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bheadmaster

> I am loosing $Xk worth of sales every month

You're not "losing" anything, you just have expectations that aren't compatible with reality.

> The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free?

Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the food on your table?

> I spent almost 2 years on writing the book.

Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give you the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing information. Writing books isn't profitable anymore? Don't write books for living, do something else. That how the rest of us lowly peasants get by when we invest our time into something that flops.

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I generally agree with this particular point, but not with the overall sentiment. Which is that this is the author's problem and he should just suck it up.

It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality books are an asset for society, and we all should be interested in finding a solution. Not necessarily by enforcing unenforceable rules from previous centuries. But we need something else that works.

A society in which only those with too much time on their hands write books is an intellectually poor one. We need authors who spend full time on producing high quality books, be it on non-fictional educational topic or on fictional entertainment. No worlds-best-expert is going to sit down and spend years of their life compiling a well-written book on a subject, just as little as Tom Cruise is going to shoot the next Top Gun for free (and the rest of the production company as well). We need to find a way, otherwise education will be stuck with outdated material and 5min ad-ridden clips on youtube by non-experts. (No offense, there are lots of experts on youtube, but there is a lot of crap out there too, and a 5 min clip on quantum entanglement just can't compete with a proper book. Whoever disagrees with this has likely watched too many such clips and never consumed a good book.)

> It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality books are an asset for society, and we all should be interested in finding a solution.

That is a real problem, but copyright is not an attempt to solve that problem. Copyright is an attempt to limit the distribution of information throughout society, supposedly to make content creation more financially rewarding. Piracy, on the other hand, is an attempt to increase the distribution of information throughout society, and supposedly makes content creation less financially rewarding.

The problem you describe is real, but neither copyright systems nor piracy (at least according to the popular naive descriptions I provided) are an attempt to solve it. They’re both just choices about whether the distribution of information throughout society or the financial rewards for content creation are more important.

Of course the author is losing something, someone stole his intellectual property and distributed it for free. It's not your responsibility to put food onto someone's table, but it is your responsibility not to steal it. Immoral acts do not become moral because they are easy to commit.

It’s amazing the lengths people go to justify self serving bullshit. The apologetics in this thread are no different than the ones made 20 years ago for stealing music and software. Indie software only escaped because the sass model made piracy hard. Music is in terrible shape and its only saving grace is that it’s also a performance medium.

If piracy makes it so that it doesn’t make much sense to produce novels, it’s the world that’s poorer. Justifying that because it happens or because it’s easy is nothing more than the naturalistic fallacy.

The parallel between SaaS and live music is pretty interesting. Seeing a play in a theater (as the un-pirate-able version of a movie) also fits in this category. Service instead of product, essentially.

I'm struggling to extend the analogy to books, though. The mental image of a kindergarten teacher reading a book and holding it up for the class to see the illustrations is a bit weak... perhaps theater serves as the post-movie and post-book medium alike.

Exactly. The form of the novel is tied to text and text is fundamentally east to distribute because it is information. The problem is structurally tough.

If someone steals your food, you no longer have it. If someone “steals” your book, you still have it.

begging the metaphor is one approach when attempting to defend an indefensible position

Who said it's a metaphor?

"Taking food off the table" was a metaphor. Your statement makes even less sense if you weren't referencing that. You're saying, in effect, that zero marginal cost items are not property. That's a radical position that I would be surprised if you actually endorse after you think about it.

Before the food metaphor, you said, quoting:

> someone stole his intellectual property and distributed it for free

That's not a metaphor. Copyright infringement/ ip violation is not theft. When an item is stolen, you lose it. When your copyright is infringed, you may not even know it happens.

A lot of defenders of copyright often liken ip violation to theft. I remember a famous campaign where I'm from saying "piracy is theft". This is misinformation and fallacy. Copyright infringement is not theft, and there is no reason it should be treated as such

> When an item is stolen, you lose it.

"Steal" has many meanings and only some of them involve the loss of the thing stolen.

The Oxford American Dictionary provides several examples (I'm using "___" to indicate indentation in the following) that illustrate the range of what can be stolen:

steal | stēl |

verb (past stole | stōl | ; past participle stolen | ˈstōlən | )

1 [with object] take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it: thieves stole her bicycle | (as adjective stolen) : stolen goods | [no object] : she was found guilty of stealing from her employers.

• dishonestly pass off (another person's ideas) as one's own: accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying.

• take the opportunity to give or share (a kiss) when it is not expected or when people are not watching: he was allowed to steal a kiss in the darkness.

• (in various sports) gain (an advantage, a run, or possession of the ball) unexpectedly or by exploiting the temporary distraction of an opponent.

• Baseball (of a base runner) advance safely to (the next base) by running to it as the pitcher begins the delivery: Rickey stole third base.

2 [no object, with adverbial of direction] move somewhere quietly or surreptitiously: he stole down to the kitchen | figurative : a delicious languor was stealing over her.

• [with object and adverbial of direction] direct (a look) quickly and unobtrusively: he stole a furtive glance at her.

noun [in singular]

1 informal a bargain: for $5 it was a steal.

2 mainly North American an act of stealing something: New York's biggest art steal.

• an idea taken from another work: the chorus is a steal from The Smiths' “London”.

• Baseball an act of stealing a base.

• Basketball & Hockey an act of taking possession of the ball or puck from an opponent: point guard Kaleb Joseph finished with eight points, four steals, and seven assists.

PHRASES

steal someone blind

___informal see blind.

steal a march on

___gain an advantage over (someone) by acting before they do: stores that open on Sunday are stealing a march on their competitors.

steal someone's heart

___win someone's love.

steal the show

___attract the most attention and praise.

steal someone's thunder

___win praise for oneself by preempting someone else's attempt to impress. [from an exclamation by the English dramatist John Dennis (1657–1734), who invented a method of simulating the sound of thunder as a theatrical sound effect and used it in an unsuccessful play. Shortly after his play came to the end of its short run he heard his new thunder effects used at a performance of Macbeth, whereupon he is said to have exclaimed: ‘Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!’.]

And which of these definitions includes copying?

1. Taking food off someone's table was a metaphor.

2. If you're making the argument that theft is limited to tangible things, well, you're entitled to that belief, but generally the consensus is that intangible property is still property. Money is property.

3. If you're making the argument that zero marginal cost items are not private property, that's an extremely radical position that I doubt you actually endorse after thinking about the incentives in a society where that was the dominant view.

The most legitimate argument for large scale copyright theft is eminent domain style seizure on the grounds that it benefits society. I would even endorse a weak version of that argument in narrow, well defined instances. And do. Copyright should expire, and it should definitely be harder to extend. And it should be possible to seize copyright from estates where the creator is no longer living, in certain circumstances, or at least expand fair usage in some graded manner.

That's not what's being argued about though, what people in this thread, and what people who steal music and software used to believe was that those products weren't really property and so they could take them. It's flimsy justification for bad behavior.

> If you're making the argument that theft is limited to tangible things, well, you're entitled to that belief, but generally the consensus is that intangible property is still property. Money is property.

The argument is not about tangibility. If you steal someone's virtual money, they still cease to have it.

> If you're making the argument that zero marginal cost items are not private property, that's an extremely radical position

On the contrary, I'd argue that allowing people to literally own numbers is absurd.

Ah, then you’re a moron or a child.

Baseless insults are a great way to indicate that you don't have an argument.

I stand by my statement.

Your entire argument boils down to the idea that musicians shouldn't own distribution rights to their work and that sass software licenses should be free. It's a stupid position to hold that falls apart immediately.

So yes, either you're under thirty and haven't thought it through or your ability to reason about this stuff is limited.

> Your entire argument boils down to the idea that musicians shouldn't own distribution rights to their work and that sass software licenses should be free.

Not really. It's about copying not being the same, in benefits and drawbacks, as stealing. If you want to engage in good faith debate, you should acknowledge the difference.

Copying datas/ideas is easy, beneficial to many and not at all clear to always be harmful to society.

I'm being pretty good faith about this, I just don't appreciate people who can't read.

The theoretical benefits to society from distributing people's IP for free is that people who otherwise couldn't afford the money for a book or song or piece of software are able to use it.

Of course, it becomes impossible to support yourself as an indie producer of (software/music/literature/etc) in a world where your work can be taken for free. That reduces the number of people who can participate in the creation of that sort of thing to hobbyists and large businesses that are capable of protecting their IP through other avenues.

Getting rid of intellectual property rights is a short sighted exercise and all you end up doing once you've run through the trove of contemporary and historical IP is impoverishing the world to a much greater degree by destroying incentives for creators to create new things.

The only solutions that I've heard defenders come up with is some version of <hand waving> "it doesn't matter, people will still produce art" Yeah, people will produce, but like 1/10th what they could if they can't make a living off it or aren't trust funders.

Current copyright is life of the author + 70, which is too long. Still, even in that situation, those who wouldn't otherwise have access to those books will eventually get it for free as works enter public domain. If you want to argue that we should drastically reduce the length of copyright, I'd agree with you. But pretending that IP theft doesn't matter is naive.

> Yeah, people will produce, but like 1/10th what they could if they can't make a living off it or aren't trust funders.

Not a big loss. There's enough art in the world. And things that are not made for money tend to be better quality.

You've proven my point for me, thanks.

In your line of argumentation, if we enforced the ban on copying books, songs, movies perfectly, we would get much more of them.

Is this what we want though?

We are flooded with bad quality books, songs, movies, and it is hard to find something worth the time of a consumer who expects quality.

This flood of rubbish is apparently immensely profitable, even while all the copying is going on.

Why would high penalties for copying increase the average quality of production? There would be even more money in the business, attracting even more rubbish production.

If it's not possible to make a living at a vocation, all you will get is amateur participants. Even the most talented will have to find other things to do with their time in order to support themselves.

Contrary to the above sibling comment, amateurs do not often produce better art than professionals—promising amateurs learn their craft as professionals and tend to produce their best work mid-career. This conflicts with the lay understanding of creative endeavors, of course.

> If it's not possible to make a living at a vocation, all you will get is amateur participants.

Any examples? Do you believe the widespread availability of stuff on the internet makes it not possible to make a living writing software, books, TV show scripts or creating music?

> But pretending that IP theft doesn't matter is naive

I agree with you in the sense that distributing stuff on the Internet for free may cause lower revenue of the author than there would be without that. But the author and distributor should be aware of the Internet and its tendency to copy what is of interest and execute marketing/selling strategy to make it work anyway. Many do.

This is the "it's easy to steal so it's okay" argument, which I addressed up thread in a sibling comment about the dynamics of IP on the internet.

Yes, the conditions are as they are. Literature by dint of being pure text is probably in deep shit, but that's not what we're talking about—we're talking about whether the wide scale tragedy of the commons that is zero-friction IP theft is on balance, a bad thing.

No, it's the "internet is the platform for sharing" argument. Copying, sharing work of others is not, in essence, stealing that work. It is sharing that work, maybe illegaly, but then it is illegal sharing, not stealing.

1. I took it as a comparison

2. No, that’s not the argument I’m making. If someone steals the money on your bank account, you still lose a quantifiable amount of that money. Your private property is being taken. If someone infringes on your copyright, they have infringed on your right to exclusivity to the content, but they have not stolen any of your property.

Note that here, I’m not making a judgment of value. Copyright infringement is a crime under the law of most countries, and it is definitely bad in some systems of values.

But it’s just not stealing. Something can be a crime without being thievery.

As a comparison (not metaphor), say somebody organizes a barbecue in your lawn while you’re absent, without your authorization. They bring their own stuff, they don’t damage anything, and when you come back you don’t even realize they were here.

Did they commit a crime? Yes, they infringed on your property

Did you lose money? Maybe. It may be so that they would have paid you money to use your lawn if they had no choice. Or maybe they wouldn’t have had that barbecue at all.

Did they steal something of yours? No. Their crime is trespassing, not thievery.

3. That’s closer, but distorted. First, I never argued that copyright should be abolished. You are arguing on a weaker version of something I did not even mention. The only thing I was commenting on was that your argument for it was based on calling ip violation thievery, which it is not. Most modern systems of values consider thievery wrong, thus you create an emotional response to copyright by likening the two. But that is not a correct argument because copyright infringement is not thievery.

> and what people who steal music and software used to believe was that those products weren't really property and so they could take them. It's flimsy justification for bad behavior.

Those products didn’t exist before they made illicit copies themselves. If I make a fake Louis Vuitton bag for myself and wear it, I did not steal it. I certainly infringed on the designer’s IP, but my crime is counterfeiting, not thievery.

> that's an extremely radical position that I doubt you actually endorse after thinking about the incentives in a society where that was the dominant view.

Now that’s the interesting part. Now that we have admitted that copyright infringement is not thievery, ie not innately morally wrong in at least some systems of values (and I’m pretty sure it is actually a very recent notion), we can ask ourselves the right question: does it have a positive impact on society? The answer to that is mixed:

- It creates incentives for artists and people who transmit knowledge

- But it also creates inequality in access to culture / knowledge

- And it creates counter-incentives for people to access culture and knowledge. Thus making individuals less learned and knowledgable

No doubt that the first effect largely compensates the 3rd, and that globally it has a good effect on society. Remains that it is not optimal at all.

But can we create a better system of incentives? That’s the real question. My take on that is "probably.".

Copyright infringement is not theft. You can't "steal" "intellectual property" because there's no such thing, it's a misnomer.

If you learn that a trillion aliens from andromeda were reading your book right now are you horribly upset and graciously harmed by this blatant copyright infringement? What if they instead land and take all the worlds water? Note the difference between the two scenarios?

lol

Gotta agree, I never understand the hard work argument regarding worth. Just because someone works hard doesn't mean it's a profitable endeavor. I worked hard at startups that failed, it doesn't mean the startup has to be worth anything.

The book market shows people DO buy books, just like OP said. Clearly their book was worth something. Just because people will take it for free instead doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have paid for it.

Also, just because people will take it for free doesn’t mean they would have paid for it.

> Gotta agree, I never understand the hard work argument regarding worth

The labor theory of value is obviously complete bunk, but it sticks around anyway because it's a central tenet of Marxism.

I think that gets the causality the wrong way around. I've heard plenty of people express similar sentiments without (so far as I can tell) being Marxists.

More likely: it sticks around as a tenet of Marxism because it's a thing many people find intuitively plausible. "I did all this hard work, so I should be rewarded" is a pretty natural thing to think.

> "I did all this hard work, so I should be rewarded" is a pretty natural thing to think.

Is it really? I rolled a boulder up and down a hill all day, pay me.

"Nobody asked you to do that and nothing productive was accomplished. Nobody will pay you for that."

But I worked really hard! Labor creates value, therefore I am entitled to payment.

Whether you're rolling a boulder or writing a book, your labor hasn't created value unless you've actually produced something other people subjectively believe to be valuable. The subjective theory of value is common sense. The labor theory of value is obvious bullshit. It might fool children but for an adult to believe it requires brainwashing.

> The subjective theory of value is common sense.

This is also the crux of why I cannot understand how people follow LTV. It just doesn't make sense upon even the slightest introspection.

Slightly introspect for me then, why doesn’t LVT make sense?

Read my parent comment. Labor does not equal value by how most people define it. If I can labor for a task that people don't find valuable, like rolling a rock uphill, that means people intuitively feel some sort of subjective theory of value that's not connected simply to how hard someone worked. Hence, LTV does not make sense and we must find a different theory of value. Now, you can disagree that capitalism is not such a theory, but you ought to be able to agree that LTV ain't it, chief.

You haven't said anything about land, only about labor, so your sentence does not follow. You’ve made a case for why labor inputs might not be directly related to market price, but that says exactly zero about land?

Why are you talking about land? This thread is about the labor theory of value, LTV. Are you talking about the land value tax, LVT? Those are two very different things.

The miscommunication in that case is that the person doing the boulder-rolling/book-writing/startup-programming genuinely thought they were providing value to society. Your example picks a ridiculous non-valuable labor. To understand their point of view, imagine something that you would consider valuable, but which goes generally unrewarded. To get you started: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, volunteering for a fire department, cleaning an oil spill, rescuing animals, planting trees to reduce man-made erosion, ...

Choosing to write a book that nobody wants to buy is no different from choosing to roll a boulder up a hill. You better be in it for fun because you're not doing anything of value to anybody else.

If you want to volunteer for homeless shelters or something, then you can sleep sound with the knowledge that what you're doing is worth a great deal to people who can't afford to compensate you for it. But writing books nobody wants to buy is not that sort of selfless act of charity.

I said that it's natural, not that it's right. I decline to pay you for rolling your boulder up and down the hill.

Did the startups fail because people were stealing intellectual property? (For example, by illegally obtaining trade secrets, such as proprietary source code.) Or did they fail because they were unable to create offerings that customers valued above the cost to produce them?

Until the United States economy no longer recognizes intellectual property rights, this is a critical distinction, whether we're discussing books, music, or proprietary software and hardware designs.

I used startups as an example, what I'm really criticizing is the notion that simply working hard means something is valuable, which it's not. I could have just as easily used the example of rolling a boulder uphill. Don't extrapolate the a analogy onto the original book argument, they are not connected when I wrote it.

You are completely missing the point of this thread. Even if we morally agree with all your points, the claim is that less books will get written and that that's bad for all of us.

To rebut this, you need to either argue that this won't happen, suggest an alternative incentive for books to get written, or maybe even disagree that this result is bad.

Let's get real. Even in the era of Internet and easy copying, zillions of books are being made and sold for money, profitably. The number of books being printed has no end. This situation is harmful to society, because good quality books are hard to discover and check (in a bookstore, on a piracy site) because they are drowned in the pile of rubbish that is wasting our time.

Making books less profitable would suppress the production and make the quality stand out. A net positive for humanity.

> Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the food on your table?

If someone wants to release his book for free he can do it, we have a law that protects those that do not.

> Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give you the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing information.

He doesn't deny anything to anyone, as I said before if someones wants to write books for free he can do it and he can share it with everyone. You deny his right to get paid for his work.

The law protects against somebody else making money. It is not very effective in making readers pay the author.

> You deny his right to get paid for his work.

I think he (and me) is saying there is no such right in general. There is only "copyright" - the right to distribute the copies, or sell the license. But there is no right to get paid.

> Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the food on your table?

What a crappy comment. Sad that there are people whose only apparent ability is to hurt, destroy, and consume.

Not at all. The point is sound - the reader is not responsible for paying the author, not even if the reader read author's work. The buyer is responsible for paying the author. If the author can't hack it and get buyers(often the buyer in this sense is the distributor), then the author should find a different occupation.

> The point is sound - the reader is not responsible for paying the author, not even if the reader read author's work.

What a convenient way to make oneself feel comfortable living a moral-free life. Like as if this changes anything for the end result that someone stole something, and someone else has to foot the bill for that. You’re arguing off the premise that „the distributor is big anyway, so stealing from them doesn’t hurt anyone”. And the premise that it won’t hurt the author. It appears worthy of consideration that there may be a lack of fantasy here on your part.

Oh, the moral card. Morals are highly context-dependent and vary across the population and social classes. There is no consensus on the idea "reading books without paying for them is immoral". It may be - if the person reads all books by some author, can afford to pay, but never does, then it does smell like bad behaviour. But not everybody behaves like this.

Most books I download and read are some scholarly or technical stuff, where I read maybe one or two pages that interest me and then never open the book again for a year.

I could never get all the books from stone-walled library or buy them all. But fortunately I do not have to, they are all available in the Public Library called the Web, and using this is beneficial to me, and harmless to anybody else.

> you just have expectations that aren't compatible with reality

Guessing certain types of readers are more likely to pirate than others. The reality you're describing is one in which pirating readers have fewer books written for them. As someone who doesn't pirate books, I'm reluctantly fine with that. My authors will get compensated and write. Others' authors will find something else to do; they can make podcasts or whatever.

And my authors will keep writing because they want to write. I will also keep donating them money but it's not enough for them to go full time.

World 1: zero copyright infringement. Everyone pays. No one pirates.

More people write books. (as will be more money in it)

World 1.1 Pays your bills. Doesn't make you rich.

More crappy books. More high quality books.

World 1.2 Can make you rich.

Many people will write purely for financial reasons. Some people will be doubly motivated - financial and professional success. They can focus solely on their area of interest, and creating content for it knowing they can also achieve financial success with it. More books written by companies. More crappy books. More high quality books.

World 2: Not one person on earth pays. Every single book has to be for free.

The fewest books produced. Hobbyists or retired people only. People will write for passion. Not necessarily the most qualified people.

World 3: Somewhere in between (our world)

In-between.

Look at youtube which is close to world 1.2. There certainly is a TON of crappy content. However, there's also very high quality, professionally produced content in there. No financial incentive means few of those high quality ones would be there.

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