So yes, having books shut off sucks but so does piracy.
One of the first things I learned as a teenager online was that anything that can be read, seen or heard can also be copied.
It's only with interactive things like games and programs that pirates have a real challenge.
Books can be copied for sure, but the cost of copying a digital book is negligible compared to the cost of copying a real book. Zero cost of copying makes it possible to give it away for free (e.g. to drive traffic) and monetize otherwise (most digital piracy is business, not charity).
In the physical world, copied books are not given away for free typically because the cost of copying a book is relatively high.
Copyrighting digital items is a fundamental problem which has no good solution so far.
https://natecraun.net/articles/linux-guide-to-book-scanning....
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Creating_a_DjVu_file
In fact copying entire books was done daily where I went to university and took no longer than 15m, at something like five bucks each. You’d bring that stack of A4 home, and maybe hand it down if it survived the semester.
Photocopying / xerographic printing is modestly expensive, though a high-quality laserprinter reduces costs to about a penny per printed side. Stock choice (acid-free rag, for durability) is a larger cost.
Of course the world is more complicated than ideological arguments about individual sales. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2017/09/21/europ...
I'd argue it's exceptionally rare that a digital good be so unique as to be a "buy legitimately or have nothing" item and any DRM designed to treat software like that does more harm to sales through difficulty to purchase or use than it saves.
Why Windows became popular will never have a single unarguable objective answer. It was probably a combination of factors, like anything else. The only fact we know is that Microsoft became one the most successful and richest companies, and it was because hundreds of millions of people paid Microsoft for their software, when credible alternatives existed and continue to exist.
>If even one person/business would have used something else that was free as a result of having never used Windows before then there is a definite argument piracy drives sales.
I'm not sure I follow your line of thought here. Piracy made windows popular, and so people bought Windows because... they didn't want to pirate it? That is a pretty convoluted argument.. ! :)
Many pirates are not bad people: they want to pay for your content, but for a variety of reasons they can’t (DRM prevents them from using it they way they want, they can’t afford it right now, etc.) As circumstances change they will purchase your stuff.
Yes, things don't get popular primarily because they're the best in class. They get popular because of a variety of factors. That applies to all tech products that are popular - Photoshop, oracle, mysql, windows, macOS, Linux, iphones, android phones, etc, etc, etc. MS, like every other company started at 0% market share. People chose to use their products because they provided some value to them. If you don't think people bought MS products because they were good, thats OK, you can have that opinion. Whether or not MS software is shitty has no real bearing on my point here.
>And that's how piracy helped MS, children playing with computer games arrived in the work market with familiarity with MS products, which kept the companies using and buying those products.
Without any numbers or data, I will just have to accept your argument at face value. I'd love to see verified stats of sales versus users/installations. Will be easy to confirm exactly how much of an effect it had...
https://web.archive.org/web/20060411095315/https://www.latim...
Yet all those who purchased it legally could one day be left with having their purchase shut off? They might be lucky and get refunds but they still lose access to the book.
To me that seems like an utter failure for everyone.
Reasonable pricing has proved the best piracy.
The textbook market is a predatory scheme to fleece money out of students who are usually pretty close to broke, by making the books more important even than healthy food.
Not releasing a new edition every few years would have the same effect as "piracy", once the used market is large enough to supply each new class.
Professors and professionals who write textbooks should treat them as a marketing and career advancement exercise. Write a good book, get noticed by tenure committees or potential consulting clients. Most people who write books like that already have relatively secure jobs, and the book, if it's not awful, improves their career trajectory even more. It builds their reputation or brand.
It's tough to side with them over broke college students slavishly scanning thousand-page textbooks while eating ramen.
Yes losing all of those pretty girls sucks but so do volcanoes destroying the village...
[EDIT] what I'm getting at is that DRM doesn't just fail to stop piracy, it also makes the pirated version much better than the original.
99% of the time DRM is used, it makes the product less convenient to use by people who bought it legally, as opposed to those who pirated it. An example that comes to mind, all those blu-rays with bajillion of warnings and ads before the movie starts vs. just watching the movie right off the bat without any ads or wasted time if pirated. Don't even get me started on Denuvo or any other video-game DRMs, those are creatures straight out of UX nightmares.
Steam doesn't even have particularly good drm. The media isn't encrypted, only the executables, so you can generally just get a nocd crack and overwrite the encrypted binary in the install folder.
It's unfair? Sounds like a dream come true to me, I'd love for my work to have such incredible reach. Is your friend starving, or living on the street or something?
DRM isn't super hard to break, it is just annoying. But for piracy, only ONE person has to break it, and suddenly it is available, DRM free, for everyone. Legitimate readers continue to be forced to deal with DRM annoyance while pirates get a DRM free experience.
How does this help the situation of content creators not getting paid?
Not saying I'm some Mother Teresa type.. but I'm against online ads, and I don't run an ad-blocker. I simply don't visit sites which feature blaring in-your-face ads. I filter Google results to exclude domains which I will never visit because of their ad policy.
Some of these things that people want to charge fees for are things that you can participate in for free naturally, so long as nobody is gate-keeping you. So it's very hard to justify spending money on them... particularly if you consider them bad for you, (like, say, binging on Netflix.)
Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with copyright laws, per se. What I'm saying is that it is not 'entitlement' on the part of the copier, but entitlement on the part of the copyright holder to expect to hold dominion over other people's capabilities. That is the negotiated result of social processes.
Well, you can do anything you like with the freedoms you have as enshrined in the legal framework that applies to your domicile. Do you also respect the freedom of a creator to choose a license and a distribution method of their liking for their works? It seems like you don't.
> What I'm saying is that it is not 'entitlement' on the part of the copier, but entitlement on the part of the copyright holder to expect to hold dominion over other people's capabilities.
But the fact is that one of those people is on firm legal ground, and the other one isn't.
>Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with copyright laws, per se.
Well, your comments seem to indicate that you find many things wrong with the copyright law.
It seems like you want to peddle a narrative. Otherwise you wouldn't be jumping to conclusions about things you have no knowledge of.
>Well, your comments seem to indicate that you find many things wrong with the copyright law.
My comments are not referring to the merit of copyright law. In fact, I explicitly said that I'm not arguing there was anything wrong with it per se in order to highlight that. So if that's what you're looking for, stop. You are missing my point. Don't accuse me of trying to make a point that I am explicitly telling you I'm not trying to make. That is beyond uncharitable.
>But the fact is that one of those people is on firm legal ground, and the other one isn't.
Copyright law was invented in the seventeenth century. The vast majority of human history has taken place in a world where humans were rewarded for copying and sharing any information they could find. I have the lyrics to a copyrighted song stuck in my head at this very moment! I don't want it, but it is there.
My objection is the use of the word 'entitlement,' which is nothing more than a propagandist term here.
> Real life doesn't have any policy either, if you have the capability, you're free to copy & distribute what you have access to or not. It is a third party that is trying to interfere with these native abilities.
Your comment indicates that you feel its your right to be able to infringe on copyright.
>My objection is the use of the word 'entitlement,' which is nothing more than a propagandist term here.
Okay, I won't use that term, what term would you prefer?
Couple counter-points:
1) It's reasonable that I'm expected to compensate the creator for the content. It's not reasonable for the publisher to dictate how I get to consume that content, especially not by forcing me to use particular format, software or hardware. DRM is enforcing the latter, not the former.
2) Having personal wishes wrt. content distribution is part of the market game. There is huge demand for bullshit-free content distribution, which is evidenced by the success of Steam and Netflix (especially relative to Torrents!), who cut out most of the crap and left the "you're now renting the content, not buying it".
3) Most content is non-substitutable. You can't just "take your business elsewhere", because there's nowhere else to take the business to! If Disney decides that the newest Star Wars is DRMed, there's shit all I can do - it's going to be DRMed everywhere, I can only choose from providers that enforce that DRM, and I can't exactly go and watch some cat videos on PeerTube instead - I wanted Star Wars, not smelly cats. This applies to books, movies, TV shows, video games, and to a large extent, to music.
2) I agree. I avoid DRM and other BS as much as possible. I went out and purchased affinity photo when photoshop went to a subscription model. I'm going to cling on to my CS6 for as many years as I can. Yes, I'm going to lose out eventually when plugins stop working or when I buy a new camera whose RAW files cannot be opened by CS6, but thems the breaks.
3) Yes, that sucks! I don't know what else to say. You can either be principled and avoid DRM, or be a realist and accept DRM in as few places as possible. I'm objecting to the "I'm entitled to pirate it because they didn't sell it or stream it without DRM" mindset.
3) I can be principled realist and accept DRM whenever it's convenient, and find ways to break it or alternate sources whenever I prefer it.
A principled person would follow their own principles which may be different from yours.
Students usually have the choice of the brand new print edition $$$ that they can resell for $, the ebook edition ($$) that expires after the term and you cannot resell, or fighting for one of the two copies of the book on 2 hour loan from the main campus library. Some professors do not let you use an older copy, and for some classes, they make you do your homework on proprietary publisher websites that charge for temporary access codes. So even if you pirated your book you would still have to pay McGraw Hill their cut to get full points in the class.
Curious how well textbook prices correlate to the maximum federal loan you can apply for.
Sadly, you are dating yourself with that comment.
However, there are a lot of ebook options now for $50-100 per course. Books that can stop working, as crazy as the linked tweet thread acknowledges. Books that will not be available on my bookshelf if I want to keep them for reference in the future.
And there's still piracy. I expect the ebooks will make this more and not less popular; a lot of pirated textbooks were...allegedly....low-quality scans when I was in college.
Textbook prices correlate with federal loan amounts. Publishers probably take the same % of that loan limit to price their books, so ironically the tools designed to help make education affordable are being exploited to make education unaffordable.
That's the kind of system draconian copyright laws create.
When there is a book I need, but don't want, I'll get by with a PDF. When its a book I want, I buy the real thing, because I enjoy having it. Just curious, what the intended use of the book is, and whether you think a similar attitude might have had any effect.
Chances are, your friend would have made dimes per book while the publisher pulled $180 a pop from broke indebted students trapped in a captive market. Textbooks have gotten so costly because students are just the publisher's delivery device for the huge amounts of federal loan money awarded every year.
I really believe that books should be mostly free and people should//would pay based on usefulness. I will gladly donate 200$ for a book that helped me. I would also never have bought that same book if it was 10$ to start with.
Everyone says. Nobody does.