as Owen says - people know, consciously or not, that the cost of manufacturing more of a particular digital file is effectively zero. They don't care how much it cost to make the original nor what the circumstances were of the creator. They don't care about the value that's been sunk into making it. All the moralizing in the world isn't going to change this.


I'd challenge the notion that it doesn't work. That would apply if one were trying to reverse behavior. But that idea is a smokescreen. Nobody is really trying to reverse the behavior of pirates. They are trying to prevent the notion that books can be freely exchanged from becoming a social norm. The pirates aren't important. The people who are buying books are the targets. The objective is to keep them from emailing their favorite books to their sorority email list. In that type of campaign, moral suasion has proven effective.

I'm content to let the pirates trade books and talk about how new and different the world and their generation is. That Great Hoax has been perpetrated on each and every new generation since the Rosetta Stone initially chronicled it.

This will all pass away when pirates and their economic theories become obsolete. We won't be downloading books files in the future. We will be using the cloud with subscriptions. Pirating will be far too labor intensive and old school for most folks to bother. The next generation that falls for the Great Hoax will look back on them with mild amusement.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

I mentioned Eric Flint so I copied a bit of his comments over at Baen's Free Library (originally post back in 2000) which I happen to agree with in full:



> I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:
> 
> 1. Online piracy - while it is definitely illegal and immoral - is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.
> 
> ...


Linkie for anyone who wants to read the rest of Mr. Flint's rather reasoned remarks: http://www.baen.com/library/intro.asp

If anyone can be "cited" as the originator of this attitude Eric Flint probably gets that honor. He has long been a strong opponent of DRM and a strong PROponent of giving away novels. Baen's has gotten a lot of sales from it.

Edit: He makes the very intelligent observation that ANY free copies engender sales. There isn't something magical that makes the ones we give away engender sales but the ones that are pirated not. They all do. So whether I love pirates are not, and I don't, that has to be a factor.

The other factor that no one has mentioned is that I refuse to harm or inconvenience people who have PAID for my work just to get at pirates. I refuse to endorse the industry going after pirates the way RIAA has and engendering TERRIBLE PR. Every solution people mention is much worse than the piracy which is not a big deal.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

NathanWrann said:


> Copying isn't theft, it's infringement.


Involuntary manslaughter isn't the same thing as murder, but someone still ends up dead.


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## Cheryl M. (Jan 11, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Involuntary manslaughter isn't the same thing as murder, but someone still ends up dead.


Yes and the laws and punishment reflect the difference.


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## Owen (Aug 24, 2011)

Well it's been fun repeating myself, guys, but my girlfriend is angry with me now because she's at home sick and I've been indulging in this debate instead of looking after her so I'm off to dote for a bit. 

No hard feelings?


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

JRTomlin said:


> Konrath had no reason to "cite" Gaiman. He was giving his opinion not saying who shared it. He didn't say it was an original opinion. That was you. Sorry that you haven't followed the history of the issue. That video has posted here probably a hundred times. It's no news. Neither is Eric Flint's (which you can read over at Baen's Library in Snippets) which considerably pre-dated Gaiman's.
> 
> And I am just so sure they are horribly upset at your "calling their bluff".
> 
> Now I tell you what... find some EVIDENCE that piracy hurts sales. Present it here.


You underestimate me and anyone else with a little dedication and an internet connection: I could very well make them "care" about it-a lot.

I have to wonder how long people like me are going to keep handing over cash to "creative people" who want to pander to pirates to avoid bad press. Maybe we start saying, "If you won't defend your rights, why should I bother paying?"

What's the answer to that question? Why should I pay someone who publically admits he's against do anything about piracy? Out of the goodness of my heart? Surely you know I don't have any of that so you better come up with another good reason to fork over my dough.


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## Sam J (Jul 18, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Involuntary manslaughter isn't the same thing as murder, but someone still ends up dead.


You are mixing two completely different scenarios. Murder causes physical and psychological harm - including loss of life. Copying doesn't even cause a itch on the finger. This is flawed logic. It's like trying to comparing an anthill with that of an execution camp.

Who ends up dead on infringement? Even those who will commit piracy don't die, they go to jail. (On rare occasions) Please stop using real world examples such as pedophilia, murder, rape, etc. to justify your arguments. Infringement doesn't lead to loss of life, etc. The rules reflect the same.

*Back to eating popcorn*


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

OwenAdams said:


> the spread of piracy is due to more than the draw of free stuff


Nail, meet head.

The rate of data replication has permanently surpassed the rate of data extinction. The phenomenon cannot be arrested. The players must instead adapt.

B.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Kent Kelly said:


> If digital files have zero value, why do people want them?
> 
> Demand, regardless of infinite supply, implies value. (Insert snark re: paper money off of the gold standard here.)


That's a good point. Turns out there's a very compelling reason that has to do with sociological change and how&#8230;how does it go again?


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

Cheryl M. said:


> No, actually the point is to try enforcing the laws we have instead of trying to make new ones


Unless you and Owen had a private discussion, nothing in what he said, or I replied to, implied this. Nobody is talking about creating more laws or the quality of the existing ones. In fact, this discussion isn't even about file-sharing. File-sharing has legitimate uses. We are talking about piracy: the act of making an illegal copy of a work and distributing it. File-sharing and piracy are not interchangeable words.

To clarify my position:

1. I do not support DRM or heavy-handed methods of fighting piracy. Such methods treat honest customers like criminals and do little to actually stop real pirates.
2. I agree that the movie and music industries have adopted a 'scorched earth' approach to the problem, which only turns these little punks into "Robin Hoods" fighting against Big Business instead of addressing the underlying fundamental issues of how to properly compensate creators for their efforts.
3. The ease with which something CAN be done is not justification for doing it. I often joke that if I was unethical, I would be rich because I could come up with dozens of ways to get something for nothing very easily. But the ease with which I COULD do these things has nothing to do with whether or not I should do them.
4. The creator of a work, and only the creator of the work, has the final say as to how and when a work should be distributed. We can argue whether or not such decisions are smart from a business standpoint, but we don't have the right to strip them of the ability to make those decisions. This is what piracy does. It takes away from the creator the ability to chose how a created work is shared.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

WHDean said:


> You underestimate me and anyone else with a little dedication and an internet connection: I could very well make them "care" about it-a lot.
> 
> I have to wonder how long people like me are going to keep handing over cash to "creative people" who want to pander to pirates to avoid bad press. Maybe we start saying, "If you won't defend your rights, why should I bother paying?"
> 
> What's the answer to that question? Why should I pay someone who publically admits he's against do anything about piracy? Out of the goodness of my heart? Surely you know I don't have any of that so you better come up with another good reason to fork over my dough.


I am sure Gaiman, Flint and Konrath are all trembling in their boots.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

Sam J said:


> You are mixing two completely different scenarios.


The point is that it doesn't matter what you call it, whether or not it is theft or infringment the end result is the same. We're simply arguing matters of degree. If I shoplift a pencil, it's a misdemenor. If I break into your car and steal it, its a felony. They are both still taking something that doesn't belong to me, but they are different degrees of such. So arguing whether or not piracy is theft or infringment is not really relevent to the discussion.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Unless you and Owen had a private discussion, nothing in what he said, or I replied to, implied this. Nobody is talking about creating more laws or the quality of the existing ones. In fact, this discussion isn't even about file-sharing. File-sharing has legitimate uses. We are talking about piracy: the act of making an illegal copy of a work and distributing it. File-sharing and piracy are not interchangeable words.
> 
> To clarify my position:
> 
> ...


As much as I hate to admit it, we are probably at least largely in agreement. I doubt that "piracy" (which is a word devised to try to make copyright enfringement sound worse than it is) does much harm and may engender sales, and I believe we may disagree on that. But on the practicalities that DRM and scorched-earth policies such as those of the RIAA are counter-productive, I think we are in total agreement.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> The effects of murder are actually know; the effects of piracy are not.


The economic effects of pirated goods are well known. It reduces income to the legitimate producers, reduces incentive, and leads to a reduction in supply.



> I doubt that "piracy" (which is a word devised to try to make copyright enfringement sound worse than it is) does much harm and may engender sales,


Think folks at independent coffee houses will be impressed when some guy swaggers up with a double latte and identifies himself as a copyright infringer rather than a pirate? Let's have some pirate pride here.


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## Sam J (Jul 18, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> The point is that it doesn't matter what you call it, whether or not it is theft or infringment the end result is the same. We're simply arguing matters of degree. If I shoplift a pencil, it's a misdemenor. If I break into your car and steal it, its a felony. They are both still taking something that doesn't belong to me, but they are different degrees of such. So arguing whether or not piracy is theft or infringment is not really relevent to the discussion.


It is relevant if you read the recent SOPA, PIPA and ACTA arguments between the two sides. The one side defines piracy in a similar way as you are doing. When you steal a pencil you have one pencil less. When you break into my car, i have suffered losses. The same scenario online would be hacking a server, where you actually cause losses to the other party. Copying on the other hand is replicating a product without taking it away from the owner. (With or without their permission). Piracy hence is not theft but infringement of someone's rights. (Not property)

It is important to fill water in the glass before you take a sip. So yes understanding what and how piracy works is relevant to any discussion.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> The economic effects of pirated goods are well known. It reduces income to the legitimate producers, reduces incentive, and leads to a reduction in supply.


Actually, Terrence, that is NOT known. How does copyright infringement lead to a reduction is supply? How does it reduce my income?


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

JRTomlin said:


> I am sure Gaiman, Flint and Konrath are all trembling in their boots.


Go ahead, writer, mock one of the people who actually pays. Maybe you should contact them and ask them if they'll join in mocking me too. I think it would be a great way to pander to pirates.

Actually, why don't I start pointing out in various places how writers really feel about piracy and how they laugh at people who actually pay. Amazon has a handy spot for that...


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

SOPA was an exercise in rent seeking. It was bad policy regardless of one's views on piracy. One can oppose piracy and easily oppose SOPA because it was so bad. The solution was worse than the problem it purported to address. It was good for some large interests who were content to implement a globally bad policy in order to line their own pockets. SOPA isn't a litmus test for views on piracy.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Actually, Terrence, that is NOT known. How does copyright infringement lead to a reduction is supply? How does it reduce my income?


We have lots of history that shows pirated goods drive legitimate goods out of the market. The supply of the legitimate goods falls since pirated goods are taking market share. High end watches are a good example.

I don't know anything about your income. I'll deal with issues and ideas, not individuals.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

Sam J said:


> Piracy hence is not theft but infringement of someone's rights. (Not property)


Fine, then does the government have an obligation to protect the *rights* of its citizens, and do citizens have the right to defend their rights? Or do our rights only exist insofar as it is not easy or convenient for others to infringe upon them? Does my right to privacy, for example, cease to exist now that technology is so advanced a camera from the street can peek in my bathroom window and take a photo of me in the shower? Obviously, taking a picture of me doesn't deprive me of myself, so therefore it must be acceptable? If a hacker hacks into my emails and reads them all, but doesn't damage my computer, is this acceptable simply because he has not deprived me of my emails? If someone breaks into my car and takes it for a joyride, but doesn't damage it and returns it, does that mean he did nothing wrong?


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> We have lots of history that shows pirated goods drive legitimate goods out of the market. The supply of the legitimate goods falls since pirated goods are taking market share. High end watches are a good example.
> 
> I don't know anything about your income. I'll deal with issues and ideas, not individuals.


Post your evidence please in regard to digital goods and books in particular.

Watches are in no way similar to ebooks.

How many watches do you own? How many books? See a small difference? There is a long history of borrowing and loaning books. Apples and oranges.

I asked you how digital piracy reduces supply which you claimed. I note you didn't reply.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Fine, then does the government have an obligation to protect the *rights* of its citizens, and do citizens have the right to defend their rights? Or do our rights only exist insofar as it is not easy or convenient for others to infringe upon them? Does my right to privacy, for example, cease to exist now that technology is so advanced a camera from the street can peek in my bathroom window and take a photo of me in the shower? Obviously, taking a picture of me doesn't deprive me of myself, so therefore it must be acceptable? If a hacker hacks into my emails and reads them all, but doesn't damage my computer, is this acceptable simply because he has not deprived me of my emails? If someone breaks into my car and takes it for a joyride, but doesn't damage it and returns it, does that mean he did nothing wrong?


WHAT are you proposing, Julie?


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## 56139 (Jan 21, 2012)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Henry Ford built cars because he got paid for them.
> 
> I'd challenge the notion that it doesn't work. That would apply if one were trying to reverse behavior. But that idea is a smokescreen. Nobody is really trying to reverse the behavior of pirates. They are trying to prevent the notion that books can be freely exchanged from becoming a social norm. The pirates aren't important. The people who are buying books are the targets. The objective is to keep them from emailing their favorite books to their sorority email list. In that type of campaign, moral suasion has proven effective.
> 
> ...


I just thought I'd chime in and :::Clap::: :::Clap::: :::Clap::: for this.

Pirates are just pushing DRM farther down the road at an increasing rate of speed. And I can't wait to watch them bi*ch and moan about it when it comes back to bite them in the A**.


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## Owen (Aug 24, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Unless you and Owen had a private discussion


Not to my knowledge, and yeah, that wasn't my point at all.

(yeah, yeah, I know I said I was gone but I had my iPad and I was worried I was leaving bad blood for later)


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## Cheryl M. (Jan 11, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Unless you and Owen had a private discussion, nothing in what he said, or I replied to, implied this. Nobody is talking about creating more laws or the quality of the existing ones. In fact, this discussion isn't even about file-sharing. File-sharing has legitimate uses. We are talking about piracy: the act of making an illegal copy of a work and distributing it. File-sharing and piracy are not interchangeable words.
> 
> To clarify my position:
> 
> ...


No no, I didn't mean to give the impression that anyone actually said any of it and I apologize. I wasn't very clear. I meant that it's MY point to the whole argument of piracy. At the end of it all, I don't think anyone disagrees that piracy is bad. I think that the arguments get convoluted when we discuss things that have no real bearing on the actual act of piracy. I don't believe ANYONE pirating doesn't know they are pirating. I don't believe anyone pirating doesn't feel entitled to it on some level, whether strongly or indirectly through lame excuses like I'm poor. Many libraries offer free digital lending and you can even get a library card online now - you don't even need to leave your house. Heck, our library actually advertises on their site that they have DRM free CDs too. I was really just trying to say that I think that argument always ends up focusing on the wrong things as those aren't the real issues. No one doesn't actually believe that distributing free copies of someone else's work without their permission is legal no matter whether you call it infringement or stealing. It's still illegal which means it's still unethical. Immorality is defined by the individual so that's a bit of a grey area. And that's why I don't understand the need to jerk each others' chains over the rest of the stuff.

The question of law does come up when the argument is that those that don't care are somehow advocating or even supporting it. By saying Neil Gaiman, by his act of not supporting the futile efforts of stopping piracy, somehow means he's going so far as to support or even encourage piracy is taking a huge leap of assumptions. He's fully aware it's illegal, too. He's fully aware that fighting it like we are currently is pointless. He's always quite aware of the huge leap of sales he got when it was given away for free. Those on Amazon do it all the time. Does it take away money? I dunno. Neither does he. Neither do you. Does it increase sales? I dunno. Neither does he. Neither do you. But the assumption constantly being made is that anyone that doesn't support antipiracy rhetoric must support piracy. And that's exactly where this argument has squarely landed - semantics of piracy and it's ethical and moral application to PEOPLE. I'm just trying to point out that it's not exactly the case.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

JRTomlin said:


> WHAT are you proposing, *****?


I'm not proposing anything. I'm asking a question. If we accept the point that, since the author is not deprived of his work, then piracy does no harm, does it then follow that peeping toms with high tech cameras and hackers with nothing but idle curiousity about your email aren't doing harm since they are not depriving anyone of anything? If the litmus test for whether or not we should stop fighting piracy is merely that the creator is not deprived of his or her work, then does that test also apply to other situations where the victim is not actually deprived of anything?


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

JanneCO said:


> I just thought I'd chime in and :::Clap::: :::Clap::: :::Clap::: for this.
> 
> Pirates are just pushing DRM farther down the road at an increasing rate of speed. And I can't wait to watch them bi*ch and moan about it when it comes back to bite them in the A**.


Actually, they'll just crack it. Just like they do now. And when RIAA does one of their suits where some shmoe gets fined $5million for downloading illegal copies, it isn't the schmoe who likes like a bully and gets the bad PR.

So who is it who really gets bitten in the ass?

The people who over react to a relatively minor problem and want to give draconian solutions into the hands of the government and big corporations or the guys who say, "Calm down. It's illegal but so is jaywalking."


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> I'm not proposing anything. I'm asking a question. If we accept the point that, since the author is not deprived of his work, then piracy does no harm, does it then follow that peeping toms with high tech cameras and hackers with nothing but idle curiousity about your email aren't doing harm since they are not depriving anyone of anything? If the litmus test for whether or not we should stop fighting piracy is merely that the creator is not deprived of his or her work, then does that test also apply to other situations where the victim is not actually deprived of anything?


For me the litmus test is:

IS ANYONE HARMED?

However, I don't fight piracy because anything I do to "fight it" is self-defeating. Please do not turn that into a position that it is legal or moral. I do not oppose copyright laws, but we need to bring good sense into how they are enforced.


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## Sam J (Jul 18, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> The economic effects of pirated goods are well known. It reduces income to the legitimate producers, reduces incentive, and leads to a reduction in supply.
> 
> Think folks at independent coffee houses will be impressed when some guy swaggers up with a double latte and identifies himself as a copyright infringer rather than a pirate? Let's have some pride here.


Yes in some way piracy causes losses. But without piracy many of the music artists would not have the fame they have currently. Piracy cannot be prevented for various reasons but can be controlled up to a certain limit. One way of controlling piracy is adapting.

Example: The music industry wasn't growing with sales, but was growing with an audience (with large International following). They couldn't stop piracy, so they started to adapt. In regions where laws are strict, there are services like iTunes which have helped them. In cases where they can't implement or control laws, they adapted as well. Prime example would be youtube. I get majority of my music from youtube (without pirating). Heard about VEVO? The adaption is that i get music without pirating while the music industry makes an income by showing me a 30 sec ad before every music video i watch. Did they hurt sales? Yes. Did they hurt income? No.

The Solution: Find ways to monetize those who won't or can't pay. If you have been in Internet marketing, you will realize the value of an audience. Sure they are not buying your product. But don't give up on the opportunity to build a platform. Those pirates who are in your fan page or your mailing list are not useless. Why? Because you can monetize your platforms - ads, partner up with others, provide a service. There is nothing you can do about piracy, but you can make a living out of it if you know how.

Another Example: There are many people who are amazing artists, video producers, etc. They give away their products for 'free'. Know youtube stars? Or those struggling artists at deviant art? You can see their videos or art for free. There are those writers who want to get paid for every word they put on paper. They work as freelancers, ghostwriters, journalists. And then those who want to share and build an audience - bloggers, etc. Problogger, copyblogger, etc are prime examples of how you can build an audience out of nothing and still earn a living. Authors fall in between.

When someone takes a book and distributes it to a few hundred people, you want to complain about piracy. And then you giveaway books for free, go to hundreds of sites to reach optimum distribution and celebrate giving away thousands of copies? Why? Realize the power of free. If you hate piracy so much, why are you even running KDP Promos? Don't give away your books for free. The only difference is you had the choice to give away something for free. However the people who are pirates have more choice. There are thousands of books but they choose to read yours.

I am not saying its ethical or moral to do so. But its not a big difference. Your paying customers are not going to pirate, and those who pirate might one day become your paying customers.

A quote form the same youtube video of Gaiman:

_"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," [Newell] said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."_


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Post your evidence please in regard to digital goods and books in particular.
> 
> Watches are in no way similar to ebooks.
> 
> How many watches do you own? How many books? See a small difference? There is a long history of borrowing and loaning books. Apples and oranges.


No I'm not going to post my evidence. I invite one and all to study economics. It's a wonderful field.

Watches and any good are similar in this regard. I own one watch because I have one left wrist, and the watch I have does a good job. My need for watches is a function of my ability to consume them, and a practical constraint on the number I have.

I own many books, and they too are a function of my ability to consume them. Like my wrists, my eyeball hours are limited. I can only consume a limited number of books. That constraint limits my consumption. When my eyeball hours consume one book, they cannot be used for another book. Those hours are gone. If I read a borrowed book, that consumes eyeball hours that can never be used to consume a paid book. If I didn't borrow the book, I would have used those eyeball hours on a paid book. Same with library books, pirated books, stolen books, or books I read over your shoulder.

Likewise, I have a limited capacity for food. If I eat apples for lunch, I cannot also fill myself with oranges. The apples displace the oranges because of constraints on my consumption.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

Cheryl M. said:


> He's always quite aware of the huge leap of sales he got when it was given away for free. Those on Amazon do it all the time.


This is where Gaiman and others confuse the issue. There is a fundamental difference between the creator of a work making a decision to distribute his or her work for free and a non-creator who has nothing to do with the creation or funding of the work distributing it for free. If I decide to upload my book to a torrent site and allow people to download it for free, that is my decision to make. Not yours. Not Gaiman's. Not John the Pirate's. Mine. If I decide to make my book free on Amazon, and only Amazon, that isn't blanket permission for everyone and their cousin to start distributing it for free. It's my decision.

The heart of the issue, for me, has always been that pirates are taking not my book from me, but MY RIGHT to decide what to do with my own work. I no more am going to sit by and give up on my right to decide how to distribute my work than I will give up my right to practice my choice of religion or who I will vote for in the election. Those are my decisions to make, and people telling me to 'deal with it' and 'adapt' don't understand what the root problem is.


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## William Peter Grasso (May 1, 2011)

By the time I finished the first page of posts on this thread, I was so irritated I couldn't read any more. So, if I'm regurgitating someone else's words here, forgive me.

As far as I'm concerned, pirating is an unfortunate fixture of digital life, just like head lice, fleas and ticks are to physical life. Don't waste a second rationalizing their "benefits." And don't encourage them. Please.

WPG


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## Cheryl M. (Jan 11, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> I'm not proposing anything. I'm asking a question. If we accept the point that, since the author is not deprived of his work, then piracy does no harm, does it then follow that peeping toms with high tech cameras and hackers with nothing but idle curiousity about your email aren't doing harm since they are not depriving anyone of anything? If the litmus test for whether or not we should stop fighting piracy is merely that the creator is not deprived of his or her work, then does that test also apply to other situations where the victim is not actually deprived of anything?


This is exactly my point. The assumption of whether or not piracy does any harm is truly irrelevant. We have laws that prevent theft and infringement and copyright. Harm bears no value except when we are able to actually enforce the laws we currently have that DO get modified for new technology as needed. Sometimes later than others of course but still, it happens.

By enforcing current laws, we can actually establish value, both through enforcement and fines but also, as the cost/benefit ratio of piracy weakens, we can establish how much of it actually affects sales. Less piracy should either show a significant change or not or something in between.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> 4. The creator of a work, and only the creator of the work, has the final say as to how and when a work should be distributed. We can argue whether or not such decisions are smart from a business standpoint, but we don't have the right to strip them of the ability to make those decisions. This is what piracy does. It takes away from the creator the ability to chose how a created work is shared.


On the ethics of this, I agree. Problem is, the facts on the ground have changed. The creator of a work no longer has the final say as to how and when a work is to be distributed. That era is over. The cost of eliminating data now far exceeds the cost of replicating it. Information is becoming harder and harder to suppress. Soon, it will become essentially impossible.

We are already dealing with an amorphous blob of users that is able to acquire, disassemble, encrypt, and reform unreleased content on whim. Almost all torrents already anonymize, and that is just counting the public ones. Some of the private torrents are far sneakier. Even IP addresses are masked, and the activity of the entire network remains unknown.

Sure, tracker hosts can be attacked, but even a well-publicized site like the Pirate Bay has managed to survive by hosting in grey states. Soon, new advances will make even tracker banks unneeded. Soon, we'll be looking at bittorrents with tired eyes. And what happens when individuals are able to consume content without even _possessing_ the entire file? (Will we prosecute a person for hosting a single sentence? How about a single word?)

You want the government to protect your content?

Please, they can't even protect their own.

The data game is already over. Content creators must evolve or perish.

This is going to be a fascinating century.

B.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

JRTomlin said:


> IS ANYONE HARMED?


OK, if a peeping tom uses his high tech camera to capture a photo of you in the shower, but you are not physically or financially harmed, is his action OK? If a hacker hacks into your email and just reads them, but otherwise doesn't delete anything and you aren't harmed, is that acceptable?

Read my initial posts and you'll see I don't go crazy hunting down pirates in my (non-existant) spare time. Time spent playing Whack-a-mole on such things is time not spent doing other things. I'm not saying people have to spend six hours a day sending out cease and desist orders. It is your choice whether or not to pursue it. But that is actually the point. It is YOUR CHOICE, and for some people to imply I should just deal with it or accept it or adapt is depriving me of that choice.


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## Owen (Aug 24, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> It is YOUR CHOICE, and for some people to imply I should just deal with it or accept it or adapt is depriving me of that choice.


Just incase I was included in this, my point was never that anybody should or shouldn't do anything. Simply that ten years from now this debate will be resolved so completely that whatever the new shape of things is, it will be so taken for granted that this whole conversation will seem ridiculous.

I, for one, am going to relax and enjoy seeing what happens.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

I have a great idea. Since so many writers believe piracy is good for sales—not to mention that paying nobodies like me don’t matter—I think I’ll buy all their (and your books dear piracy-lover!), then convert and host them for free on my blog. Surely, I won’t get any take down notices or calls from lawyers because I’m really doing them (and you) all a big favour by spreading the word. It’s good for me too, because now I won’t feel like a sucker for actually paying for the stuff.

Stay tuned: All Neil Gaiman’s e-books will soon be free at a blog near you! No restrictions, no limits, no liabilities!


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> OK, if a peeping tom uses his high tech camera to capture a photo of you in the shower, but you are not physically or financially harmed, is his action OK? If a hacker hacks into your email and just reads them, but otherwise doesn't delete anything and you aren't harmed, is that acceptable?
> 
> Read my initial posts and you'll see I don't go crazy hunting down pirates in my (non-existant) spare time. Time spent playing Whack-a-mole on such things is time not spent doing other things. I'm not saying people have to spend six hours a day sending out cease and desist orders. It is your choice whether or not to pursue it. But that is actually the point. It is YOUR CHOICE, and for some people to imply I should just deal with it or accept it or adapt is depriving me of that choice.


If you want to spend your time doing that, it is your choice. _Who in this thread said that it wasn't?_

I may choose to tell you I don't think it's terrifically productive way to spend your time, but it's a forum. People come here to express opinions. That's mine. My expressing it in no way infringes on your right to do whatever you please. People here ignore other people's opinions every day of the week.

And I think we might disagree on whether harm was done in the examples you cite. Yes, I do think that the basic question in devising laws should be whether the activity does harm and there are all kinds of harm, whether financial, physical or psychological. I believe the penalties should reflect the amount and type of harm done.

Edit: Digital piracy does some harm imo. It infringes on our right to control where and how our work is distributed. But the harm done is relatively minor so I simply refuse to get very excited about it. That's all.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Yes in some way piracy causes losses. But without piracy many of the music artists would not have the fame they have currently. Piracy cannot be prevented for various reasons but can be controlled up to a certain limit. One way of controlling piracy is adapting.


Perhaps those specific music artists would not have the same fame they have today. But some artists would be enjoying those fame positions. The public wouldn't be lacking musicians to pay. We had lots of famous musicians prior to digital piracy. It certainly isn't necessary for fame or music.


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## Adam Pepper (May 28, 2011)

B. Justin Shier said:


> The data game is already over. Content creators must evolve or perish.


This is really the bottom line. Intellectual property does have value. If your goal is to monetize that value, you have to work within the framework of the real world. Not a just and fair world that exists only in your head.


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## Cheryl M. (Jan 11, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> This is where Gaiman and others confuse the issue. There is a fundamental difference between the creator of a work making a decision to distribute his or her work for free and a non-creator who has nothing to do with the creation or funding of the work distributing it for free. If I decide to upload my book to a torrent site and allow people to download it for free, that is my decision to make. Not yours. Not Gaiman's. Not John the Pirate's. Mine. If I decide to make my book free on Amazon, and only Amazon, that isn't blanket permission for everyone and their cousin to start distributing it for free. It's my decision.


I completely agree. As I'm pretty sure everyone else does. I don't think by mentioning doing it on Amazon negates that. I think it's the standard people use to show that giving things away for free helps sales. It's not really meant to show that _everyone else giving your products away_ should actually be encouraged. And yes, I can see why that would seem like blanket permission by using it as an example and maybe it is a poor example because I don't believe the intent for that was there. I believe the intent is just to show that free things encourage sales. I don't think it's really meant to go any deeper than that in terms of what it means by using it as an example. It's a simple marketing example of free=>sales. Not an ethical argument of when it's okay and when it's not. So yeah, I get what you're saying and it's a valid point. But how else would a person give an example then of how free could equal sales? No matter how you do it, it seems like it would come out as some kind of similar situation because if the person making the argument from a purely marketing standpoint and is not trying to argue the ethics of it, what do you say without it turning into an ethics argument? You'd have to make a super convoluted sentence like: marketing and distribution by the legal owner of the copyright giving it away for free through the venue of their choosing, within the copyright owners chosen and specified time frame = >sales.

I dunno. It seems people would tune out three words into the legaleze. I think most people are capable of figuring out that saying free things = more sales isn't that hard to understand and there's and established reason to believe that anyone saying it isn't talking about illegal means because that's not socially acceptable. Societally, it's not the first thing we think of when people talk about marketing. When people think of shady marketing scams, they usually are pretty easy to spot. Society has just evolved to understand shady from not fairly easily or at least learn to identify shadiness in shorter time. How many people answer the email from the bank that needs you to accept money from them in order to get their money and they'll pay you for it? It didn't take long for that to be established as a scam.

I've been told I think people are smarter than they actually are, though. I believe WHDean points that out to me regularly. 



> The heart of the issue, for me, has always been that pirates are taking not my book from me, but MY RIGHT to decide what to do with my own work. I no more am going to sit by and give up on my right to decide how to distribute my work than I will give up my right to practice my choice of religion or who I will vote for in the election. Those are my decisions to make, and people telling me to 'deal with it' and 'adapt' don't understand what the root problem is.


I dunno, I think we all understand that. I think it's just one of those things that no, you don't have to _deal with it_ if you don't want to but each of us will deal with it differently. Some will stress more than others and I think the reality is, no one wants to see anyone get an ulcer over it because it's not likely going to change anytime soon. It's like worrying about going to the movie theater and dealing with a gun-toting psycho (sooooo sad   ). It's out of our control, no matter how much we try to be in control. But I definitely understand the frustration of being told to just _deal with it_ by someone that isn't as invested in the issue as someone else. But by saying "not as invested" it doesn't mean approval. It just means that what they do or don't do toward fighting piracy isn't likely the same thing as what someone else would or wouldn't do.


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## Sam J (Jul 18, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Fine, then does the government have an obligation to protect the *rights* of its citizens, and do citizens have the right to defend their rights? Or do our rights only exist insofar as it is not easy or convenient for others to infringe upon them? Does my right to privacy, for example, cease to exist now that technology is so advanced a camera from the street can peek in my bathroom window and take a photo of me in the shower? Obviously, taking a picture of me doesn't deprive me of myself, so therefore it must be acceptable? If a hacker hacks into my emails and reads them all, but doesn't damage my computer, is this acceptable simply because he has not deprived me of my emails? If someone breaks into my car and takes it for a joyride, but doesn't damage it and returns it, does that mean he did nothing wrong?


Julie again you are confusing Digital piracy with real world examples. Someone using a camera to take a picture of you is invasion of your privacy and is a crime. In this scenario you are being invaded without your choice. This is a punishable crime. However when you put out a product for sale, you open it to the market and to pirates. Are you comparing your own self to product for sale?

Example: celebrities. Many of them are products, everything they do are endorsed, they make money for appearances, they give up privacy and hence paparazzi invade them. When a celebrity gives birth to a child, they choose to make a reality tv show out of it. It is a product and if there are video clips or photos of this product online - then it is piracy. When you accept a role in a movie you are opening yourself to the world and to privacy invaders. This has nothing to do with the real world example you gave.

With the same logic, you have the rights to complain if you were a porn star and someone uploaded a picture of you without your permission - that is piracy. Piracy is the infringement of your product, not your body.

And once again, all those examples you gave are flawed. A hacker won't risk his time and efforts to hack you just to read your emails, hackers hack for a purpose and a strong motive. And yes they do damage your computer and jeoperdize everything you own on the Internet - read my previous post, hackers are not pirates.

No one takes a car for a joyride, no one wants to waste time and risk going to prison to drive your car. Just because you imagine such a scenario, doesn't mean it is a justifiable argument against piracy - because it doesn't exist, and if it does, it is still a real world crime - you loose your car or petrol. Pirates don't steal your car they copy it and the petrol and you will never know if someone is taking a joyride with your car, because you will still have yours in your garage.

And i never said about piracy being legal or government not being able to protect the rights of their citizens. It's a question of how to do it, not if they should do it.

Alright, gotta go. This thread is getting flamed. Prolly won't be replying again. No hard feelings.


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## Cheryl M. (Jan 11, 2011)

JRTomlin said:


> If you want to spend your time doing that, it is your choice. _Who in this thread said that it wasn't?_
> 
> I may choose to tell you I don't think it's terrifically productive way to spend your time, but it's a forum. People come here to express opinions. That's mine. My expressing it in no way infringes on your right to do whatever you please. People here ignore other people's opinions every day of the week.


At the end of the day, this is really what it boils down to. Someone saying it's not worth getting bent out of shape over is not telling you you can't get bent out of shape. It's just advice and opinions being doled out here like they are all the time every day. We have to use our own discretion daily on who we take advice from and who we don't. We have to choose who to respond to and who to stay away from. We have to choose which arguments to join in and which arguments to stay away from. And each forum has their own unique way of handling things so you have to learn each forum personality individually. What wording works for one forum may be completely offensive in another.

And some people never really figure a forum out.

*shrugs*

I just try to run and take cover most days.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

*UPDATE to my ORIGINAL POST*

The Poster on that message board accepted my terms (an honest review for both of my books) but mentioned that they don't have an amazon account so they will be leaving the review using their mother's account. My guess is that this is a kid who doesn't have access to credit cards and reads whatever they can find it for free and I'm guessing that when they get older they will join the paying customer masses in order to buy the new content from the creators that they enjoyed when they couldn't pay. I'm happy with the decision I made (sending them a coupon code in exchange for reviews).


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

I hear about Gaiman a lot, and I take him at his word when he relates his experience. However, I suspect the fallacy of composition may be stalking.

That simply says something that is good for the few becomes a bad when the many do the same thing. The textbook example is a town with no gas stations. A clever fellow builds a gas station on a corner and that is a howling success. Some folks follow his lead and build on some other corners. That results in bit of grumbling, but life goes on. Then a bunch of less clever folks build gas stations on all the corners, and everything goes to hell. [The example is to convey the concept as it has been conveyed to thousands before us. I'm not going to debate gas stations or small towns.]

Could everyone have Gaiman's experience if piracy expanded to cover lots of books and consumers? Would Gaiman himself still enjoy the experience? The fallacy of composition shouldn't be ignored.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> However when you put out a product for sale, you open it to the market and to pirates.


And when you open your windows, you open them to all those long lenses and perverts.


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## Cheryl M. (Jan 11, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Could everyone have Gaiman's experience if piracy expanded to cover lots of books and consumers? Would Gaiman himself still enjoy the experience? The fallacy of composition shouldn't be ignored.


Very very true. But it's also the same argument used to say only authors that were trade published will ever make money self-publishing because they have a built in readership. The other side of the fence says that's not true.

I'm still unsure of either argument on this deal. Seems kind of hard to prove as people making, say 85k/year or more as completely unknown authors aren't lining up tell everyone how much money they make. A couple here talk a little bit about it but a couple in the vast numbers of self publishers is hard to use as any kind of norm. Especially when you consider how many aren't on KB or other forums that may or may not be making a decent income on writing alone.


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## Sam J (Jul 18, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> And when you open your windows, you open them to all those long lenses and perverts.


And perverts are criminals. They invade your privacy and there are laws that punish them for this.
Pirates don't invade privacy, they distribute your product. I don't see how this is relevant here?


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Very very true. But it's also the same argument used to say only authors that were trade published will ever make money self-publishing because they have a built in readership. The other side of the fence says that's not true.


It is working in eBook publishing. That's where those rankings of #1,500,000 come from. But it has no connection to traditional publishing. It doesn't need it.



> And perverts are criminals. They invade your privacy and there are laws that punish them for this.


And pirates are violating civil law. They copy your book and there are laws to punish them for this.


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## dalya (Jul 26, 2011)

NathanWrann said:


> *UPDATE to my ORIGINAL POST*
> 
> The Poster on that message board accepted my terms (an honest review for both of my books) but mentioned that they don't have an amazon account so they will be leaving the review using their mother's account. My guess is that this is a kid who doesn't have access to credit cards and reads whatever they can find it for free and I'm guessing that when they get older they will join the paying customer masses in order to buy the new content from the creators that they enjoyed when they couldn't pay. I'm happy with the decision I made (sending them a coupon code in exchange for reviews).


That's great news! That's really sweet. You probably have a new fan for life, too. 

FWIW, I think pirating is wrong, but I also think breeding dogs who can barely walk a block because their breathing is compromised by the structure of their face (to be cute) is also wrong. These are all just things people do. I want my swimming pool.


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## Sam J (Jul 18, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> It is working in eBook publishing. That's where those rankings of #1,500,000 come from. But it has no connection to traditional publishing. It doesn't need it.
> 
> And pirates are violating civil law. They copy your book and there are laws to punish them for this.


And where did i say that it is not violation of the civil law or punishable. You are just rephrasing my sentences and changing words without getting the point i am making. Piracy and privacy are two different topics. Products and perverted photos are two different scenarios. And yes both are immoral and unethical, but cannot be used to prove the other right/wrong and vice versa.

The point is understand piracy from a digital perspective not real life crimes. Because piracy is not under the jurisdiction of one country or law.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

If you are going to use violation of the law to make your point, I guess I can follow your lead. Lead on...


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Adam Pepper said:


> This is really the bottom line. Intellectual property does have value. If your goal is to monetize that value, you have to work within the framework of the real world. Not a just and fair world that exists only in your head.


I suggest that one of those fantasy worlds is the one where writers-the people with a vested interest in stopping it-can be indifferent or even positive toward piracy while expecting those who actually pay to keep on paying-i.e., those with no incentive to stop it. Seriously, has it occurred to no one that this attitude will eventually percolate down to readers-especially when it's being publically disseminated? And why should they pay for something you can't bring yourself to defend?

Look, I'm not knocking you personally here Adam. I'm just pointing out that it's whistling past the graveyard to pretend than anyone can play coy about piracy and expect there to be no repercussions. There's no winning position: you side with anti-piracy and alienate the pirates or you side with the pirates and alienate your paying customers (or encourage them to stop paying), some of which are probably pirates. That's reality.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

Sam J said:


> ***** again you are confusing Digital piracy with real world examples.


Then I must be very confused. If I can't use real world examples, which fictional world should I be referencing?



> Someone using a camera to take a picture of you is invasion of your privacy and is a crime. In this scenario you are being invaded without your choice. This is a punishable crime. However when you put out a product for sale, you open it to the market and to pirates. Are you comparing your own self to product for sale?


This is what you said:


> Piracy hence is not theft but infringement of someone's rights. (Not property)


YOU changed the discussion from property to individual rights. You said piracy is not theft because no product is taken. Instead my right to control how my work is distributed was infringed upon. So I then asked about other situations where my rights might be infringed upon but no physical harm was done to me. Would the same logic apply. Your answer is no, because my book is a product for sale...but if it is a product for sale then it can be stolen and therefore piracy is theft.



> Example: celebrities. Many of them are products, everything they do are endorsed, they make money for appearances, they give up privacy and hence paparazzi invade them. When a celebrity gives birth to a child, they choose to make a reality tv show out of it. It is a product and if there are video clips or photos of this product online - then it is piracy. When you accept a role in a movie you are opening yourself to the world and to privacy invaders. This has nothing to do with the real world example you gave.


This makes no sense. You keep separating 'real world" from digital world. Last time I checked, my digital banking is very real. When I filed my tax return digitally, it was a real return. You are creating this artificial wall between what happens online versus what happens in the "real world." The digital world is part of the real world, not a separate planet immune to the law.



> And once again, all those examples you gave are flawed. A hacker won't risk his time and efforts to hack you just to read your emails, hackers hack for a purpose and a strong motive. And yes they do damage your computer and jeoperdize everything you own on the Internet - read my previous post, hackers are not pirates.


No one takes a car for a joyride, no one wants to waste time and risk going to prison to drive your car. Just because you imagine such a scenario, doesn't mean it is a justifiable argument against piracy - because it doesn't exist, and if it does, it is still a real world crime - you loose your car or petrol. Pirates don't steal your car they copy it and the petrol and you will never know if someone is taking a joyride with your car, because you will still have yours in your garage.[/quote]

Again this makes no sense. I am asking a theoretical question. Claiming "nobody would do that so it doesn't matter" avoid the question. I'm trying to understand your logic. You seem to be saying if someone makes a copy of my property without my consent, then this is perfectly acceptable because I'll never know. What? What does the fact of whether or not I know have to do with a crime being committed? If I steal your social security number and create a fake identity for myself and you never discover it, have I still committed a crime?


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> There's no winning position: you side with anti-piracy and alienate the pirates or you side with the pirates and alienate your paying customers (or encourage them to stop paying), some of which are probably pirates. That's reality.


When reality sucks, you change it. I've been using the new Apple Cloud on iPhone, iPad, and iMac. It's amazing. The thing even extends into the PCs. I suspect the story of piracy will be recorded on vinyl.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

WHDean said:


> I suggest that one of those fantasy worlds is the one where writers-the people with a vested interest in stopping it-can be indifferent or even positive toward piracy while expecting those who actually pay to keep on paying-i.e., those with no incentive to stop it. Seriously, has it occurred to no one that this attitude will eventually percolate down to readers-especially when it's being publically disseminated? And why should they pay for something you can't bring yourself to defend?


I don't think that people who are "pro-piracy" actually "expect" anyone to pay for their work, I think they just assume that some people will pay and some won't. It is what it is. Musicians have succeeded in the era of piracy by making more money off of non-copyable things like concerts and merchandise. TV makes money off of "free" content through advertisers (is DVRing and bypassing the ads piracy?). and Neil Gaiman makes money from non-piratable sources (screenplays, film rights, action figures, merchandise, etc). To succeed in a world where free content becomes the new normal you have to monetize non-piratable items (merchandise, special editions, etc).


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> TV makes money off of "free" content through advertisers


Ads in books could completely change the economics of piracy.


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## Adam Pepper (May 28, 2011)

WHDean said:


> Seriously, has it occurred to no one that this attitude will eventually percolate down to readers-especially when it's being publically disseminated? And why should they pay for something you can't bring yourself to defend?


You are a decade behind. This has already happened.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Ads in books could completely change the economics of piracy.


Yes and no. Korean webtoons are doing great...but piracy of them is still rampant.

Ex) http://comic.naver.com/webtoon/weekday.nhn










B.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

NathanWrann said:


> I don't think that people who are "pro-piracy" actually "expect" anyone to pay for their work, I think they just assume that some people will pay and some won't. It is what it is. Musicians have succeeded in the era of piracy by making more money off of non-copyable things like concerts and merchandise. TV makes money off of "free" content through advertisers (is DVRing and bypassing the ads piracy?). and Neil Gaiman makes money from non-piratable sources (screenplays, film rights, action figures, merchandise, etc). To succeed in a world where free content becomes the new normal you have to monetize non-piratable items (merchandise, special editions, etc).


Adam brought up being realistic. I'm being realistic. Assuming that some will pay and some won't is unrealistic because it ignores the fact that reality is dynamic. There's a tipping point in this, and once you pass it, no one will pay anymore. So yer fer us or agin' us. If you're fer us, you might lose; if yer agin' us you're a free rider until we do.

As for Neil Gaiman, he can pander to pirates all he wants. He already got rich off the paying system. And the production companies that buy his screenplays are the ones fighting to protect their (and his) rights, so he can play the philosophical one without suffering any consequences.


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## Sam J (Jul 18, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Then I must be very confused. If I can't use real world examples, which fictional world should I be referencing?
> 
> This is what you said: YOU changed the discussion from property to individual rights. You said piracy is not theft because no product is taken. Instead my right to control how my work is distributed was infringed upon. So I then asked about other situations where my rights might be infringed upon but no physical harm was done to me. Would the same logic apply. Your answer is no, because my book is a product for sale...but if it is a product for sale then it can be stolen and therefore piracy is theft.
> 
> ...


The confusion is lack of understanding the difference between Real world and the Internet. Violations on the Internet are committed by people from various regions and are judged according the laws of those regions. Piracy still exist because piracy laws in USA are different from those in India, China or Russia. Real world crimes like murder, rape, pedophila also have different punishment in different countries, some use jail term others give the death penalty. On the Internet, people use laws of one country to try and fight piracy. This doesn't work because the person committing the crime doesn't understand the laws of your country.

My point wasn't if piracy is right or wrong. But what piracy is - its not theft but infringement and you are confused because you did not bother to look up the difference between theft and infringement before making comparisons with real world crimes. Your using a one sided logic of a 'product being stolen equals theft'. Stealing is perhaps confusing when it comes to piracy. Your product is being stolen (replicated) but you don't loose it (you still have it). This isn't theft in its true sense as you still retain your product. If you loose the product all together then i wouldn't mind you comparing the piracy scenario with real world theft. I am sorry but i simply cannot break this down for you even further. I am not implying piracy is right or wrong, i am just saying understand it properly before you go and justify for/against it. You are asking theoretical questions to prove theories? You need to check the practical implications of piracy and how it works. Piracy is a complicated crime and doesn't work as is as taking a car for a joyride, it has many factors playing and either party can prove themselves right or wrong.

Here is an example: Robin Hood steals from bakery and leaves 100 loafs of bread on the ground. Hungry villagers come across the free food lying on the floor, they see no one around, they eat it. Next day the villagers are rounded up and been threatened to the guillotine. Now the real question is, are the villagers responsible? The were hungry, they saw free food, they took it. What should the judge do? Find Robin Hood for being the real 'Pirate'? Hang the villagers? (i used 'hang' since you seem to be comparing digital piracy with major crimes, so i assume you want severe punishment to the people who pirate products?) or better yet, they should blame the ground and catch the land lord? (as in the case of megaupload.com where the files were being uploaded?)

Lessons:
1. The internet works similarly, people see free stuff, they take it. Without thinking of the implications. Why? Because most of them are kids, underage and without knowledge of the law.
2. You need to understand that the real pirates are the ones who actually steal(copy) the product and give away for free. Not the ones who are the end receivers. Just because someone came in possession of a copy of your book for free, does not mean they are the ones causing you harm or are the real pirates even. Another scenario would be someone downloading a copy of your book via free KDP promo and also visiting a warez forum where you book is being shared by someone else (though not knowing that). When the court catches the people based on IP he can be equally be blamed for having a copy of your book, but he did not necessarily 'steal' it. The way to fight piracy is to catch these real 'pirates'.

You can argue that the person was 'unethical' for visiting the warez forums in the first place. You can even call the villagers unethical for taking what's not theirs. But that doesn't equate to them committing crimes. The villagers did not go and steal form the bakery. The person did not share the book on the forums. And it gets even worse when these villagers/the person are 12-14 year olds who don't know the law any better, let alone ethics of doing business.

I am not sure if you misunderstood my initial posts, i am not advocating piracy or fighting it. I am merely asking you to research the issue before comparing piracy with theories or your personal views. (I agree with most of your views, but personal views don't matter when it comes to the law.) I will end the discussion here. But i urge you to check forums where the issue is discussed, forums where they discuss PIPA, ACTA and SOPA and check the court records of these cases and the videos from senators and those who are pro-piracy and anti-piracy etc. Understand piracy only then you can do something about it. Am just a messenger, so don't try to shoot me for making a point. Have a great day.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

THEFT vs INFRINGEMENT

First: Both are crimes. 

THEFT is a crime where real harm is done. By real harm I mean that something real and physical that one, real person owns is taken from them. 

INFRINGEMENT is a crime where abstract, non real, non tangible "rights" that have been granted to a real person have been violated as defined in the abstract definition of those non tangible rights. 

The difference is that THEFT has always been a crime. If I own something and you take it from me it is wrong, always has been always will be. INFRINGEMENT of someone's RIGHTS depends on whether or not a legislative body has determined those "rights" to exist. Which means that before there was copyright, there was no copyright infringement.  

Example: I'm standing on a street corner in 1789 selling a book called "Superman" and John Smith comes up and buys a copy. That night he goes home and transcribes it into his own book, word for word and even keeps my name on the cover. The next day John Smith sets up a table right next to me and starts selling the book. I think this is ridiculous so I call a policeman over and tell the policeman that John Smith stole my book. John Smith says "No I didn't these are my books. I wrote the words on the paper and bound them myself." I, of course, agree, that that is true. So the policeman says "Well which of these books did he steal" and I say "He didn't steal any of them he stole my story." The policeman laughs and walks away saying, "So what?". Then the next day Sam Jones comes up to my table, swipes all of the books off of it and sets them on the table across the street and starts selling the books. I tell the policeman that Sam Jones stole my books and the policeman arrests him. 

Then a year later Congress grants me intellectual property rights with copyright law and going forward John Smith can't "steal" my stories because he would be infringing on the rights that Congress granted me. So one day I didn't have intellectual property rights, and the next day I did. While all along I had physical property rights. 

So that's the difference between THEFT and INFRINGEMENT.

The only reason that you have a "right" to your content is because the Guvment says you do. If Copyright law is dissolved tomorrow there would be no more piracy, because it would no longer be illegal. People would still buy content (just as they do now with public domain works).


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## Adam Pepper (May 28, 2011)

Sam J said:


> My point wasn't if piracy is right or wrong. But what piracy is - its not theft but infringement


I see this argument a lot but isnt it semantical in nature and not fundamentally important? Unless you're arguing that intellectual property doesnt have value or that infringement is not unethical.


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## Sam J (Jul 18, 2011)

Adam Pepper said:


> I see this argument a lot but isnt it semantical in nature and not fundamentally important? Unless you're arguing that intellectual property doesnt have value or that infringement is not unethical.


Theft and infringement are both crimes and unethical. I am not trying to prove they are not. But using theft as a substitute for infringement and using real life theft examples as basis of justification is irrelevant and that's what i am trying to point.


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## Sam J (Jul 18, 2011)

NathanWrann said:


> THEFT vs INFRINGEMENT
> 
> First: Both are crimes.
> 
> ...


Thank you for posting this and a perfect example as well to illustrate the difference between theft and infringement.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

@Nathan

That was beautiful.

B.


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## Owen (Aug 24, 2011)

Wow, are we still going?


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

JRTomlin said:


> ...And would you really walk up to Neil Gaiman and say that to his face, I wonder.


Knowing me, yeah, I probably would. Not saying I'd still have my teeth when I got through, however...


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

NathanWrann said:


> THEFT vs INFRINGEMENT
> 
> First: Both are crimes.
> 
> ...


You can't be serious Nathan. The word "theft" is a moral one that's been backed by law-just like infringement and intellectual property. Theft no more exists or doesn't exist than infringement. A parking ticket is as "real" an offence as murder, even if a less serious one.

What happened to realism?


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## 56139 (Jan 21, 2012)

WHDean said:


> What happened to realism?


It went out the door with this stupid thread.

I detest pirates. Zero respect for them at all. Period. I don't waste my time tracking them down or anything and I know my stuff is being pirated everyday, but I think they are scum. Total SCUM - because they hide behind the theoretical BS being spewed out on this thread that ALLOWS them to think they are righteous when they refuse to respect the hard work of others.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

WHDean said:


> You can't be serious Nathan. The word "theft" is a moral one that's been backed by law-just like infringement and intellectual property. Theft no more exists or doesn't exist than infringement. A parking ticket is as "real" an offence as murder, even if a less serious one.
> 
> What happened to realism?


In the portion that you quoted I clearly state that they are both crimes. I didn't make any indication whether one was less serious than the other. the difference is that one is physical possession and the other is a non-physical possession that is identified solely by the government definition.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

Words are printed on paper. Words are encoded on hard drive, RAM, or flash memory. It's all physical. The words don't exist outside of the physical. Words can be copied onto paper, and words can be copied onto digital memory. We need more than that to be part of something new and special. This is just old and ordinary. It's like being part of the Xerox generation.


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## Guest (Jul 20, 2012)

Sam,

Stop telling me I "don't understand." Piracy is not a complicated crime. People make it complicated by choice. I release a book. You copy that book and upload it to a pirate site where other people download it without paying for it. Bingo:  piracy. Not complicated. 

Saying that laws are different in other countries therefore there is piracy makes no sense, because laws are different in other countries for everything. 

You also seem to be making a lot of assumptions on what "I think." Not once have I said piracy is the same as murder. NOT ONCE. Not once have I said the kid who downloads a file is the same as the pirate that uploads it. NOT ONCE. But that said, I don't believe a kid that goes to a torrent site doesn't know perfectly well what he or she is doing. They know. That's why most of those sites used all sorts of encryption to hide themselves and multiple servers and require invitations. Lets not pretend that all the people frequenting torrent sites are oppressed third-world residents with no access to books or stupid kids. The majority know damn well what they are doing. You think I've never deal with pirates or people who go to those sites? 

PIPA, ACTA and SOPA are not even on my radar in this conversation, because I didn't say anything about creating, supporting, or destroying laws regarding piracy. I was talking about the act itself. One can understand SOPA was bad law AND believe piracy is unethical, because the act of piracy is different from the laws themselves. Just like I can believe mandatory prison sentences for drug offenses are wrong and still believe you shouldn't do drugs.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

JanneCO said:


> It went out the door with this stupid thread.
> 
> I detest pirates. Zero respect for them at all. Period. I don't waste my time tracking them down or anything and I know my stuff is being pirated everyday, but I think they are scum. Total SCUM - because they hide behind the theoretical BS being spewed out on this thread that ALLOWS them to think they are righteous when they refuse to respect the hard work of others.


Is making a mix tape and giving it to a friend piracy?


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

NathanWrann said:


> Is making a mix tape and giving it to a friend piracy?


Yes.


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## Sam J (Jul 18, 2011)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Sam,
> 
> Stop telling me I "don't understand." Piracy is not a complicated crime. People make it complicated by choice.* I release a book. You copy that book and upload it to a pirate site where other people download it without paying for it. Bingo: piracy. Not complicated. *
> 
> ...


You release a book. Someone buys the book, uploads it to a filesharing site to share with a friend - this friend gets the book without having to pay for it. According to what you just posted, that is piracy. How is it different from buying a DVD or a paperback and giving it to friends for a read/watch? And guess how many regular people do that, the whole world is pirating right now.

*Piracy is illegal, unethical, immoral. So is theft, infringement or any crime. Just don't blow the entire issue out of proportions. *There i skimmed my views in a few lines, as for the remaining part of the argument, watch these two videos from 2 of my favorite people.


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## dalya (Jul 26, 2011)




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## Claire Ryan (Jun 7, 2012)

Dalya, your gif is awesome and you are awesome.

I shall now bin whatever I had typed out and exit stage left.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Is making a mix tape and giving it to a friend piracy?


Does the friend wear Berkenstocks? Talk about our common cultural heritage? Stand up to the man? Translate corporate speak at weddings? Ask for double nutmeg in his latte?


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

NathanWrann said:


> In the portion that you quoted I clearly state that they are both crimes. I didn't make any indication whether one was less serious than the other. the difference is that one is physical possession and the other is a non-physical possession that is identified solely by the government definition.


I just clipped your post. You said theft was different from infringement because the latter exist only by fiat (i.e., government definition). Well, I have news for you: theft exists only by fiat too, so does property, so does every other law. Physical harm only matters because we conventionally believe that it matters and this belief is reflected in law. The philosophical justification for these laws is immaterial to their standing as laws. One isn't less real because it addresses non-physical crimes.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Sam J said:


> You release a book. Someone buys the book, uploads it to a filesharing site to share with a friend - this friend gets the book without having to pay for it. According to what you just posted, that is piracy. How is it different from buying a DVD or a paperback and giving it to friends for a read/watch? And guess how many regular people do that, the whole world is pirating right now.
> 
> *Piracy is illegal, unethical, immoral. So is theft, infringement or any crime. Just don't blow the entire issue out of proportions. *There i skimmed my views in a few lines, as for the remaining part of the argument, watch these two videos from 2 of my favorite people.


So you can take one DVD or paperback and physically share it with millions of people simultaneously? Man, you're good!


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## Sam J (Jul 18, 2011)

Greg Banks said:


> So you can take one DVD or paperback and physically share it with millions of people simultaneously? Man, you're good!


No but 10,000 people buy DVD or paperback and physically share it with 10,000 others and so on. And believe it or not it still happens.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

Correct. But the number of copies hasn't changed. Nothing has been copied. There are still only 10,000 copies.

A similar situation with ebooks would be to buy 10,000 Kindles and 10,000 copies of an ebook, and physically share them with 10,000 others and so on. Nothing has been copied. There are still only 10,000 copies.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Correct. But the number of copies hasn't changed. Nothing has been copied. There are still only 10,000 copies.
> 
> A similar situation with ebooks would be to buy 10,000 Kindles and 10,000 copies of an ebook, and physically share them with 10,000 others and so on. Nothing has been copied. There are still only 10,000 copies.


Exactly, and I'm starting to get sick and tired of people trying to twist things around and comparing apples to oranges just to create an excuse for piracy. It takes the IQ of a turnip to grasp the difference, and I know that all of the people here are far too smart not to understand the differences.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

WHDean said:


> I just clipped your post. You said theft was different from infringement because the latter exist only by fiat (i.e., government definition). Well, I have news for you: theft exists only by fiat too, so does property, so does every other law.


All true. Both Theft and Infringement and all laws are defined by governments (although some violations against humanity are defined universally even in the absence of governments) My point was that the "objects" of the crime in a theft are physical. The "objects" of the crime in Infringement (i.e. "rights") are not.



WHDean said:


> Physical harm only matters because we conventionally believe that it matters and this belief is reflected in law. The philosophical justification for these laws is immaterial to their standing as laws. One isn't less real because it addresses non-physical crimes.


I didn't say that one was less real because it addresses non-physical crimes. They are both crimes. They are both serious and valid. I've never argued the opposite. There seemed to be a belief earlier in the thread that THEFT and Copyright Infringement were the same thing. I illustrated that they were not.

Infringing upon someone's copyright can certainly cause harm. If I copy your story and sell it you have clear cut evidence that money was made from the sale. That was money that should have gone to you, therefore I, ultimately, stole money from you. So if I copy your story and upload it to the internet and a million people download it there was harm done according to copyright law in that your rights were infringed upon but there is no way of determining or proving the extent of harm any further than your feelings being hurt because you didn't have the choice of whether to upload it or not. Doesn't make it any less real than a physical crime.


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## Twofishes (May 30, 2012)

Greg Banks said:


> Exactly, and I'm starting to get sick and tired of people trying to twist things around and comparing apples to oranges just to create an excuse for piracy. It takes the IQ of a turnip to grasp the difference, and I know that all of the people here are far too smart not to understand the differences.


Do you or do you not believe the copyright holder has sole authority of reproduction and distribution?


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> My point was that the "objects" of the crime in a theft are physical.


And when a hacker takes money from a bank account, what is the physical object?


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Twofishes said:


> Do you or do you not believe the copyright holder has sole authority of reproduction and distribution?


That's a trap question. Whether or not the copyright holder has sole authority of reproduction and distribution of his or her work (which the copyright holder does, by the way) in no way makes one person loaning (or selling) their own physical copy a book or DVD the same as one person putting a digital copy online that everyone on the planet could download for free.


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## Lily_T (Sep 25, 2011)

NathanWrann said:


> All true. Both Theft and Infringement and all laws are defined by governments (although some violations against humanity are defined universally even in the absence of governments) My point was that the "objects" of the crime in a theft are physical. The "objects" of the crime in Infringement (i.e. "rights") are not.


Not to derail but what are "these violations against humanity that are defined universally even in the absence of governments?"

Your 16th century example seems a tad optimistic. The lawman wouldn't need to be troubled. One man would challenge the other and once one of them was dead there would be no more dispute. Cast your scenario further back into the past and the resolution would be bloodier and nastier. And this in spite of the fact that governments (read: the social contract we agree to abide by or else) of one sort or the other have existed for millenia.


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## Isa Ritchie (Jul 3, 2012)

Wow this is quite a debate. It basically goes like this:

*"Piracy is stealing. Stealing = bad. Piracy is bad"

"No, Piracy is not stealing. Piracy is sharing. Sharing is not necessarily bad."*

Being in the latter side, I feel like quoting Bill Hicks:




Ownership is a strange concept to me. MINE. The dominant understanding of it is Western and contemporary, but things are changing. Cultures change and I'm very excited about the shift from things being black and white: "Mine is mine!", to a more share-friendly dominant culture.

I recently read this book: http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/book-and-authors/

It gave me hope for the future. The world needs to move away from exclusion and ownership entitlement if we are to become sustainable enough to continue. Every American does not need to own a cordless drill.

As I said in the other thread. I don't believe in owning information. That's a weird concept to me. Yes, it's our work and we work hard. But I don't think we own it any more than a laborer owns the work they did on someone else's house. Yes, we deserve to be compensated for it. And what better compensation is there than having people willingly 'buy' your book when they don't have to.

The idea that people will only buy something because they have to is getting old. People buy Neil Gayman because they love him and want to support him. No one needs his work. No one needs your work. They want it. Feel good about that.

Owning information is a very new construction in human history. When most people were illiterate, no one copyrighted the rhymes, songs and oral histories that gave people the information they needed to survive. The information was still valued. I suppose it was only with the printed word - with making the intangible tangible that copyright even got a possibility of existing. But now our technology has come full circle and books are becoming non-tangible again, which means they can be easily shared with the world.

If you're complaining about the sense of entitlement of pirates - what about the sense of entitlement of authors? - yes your work is 'original' but did you pay a royalty to 'sci-fi' or 'romance' for using their plots? Did you compensate Phillip K Dick for his ideas? Nothing is new under the sun. We are built up of what came before.

Even the atoms in your body came from other people, other things, you aren't even really 'yours'. That is why the concrete construction of ownership confuses me. We are all just borrowed energy anyway.


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## jackz4000 (May 15, 2011)

The danger in piracy is how it will play out in the future. When someone like me says to myself, "Why bother paying an author for his ebook, when I can get it for free?" On KB there are authors who think pirating is fine, so it's not like authors care. Some encourage it. Some are so needy they are hoping to be pirated. I'll help them out.

Like my wonderful 19 year old niece says, "Unk I download all my books, I'll never pay for a book again. Paying is stupid when I get them for free. Say could you loan me 10,000 Euros?"


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Isa Ritchie said:


> Wow this is quite a debate. It basically goes like this:
> 
> *"Piracy is stealing. Stealing = bad. Piracy is bad"
> 
> "No, Piracy is not stealing. Piracy is sharing. Sharing is not necessarily bad."*


Very much an oversimplification of the debate. There are more than two positions.

The position of a number of people on this forum is *"Piracy is stealing, but we get more from the added distribution than we lose in the theft."*

I happen to share that particular position in the debate but there are no doubt other permutations. One might be *"Piracy is stealing but every possible solution proposed has been worse than the problem."*

What I get REALLY tired of is people misstating other people's opinions.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Isa Ritchie said:


> Wow this is quite a debate. It basically goes like this:
> 
> *"Piracy is stealing. Stealing = bad. Piracy is bad"
> 
> ...


Your perspective doesn't exactly make sense, though I understand what you are saying. By your very definition, no one technically owns anything, therefore how would you have people actually earn a living? And if you're going to ask if anyone paid a royalty to "sci fi" to write a book in the genre, that I'd like to know who paid a royalty to the earth for the land, sea, and air? A person to person interaction in a materialistic based society is not an abstract concept and can not be treated as such. Your perspective would perhaps result in a beautiful world if it existed, but we are discussing the world that does exist. We can no more discuss this topic in the terms under which you defined them than we could determine how to live our lives outdoors without getting eaten by dragons. There's no logic in basing real world discussions on premises which simply do not exist. Although dragons would be cool...


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## Isa Ritchie (Jul 3, 2012)

Greg Banks said:


> Your perspective doesn't exactly make sense, though I understand what you are saying. By your very definition, no one technically owns anything, therefore how would you have people actually earn a living? And if you're going to ask if anyone paid a royalty to "sci fi" to write a book in the genre, that I'd like to know who paid a royalty to the earth for the land, sea, and air? A person to person interaction in a materialistic based society is not an abstract concept and can not be treated as such. Your perspective would perhaps result in a beautiful world if it existed, but we are discussing the world that does exist. We can no more discuss this topic in the terms under which you defined them than we could determine how to live our lives outdoors without getting eaten by dragons. There's no logic in basing real world discussions on premises which simply do not exist. Although dragons would be cool...


Dragons would be cool.

"who paid a royalty to the earth for the land, sea, and air?" That is exactly my point.

People earn a living because people value the work they do. Often this does not translate fairly in the current system. I'm sure a lot of people who clean public toilets work harder than a lot of the richer people in our world. It's true, I'm an idealist, but the world is changing in different ways and this is one of them. And for me, this is a positive shift because it undermines the power of large multinational corporations that are responsible for most of the world's problems and it opens things up more for indies.

I know you have a different perspective and I'm not asking you to change it. But if piracy is a problem for you, you have a choice. You can complain about it and feel anger, you can label pirates evil dirty thieves and defend the absolute right of ownership that the author should have or you can accept that piracy isn't going to go away and make peace with it.

This is the way the world is changing. You may not like it, but liking it will make it a much more pleasant experience for you.

The interesting thing is, the people who resist piracy are more likely to suffer from it - it's not just that they are resisting it because it's bad for them, their resistance self-reinforces. If you are anti-piracy and someone pirates your work they are less likely to buy it and promote it. Pirates are people and will actively support artists and writers who don't discriminate against them. I think that's why Neil Gayman has done so well.

I find it ironic, because a lot of modern Western culture is based on this ideal of freedom, and although the corporate system promotes the ideal to gain from it, there is this huge resistance to the freedom to access information. It seems pretty arbitrary that for 50 years you 'own' the copyright and then it's public. We are human beings, having access to the information created by human beings; to the music of Mozart, to the Mona Lisa, to Shakespeare, is our birthright. As an author you are creating and contributing to this mass of human information and creation. Don't you want to share with the world rather than guard your dragon's hoard?


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## Twofishes (May 30, 2012)

Greg Banks said:


> That's a trap question. Whether or not the copyright holder has sole authority of reproduction and distribution of his or her work (which the copyright holder does, by the way) in no way makes one person loaning (or selling) their own physical copy a book or DVD the same as one person putting a digital copy online that everyone on the planet could download for free.


It isn't a trap question. You either have to believe you have the sole right to distribute or not. Obviously there is a difference between digital media and physical media. Digital media can be reproduced without degradation infinitely. So. 
Are you making a distinction between physical and digital media with regards to the exercise of distribution?

If so what is the distinction?
So maybe there is a trap, but not the one you're thinking of. More along the qualities of paper and ink and binding vs the qualities of 1s and 0s.


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## Lily_T (Sep 25, 2011)

Isa Ritchie said:


> Ownership is a strange concept to me. MINE. The dominant understanding of it is *Western and contemporary*, but things are changing. Cultures change and I'm very excited about the shift from things being black and white: "Mine is mine!", to a more share-friendly dominant culture.


That would be news to the Sumerians and all the dozens of property-oriented civilizations that predated our Greco/Roman-inspired Western one.

On thread: "Piracy" is ubiquitous because it's easy *and* it accrues value to the perpetrator because they don't have to pay for the good. When people around me start to champion piracy I usually ask them what their thoughts are on academic dishonesty.

Shockingly enough there are only two groups that don't lose their enthusiasm for the discussion.

1) Teens who are giving the disillusioned youth persona a spin. "School's bullshit. Tests are bullshit. Teachers are bullshit."

2) Adults whose personal philosophy is in line with that of the colonists in Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed.

The trick to these discussions is to find acts that are similar in scope, utility derived, and harm inflicted. Otherwise it devolves into long exchanges over whether X is _really_ like copyright infringement.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Isa Ritchie said:


> Dragons would be cool.
> 
> "who paid a royalty to the earth for the land, sea, and air?" That is exactly my point.


I know that's your point, but I don't think you're getting mine. We _do not live in that world_. Land, sea, and air, and what one human being creates and profits from by selling it to others is not the same thing, nor is such monetary construct the same as hording information or keeping it away from others. We have libraries and such for the free sharing of knowledge. Are you then saying that if a person gives birth to a child, anyone should have free reign to take the child and raise it for their own? Why is the ideal that comes out of my head any less tangible, or any less my property, free for me to choose the manner in which I share it? If you're going to adopt the ideology that no one owns content, then no one owns _anything_. Are you then proposing that we just cast out the current monetary system on which society is based, and furthermore, do you think such a suggestion is realistic? If no one owns anything, Steven King can't profit on his novels, Steve Martin can't profit on his jokes, George Lucas can't profit on his films, Rachel Ray can't profit on her recipes, Nike can't profit on their shoes, and no artist, writer, sculptor, or inventor of any kind could profit on anything they create or conceive of, because by your very definition, even though it sprung from their minds it doesn't belong to them. Does their minds therefore not belong to them? Their homes, their very bodies? What is rape or murder if you don't own your own body? I know that seems extreme, but to apply your concept in the way you've described it, then it applies to everything.

Or does it have limits? And if it has limits, then why does the concepts born out of my own mind not count as my own personal property? Who makes that determination of what does and doesn't belong to me? Because I don't see the distinction between my concepts and my personal body or my offsprng being in any way concrete, at least not in the way I believe you are applying this philosophy.



Twofishes said:


> It isn't a trap question. You either have to believe you have the sole right to distribute or not. Obviously there is a difference between digital media and physical media. Digital media can be reproduced without degradation infinitely. So.
> Are you making a distinction between physical and digital media with regards to the exercise of distribution?
> 
> If so what is the distinction?
> So maybe there is a trap, but not the one you're thinking of. More along the qualities of paper and ink and binding vs the qualities of 1s and 0s.


The distinction has already been laid out plain for all to see. You literally cannot share one physical book with everyone on the planet, while with the digital media, you very well could do just that. No one would consider sharing your one copy of an ebook (or selling it to someone else) as pirating. However, taking your copy and making it available online where any- and everyone could download an exact duplicate for free, is very much piracy. You are widely distributing my content without my permission and without my getting compensation. It is the reality of the digital world. It doesn't make it any more right to do just because it is easy to do, nor does it make the offense any less extreme.


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## Twofishes (May 30, 2012)

Greg Banks said:


> The distinction has already been laid out plain for all to see. You literally cannot share one physical book with everyone on the planet, while with the digital media, you very well could do just that. No one would consider sharing your one copy of an ebook (or selling it to someone else) as pirating. However, taking your copy and making it available online where any- and everyone could download an exact duplicate for free, is very much piracy. You are widely distributing my content without my permission and without my getting compensation. It is the reality of the digital world. It doesn't make it any more right to do just because it is easy to do, nor does it make the offense any less extreme.


Yes the distinction is obvious as I noted. My question is, are you always selling content or are you sometimes selling content and sometimes selling paper and ink?


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Twofishes said:


> Yes the distinction is obvious as I noted. My question is, are you always selling content or are you sometimes selling content and sometimes selling paper and ink?


But isn't that an abstract question without an answer? Because in my mind at least, the answer depends on the value of the content itself, and I certainly don't think you, for example, would have the right to tell me how much (or how little) I should value my content. You have the right to decide for yourself whether or not to buy, but that doesn't give you the right to then steal it from me by downloading it digitally on a pirating website any more than you would be justified to break into a bookstore and steal a physical copy off the shelf.


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## Isa Ritchie (Jul 3, 2012)

Lily_T, are you implying that our modern ideas about property are the same as the ancient cultures you mention?  That is a bit far fetched.  I don't think they had copyright laws at all   as for academic dishonesty, don't get me started.  I have been involved in academia for a long time and and hold no illusions about its merits.  I don't enjoy it when I read first year essays that are pasteurised, because they're not playing the academic game properly and that is what we grade them on.  The whole academic system is a mass of constructions that have to adapt to change or be made redundant.

Greg, your construction of children as something to be 'owned' disturbs me.  I prefer the Maori concept of Kaitiakitanga, loosely translated as guardianship, to that of ownership.  I am the guardian of my child, of my home, of the environment etc.  I am the guardian of my writing and I want it to be valued by others.  I feel honored when other people want to read what I write.  I feel incredibly grateful that people want to give me money for my writing, but I don't feel entitled to gate-keep knowledge because it violates my principles.  

Ideas that come out of your head aren't tangible, by definition, you can write them on paper or type them and print them, then they are tangible, by definition.  

To quote fight club: You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, you are the same decaying organic matter as everything else


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## Kent Kelly (Feb 12, 2011)

It's pretty simple, the creation of elaborate intellectual content actually requires significant work ... expenditure of limited mortal energy toward a specific goal. The person performing the expenditure has a fundamental first right to the creation itself, especially when compared to any consumer who has risked and provided nothing and who wants an equal share. Even if something is going to be replicated infinitely, the creation of that original still required significant labor. And without the original, the copies would never exist.

Piracy takes away the creator's right of control without the creator's permission. Even if the net effect of this wrong act is accidentally positive, the act in and of itself is a violation and a disrespect toward the creator, and therefore wrong.

That's why piracy is bad, it stifles innovation and the incentive to create while proclaiming itself a positive force. People who have trouble comprehending the principles, importance and validity of ownership can begin their self-education with http://oaks.nvg.org/fta.html and proceed from there.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Not to derail but what are "these violations against humanity that are defined universally even in the absence of governments?"


Nathan is quite capable of speaking for himself. But so am I. I would take this to refer to the theory of natural law and natural rights developed from Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and the Enlightenment philosophers. (And a host of others.)


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Ownership is a strange concept to me. MINE. The dominant understanding of it is Western and contemporary, but things are changing. Cultures change and I'm very excited about the shift from things being black and white: "Mine is mine!", to a more share-friendly dominant culture.


That share-friendly dominant culture has been tried many times, and the result was usually poverty and subsistence living. That has been the rule for most of human history.

In the last two hundred years, we have managed to provide more prosperity for more people than at any other period in history. Much of this can be traced to the development of capitalism, and the various stages of economic organization that led to it. And they couldn't have existed without property rights which began to develop into their modern form in Europe starting about 1000AD.

Many people have theories they claim are better, but none of the ones that have been tried have succeeded.

And where are things changing? The biggest change staring us in the face over the last twenty years is China. They changed by embracing property rights, not repudiating them. Theirs is a different model with their political structure, but they definitely moved along the path of property rights, and have made dramatic strides along the way.



> As I said in the other thread. I don't believe in owning information. That's a weird concept to me.


That is an odd concept. I don't believe in it either, and we're in good company. Neither does anyone else.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> And when a hacker takes money from a bank account, what is the physical object?


The digital dollars in the bank have a 1:1 value with real dollars. When I go to make a withdrawal from my bank if I have 100 digital dollars in the bank I can get 100 dollar bills. If someone takes the 100 digital dollars out of my account I cannot get the 100 dollar bills, therefore that person has taken real value from me.



Lily_T said:


> Not to derail but what are "these violations against humanity that are defined universally even in the absence of governments?"


Are you seriously asking this question today? Is there a person alive that would look at the massacre in Aurora Colorado and think that what that person did in that movie theater is only bad in the eyes of the law? It's sickening in every context. There's a reason that "good" people don't walk around and randomly kill without need or reason, because it goes against human nature. It goes against survival of the species. We don't need laws to tell us it is bad. There are other universal violations against humanity but I don't think it is necessary to belabor this point.



Lily_T said:


> Your 16th century example seems a tad optimistic. The lawman wouldn't need to be troubled. One man would challenge the other and once one of them was dead there would be no more dispute. Cast your scenario further back into the past and the resolution would be bloodier and nastier. And this in spite of the fact that governments (read: the social contract we agree to abide by or else) of one sort or the other have existed for millenia.


You seem to think that 1789 America was the wild wild west. Need I remind you that that is 13 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. I live in New England, this region of America has been civilized for quite some time. There would be no duel in the street*. Are you saying that intellectual property would have started wars even further back? It is well known that William Shakespeare stole every idea he ever had, were there "bloodier and nastier" disputes over his work?

Even in the wild west I hardly think that someone would kill someone else over a campfire tale.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> The digital dollars in the bank have a 1:1 value with real dollars. When I go to make a withdrawal from my bank if I have 100 digital dollars in the bank I can get 100 dollar bills. If someone takes the 100 digital dollars out of my account I cannot get the 100 dollar bills, therefore that person has taken real value from me.


They have indeed taken something of real value. Those dollars in the bank are real dollars in their digital form. And they are not a physical object. That credit balance never has to be converted to cash for either you or the hacker to use it. The cash in circulation is far less than the money supply. Cash in circulation is less than M1, M1 is less than M2, and M2 is less than M3. The key is the value, not the fact that an object is involved.

We can trace that deposit from the federal reserve repurchase, to a bank's fed account, to your employer's line of credit, to your account, to the hackers account. Lots of value is involved, but no object. No cash. We could also trace it back from the hacker's account to the fed without ever converting to cash. Fiat money. Ain't this a great country?


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Yes the distinction is obvious as I noted. My question is, are you always selling content or are you sometimes selling content and sometimes selling paper and ink?


When we sell a paperback, we sell paper and ink.

When we sell the rights to a work, we sell the content.

When we sell an ebook, we sell a license for use.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> They have indeed taken something of real value. Those dollars in the bank are real dollars in their digital form. And they are not a physical object. That credit balance never has to be converted to cash for either you or the hacker to use it. The cash in circulation is far less than the money supply. Cash in circulation is less than M1, M1 is less than M2, and M2 is less than M3. The key is the value, not the fact that an object is involved.
> 
> We can trace that deposit from the federal reserve repurchase, to a bank's fed account, to your employer's line of credit, to your account, to the hackers account. Lots of value is involved, but no object. No cash. We could also trace it back from the hacker's account to the fed without ever converting to cash. Fiat money. Ain't this a great country?


A great country? How about a great world. Follow the trail and the reality is that there is more digital currency around the globe than actual gold value. That is what the value of currency is based on, right? And really, what value is gold? This could get really philosophical but I see what you are saying, however, there is a universal (for the most part) agreed upon value placed on currency whether it is digital or physical, with the assumption that there is gold backing it up (I'm not an economist, so this is my uneducated understanding of the process). There is no universal agreed upon value or market for trading individual pieces of intellectual property (there is a market (amazon) but not in the sense of a money market that determines value based upon circulation) therefore all intellectual property is effectively valueless and only worth something to someone who believes it to have value to that individual. Also, digital currency can't be replicated over and over and over like an e-book.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Follow the trail and the reality is that there is more digital currency around the globe than actual gold value. That is what the value of currency is based on, right?


No. Nobody is on the gold standard anymore. The simplest way to understand the concept of fiat money today is to consider the total production of goods and services in an economy. All of its stuff of value. The currency quantifies all of it. The currency is backed by the productive power of the economy. The currency is worth all the stuff it can buy.

[Yes, I know that explanation has a high sucks index.]



> Also, digital currency can't be replicated over and over and over like an e-book.


It can indeed be replicated. And that is where inflation comes from. The base of value does not change with currency replication, so each additional currency unit produced by replication is worth less.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> > Also, digital currency can't be replicated over and over and over like an e-book.
> 
> 
> It can indeed be replicated. And that is where inflation comes from. The base of value does not change with currency replication, so each additional currency unit produced by replication is worth less.


I suppose my statement should have read: digital currency can't be replicated over and over without harming the value.

an e-book can be replicated a million times and still have the same value.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

WHDean said:


> I just clipped your post. You said theft was different from infringement because the latter exist only by fiat (i.e., government definition). Well, I have news for you: theft exists only by fiat too, so does property, so does every other law.


Thought about this some more today and I think I disagree with you. If I read your statement above correctly you're saying that theft and property only exist as they are defined by law. That without law or fiat then there can be no theft and no property.

So I thought of the following example:

There are two chimpanzees in a zoo, Bud and Sara. Sara has an apple and is about to take a bite of it but Bud comes over and takes it away from her. Sara, without any laws to tell her so, knows that she has been "harmed" and knows that something wrong has occurred and will either skulk away knowing that something that was hers was taken from her by a bigger stronger chimp or she will fight back for it. One way or another she knows that she has been wronged. That's an example of theft without it being defined by laws. Chimps have no defined laws yet they know the difference between wrong and right. If you've ever been robbed you know that what you feel afterward is not offense that the robber had the gall to break the law, you feel offended (and angry) that they took something that was yours. You don't need a law to tell you that was wrong. The law simply makes a legal precedence for punishment or compensation.

On the flip side: Bud is sitting there and draws a circle in the sand with his finger. Sara comes over, sees the circle then goes over to another patch of sand and draws an exact copy of Bud's circle. Bud does not get angry that Sara infringed his copyright on that circle. He has no idea what the concept of copyright is because it's a manufactured, abstract. A "right".

That is the difference between theft and infringement of rights. Again, within the context of modern society I'm not saying that either theft or infringement of rights are more important than the other. They are both valid laws. However, the government could rescind copyright and within a generation content creators would have no more attachment to the work they create than Bud had to the circle in the sand. But if the government rescinded theft and property laws, a hundred years from now we would still fight over apples.

What this has to do with digital file piracy in the year 2012 is very little, however it could matter in the future.


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## dalya (Jul 26, 2011)

At the risk of being booed by everyone who's enjoying the debate, I dislike all the metaphors and stories and comparisons used to describe the pirating issue. Pirating isn't like growing a new corn plant from your can of creamed corn or like eating puppies. It's not exactly like anything else. It's about getting in your boat and taking what you want, by musket or cannon, and anyone who don't like it can kiss your peg leg.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

dalya said:


> At the risk of being booed by everyone who's enjoying the debate, I dislike all the metaphors and stories and comparisons used to describe the pirating issue. Pirating isn't like growing a new corn plant from your can of creamed corn or like eating puppies. It's not exactly like anything else. *It's about getting in your boat and taking what you want, by musket or cannon*, and anyone who don't like it can kiss your peg leg.


Nice metaphor. Or is that an analogy. I guess I'll just say "nice story"


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## dalya (Jul 26, 2011)

NathanWrann said:


> Nice metaphor. Or is that an analogy. I guess I'll just say "nice story"


pirating = pirating

The only acceptable metaphor.


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## Isa Ritchie (Jul 3, 2012)

Terrence OBrien said:


> That share-friendly dominant culture has been tried many times, and the result was usually poverty and subsistence living. That has been the rule for most of human history.
> 
> In the last two hundred years, we have managed to provide more prosperity for more people than at any other period in history. Much of this can be traced to the development of capitalism, and the various stages of economic organization that led to it. And they couldn't have existed without property rights which began to develop into their modern form in Europe starting about 1000AD.


I am currently undertaking a PhD on food sovereignty. In the past 200 years we have created more prosperity, true, but at the same time we have created more poverty. Global capitalism is responsible for mass poverty, starvation and dislocation all around the world. Check out the international peasant movement Via La Campesina if you don't believe me.

The difference between a money taking another monkey's apple is that it is absolutely nothing like piracy  as Dalya said. A better metaphor would be if monkey A learned to wash the dirt off his apple before eating it and monkey B followed suit then monkey A said "Ooooh oh uh" meaning "hey, I invented that! I own that! I'm filing a law suit!"


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

Isa Ritchie said:


> The difference between a money taking another monkey's apple is that it is absolutely nothing like piracy  as Dalya said. A better metaphor would be if monkey A learned to wash the dirt off his apple before eating it and monkey B followed suit then monkey A said "Ooooh oh uh" meaning "hey, I invented that! I own that! I'm filing a law suit!"


The monkey [chimpanzee] example wasn't a metaphor for piracy. It was to illustrate the difference between THEFT and INFRINGEMENT.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> I am currently undertaking a PhD on food sovereignty. In the past 200 years we have created more prosperity, true, but at the same time we have created more poverty. Global capitalism is responsible for mass poverty, starvation and dislocation all around the world. Check out the international peasant movement Via La Campesina if you don't believe me.


I'll concede I have no idea what food sovereignty means. And I agree there is more poverty if we simply count heads. But on a percentage basis it is much smaller than it was. Likewise, if we count heads, there is much more prosperity, and on a percentage basis it is much higher than it was. Capitalism and the mobilization of resources it allows led to the prosperity and reduction of the percentage living in poverty.

Those living in poverty today were living in the same state prior to global capitalism. But many who were once living in poverty now live in much more prosperous circumstances. Prosperity continues to encroach on poverty. It's been doing it for 200 years.

I'll discuss whatever you like here, but I won't be looking at Via La Campesina. And I won't ask you to read various economic texts. I'll make my own case.


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## Isa Ritchie (Jul 3, 2012)

If you divide overall prosperity by people perhaps there would be less poverty but because of unequal distribution there is a lot more actual physical poverty and starvation now.

*There are more people living in poverty now than any other time in history.*

Percentage based or otherwise. If you measure prosperity by the GDP of countries, then you're not really looking at poverty, just the number of economic transactions.

The number of people living in poverty is steadily growing as more and more people are being forced off their land by large corporations intending to grow crops for biofuels etc. Before these companies come in people are able to live sustainably on their land. When their means of food production is taken away they are left in abject poverty.

You know all those starving kids on TV that you can sponsor - there wouldn't be nearly as many of them if people were not being forced off their land. Global capitalism/corporatism (not the nice farmers market variety) is one of the biggest causes of global poverty. Another big cause of global poverty (ironically) is the food 'aid' the US used to give to poor countries to offload their massive surplus and also to win political bargaining power. This created a huge dependency and at the end of the cold war there was, all of a sudden, no more surplus and massive poverty. I have been reading a lot about this recently.
_Sorry for going so off-topic_


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> If you divide overall prosperity by people perhaps there would be less poverty but because of unequal distribution there is a lot more actual physical poverty and starvation now.


More than what? I agree world population has grown, and I agree impoverished populations have likewise grown. What does that have to do with capitalism? Likewise, the prosperity of peoples is greater than at any time. Entire continents live lives never dreamed of before in history.



> Percentage based or otherwise. If you measure prosperity by the GDP of countries, then you're not really looking at poverty, just the number of economic transactions.


No. GDP looks at the value of all goods and services produced by the country. Number of transactions often correlates to GDP, but transactions have to represent value before that can contribute to GDP. GDP is definitely not a count of transactions.



> The number of people living in poverty is steadily growing as more and more people are being forced off their land by large corporations intending to grow crops for biofuels etc.


The biofuel industry is minuscule, and it's greatest concentration is in Iowa. It has nowhere near the power to increase poverty that simple reproduction of impoverished populations has.



> You know all those starving kids on TV that you can sponsor - there wouldn't be nearly as many of them if people were not being forced off their land.


I don't accept TV commercials as evidence of anything.



> Another big cause of global poverty (ironically) is the food 'aid' the US used to give to poor countries to offload their massive surplus and also to win political bargaining power.


I suppose if they had starved to death we would have fewer in poverty.



> This created a huge dependency and at the end of the cold war there was, all of a sudden, no more surplus and massive poverty.


Dependency isn't imposed. It is created internally and exacerbated by corrupt social and governmental systems.


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## Isa Ritchie (Jul 3, 2012)

Let me paste some quotes from some peer-reviewed articles for you, then we can get back to the piracy debate:

"On July 3rd 2008 the Guardian exposed a secret World Bank report that claimed that the US and the EU agrofuel policies were responsible for three quarters of the 140 percent increase in food prices between 2002 and 2008." (Bello & Baviera, 2011)

“Large U.S. agricultural subsidies led to a transformation of markets and diets in the Global South as the federal government began disposing of chronic grain surpluses in the U.S. through the mechanism of food aid.  This ingenious arrangement, codified as Public Law 480 (PL480) served the dual purpose of winning allies in the Global South during the Cold War and disposing of surpluses in such a way as to cause dependency and create future markets for those grains. (Friedmann, 1993)

Of course it all depends on how you define poverty.  There are more than 2billion people living below the poverty line but you could say 200 years ago all but the few rich and middle class people were 'poor' but before being forced off their land (as with the British Commons) they had the ability to sustain themselves and produce their own food.  That is food sovereignty. 

If you want to continue this debate we should probably do it somewhere else.

In my research I am looking at the democratisation of food, which unlike the democratisation of knowledge (piracy, etc) has physical boundaries.  It's too bad you can't download a piece of fruit.

It's a bit like that anti-piracy ad - you wouldn't steal a car.  No but I'd download one if I could


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## Adam Pepper (May 28, 2011)

Most of us are writing fiction. So we aren't withholding any knowledge but rather sharing our own imaginations. And we aren't trying to take food from the mouths of the starving but rather a few bucks of disposable income from those who have it readily available to spend.


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## jackz4000 (May 15, 2011)

Adam Pepper said:


> Most of us are writing fiction. So we aren't withholding any knowledge but rather sharing our own imaginations. And we aren't trying to take food from the mouths of the starving but rather a few bucks of disposable income from those who have it readily available to spend.


Agree. ^^^

isa--With fictional stories we are not talking about "withholding of important information." Fictional stories are not food. Nor should they be used to leverage your argument which gets thinner with each post.

Isa--I have no love for most corporations, but you are heaping too much blame on them. Most of these impoverished countries are a mess and they keep producing babies and their populations far outstrip available resources. Their governments are so corrupt they defy belief. This is not a political forum, please find a few.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Let me paste some quotes from some peer-reviewed articles for you, then we can get back to the piracy debate:


I'm not going to accept quotes from anything as definitive without the evidence for the conclusions. Note the two quotes you cite are contradictory complaints. One cites a secret report and complains about price increases. The other cites subsidies and complains about food price decreases.

And Guardian articles? They are not peer reviewed. Neither are secret World Bank reports. They wouldn't be secret if they were. B&B may have had some peers involved, but that tells us nothing about either the Guardian or the World Bank. All the reviewers could possibly have done is look up the Guardian article.



> Of course it all depends on how you define poverty. There are more than 2billion people living below the poverty line but you could say 200 years ago all but the few rich and middle class people were 'poor' but before being forced off their land (as with the British Commons) they had the ability to sustain themselves and produce their own food. That is food sovereignty.


If two billion are below the poverty line, then capitalism and property rights have been a howling success over the past two hundred years as the populations represented by the other five billion have risen above it.



> Democratisation of food.


What does that mean?


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> I'll concede I have no idea what food sovereignty means. And I agree there is more poverty if we simply count heads. But on a percentage basis it is much smaller than it was. Likewise, if we count heads, there is much more prosperity, and on a percentage basis it is much higher than it was. Capitalism and the mobilization of resources it allows led to the prosperity and reduction of the percentage living in poverty.
> 
> Those living in poverty today were living in the same state prior to global capitalism. But many who were once living in poverty now live in much more prosperous circumstances. Prosperity continues to encroach on poverty. It's been doing it for 200 years.
> 
> I'll discuss whatever you like here, but I won't be looking at Via La Campesina. And I won't ask you to read various economic texts. I'll make my own case.


Are you seriously saying you believe what you just posted? While even in the US and the UK, more and more of that "prosperity" has gone into the hands of a smaller and smaller percentage of the population?

What is to blame for the widespread (and severe) poverty in much of Africa and the Indian sub-continent? It couldn't POSSIBLY have anything to do with its conquest by "First World" nations who stripped their assets, broke up long standing governmental and social constructs and then retreated leaving behind chaos and -- yes -- poverty. But it's their own fault for getting in our way and having assets we wanted.

Edit: Is it coincidence that the imperialists who raped much of the world were also capitalists? A whole different debate.

Also a different debate is the affect at the type of capitalism which has evolved in which most of the world's assets are in the hands of multinational corporations which evolution many blame for the growing poverty even in first world countries.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Are you seriously saying you believe what you just posted? While even in the US and the UK, more and more of that "prosperity" has gone into the hands of a smaller and smaller percentage of the population?


Of course I believe it. That's why I wrote it. Prosperity is not a zero sum game. The fact that one person increases his prosperity does not mean another person's prosperity diminishes.



> What is to blame for the widespread (and severe) poverty in much of Africa and the Indian sub-continent? It couldn't POSSIBLY have anything to do with its conquest by "First World" nations who stripped their assets, broke up long standing governmental and social constructs and then retreated leaving behind chaos and -- yes -- poverty. But it's their own fault for getting in our way and having assets we wanted.


They were in poverty before they met the first world. So was what we call the first world. There was no first world. There were just Europeans with ships. The Chinese had better ships, sailed farther, and decided the rest of the world was a barbarian wasteland. Remember how the Chinese rejected European trade goods because they were inferior to what China had? The princes who ruled were rich, but not the rest of the folks. What assets were stripped? Both places are rich in resources. Remember, this discussion focused on how capitalism causes poverty. To cause poverty, one would have to move from prosperity to poverty. That didn't happen. India continues to drop its socialism in favor of capitalism, and they increase their prosperity as they do.



> Edit: Is it coincidence that the imperialists who raped much of the world were also capitalists? A whole different debate.


You would have to specify the years and people in question.



> Also a different debate is the affect at the type of capitalism which has evolved in which most of the world's assets are in the hands of multinational corporations which evolution many blame for the growing poverty even in first world countries.


And who owns the corporations?


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

B.


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## Lily_T (Sep 25, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Nathan is quite capable of speaking for himself. But so am I. I would take this to refer to the theory of natural law and natural rights developed from Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and the Enlightenment philosophers. (And a host of others.)


Eh. Natural law builds its scaffolding around the defense of property. Property does not exist in the absence of a social contract. I still don't see it.


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## Lily_T (Sep 25, 2011)

Isa Ritchie said:


> Lily_T, are you implying that our modern ideas about property are the same as the ancient cultures you mention? That is a bit far fetched. I don't think they had copyright laws at all


Nope, not implying. I'm stating (in opposition to your assertion that property rights are a modern invention) that ancient cultures had a far more developed concept of property.

In fact the trend throughout history is toward a loosening of property rights (which is what you're arguing for, so I'm actually a little surprised that you don't realize this) and the removal of categories from the class of property. For e.g. spouses, children, your employees and their children, vanquished political rivals, the lands of vanquished political rivals etc.

Copyright is an outgrowth of mass media. For most of human history mass media did not exist so it was unnecessary. And even now all it does is grant you the right to a copy of a _work of art_. While Mickey will pass into the public domain in the near future, Disneyland will not. You may have seen the Mona Lisa or read Jane Eyre, but you certainly don't have a right to the original painting or first editions of the book and you'd be laughed out of any court for suggesting you did. But if history is anything to go by, it will be different in the future. Plus ca change.


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## Lily_T (Sep 25, 2011)

NathanWrann said:


> Are you seriously asking this question today? Is there a person alive that would look at the massacre in Aurora Colorado and think that what that person did in that movie theater is only bad in the eyes of the law? It's sickening in every context. There's a reason that "good" people don't walk around and randomly kill without need or reason, because it goes against human nature. It goes against survival of the species. We don't need laws to tell us it is bad. There are other universal violations against humanity but I don't think it is necessary to belabor this point.


I cried when I read about Aurora and especially about Jessica Ghawi (can you imagine...narrowly missing one crazed gunman only to be delivered to another?) so I'd answer your first question with a "no."

But that doesn't mean I can't still dispute your claim of natural laws which it seems you've now shaded into a concept of natural morality. The existence of conflicting codes of morality unravels that line of argument. My assertion is that human are naturally selfish and self-aggrandizing and this leads naturally to conflicts. Natural law theories rob our ancestors of the acknowledgement of the work it took to create and enforce social contracts. Patting ourselves on the back for our inborn morality(? ) trivializes this work and leads to complacency which in turn leads to Bad Things.

It is "natural" to you because it is what you've been taught, but in actuality it is the product of thousands of years of social engineering.



NathanWrann said:


> You seem to think that 1789 America was the wild wild west. Need I remind you that that is 13 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. I live in New England, this region of America has been civilized for quite some time. There would be no duel in the street*. Are you saying that intellectual property would have started wars even further back? It is well known that William Shakespeare stole every idea he ever had, were there "bloodier and nastier" disputes over his work?
> 
> Even in the wild west I hardly think that someone would kill someone else over a campfire tale.


You didn't qualify that example as needing to occur within the Northern States of America or even in America at all. As you may well know levels of stranger aggression and the adherence to honor codes varied and still vary by region in America. As for the rest of it, there's plenty that I find uncivilized about New England in the 16th century, (and New England today even) but that might have to do with my personal politics so I'll abandon this thread of the discussion.

Also it is well-known (lol) that William Shakespeare stole ideas and inspiration. I've not seen serious peer-reviewed scholarship that outs him as a plagiarist/copyright infringer. Which is what your example was about right?

*It's not for me to say what may or may not have moved people to murder. The microfiches at your local library can give you a good accounting of what people did in fact kill for and a lot of it would read as trivial to our "civilized" eyes.


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## Lily_T (Sep 25, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> And who owns the corporations?


This is just an aside, but I hate when people blame corporations and then stop. right. there. It's such a petty defense from having to follow the buck and therefore implicate yourself in the misery you're railing against. Guess what? If you're posting on Kindleboards then you're relatively privileged as far as the world goes and therefore statistically likely to be part of the problem.

Swallow that bitter pill. Own it. Then turn that impotent rage into something potent.

Well that's me for today. Thanks for the discussion KB. My husband goes silent and shifty-eyed if the words history or philosphy are mentioned so this is a nice change.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

NathanWrann said:


> Thought about this some more today and I think I disagree with you. If I read your statement above correctly you're saying that theft and property only exist as they are defined by law. That without law or fiat then there can be no theft and no property.
> 
> So I thought of the following example:


I'm not disputing the difference between theft and infringement; I'm saying it's a distinction without a difference when it comes to its legality. Infringement isn't somehow less wrong or less legitimate because it lacks antiquity. Then again, the principle behind it-that labour belongs to the one who laboured-is as old as the law itself.

Of course, I could easily show that draining your bank account isn't physical harm. Terrence mentioned a bit of this. Come to that, I could probably show that I'd be doing you a potential favour by raiding your account. But that's the beauty of casuistry: you can prove anything.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

I'm not getting into the anti-free-market silliness, because it's just that. But it's worth noting a remark by TO:



Terrence OBrien said:


> Prosperity is not a zero sum game. The fact that one person increases his prosperity does not mean another person's prosperity diminishes.


Cultural anthropologists call this the "idea of limited good." It has a name not only because it's so common across cultures, but also because it's the basic reason tribes stay tribes. Everyone believes someone else's gain is their loss, so they take measures to prevent wealth accumulation, which puts the kibosh to growth.


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## jackz4000 (May 15, 2011)

Isa Ritchie said:


> Lily_T, are you implying that our modern ideas about property are the same as the ancient cultures you mention?
> 
> Greg, your construction of children as something to be 'owned' disturbs me. I prefer the Maori concept of Kaitiakitanga, loosely translated as guardianship, to that of ownership. I am the guardian of my child, of my home, of the environment etc.


Since the beginning of the Holocene and the development of farming property has been a huge issue. Prior to that in the hunter/gatherer periods--not so important.

The Maori guardians of their enviroment. Since arriving in NZ in the 1300's they hunted millions of the moa bird to extinction and other animals. The moa was a flightless 16 foot tall chicken (emu-like) and within 100 years it was extinct from over hunting by the Maori. They were not the guardians of the enviroment you present. Many other animals were killed off in the Maori hunting practice of burning down forests so they could easily kill the animals escaping.

It was common worldwide for primitive societies to burn thousands of acres for a easy hunt and pre-cooked too.

Many primitive societies were just as bad with their environments as people were 200 years ago. Some worse. We prefer to bash everything recent.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Of course I believe it. That's why I wrote it. Prosperity is not a zero sum game. The fact that one person increases his prosperity does not mean another person's prosperity diminishes...


It does not mean that one person's prosperity _has to_ diminish another's, but if you are oblivious to the fact that this is the way society has, and continues to, work for the most part since the dawn of time, you are either delusional or naive. Africa was a very prosperous country in its own right until many of their people were stolen and enslaved, and their resources claimed by others. The Native Americans now live in poverty on the Reservations they were relegated to by the outsiders, despite the fact that the very land the outsiders built this country on (with the labor of enslaved Africans, I might add) belonged to them first.

History is filthy with this scenario being repeated over and over again, yet you honestly think that one has nothing to do with the other?


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

You mean the North American Indians had property rights? Clovis Estates? I think they had slaves, too. Seems  just about everyone did.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> You mean the North American Indians had property rights? Clovis Estates?


The urbanites of Cahokia probably did. Their city was quite well-ordered and even included gated estates. (They probably had unwritten CC&Rs and everything.) But what does this have to do with pirates?

B.


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## Shadow XX (Jul 16, 2012)

I'm never bothered when someone pirates my work. Chances are if they pirate books they weren't going to buy it anyway, so no loss. And I know for definite I've got sales from people who have read pirated versions of some of my stories and wanted more, or who have been recommended my stories by someone who pirated them. Everyone gains in the end. It may not be fair, but it's reality, and it works out for me in the end.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

Property rights. It's an unbroken chain from downloading a book back to the Chahokia, and probably further in multiple branches.

I haven't read about Chahokias.  But the story of the North American Indian civilizations the very first European explorers found compared to what the guys a hundred years later found is getting curiouser and curiouser. There's a good book for someone in there.

EDIT: Yes. These are the folks deSoto found in 1540, but by the time Europeans returned to the area, they were gone. Lack of immunity seems to be the suspect.


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## Shelley K (Sep 19, 2011)

B. Justin Shier said:


> The urbanites of Cahokia probably did. Their city was quite well-ordered and even included gated estates. (They probably had unwritten CC&Rs and everything.) But what does this have to do with pirates?
> 
> B.


They also apparently made human sacrifices.

Weren't we talking about copying a digital file?

I think it's crummy that big sites take a copy and put it online for the masses to download free. There's no point in that. But A copying a file of something he's read and liked and sharing it with B who might share it with another friend, we've been doing that with books, music and movies since they existed.

And nobody will ever stop either. My best friend is a scumbag according to some in this thread. She downloads ebooks off a pirate site all the time. If she starts reading and it sucks, she deletes it. If she reads it and loves it, she goes and buys everything that writer has available and tells me and her other friends how we absolutely must check them out. What a degenerate.


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## jackz4000 (May 15, 2011)

Greg Banks said:


> It does not mean that one person's prosperity _has to_ diminish another's, but if you are oblivious to the fact that this is the way society has, and continues to, work for the most part since the dawn of time, you are either delusional or naive. Africa was a very prosperous country in its own right until many of their people were stolen and enslaved, and their resources claimed by others. The Native Americans now live in poverty on the Reservations they were relegated to by the outsiders, despite the fact that the very land the outsiders built this country on (with the labor of enslaved Africans, I might add) belonged to them first.
> 
> History is filthy with this scenario being repeated over and over again, yet you honestly think that one has nothing to do with the other?


Slavery has been with with us since before the ancient Egyptians. Whenever one tribe conquered another down through the ages the losers got to be slaves or die. During the Roman Empire most people were slaves, that's why Spartacus was so dangerous, over 2/3 d's of the population of Rome was slaves.

From the 7th century onward the Arabs controlled most slavery and made it into a thriving business grabbing slaves from all over Africa and selling them. They would grab Americans and Europeans, whatever they could get. Barbary Pirates?

Some were sold by tribal chiefs in many areas to the slavers for things they wanted. It wasn't until Stanley and Livingstone penetrated the Congo that the world heard of how massive the slave business was. And that was 10 years after the US Civil War.

Sadly in many places slavery is still common.

*Cahokia?? * Uuummm cannibals too.


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## BRONZEAGE (Jun 25, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> I haven't read about Chahokias. But the story of the North American Indian civilizations the very first European explorers found compared to what the guys a hundred years later found is getting curiouser and curiouser. *There's a good book for someone in there.*


Someone wrote it. See Tony Horwitz, *A Voyage Long And Strange.*

Native tribes: see the numerous titles from Kathleen O'Neal Gear and Richard Gear, archaeologists who write fiction set in pre-european North America. ( Plotlines tend to repeat but their research is good. )


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

jackz4000 said:


> Sadly in many places slavery is still common.


Yep. Like the United States.

_"With job descriptions ranging in scope from prostitute to waiter to maid, more than 150,000 people in the United States are living in slavery, according to the U.S. Department of Justice."_

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700205764/Stolen-innocence-The-battle-against-modern-day-slavery-in-the-US.html?pg=all

Globally:

_"27 million people are enslaved, more than at the height of the transatlantic slave trade."_

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0901/p16s01-wogi.html

Sorry for continuing the tangent. 

B.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Terrence OBrien said:


> You mean the North American Indians had property rights? Clovis Estates? I think they had slaves, too. Seems just about everyone did.


When you show me the property rights (or civil or moral rights, for that matter) that justified the Europeans coming in and taking their land away, slaughtering and/or relegating them to tiny little portions of the very land on which they stood first, then perhaps the above comment might have some relevance.


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## jackz4000 (May 15, 2011)

They didn't have any rights really. Except man's right to take, which he always seems to exercise. South America had 50 million people and North America had 8 million natives peoples before Columbus. Some say more, some say less. Scientists squabble. The diseases brought by the Europeans and Africans killed off 85% of the Indians. They had no resistance. There was little left to slaughter when disease does it. The Euro's didn't even have to visit the city--the diseases were carried on the wind.

Without an immunity to smallpox, plague, measles, chicken pox, black death, whooping cough, tuberculosis, etc and all the other diseases brought to the America's the native Indians populations crumbled. If disease had not ravaged them so severely they would have beat back the Europeans...at least for some time.


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## Isa Ritchie (Jul 3, 2012)

jackz4000 said:


> Since the beginning of the Holocene and the development of farming property has been a huge issue. Prior to that in the hunter/gatherer periods--not so important.
> 
> The Maori guardians of their enviroment. Since arriving in NZ in the 1300's they hunted millions of the moa bird to extinction and other animals. The moa was a flightless 16 foot tall chicken (emu-like) and within 100 years it was extinct from over hunting by the Maori. They were not the guardians of the enviroment you present. Many other animals were killed off in the Maori hunting practice of burning down forests so they could easily kill the animals escaping.
> 
> ...


As a New Zealander I'm well aware of the extinction of the Moa, etc. Every time human beings have settled in a previously unpopulated land they tend to kill off species and part of that is just an ecological process and takes a while to balance out. I think for Maori, after seeing these extinctions, they learnt how to be guardians of the environment and saw it as interconnected with their own well being. It takes a long time for people to learn lessons like this I guess, but never underestimate humanity's ability to respond and adapt to a crisis.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Of course I believe it. That's why I wrote it. Prosperity is not a zero sum game. The fact that one person increases his prosperity does not mean another person's prosperity diminishes.


People make arguments all the time that they don't actually believe.

One person's prosperity increasing would not necessarily means another diminishes but that doesn't change the fact that more assets have gone into the hands of a small percentage of the population while those in the hands of the middle class have diminished markedly. So that it didn't HAVE to have happened didn't keep it FROM happening. And it continues to happen at an increasing rate.


> They were in poverty before they met the first world. So was what we call the first world. There was no first world. There were just Europeans with ships. The Chinese had better ships, sailed farther, and decided the rest of the world was a barbarian wasteland. Remember how the Chinese rejected European trade goods because they were inferior to what China had? The princes who ruled were rich, but not the rest of the folks. What assets were stripped? Both places are rich in resources. Remember, this discussion focused on how capitalism causes poverty. To cause poverty, one would have to move from prosperity to poverty. That didn't happen. India continues to drop its socialism in favor of capitalism, and they increase their prosperity as they do.
> 
> You would have to specify the years and people in question.


First World is the best term for it since it was NOT only Europeans. Ever heard of a country called the US that has gone around empire building? It's not only Europe.

I will give you that the nation that was best as it was the British.

That the entirety of the rest of the world was in poverty and were rescued by our ('our' being Europe and the US) conquering them is BS. China had a substantial portion of its population forced into addiction after TWO opium wars by the British to force them to buy opium. There was poverty in India but much of it was prosperous (a similar mix of a few rich, a merchant class and a lot of poor that you would find in oh-so-superior Europe and the US) until it was raped by the British. Then ALL of Indian was impoverished except a few pet Indians allowed to keep token power and their British conquerors. But they were supposed to be grateful.

The same with much of Africa and various European conquerors while the US helped itself to the Philippines and various other minor bits.

The argument that the entire world was in poverty and should be grateful for being conquered is so specious as to be ridiculous.

Of course there were poor in China and Africa. There were no more poor there than in Britain or much of Europe and simultaneous to much of the conquest of the world, potato famines and forced migration in the Highland Clearances was depopulating poverty-stricken Ireland and Scotland back home in Europe and the Corn Laws and Poor Laws were keeping the poor in England in hand. So don't do the "Europeans are so superior" thing with me.



> Who owns the corporations?


Myths perpetuated by various people notwithstanding, most of the ownership and control of the corporations is in the hands of the small percentage of the population that is wealthy.


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## Sequart (Jun 10, 2012)

NathanWrann said:


> There's another thread today asking "have your books been pirated" so I didn't want to take that thread OT.
> 
> Hello NathanWrann,
> 
> ...


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

The extent of the rightness or wrongness of colonialism can be debated all day. It's a matter of cosmic justice, Justice with a capital "J." But the claim that Europeans "stole the wealth of the colonies [etc.]" presumes the colonies had wealth to steal in the first place. Some people seem to think the colonized parts of the world all had big bags of money laying around and Europeans went in and seized their money bags at gun point.

That's not how it worked then or how it works today. The colonized world had trade routes, boats and basic mining and agricultural abilities. But none had ports, ships, roads, railroads and steam engines, smelters, factories and true mass-agriculture techniques. (India and China are partial exceptions, though they lacked free markets, private capital and railroads.) How did all these things get to the colonized world? European capital built all these things. In other words, it was European money that built the ports, ships, roads, railroads, factories, mines and smelters, cleared the land for agriculture and, equally important, provided the markets for the goods produced there.

So all the "stolen wealth" was also mostly created by the people who "stole" it. Sure, the majority of the labour came (sometimes unwillingly) from the locals. But the wealth didn't exist until the colonizers created it.

Again, I'm not trying to argue it was all for the good or that Europeans did for the benefit of the colonized. But it is simple ignorance (willful or otherwise) to claim that wealth was stolen when the direction of capital flow was out of the West, not into it.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

Sequart said:


> Our most popular book, Improving the Foundations: Batman Begins from Comics to Screen, has been extensively pirated. From the data we have been able to gather, it seems that the turn over rate [i.e. purchase] of this book has been roughly %10. If people really like it they will occasionally buy it; the data suggest that sections of the pirate community treat pirating as a "try before you buy" phenomenon. While the opportunity cost of lost revenue can hurt a publisher with a smaller book line, it seems to encourage future [, available] purchases.


Sounds like we're in the same ballpark. I think my conversion rate (from pirated to paid) is around 5%.

I think you'll agree that what then becomes really hard to quantify is the word-of-mouth effect these pirated 'sales' have. When one of these individuals posts on a message board about a positive reading experience, does it lead to paid sales?

I strongly believe it does. Some make the 'pirates only hang out with pirates' argument, but I think this argument is silly. Internet pirates do not live in hide-outs on Roatan. They live with their parents in the suburbs. They live on college campuses. They comprise some the hardest to reach demographic segments (including the infamous 'Lost Boys', males 18-35), and many ONLY trust word-of-mouth advertising. In the ideal world, piracy is not how I would prefer to reach them, but I am certainly not going to cut my nose off to spite my face.

B.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

WHDean said:


> The extent of the rightness or wrongness of colonialism can be debated all day. It's a matter of cosmic justice, Justice with a capital "J." But the claim that Europeans "stole the wealth of the colonies [etc.]" presumes the colonies had wealth to steal in the first place. Some people seem to think the colonized parts of the world all had big bags of money laying around and Europeans went in and seized their money bags at gun point.
> 
> That's not how it worked then or how it works today. The colonized world had trade routes, boats and basic mining and agricultural abilities. But none had ports, ships, roads, railroads and steam engines, smelters, factories and true mass-agriculture techniques. (India and China are partial exceptions, though they lacked free markets, private capital and railroads.) How did all these things get to the colonized world? European capital built all these things. In other words, it was European money that built the ports, ships, roads, railroads, factories, mines and smelters, cleared the land for agriculture and, equally important, provided the markets for the goods produced there.
> 
> ...


That's true if you define wealth in "First World" terms, but the meaning of prosperity and wealth are different in New York City than an African village deep in the jungle away from "civilized" society. I think it's very fair at least to say that both the Native Americans and the Africans lost much of their prosperity (if not "wealth" per se) due to the outsiders who came in and stole their resources, and in many cases their people as well.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> When you show me the property rights (or civil or moral rights, for that matter) that justified the Europeans coming in and taking their land away, slaughtering and/or relegating them to tiny little portions of the very land on which they stood first, then perhaps the above comment might have some relevance.


Property rights have relevance regardless of what I am shown.


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## Paul Clayton (Sep 12, 2009)

Don't dress up stealing.  Pirating books is stealing.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Property rights have relevance regardless of I am shown.


Of course it has relevance, which is the point. The Europeans had NONE. You could claim that the Native Americans had none either, but they were living on it, and as I recall, in those days the way one gained ownership of land was to lay claim to it, however, I don't think you could lay claim to land that someone else already had claimed. And the Native Americans didn't have to lay claim to the land, because they were _already there when the Europeans came_.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

Sure. The Chohokia probably enforced them in their areas. The Europeans did the same in theirs. The Chahokia and Europeans had extremely little contact. They sent DeSoto running down the river for his life. They enforced their property rights.


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## jackz4000 (May 15, 2011)

Greg Banks said:


> Of course it has relevance, which is the point. The Europeans had NONE. You could claim that the Native Americans had none either, but they were living on it, and as I recall, in those days the way one gained ownership of land was to lay claim to it, however, I don't think you could lay claim to land that someone else already had claimed. And the Native Americans didn't have to lay claim to the land, because they were _already there when the Europeans came_.


Greg, throughout history countries/nations/states/empires/kings/queens/pharaohs simply took the lands they wanted from others. Didn't matter who lived there first. Didn't need to be Euro either. Look at Alexander, Xerxes, Ur, the Romans, Hyskos etc.

The Kingdom of Kush conquered the Egyptians because they wanted the land and the Nile valley and the Egyptians were looking weak. Actually in the timescape of history the NA Indians were treated far better than others throughout human history.

Anyway where are the pirates? This thread had really jumped the track. And those Indians? Look what they did to the Vikings? It's the pirates fault.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> People make arguments all the time that they don't actually believe.


And on the Eighth Day the Lord said, "Let there be lawyers, and let them walk the earth speaking what they don't believe." And on the Ninth Day the lawyers said, "Lord, will the court entertain a motion for billable hours?"



> One person's prosperity increasing would not necessarily means another diminishes but that doesn't change the fact that more assets have gone into the hands of a small percentage of the population while those in the hands of the middle class have diminished markedly. So that it didn't HAVE to have happened didn't keep it FROM happening. And it continues to happen at an increasing rate.


But that's not a fact. The middle class has experienced a huge increase in assets over the past 200 years. Anyone still running outside to the privy at night? If you do, do you take your iPhone? Ain't this a great country?



> That the entirety of the rest of the world was in poverty and were rescued by our ('our' being Europe and the US) conquering them is BS.


Well, most of the world was living in poverty. But the rescue? Perhaps someone will make that case.



> China had a substantial portion of its population forced into addiction after TWO opium wars by the British to force them to buy opium.


Wouldn't it have been easier to just force them to buy the crappy British trade goods? Then they could have called it the Tea Pot War. Why bother with opium? The answer is simple. There was a huge demand for opium among the Chinese. The Chinese government prohibited trade. The Brits forced the Chinese government to allow trade. So the Chinese bought and used. But nobody was forced to buy. Nobody was forced to use. They were lined up waiting to buy. They acted freely when the goods were offered for sale.



> Myths perpetuated by various people notwithstanding, most of the ownership and control of the corporations is in the hands of the small percentage of the population that is wealthy.


A good place to start is with the US pension funds. They have huge portfolios. CalPers is the largest single US investor with a $236 billion portfilio invested in all kinds of stocks, bonds, etc. Pogo said it best: "_We have met the enemy, and he is us_."


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

jackz4000 said:


> Greg, throughout history countries/nations/states/empires/kings/queens/pharaohs simply took the lands they wanted from others. Didn't matter who lived there first. Didn't need to be Euro either. Look at Alexander, Xerxes, Ur, the Romans, Hyskos etc.
> 
> The Kingdom of Kush conquered the Egyptians because they wanted the land and the Nile valley and the Egyptians were looking weak. Actually in the timescape of history the NA Indians were treated far better than others throughout human history.
> 
> Anyway where are the pirates? This thread had really jumped the track. And those Indians? Look what they did to the Vikings? It's the pirates fault.


Cold blooded murder has been around throughout history too, but I don't see anyone making a case to justify it. I never said what was done to the Native Americans or the Africans was new, I said was wrong. The same is true for piracy, even if Jack Sparrow is a rather lovable pirate.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> That's true if you define wealth in "First World" terms, but the meaning of prosperity and wealth are different in New York City than an African village deep in the jungle away from "civilized" society.


It's interesting to observe how views of prosperity converge once people are exposed to the range of goods and services available. Those African villagers like iPods and sneakers just as much as the New Yorkers. They freely choose civilization, and define prosperity for themselves..


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## Krista D. Ball (Mar 8, 2011)

Bottom line: if an author says they don't want their works pirated and people pirate them, that is dirty, scumy, and those people aren't fans; they are thieves.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Terrence OBrien said:


> It's interesting to observe how views of prosperity converge once people are exposed to the range of goods and services available. Those African villagers like iPods and sneakers just as much as the New Yorkers. They freely choose civilization, and define prosperity for themselves..


I don't think that necessarily means they are any less exploited, especially when we are talking about many villages that are no longer prosperous for the reasons we've been discussing, and are just as desperate for food and water. They are disadvantaged now, unlike 400+ years ago, when they were treated like cattle and dragged away to be sold at auction in a far away land.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

Exploited by knowledge? I don't know. They still choose their own definition of prosperity. They like iPods. They like sneakers. They don't give a hoot what we think about it. Good for them.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Exploited by knowledge? I don't know. They still choose their own definition of prosperity


I don't know. Just because a hungry dog greedily accepts a bone, I don't know the dog would consider himself "prosperous". The Africans may think of it as prosperity, but whether they do or not, I think any implications you're trying to infer from that is negated because of this state of disadvantage. A person who is kidnapped and held against their will can become emotionally attached to the kidnapper, but that doesn't in any way change the nature of the situation or the guilt of the kidnapper. I think you have an awfully low opinion of the Africans (much like those who impoverished them in the first place), if you're going to sum them and their predicament up on the basis of a few Western "perks" that have been given to them. Would you have a higher opinion of them if they turned down these trinkets and instead rose up and slaughtered the outsiders? They are being given these toys by the very same people who bring them the things they do need, like food and medicine. People who are likely the descendents of the same people who began the downfall of their culture and leading to their impoverishment to begin with.

The whole situation is a convoluted and sad mess, and trying to somehow disparage the character or values of these people, to me, is not much better an attitude than the ones who dragged fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons, off to slavery over 400+ years ago. So I really don't understand the point you've been trying to make with this train of thought? It in no way changes the circumstances behind their present situation.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> So I really don't understand the point you've been trying to make with this train of thought? It in no way changes the circumstances behind their present situation.


My point has been very simple. Over the past 200 years capitalism has brought more prosperity to more people than anything else in history, and property rights are essential to capitalism.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

This thread is starting to remind me of _The Tragedy of Man_.



Terrence OBrien said:


> My point has been very simple. Over the past 200 years capitalism has brought more prosperity to more people than anything else in history, and property rights are essential to capitalism.


Norman Borlaug, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture, and the US Department of Agriculture get a little credit too. 

B.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Terrence OBrien said:


> My point has been very simple. Over the past 200 years capitalism has brought more prosperity to more people than anything else in history, and property rights are essential to capitalism.


More people have become prosperous and more people have become poor, and the growth of the poor has been greater. And the gap between the prosperous and the poor has grown. Your point doesn't exactly hold any sort of positive merit because it's a one-sided and simplified view of a much broader and complex situation. Easy to say prosperity has grown when you close a blind eye to the millions around the world living in poverty, or close to it.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Norman Borlaug, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture, and the US Department of Agriculture get a little credit too.


Sure. They did great things. So did lots of others. And I expect many more to follow. Capitalism applauds them.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

Sequart said:


> Our most popular book, Improving the Foundations: Batman Begins from Comics to Screen, has been extensively pirated. From the data we have been able to gather, it seems that the turn over rate [i.e. purchase] of this book has been roughly %10. If people really like it they will occasionally buy it; the data suggest that sections of the pirate community treat pirating as a "try before you buy" phenomenon. While the opportunity cost of lost revenue can hurt a publisher with a smaller book line, it seems to encourage future [, available] purchases.


If you had the book removed from all pirate sites and nobody else pirated another copy of your book your sales would drop by whatever percentage those pirates make up, but you would keep it out of the hands of those_ dirty thieves_. Depending on what those sales actually add up to it seems that you would be cutting off your nose to spite your face. You probably wouldn't get a 10% return on paid advertising.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> More people have become prosperous and more people have become poor, and the growth of the poor has been greater.


I agree the number of people in poverty has grown. Poor populations reproduce. That makes more of them. That doesn't refute my point. The number of prospering people has also grown more than at any other time in history.

In percentage terms, the percent of the total population in poverty has fallen. The percentage prospering has shot up dramatically. The percentage prospering has continued to grow for 200 years. No other system has ever matched that.

The interesting thing today is all those poor folks have a model of something that has actually worked on a large scale. China just tried it. It worked.


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## Isa Ritchie (Jul 3, 2012)

I'm tempted to turn this thread into an argument in a novel - but then I would be pirating all your ideas


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## Guest (Jul 23, 2012)

NathanWrann said:


> You probably wouldn't get a 10% return on paid advertising.


Assuming this 10% is a direct coorellation to the book being pirated (and without asking the pirates themselves, I'm not sure how you even do that), but let's assume for a moment that 10% is a real number. Look at the subject matter of the book. This is a product with a voracious fan base. I would argue that those pirates who later bought the book would have bought it regardless. If the book had not been on the pirate sites, those people inclined to pay for it would have done so anyway as fanboys. Because the book is piggybacking off of a brand with over seventy years of rabid fan loyalty.


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## Jeroen Steenbeeke (Feb 3, 2012)

Isa Ritchie said:


> I'm tempted to turn this thread into an argument in a novel - but then I would be pirating all your ideas


Copying our text verbatim yes. Our ideas on the other hand, that would be patent law, not copyright law. A whole different debate.

Almost forgot: IANAL (I am not a lawyer)


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> I'm tempted to turn this thread into an argument in a novel - but then I would be pirating all your ideas


Ideas are always fair game. There is no copyright or ownership of ideas. Take what you wish and enjoy. It's only the individual's specific expression of ideas that could be pirated.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Greg Banks said:


> That's true if you define wealth in "First World" terms, but the meaning of prosperity and wealth are different in New York City than an African village deep in the jungle away from "civilized" society. I think it's very fair at least to say that both the Native Americans and the Africans lost much of their prosperity (if not "wealth" per se) due to the outsiders who came in and stole their resources, and in many cases their people as well.


When people talk about stolen wealth, they usually mean the material kind. The immaterial or intangible kind (e.g., quality of life) is much harder to measure, which is why I think this line of inquiry belongs to the realm of cosmic justice. That's another way of saying I don't know the answer to the right or wrong question-and I doubt there is one total answer.

But I will say this: that it was all bad is not clear cut. Every measure of material prosperity has improved for the colonized. Pre-Columbian North American Indians, for example, had a life expectancy of around 18-20 years (if memory serves me). Nowadays they have a life expectancy of around 60-70 years (depending on the group). "Are they living better or just longer?" is a hard question to answer because no one can really compare-time only goes in one direction.

Again, I'm not trying to justify colonialism. I just think there's more to it than goodies and baddies. For my part, I think all anyone can do is understand it.


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## Sequart (Jun 10, 2012)

B. Justin Shier said:


> Sounds like we're in the same ballpark. I think my conversion rate (from pirated to paid) is around 5%.
> 
> I think you'll agree that what then becomes really hard to quantify is the word-of-mouth effect these pirated 'sales' have. When one of these individuals posts on a message board about a positive reading experience, does it lead to paid sales... and many ONLY trust word-of-mouth advertising.


Perhaps figures for our company are slightly different from the book industry as a whole. Our company, focusing on comics, had to adapt to piracy. Comic print runs are marginal thanks to pirate scans. But, the base still exist to some degree. Word of mouth does play a "huge" impact. Alternative revenue streams have also covered production cost (i.e. kickstarter campaigns) which has made our Non-Profit company viable. Ironically, some of our biggest kickstarter contributors had admitted that they first found out about us via a "pirated" book/film.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Greg Banks said:


> More people have become prosperous and more people have become poor, and the growth of the poor has been greater. And the gap between the prosperous and the poor has grown. Your point doesn't exactly hold any sort of positive merit because it's a one-sided and simplified view of a much broader and complex situation. Easy to say prosperity has grown when you close a blind eye to the millions around the world living in poverty, or close to it.


Exactly. Something like 80% of the worlds population lives on less than $10 a day and about the same percentage live in countries were the differentials between rich and poor are widening.

Blaming the victims is an old trick but a rather worn out one.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

JRTomlin said:


> Exactly. Something like 80% of the worlds population lives on less than $10 a day and about the same percentage live in countries were the differentials between rich and poor are widening.
> 
> Blaming the victims is an old trick but a rather worn out one.


Agreed. It's also easy to make judgments about people whose economic situation you have no identity with. In other words, when you've got food on your table and a place to sleep, it's all too easy to look down upon those who don't have either.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> More people have become prosperous and more people have become poor, and the growth of the poor has been greater. And the gap between the prosperous and the poor has grown. Your point doesn't exactly hold any sort of positive merit because it's a one-sided and simplified view of a much broader and complex situation. Easy to say prosperity has grown when you close a blind eye to the millions around the world living in poverty, or close to it.


Capitalism has a hard time bringing prosperity to people who don't have capitalism as the base of their economy. For example, for a long time it didn't do much good for the Soviet bloc and China. North Korea and Cuba are still enjoying the perfect bliss of egalitarianism. South America flirted with it between dictators, and the Arabs aren't sure what they are using. India was pursuing socialism for a long time, and it's hard to figure out what much of Africa was pursuing.

Gaps in a given economy tell us nothing about the prosperity of the groups on either side of the gap. Both side might be enjoying the comfort of $100 sneakers, iPhones, and flat screen TVs.

I agree it is easy to say prosperity has grown. All we have to do is observe. Why wouldn't we say it? Stop and look around right now. Are you living a more prosperous life than your ancestors from 200 years back? The existence of poverty doesn't change the fact that capitalism has brought more prosperity to more people than anything else that has been tried. Ain't this a great country?


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## dalya (Jul 26, 2011)




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## Krista D. Ball (Mar 8, 2011)

Best response yet.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

dalya said:


>


I don't get it. Are you making fun of people for talking about this topic?


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## Gregory Lynn (Aug 9, 2011)

dalya said:


>


Did you bring enough for the whole class?


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Terrence OBrien said:


> ...*I agree it is easy to say prosperity has grown.* All we have to do is observe. Why wouldn't we say it? Stop and look around right now. Are you living a more prosperous life than your ancestors from 200 years back? The existence of poverty doesn't change the fact that capitalism has brought more prosperity to more people than anything else that has been tried. Ain't this a great country?


Observe the nice, pristine parts of town where you only hang out with people who share your prosperity, you mean. So easy to ignore all the people who are living in poverty, in many cases under the heel of those who are prosperous, having been shunned and taken advantage of to support your prosperity. It's a ridiculous assertion to that prosperity's growth is a positive one by the sheer numbers of those who are prosperous when the percentage of total people in poverty has grown. You wouldn't think it was a positive thing to say that the number of people who don't have malaria is growing if it was also true that the percentage of the total population with malaria was growing. Closing your eyes and pretending that only one side of the issue exists is quaint, but also quite silly.

The numbers are growing because the population is growing. But the percentages are the key, and poverty is growing at an exponential rate. If prosperity was truly growing, the number of people in poverty should be dropping, and the divide between the two should be shrinking.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Observe the nice, pristine parts of town where you only hang out with people who share your prosperity, you mean.


No. That's not what I mean. In fact we don't even have to visit my haunts. My existence has nothing to do with the issue. We simply observe prosperity in each area of the world where it has taken root with capitalism. A good place for all of us to start looking is the computer sitting right in front of us. It's a masterful machine, representing prosperity few ever dreamed of for most of human history. A true wonder. Then we can believe the theory or our own lying eyes. This is a better approach, since I doubt anyone here would even want to be seen with me, let alone hang out with me. But do you think anyone would like a tour of my haunts? Would they pay? Maybe groupies? Interesting...



> It's a ridiculous assertion to that prosperity's growth is a positive one by the sheer numbers of those who are prosperous when the percentage of total people in poverty has grown.


Not at all. Those sheer numbers are far better off being prosperous than being in poverty. That's certainly a positive development.

We can observe the sheer numbers of prosperous have grown over the last 200 years. We can also observe they grew at a rate greater than the total population growth. That means the percentage of prosperous has grown. So how do the percentages of both prosperous and impoverished grow?



> If prosperity was truly growing, the number of people in poverty should be dropping, and the divide between the two should be shrinking.


No.

Let A = set1. 
Let B = set2. 
Let C = the union of A and B.

If A and B grow at the same rate, C will grow at that same rate. A/C will not change, and B/C will not change. But the cardinal size of A, B, and C will each increase.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Let A = set1.
> Let B = set2.
> Let C = the union of A and B.
> 
> If A and B grow at the same rate, C will grow at that same rate. A/C will not change, and B/C will not change. But the cardinal size of A, B, and C will each increase.


Totally agree. I just don't believe that A and B have grown at the same rate.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

Good. Neither do I. There is no basis for either of us to believe that.

That was simply an example of how two groups can maintain unchanging percentages while numbers of both increase. The fact that  numbers of one group increase does not refute the idea that the numbers of the other are also increasing. The number of prosperous people can definitely increase while the number of impoverished also increases. We can even observe the increase in either group while ignoring the other.

It's also possible for the numbers of both to increase while the percentage of one increases and the percentage of the other decreases. For example, I expect my Groupies to increase in numbers even as they decrease as a percentage of the MFA community.


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## Rex Jameson (Mar 8, 2011)

The argument should not be about infringement versus theft or ethics versus entitlement. Our argument to the readers should be as simple as this:

Do you want me to continue writing books or not? If you do, then please make it worth my time. If you can't legally purchase the book, then please tell your friends and family and encourage them to purchase it. Then, you will be doing your part to provide me, the author, incentive to write books that you will love. I love to write, but there are many other things that I can be doing with my time, and once I hit a certain opportunity cost, other activities may provide me and my family more income per hour spent. If that happens, I may be forced to close my business of writing and focus on other things. Please help me get the word out about my book. Leave a review. Upvote reviews you feel are helpful. Talk about what you like about the book with your friends and family so that they may enjoy the book too.

The way to beat or even harness piracy is NOT to harshen penalties or engage in ethical debate or name calling. From the people who can't or won't pay, we should encourage them to spread the word about our books so that we can benefit from those people who will pay. And we should strive to ensure that readers do not feel that we are drawing lines in the sand that make us, the authors, seem like an enemy to them. They should want us to succeed, and we should go out of our way to ensure that they know we appreciate them, and that we would appreciate them even more if they would help us continue to do what we love and do so full time.


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## Greg Banks (May 2, 2009)

Rex Jameson said:


> The argument should not be about infringement versus theft or ethics versus entitlement. Our argument to the readers should be as simple as this:
> 
> Do you want me to continue writing books or not? If you do, then please make it worth my time. If you can't legally purchase the book, then please tell your friends and family and encourage them to purchase it. Then, you will be doing your part to provide me, the author, incentive to write books that you will love. I love to write, but there are many other things that I can be doing with my time, and once I hit a certain opportunity cost, other activities may provide me and my family more income per hour spent. If that happens, I may be forced to close my business of writing and focus on other things. Please help me get the word out about my book. Leave a review. Upvote reviews you feel are helpful. Talk about what you like about the book with your friends and family so that they may enjoy the book too.
> 
> The way to beat or even harness piracy is NOT to harshen penalties or engage in ethical debate or name calling. From the people who can't or won't pay, we should encourage them to spread the word about our books so that we can benefit from those people who will pay. *And we should strive to ensure that readers do not feel that we are drawing lines in the sand that make us, the authors, seem like an enemy to them. They should want us to succeed, and we should go out of our way to ensure that they know we appreciate them, and that we would appreciate them even more if they would help us continue to do what we love and do so full time.*


There is contradiction in the above (emphasis mine). If they want us to succeed then they should appreciate the damage stealing from us does. I don't suggest any harsher penalties but I don't think patting those who do go through piracy routes on the shoulder is condoning it, and the more the message that authors condone it gets around, the more people likely to do it. We live in a society where, generally speaking, the value of something is judged by its price. I just worry that the more prevalent and accepted that piracy becomes, the less sincere book buyers will begin to value our work and more will think of piracy as not such a bad thing after all.


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## jackz4000 (May 15, 2011)

Once a group is used to getting something for free they seldom want to start paying for it. File sharing will only grow unless seeders, feeders, and websites change. File sharers I've known mainly target movies and music.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

From today's NYTimes:

*Internet Pirates Will Always Win*

_"There's a clearly established relationship between the legal availability of material online and copyright infringement; it's an inverse relationship," said Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit technology organization that is trying to stop new piracy laws from disrupting the Internet. "The most downloaded television shows on the Pirate Bay are the ones that are not legally available online."

The hit HBO show "Game of Thrones" is a quintessential example of this. The show is sometimes downloaded illegally more times each week than it is watched on cable television. But even if HBO put the shows online, the price it could charge would still pale in comparison to the money it makes through cable operators. Mr. Wilson believes that the big media companies don't really want to solve the piracy problem._

...

_The way people download unauthorized content is changing. In the early days of music piracy, people transferred songs to their home or work computers. Now, with cloud-based sites, like Wuala, uTorrent and Tribler, people stream movies and music from third-party storage facilities, often to mobile devices and TV's. Some of these cloud-based Web sites allow people to set up automatic downloads of new shows the moment they are uploaded to piracy sites. It's like piracy-on-demand. And it will be much harder to trace and to stop._

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/sunday-review/internet-pirates-will-always-win.html?_r=1

B.


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