
Author Slams eBook Piracy, Son Outs Her As a Music Pirate - lockem
http://torrentfreak.com/author-slams-ebook-piracy-son-outs-her-as-a-music-pirate-101213/
======
krschultz
I've seen the following argument a thousand times:

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

That argument is actually completly irrelevant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

P.P.S. [http://www.gemm.com/item/GEINOH--YAMASHIROGUMI/ECOPHONY--
RIN...](http://www.gemm.com/item/GEINOH--YAMASHIROGUMI/ECOPHONY--
RINNE/GML12205369/)

(perhaps this is an experiment?)

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

~~~
jessriedel
There are parallels, but surely there's a large, morally important difference
between sneaking onto a half empty train with $50 seats, and stealing $50 from
someone's wallet.

~~~
xenophanes
Surely it's important to pay attention to what is actually said in
discussions. What was being said is that taking a train seat with zero
marginal cost to the train owners is parallel to downloading a song which has
zero marginal cost to the band or record label. Both are taking something with
no marginal cost.

The point was that stealing that train seat really is stealing. That means
that the argument "there is no marginal cost" is not a sufficient defense of
music piracy. It does not exclude some other defense of music piracy.

~~~
jessriedel
My interpretation...

krschultz: "Trains have zero marginal cost. We call them stealing. Therefore,
zero marginal cost does not prevent something from being called stealing."

InclinedPlane: "Trains are different from music, in that the latter never
fills up. Therefore, it is possible for zero marginal cost to be a defense."

You: "InclinedPlane, just imagine a train which doesn't fill up."

Me: "You are right that the half-empty train and piracy are similar. This
still doesn't justify calling it stealing."

You: "[Snarky comment]. All I was claiming is that they are similar."

...and I agree. I wasn't saying you were wrong in your initial comment, I was
saying that you were right _but_ it doesn't complete krschultz's argument.

No need to get snarky. Not every reply to your comment is an assertion that
you're wrong.

~~~
xenophanes
Your comment was completely off topic. You said there was a big difference
between zero-mariginal-cost stealing and entirely-mariginal-cost stealing. Of
course there is, but that has nothing to do with the arguments in the
discussion. That's why I said you weren't following the discussion and
explained the discussion to you.

Now you've rewritten your comment to remove the part about taking money out of
someone's wallet and summarized it as "Your statement is true but that doesn't
justify a conclusion [that you never asserted]". But the wallet part of your
comment was important to your comment and is the reason I replied as I did.

The topic of my comments was about the parallel btwn no marginal cost
activities (someone denied it with a bad argument, and I said so), so your
reply to me (yes it was a reply to me, or you wouldn't have it nested under
me) was off topic and missing the point of what I was talking about. It now
sounds like you wanted to be talking to the original poster, krschultz, not
me, which would have made more sense.

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

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

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

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

It often does cost time and money to pirate things.

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

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

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

~~~
showerst
I think that it depends on your definition of 'foreseeable'.

One of the first markets I can see this disrupting are things like war-gaming
miniatures, and board gaming pieces, which have a HUGE markup, but could be
reproduced in plastic relatively easily after a more few generations of this
tech. I'm not sure about patents per-se, but it's certainly an intellectual
property issue.

Once these printers gain the ability to draw circuits and build or insert
basic electronic components, things will really take off, but even before then
there are some big markets for what are basically hunks of plastic and metal
that are only expensive because they're well designed/marketed.

Will you be printing off an iPhone in 5 years? Of course not. But that fancy
$60 paperweight on your boss's desk? There's a big market for those too.

~~~
arethuza
This made me think of what is potentially a very large market - kids toys. As
any parent will tell you, an awful lot of toys (especially for young kids) are
cheap bits of plastic where the only "value" is the associated licensing of a
brand/character from someone like Disney.

~~~
sethg
The relevant patents on Lego® bricks expired decades ago, and you would think
clone bricks would have flooded the market by now. And yet Legos still
sell—even the sets that aren’t licensed brands. My experience with Mega
Blocks, cheaper bricks that are supposed to interlock with Legos, is that they
don’t interlock very well—the tolerances are just far off enough to cause
frustration. There must be something in Lego’s manufacturing process that
keeps their quality high even though, on paper, nothing could be easier than
replicating their technology.

~~~
Kliment
Lego bricks are easy to replicate on current-generation 3d printers. It's
nothing to do with the manufacturing process, it's just that making the molds
a bit looser makes them much easier to separate, and cheaper. They also tend
to round the peg size up to 5mm, when actual legos are around 4.9. This
<http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1005> is a lego-compatible part designed
from scratch that describes the issue. Using that, it's easy to make custom
parts that attach to legos. Here's one that I designed and someone else
printed: <http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:5042>

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

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

e.g.

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

A fashion designer would probably disagree?

------
c0riander
The problem most authors (artists) face is not piracy, but obscurity.

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

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

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

Footnotes.

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

------
rick888
This still doesn't change the fact that piracy does hurt authors.

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

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

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

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

~~~
arethuza
Music piracy has _always_ been rampant

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
ewams
What mediums do you two sell your books through?

~~~
pmichaud
Lots, but it's the PDFs that normally get copied.

------
xtho
> “Books are priced too high”

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

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

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

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

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

------
nene
What struck me most was this passage:

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

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

~~~
rick888
"Only for white"

hmm..so there are no whites in Russia?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

