Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

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> why should consumers care of some pirated books appear on Amazon?

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.

How does this work? There's plenty of books this is tested on: out of copyright works.

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 ...

I’m not sure I understand your question, but works that are out of copyright aren’t relevant to the reasons that copyright exists, or to the fact that Amazon is allowing fake publishers to undercut legitimate publishers with extremely low-quality copies.

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.

> 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 guess I still don’t understand your question/point. Yes if we had a hypothetically different economy in the US I suppose maybe more independent authors could get by on writing alone. They need to make a living somehow, someone needs to pay. UBI might produce more authors…

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.

> Copyright grants a time-limited monopoly to the reproduction of works by their authors

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.

Many authors write for most of their lives before they see success. Who is really suffering from copyright laws being longer than 20 years? Is there a giant void in culture because books go out-of-print? In cases of non-fiction and academics I can see there maybe being an issue with students not being able to learn, but with most fiction it's really ok to have to put some effort into obtaining a copy.

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.

This difference in our perspectives is fascinating. I think of cultural works to be owned by society. The moment you make something public then society can do what it wants with it. We give exclusive rights to the author as a pragmatic step to allow them to afford to spend time creating. We won’t need this temporary band-aid when we are fully post-scarcity.

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).

> The moment you make something public then society can do what it wants with it.

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.

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