'Elitist': angry book pirates hit back after author campaign sinks website

[RJM Corbet]

Why not?

I have, somewhere, a single volume containing Shakespeare's complete works... but it is rather heavy and not something you'd want to lug around if you were, say, travelling light.

I've read all the historical plays and tragedies. I've not yet read a couple of the comedies. I should get onto the plays I've not read -- I'm not getting younger, lol.

Imagine a generation of English readers that does not know the great master works?

 

[Ursa major]

More seriously, this problem is a generational thing.

I ought to point out that, back in the days when computer games came on cassettes (somewhere between, I think, the Late Stone Age and the Early Bronze Age), the pirating of them had a rather disingenuous name: "distributed back-up"... as if the maker(s) of the game, which was in shops all over the place, needed extra back-ups, back-ups of which they were unaware and would not be able to access.

 

[Dave]

@Ursa major - Maybe you are right. Plenty of pirating of vinyl records to tape went on too, and before anyone says there weren't multiple copies made, that they were merely for personal use, there was a good trade in knock-off tapes imported from abroad, so someone was mass producing them.

I'm just trying to understand that total disconnect evidenced in the original post's link. Where some people (not only the authors and artists) are expressing outrage and anger, while others can't see any problem at all. It is really quite a wide gap to bridge.

 

[RJM Corbet]

Would it be simplistic to try to nail it down? Copyrights and patents are legally binding. There may be difficulty enforcing them, but the legality issue is clear.

Big publishers will have lawyers to chase infringements down.

Are all these millions of self-published internet books subject to copyright? I'm learning a lot on this thread.

 

[Venusian Broon]

Are all these millions of self-published internet books subject to copyright? I'm learning a lot on this thread.

As soon as it's published (or even I think as soon as the author writes it) the copyright lasts 70 years, I believe. It's magically applies.

Of course enforcing copyright is anther thing that does cost...but for a huge proportion of these self-published books, I don't think there is going to be any pirating at all , so they are effectively safe.

 

[RJM Corbet]

As soon as it's published (or even I think as soon as the author writes it) the copyright lasts 70 years, I believe. It's magically applies.

Of course enforcing copyright is anther thing that does cost...but for a huge proportion of these self-published books, I don't think there is going to be any pirating at all , so they are effectively safe.

Thank you. My interest is really quite casual because I'm not involved in the industry. I gave up on trying to get an agent for my book years ago. Because it wasn't a very good book, lol. Well, it was good in parts, lol.

But everything changes so fast in this internet age. In 10 years so much has happened. It's good to know a bit about what's going down out there.

Traditional publishers reject a lot of very good books, simply because they don't fit the market requirements of the time. Which means there have to be a lot of very good books out there on the Internet.

It's the age of millionaire you tube stars and dee-jays, lol.

 

[Dave]

As soon as it's published (or even I think as soon as the author writes it)...

It starts immediately that it is written, recorded, created, sketched, drawn, painted... If you make something it belongs to you, if you steal someone else's intellectual property then you know that it isn't yours.

Yes, the Law is one thing, but enforcement is something entirely different. I've actually had something I've written copied and posted online. It was only a one page Word document concerning family history. I emailed it to someone once, and then much later it appeared on the website Ancestry, credited to someone else (the first person must have sent it on to someone else.) I told Ancestry that it was mine and could they remove it, twice actually, but I got no replies, even though they say that they take copyright very seriously. The thing is, if you go into the properties of the file, the author of the word doc is still me. They never even bothered to change that. So, what do I do? Send them a letter than I intend to take court action? Get a solicitor? The time and cost of that isn't worthwhile, and it doesn't really bother me. I'm not out of pocket like the author of a book would be. It is just simply staggering that someone can do that, and more so, that nobody cares.

 

[RJM Corbet]

Amazon and Kindle do not protect the copyright of books they handle?

EDIT: Sorry, the answer is probably obvious in advance: that they are merely distributors?

 

[RJM Corbet]

So, it comes down to: if you self-publish on the internet, piracy is the risk you run? But probably only if you are successful anyway? Pirates target treasure ships?

(post edited)

 

[Ursa major]

Amazon and Kindle do not protect the copyright of books they handle?

As they don't want you to pass on ebooks to others (as in sell or gift an ebook to someone else), I think that it's pretty clear that they seek to protect their interest in what they distribute.

(I suppose, as a by-product, they're protecting the author's interest, in that if you want a Kindle version, Amazon expects you to buy it from them, and the author will get their cut.)

 

[Dave]

I know nothing about these things (so this is a question) but would it not be possible for a self-published author to protect his work in the same way. Obviously, you cannot develop your own patented publishing format, because the wide availability such formats is partly what drives their sales. However, you could publish it as a non-editable file like a pdf? Or, you could publish it as an image such as a jpeg or png from which the words could not be copied and pasted. As I said, I know nothing about these things so I'm thinking that there must be an even better way.

 

[Vertigo]

I think you'll find that self-published authors publishing on Amazon will have DRM applied by the Amazon system. As far as I know the only publisher to reject DRM, in the quite correct belief that it achieves nothing, is TOR. Whenever you buy a Tor ebook from Amazon it always comes with a notification from Amazon along the lines "At the request of the publisher this book is sold free of DRM" so their books are deliberately sold unencrypted.

 

[RJM Corbet]

DRM:

How Digital Rights Management Works

 

[Dave]

I wasn't aware of that. So, the casual reader cannot easily make copies to pass to a friend, ah... I mean to put on his laptop so he can read it at the office too. The only people willing to spend the time and effort to break DRM codes will be actual, real criminals doing it for financial gain. Which in the context of the bigger picture in this thread, means that anyone getting books for free or very cheap is probably helping organised crime. In today's world, that probably means drug running, human trafficking and guns to terrorists. So, those people in the OP link that were claiming the removal was “anti-poor, classist and exclusionary” or that it was leading to “reading... becoming one of the most expensive and restrictive hobbies across the globe” are seriously deluding themselves on even more levels than I had originally thought.

 

[Vertigo]

I wasn't aware of that. So, the casual reader cannot easily make copies to pass to a friend, ah... I mean to put on his laptop so he can read it at the office too. The only people willing to spend the time and effort to break DRM codes will be actual, real criminals doing it for financial gain. Which in the context of the bigger picture in this thread, means that anyone getting books for free or very cheap is probably helping organised crime. In today's world, that probably means drug running, human trafficking and guns to terrorists. So, those people in the OP link that were claiming the removal was “anti-poor, classist and exclusionary” or that it was leading to “reading... becoming one of the most expensive and restrictive hobbies across the globe” are seriously deluding themselves on even more levels than I had originally thought.

Unfortunately that's not quite right; breaking the DRM is trivial, which is the really silly thing about the whole business. There is a very simple plugin to Calibre (the most popular ebook database software) that allows it to be done pretty much transparently which many people, including myself, do. Before you condemn me let me explain why I do this and why many others I know also do. It's nothing to do with pirating; almost the opposite. I do not and will never give any of my ebooks away to anyone else; as has been covered in great depth in this thread, that would be a theft of which I totally disapprove.

The problem is ultimately down to a lack of an universally adopted open standard format. If I get rid of my Sony reader and, for arguments sake, buy a Kindle then the format I can read switches from the open epub format to the proprietary Amazon AZW format. This means that I would no longer be able to read ANY of my legally acquired ebooks (currently somewhat short of a thousand books) as they are epub which is incompatible with Kindle. A very obviously deliberate ploy by Amazon because the reverse is also true; any Kindle owner cannot switch to any other reader and still be able to read their AZW Amazon books, so they are locked into Amazon. The only way I could now read any of my ebooks would be to convert them to AZW (or actually another now obsolete but open format Mobi will do) but the only way they can be converted is if the DRM is removed. Effectively DRM locks you PERMANENTLY into one format and, in the case of Amazon and Kindle, one vendor. There are some other vendors now selling AZW but they must pay a commission/licence fee to Amazon to do so. I consider this to be piracy from the other side (okay monopoly is a more accurate description) and I refuse to bow to that. So, yes, I remove DRM from my own books so I will not be locked into only one type of reader but I do not give my ebooks away or download pirated ones.

 

[Ursa major]

Not that I would use** it -- I already read too much on computer screens -- but there is a Kindle application that runs on Windows (and, perhaps, on other operating systems).


** - I did, however, download it onto my Windows 7 machine.

 

[Vertigo]

Not that I would use** it -- I already read too much on computer screens -- but there is a Kindle application that runs on Windows (and, perhaps, on other operating systems).


** - I did, however, download it onto my Windows 7 machine.

You are quite correct of course and, without stripping the DRM, this would be the only way to read your AZW books if you replaced a kindle with, say, a Nook or Kobo.

 

[RJM Corbet]

So there is no legality/copyright clause included when you buy a book from Amazon on Kindle forbidding the user from disabling the DRM? It's legal and permitted to disable it? Like unlocking a network locked phone?

But it is illegal to redistribute the work?

 

[Vertigo]

So there is no legality/copyright clause included when you buy a book from Amazon on Kindle forbidding the user from disabling the DRM? It's legal and permitted to disable it? Like unlocking a network locked phone?

But it is illegal to redistribute the work?

No sadly that is not the case. As I understand it in the USA it is illegal to remove the DRM, outside the USA I believe it is not illegal but I don't know if that's the case everywhere. Or maybe it is a grey area, certainly my understanding is that in Europe it is not strictly illegal.

Any redistribution anywhere is illegal under normal copyright laws.

Bottom line it's all a bit of a mess. And goes to show that any enforcement other than education is unlikely to be effective.

 

[RJM Corbet]

As @Dave observed earlier, it used to be illegal to copy vinyl to tape, or tape to tape, but blank tapes were sold right next to the records and double-deck tape players were standard. It's obviously illegal to copy a David Bowie CD to a blank.

In other words, everybody did it, but the publishers weren't interested in chasing down small cases. It is big commercial pirates the legislation is aimed at?