Pirated books thrive on Amazon
nypost.com
nypost.com
There was exteme organizational disinterest - partly for a bad but predictable reason (we made a lot of money off these fraudsters) and partly for a reason so bad it still makes me cringe (money recovered from identified fraudsters went into the balance sheet of a different SVP's org, so our org viewed it as a waste of time).
I made the case that the longer we let the problem fester, the less people would trust Amazon to buy anything. Leadership didn't really care but got sick of me constantly making noise about this and eventually signed off. That said, at my project's peak I had four engineers and one data scientist. Compare to consumer fraud and vendor fraud, both of which negatively impact Amazon directly, which were fought by entire VP-level orgs of hundreds of people.
In the end we put together a system that detected blatant fraud easily and in worrying volume, but as soon as I left - which meant there wasn't anyone in leadership sponsoring it - it was quietly mothballed.
-- Wikipedia does not tell the truth, but it never does.
Anyways. The original short story was published in some shitty literary magazine, wherefrom the evil pirate copied it to Usenet.
Turns out that software piracy keeps prices lower. As consumers, we are regularly told that price of goods or services is absolutely all that matters. Therefore, why should consumers care of some pirated books appear on Amazon?
Because pirated books are almost always of markedly lower quality, whereas pirated software is (almost always) functionally equivalent to (or better than) the non-pirated software.
People often say that pirated software has malware, but I liken it to people saying that you can’t trust Wikipedia; i.e. it’s most often false.
The fact that you have both a low-enough risk profile, and exceptional skills to minimize both the incoming risks and the consequences of a problem, does not mean that it is not or should not be a factor for others who have higher risk profiles and lower skills.
I am an actual case in point. Former CTO of several successful software/SAAS companies, now working in manufacturing, including on DOD projects. I could probably make use of some software that is $6-figures/seat, and it'd be fun to try out pirated copies since my small company can't justify that expense. But probably over a decade ago, I did encounter some malware from a download; handled it without a disaster, but it was a significant waste of time and resources. Since then, my observations of even the regular 'legit' software download services (freeware/shareware/trials, even used as official sites by some software authors), is that they look substantially less-well maintained and more 'scammy' than ever. Even if it isn't outright malware, but merely adware that comes along for the ride, I'm out.
Considering the risk of everything from malware to ransomware, to potential exfiltration of even encrypted-on-disk CUI (Confidential Unclassified Information, a new level of information control), I'm extremely wary about any software download, repeatedly check that it is coming directly from the vendor (certs, keys, checksums, etc.).
Again, I'm someone with a somewhat elevated risk profile, but also the (rusty) skills to deal with it, and I legitimately consider it a non-trivial risk. The vast majority of the user population has negative skills to deal with it despite their lower risk profile.
Stop trying to make pirated downloads look like a legitimate and safe option. They are not.
Although vendors are extremely foolish and shortsighted to not make available extended trials, you are still taking something from the owner without permission, and unless you know of some service that is actually 100% effective at scanning for malware, including 0-days and all the morphing/encrypted/etc. malware techniques, it is still a real risk (and if you do know of such a service, let us know about it, and how you have vetted their reliability).
Speaking as an author: because I write for a living, and if I can't earn a living at this I'll have to find some other job, which will cause me to stop writing. Piracy is directly rivalrous for the author's revenue-earning product. (Libraries are less so insofar as Public Lending Right and royalties on library editions cause some money to go to the authors.)
Remember, authors are not film studios or rock groups. We don't have merchandising opportunities, we don't perform live for a ticket fee, and we're mostly very small-scale sole trader businesses. Our revenue comes 100% from sales of our books, unlike bands (who make peanuts from streaming but are paid to tour) or film studios (lots of spin-off merchandise).
(Median income for full time novelists working in the UK, per the ALCS in 2022, was around £7000 a year. A tiny handful make millions, a large number are hobbyists doing it in their spare time for pin money, a small number of us earn a middle class income -- not management level, not even programmer or web developer level. It doesn't take much to tip us from "just getting by" to "giving up, have to go stack shelves in a supermarket" territory.)
A lot of high end software does have an education discount version if you're affiliated with a local college or university.
People probably won't build some dashboard for a large boring corporation but they absolutely will do it for something they love. This isn't even theoretical. See how much software and programming research exists completely outside of the market. And for writing, take a look at fan fiction or stuff on writing subreddits.
Certainly some people do it for money, but there still is a significant number of people who do it for the love of it.
The problem I have with this support of piracy myself, is that while there'd be millions of books still being published without noteworthy economic incentives, economic incentives matters to get volume and quality from at least a proportion of those producing creative works full time who we'd really like to be able to dedicate their time fully to it.
In other words: Even if (and that's purely for the sake of argument) I had the talent to produce something of similar quality as cstross, talent is not enough. It also takes a huge amount of time and dedication to polish those skills to get to the that level, and very few people who are doing it as a hobby can ever hope to (and/or want to) put in the level of effort needed. I certainly could never do that.
If we could achieve the same with grants or something like UBI, great, but I feel we'd lose a great amount of of creative works if it wasn't possible for a proportion of people to work full time honing those skills. And many of those works would be among our best.
The same goes for most contributors to D. (A handful get paid via sponsors.)
If you're familiar with my posts, I'm about as far from a socialist as one can get.
The computers & robots seem poised to make most human labor obsolete. (I'm only really good at programming computers and I feel like my career prospects just evaporated. Craigslist job section seems to agree with that assessment as well.)
To me it seems like the obvious response is to sort of declare ourselves the winners (Humanity: 1, Nature: 0) and get on with Star Trek. (In other words, institute something like UBI so people don't starve and/or riot, fix up our relationship with the ecology so civilization doesn't crash, ...and then I don't care what we do.)
What I'm getting at, is, as a professional author, if you were paid just to live and write, would you still want to be paid-per-copy of your work? I don't mean in a greed sense ("If it is money it is good.") but more in the philosophical or practical senses.
As an example of what I mean, the young fellow who writes/draws "Kill Six Billion Demons" ( https://killsixbilliondemons.com/ ) basically went from art school directly to a fan-supported, uh, career on one story, releasing pages as he drew them. (He then also publishes hardcopies, and I think he sells schwag too.)
Is restricting the use of your software or the blog post you spent a long time researcher or whatever to paying customers really want you want?
When I write software I want the most people I can reach to use it. I get a kick out of people finding my software useful.
The world we live in now with a huge universe of free software is a bazzilion times better than the world of the 1980s when I started programming. I want the same for other industries. Pay people to live and let them do what they enjoy. Some of them will create stuff for others.
Ideally I'd like to know how many people were reading my work, and whether they liked it -- but I really just want the freedom to write (in reasonable comfort).
Unfortunately actually-existing-capitalism as it is today provides no mechanism for doing this, at least on any scale that can support more than a tiny handful of authors, plus the folks climbing the teaching-MFA LitFic academic career ladder (for whom writing is often simply an extramural career progression activity -- with notable exceptions).
The other problem is a bit harder to solve though. Authors don't get paid by how much they're read, but by how many books people buy. There's a subtle difference between the two, and as the story about a large number of record owners not owning record players suggests, I might read book one of a series, get really excited about the rest of the series and buy them all. And then not read them. Maybe it balances out with readers passing one copy of a book around, but I doubt that. That might just have to be something author would have to face if Expensive Kindle Unlimited ever became a thing.
FWIW, I kinda figured. If you were really that into money you would have picked a different career, eh? (As a fan I'm glad you didn't.)
> Unfortunately actually-existing-capitalism as it is today provides no mechanism for doing this,
Ah, that's where it all falls down, eh?
I've got some ideas, and I just got some land on which to try them. At risk of sounding like an asshole, I'm looking forward to finding out if I'm a genius or just full of shit, you know?
They used to! Charles Dickens was very popular in the US in the 19th century. But because of the lack of international copyright laws, it was completely legal for American publishers to print copies of his books without giving him a dime (because they were only covered by British copyright). So what did he do? He did a couple of tours of the US where he sold tickets to shows where he would read from his books and answer questions from the audience.
But my impression is that publishers are pretty selective at sending authors around the country on a book tour these days. Obviously big time (or even big time genre) authors can often book pretty nice speaking gigs if they like.
I got sent on a couple of book tours when my career was spiking, over a decade ago. Grueling, and no very visible short term impact on sales ... and that's with free ticketing (the events were to generate publicity, not revenue). Many authors are middle-aged introverts and don't really thrive under such conditions -- myself included.
I think my favorite short/novella/novelette(?) of yours is A Colder War. But lots of great work!
Not just for individuals either — imagine what would come out of the collectives of artists who would pool that money.
And in such a world, where basic needs for all citizens are handled already, I can see a version wherein art and entertainment would be even more greatly valued — especially since UBI means access doesn’t need to be gated nearly as harshly.
Brand integrity is a way for consumers to find quality or other attributes reliably. Brand building is a real way to build wealth for those seeking to do business in the market. These positions are fragile and rely on some amount of enforcement by the market managers.
This point of view is similar to many professions who deal with large volumes of the population, and when some of them become ill, suffer, have losses or disappointment, the response is "the market is healthy. To make an omelette you have to break a few eggs. What business is it of mine if people buy fake products?"
As the article demonstrates, when the quality is extremely low, the consumers suffer. Also, in this case, the price of the pirated books is the same as the price of the authentic books, so this is not a good demonstration of Karsten’s armchair economic theory of software piracy. In this case, the consumer loses and the real authors & publishers lose, while these fraudulent middle-men, the fake publishers and Amazon, pocket the difference in price. This is bad for the consumer and bad for the economy, in addition to being illegal.
Your question implicitly is asking why we even have Copyright Law and/or the Berne Convention, which is something that has a long a rich history. I don’t feel like we need to justify the existence of copy rights. There’s a rich debate on how long copyright should last and what the limits should be, but very few people suggesting we should just get rid of it completely and allow the pirates to flourish.
And there's indeed a great variety of quality available on those books. Great and very bad. Consumers don't suffer because of this, at least I don't, in fact I've recently discovered a bunch of out-of-print out-of-copyright mathematical works that are so much better.
Also I got pirated Anthony Horowitz books (I have the originals, but 30 year old book and all. Plus it's in the attic), that are much better than the originals at this point.
The thing is when it comes to actually making texts and culture available, libraries and librarians (and archive.org), and indeed piracy are generally the highest available quality. Why? Because there's no alternative. Once 2 or 3 years pass, copyright owners forget 99% of their stuff and just refuse to make it available. Expected profit is just too low (this goes 10x against publishers, who often take books out of print against the wishes of authors). So libraries are the only quality available, and I much prefer that over the black hole copyright owners present ...
Copyright grants a time-limited monopoly to the reproduction of works by their authors. The idea is not that the economy benefits from protection forever, but that the authors have enough time to recoup their costs before the works become public. Many people (me included) think copyright terms are too long, but here we are discussing the idea that the term length should be zero, which I speculate most people would agree is too short. Having the economic incentive to produce good works is important to our economy, and if works can be stolen and faked immediately and the authors can’t profit from them, there is no incentive to make good things.
I guess to clarify… the quality of a reproduction hurts consumers when the quality is lower than the authentic original, like the case of the Amazon books in this article. But generally speaking, quality isn’t super high on the list of reasons for copyrights, or on the broader economic arguments. The primary reason, it is argued, that fakes and copying hurts consumers is because it’s a drain on the economic incentives for creative and productive people to author new works.
And this is kind of stupid because authors that can live on their book earnings are very rare indeed. In fact, you can blame communism for a lot of things, but it certainly produced a lot of books, which would seem to indicate that should it become possible in the US survive on the promise to make a book, while making zero profit of the actual book, many more books would be produced.
Economic incentives incentivise publishers, not authors. That has never really been different. That business model can't really exist without copyright. Authors very much can.
I’m not really sure why it matters how common it is for writers to make full time living on their work. What does that have to do with whether other people should be allowed to copy it without permission and get all the money for it? Copyright law does not depend on whether people can make a living creating something, it always applies, and gives authors enough time to make money, recoup costs, or sit on it, or do whatever they want (or more than enough time, as the case may be). Personally, I don’t buy into the idea that someone should be able to publish my work and make money off it just because its unavailable, for example, there should be other better reasons.
BTW, China and Russia are both party to the Berne Convention, so regardless of how authors make money, even communists believe writers and musicians and all creative people should be protected from copy theft, just like the capitalists and socialists do.
> Economic incentives incentivize publishers, not authors.
Naw, not true. Lots of people who create believe their work might make a lot of money, even if it never does. (Just like everyone who plays the lottery believes they have a chance to win.) Plus lots of people are okay with making small amounts of money, and never intended to make a full time living.
The copyright length is so long and has been extended so many times that it for a long time could have been considered infinite. Maybe with some new works showing up in the public domain on January first now it's true again. But still, the length is looooong. There are books from the 1980s and 1990s that are out-of-print and almost impossible to find. Some authors are able to take back their copyright and release them to the public domain or some CC license after they are out-of-print but many works are just abandoned.
I'm all for people making a living, but man, it's absurd these days. Maybe we should move copyright down to 20 years or something.
There are always new and amazing books being written. It's ok if some are difficult to obtain or abandoned. It's their creation and they can let it die.
I think that society suffers when we artificially make cultural artifacts scarce. I don’t know how to quantify that suffering. I feel like there are parallels between the explosion in quality software and what we can do with it and the availability of open source software (including the languages, documentation, and discovery/distribution).
Very strongly disagree with this. If Stephen King decides no more printings of any of his books he's is well within his right to do so. He can share it with the world or not.
> I think that society suffers when we artificially make cultural artifacts scarce.
I agree with this only if it's the intent of the creator. For instance, putting a Picasso painting in a billionaire's office / yacht / warehouse and locking it away is probably wrong in the sense Picasso most likely didn't want his paintings under lock and key. And although I love Picasso I don't know if there's suffering in society when there's so much other art available. It's a loss for sure, but I don't know if society is any worse.
Epic Games earn billions with their Unreal Engine and Fortnite and they aren't afraid of pirates.
Unreal engine is not technically open source, I’m aware that their revenue from it is that significant compared to Fortnite and they make money by taking a share of revenue from it’s users.
Not sure how all of that is relevant for open source though . IBM/Red Hat, Google or even Oracle would be much better examples
I tried to get a Netflix subscription. For a long while, nope. Wouldn't work.
Even now, Paramount streaming specifically excludes Linux. Theyll gladly take your money, though. Oh, and it works for chrome and android, of which the second is Linux.
The people who actually try to buy and pay distributors/creators get screwed time and again. I further refuse to take part in getting screwed again.
Or take the Microsoft Zune. Anyone who bought music there ended up buying void after they arbitrarily shut the auth servers down. Cause, uhh, Microsoft couldn't afford a few auth servers? And their sharing added in illegal DRM, especially if I was playing CC tracks that expressly forbid that. (And of course, the irony that MS is part of the business software alliance, with heavy draconian hands of licenses and copyright.... All the while pirating and breaking GPL with copilot. And you want US to respect you? QED: fuck off, MS)
There's the whole DVD debacle with deCSS.
Whereas with Linux and the FLOSS ecosystem, I do recognize that fellow creators are being ethical, and giving for the cost of "follow my license if you use code". And there's no spyware, DRM, or other harmful stuff. Sure, there's bad actors.... But those bad actors are usually companies like Microsoft who pilfer all our code for their benefit and profit (Copilot).
Tit for tat is the best game theory solution so far. And given how many times I've been screwed over by media companies arbitrarily revoking first-sale doctrine because it was really a rental... That means I'll "pierat" my media. I've paid enough. And I will help others free of charge do the same.
I guess to look at my views, it really is anti-commercial and pro-FLOSS. And having copyright rules different for the rest of us versus the big media also colors my judgement.
(And my last 3 projects were aGPL3, precisely to keep companies from _aaS my software without contributing back.)
To actually violate the GPL requires at least some effort towards locking the system down. If you just torrent some Linux ISOs, they either contain source, links to source, or that weird written offer thing that GPLv2 wanted. You'd have to actually remove those in order to violate GPL. Pirates would not be happy with you for doing this.
It's also important to note that there's a bit of a difference between different kinds of piracy, and they have different mentalities. You have the FTP topsite scene users, then P2P users, then people trying to resell copyrighted material for money. The first two are more aligned with either "we don't like copyright, period" or "we like downloading free shit", which makes them either aligned with or neutral to the FOSS community. The latter group does not care, they just want a quick way to make a buck. If they couldn't resell other people's books on Amazon, they'd probably be committing some other kind of cybercrime.
Unfortunately, as in most things, the context of my question seems to have gotten ignored:
> As consumers, we are regularly told that price of goods or services is absolutely all that matters.
Modern anti-trust law pivots on this principle. Modern attitudes toward labor and hourly rates are based on this principle.
Why are we asked to abandon this only in select cases, cases where we as consumers, end up carrying the bulk of the burden?
It helps spread the legal license of software because by using illegal software you learn how to use it and when you get to a job you ask your employer for a version of the software you are familiar with, or because others need to buy software to interop with your illegal software.
There is not really any reason to suppose that pirated books help the sale of real books in a similar manner.
Until, or unless it starts actually and materially affecting Amazon's bottom line, I doubt they'll do anything significant about anything. They're the 800lb gorilla and will survive for decades just on entropy at this point.
- Claudia Alves, Alexander Aronowitz: Lua Programming: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Learn Lua Step by Step
- Kathleen Peterson: Lua Programming: Syntax, Concepts, and Examples
In all seriousness, Amazon needs to stop being so complacent and hurry up and remove them.
This is a general tendency people believe. The categorical imperative is not something that people live by.
It's okay to pirate from some people but not others. Perhaps because software people are "overpaid" and artists are "underpaid".
Interesting stuff, definitely. For my part, the Kindle makes things too convenient for me to pirate intentionally (once I bought a book only to find that it was almost certainly pirated - massive typos in the metadata and it was removed soon after).
"the issue is especially widespread for textbooks" - Oh ok, carry on then.