The publishers are not the enemy | Hacker News Reader

The publishers are not the enemy

andreyf.tumblr.com

12 pointsandreyf23 comments

There is no argument here. There is a lot of "but they're simpletons who don't understand the Internet" and "the CEO has to answer awkward questions from other simpletons if he doesn't insist upon the right to 'unpublish' a book".

Never mind that the whole point of being a publisher is to publish books. Never mind that a bunch of people, clearly, had bought these and were therefore paying more than the paperbacks for those cost in store for fewer rights. The whole foundation of ethics is that just because you can do something does not mean you should do something.

What is your solution? The system, if you want to call it that, is massive, bureaucratic, and has checks to stop the right thing from happening. If the publisher's CEO decides he hates DRM, then what will the board say to him? There's no way to eliminate the middlemen without eliminating the content in the process, or having to create new content. Unless, of course, you want to bring the government in or something like that.

Unless, of course, you want to bring the government in or something like that.

Unless you mean "into the conversation", I think you meant "remove the government". After all, it is government which enforces copyright - removing government protection of copyright for 90 years after an authors' death is probably the best way to stop companies from being so adamant about enforcing every last bit of it. It's a bit of a Catch 22 that since copyright is so valuable, it's worth a lot of money to lobby congress to extend it (increasing its value even more).

just because you can do something does not mean you should do something

But that misses my point precisely: if this was your buddy Josh, an appeal to ethics would make sense, but a corporation isn't a person. Publishers can't do anything else, just like moths can't help but fly to light. Bringing up ethics here is like bringing up ethics when your car won't start.

In most publishers, if an "enlightened" CEO decides to give up rights, he needs to justify the business value of that - and "the 0.1% of our customers who know what DRM is and care will buy paper versions of our books instead of getting a Kindle" is just not enough business value to justify it.

A CEO isn't being paid to make his company an ethical actor in the world, he's paid to maximize the value of the company. If a CEO's ethics regarding DRM don't agree with maximizing the value of the company, he'll say "I can't do my job because it's unethical" and be replaced with someone else.

i believe the parent's post is (successfully) making a counter argument that though a publisher may have an incentive to minimize risk, primarily they are deemed a 'publisher' because they publish (that is, broker the distribution of) books. approached from this perspective, it's hard to see this blog post's defense of publishers as simply minimizing their risk exposure as anything but shallow and counter intuitive to their primary goal of distributing books. that said, i don't work in publishing - i only consume it's published products - so i reserve the right to be wrong about how they make their money. i speculate here solely on the assumption that most business still does require someone to consume a product in exchange for a currency commensurate to an agreed value.

Ah, then I should have made the distinction between "publishers" and "copyright owners", please do a mental:

    s/publishers/copyright owners/g

Publishers have nothing to do with negotiating copyrights with Amazon, unless they are also the copyright owners, and copyright owners don't give a shit how their books are consumed, as long as they keep getting paid.

that doesn't change the original replies basic point: without consumers, neither the copyright holder nor the publisher nor amazon makes any money. and pretty much everyone on the planet that's not a publisher/copyright owner/bookseller really doesn't care in the slightest about the perspectives of their business. sorry, but we never will. when you're selling something as abstract as a story you should consider yourself lucky that ANYONE is willing to devote any portion of their non-survival budget to such trivialities. While it's become common lately for people to be able to do so, this is a very new (less than 2 centuries) old phenomenon that's still quite fragile. And as the music industry has so effectively proven - if you push consumers hard enough they're not going to give up on their content, rather, they'll route around the choke point and take over distribution (and by extension content production) through less centralized means. this, in my mind, is a much greater risk facing the publishing/copyright holder industries than simple ebook platforms.

without consumers, neither the copyright holder nor the publisher nor amazon makes any money

And that doesn't change my point: most customers don't care. If customers cared, DRM would be a business risk, and acted on accordingly. But they don't, and so it's not. I wish customers cared. I really do. I wish they cared about their shoes being made by little slave children and civilian Iraqi deaths, too. But they don't.

Now, we can make ourselves feel better by sitting here and bitching about it, or we can understand the world and try to make it better in whatever little way we can.

In most publishers, if an "enlightened" CEO decides to give up rights, he needs to justify the business value of that

How about justifying it by the fact that it could cause a huge backlash and cause customers to decide buying ebooks is just too risky, and paper books are too bulky, and by god the whole "book" thing is just too much of a hassle and we'll just stick to blogs and wikipedia. I mean it's not exactly an inelastic market.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with "enlightened." That sounds an awful lot like you think this is about some RMS-inspired freedom ideology. No, it has nothing to do with that. It's not even a digital issue (other then that technology enabled it). It's the fact that if you sell shit to people and then take it back they don't like that. It's utterly moronic.

Being able to say "if you change your mind, there's an undo button" is a big deal for someone trying to minimize risk.

So cancel the deal and stop selling more copies. What exactly is the risk of someone keeping something they purchased? If it didn't sell well that will be very few people. The production and distribution costs have already been sunk, so the undo button is doing nothing but pissing off customers. Are they scared it's going to be pirated? Well if it was going to be pirated, it already is, and now there's no other way to get it.

I agree with you about how they think, but you still haven't shown what risk they are minimizing and how it's anywhere near the risk of discouraging sales by pissing off customers like this.

How about justifying it by the fact that it could cause a huge backlash...

Heh, I sure am glad I don't work in market research for you ;) "WHAT DO YOU MEAN PEOPLE DON'T KNOW OR CARE ABOUT DRM!? IT'S WRONG!"

Your response makes no sense at all. It's completely unrelated to what I said. People don't need to "know about DRM" in order to be pissed off when stuff they bought disappears.

"""A CEO isn't being paid to make his company an ethical actor in the world, he's paid to maximize the value of the company. If a CEO's ethics regarding DRM don't agree with maximizing the value of the company, he'll say "I can't do my job because it's unethical" and be replaced with someone else."""

That is wrong, and wrong in a way that is very symptomatic of the illness afflicting our society as a whole. A CEO or other officer of a company has a fiduciary responsibility to her shareholders, but she also has an ethical responsibility to the society in which her company exists; and without which it would not exist.

That the myth that fiduciary responsibilities trump all other responsibilities is so widespread that many here hold it up as an unquestioned truth should be disturbing to you. If you believe that your companies profitability outweighs any moral, ethical or legal obligation; then you are criminally insane and it is societies right and duty to limit you so that you do not harm others.

"Wrong" meaning you wish it wasn't that way, or wrong meaning inaccurate in describing the state of the world? The former I agree with, the latter you don't seem to give much evidence for.

If you wish it wasn't that way, how do you suppose we should define corporations? You can't just stick a "must has an ethical responsibility to the society in which her company exists; and without which it would not exist" clause in a law somewhere...

myth that fiduciary responsibilities trump all other responsibilities

Again, this is like talking about the myth of gravity after a rock falls on your head. Fiduciary responsibility is the law under which corporations like publishers operate.

If you don't like the law, it would be a nice exercise to suggest an alternative (which we can debate).

If you believe that your companies profitability outweighs any moral, ethical or legal obligation; then you are criminally insane and it is societies right and duty to limit you so that you do not harm others

Let's simplify: a rock fell on a baby's head and smushed it. I point and say "hey look, a rock fell on a baby's head and smushed it, because it's really heavy". You say: "If you believe that babies should be smushed by rocks; then you are criminally insane and it is societies right and duty to limit you so that you do not harm others". See my point?

See, and this confuses me - in your last sentence, you used "fiduciary responsibilities", which makes me think you went to college. But this shows such a lack of reading comprehension... oooooh... are you one of those "globalization" majors?

    <offtopic>Geezus fuck, has news.YC really come to this!?</offtopic>

Your logic does not take into account the entire ecosystem in which these companies exist. If you take it as law that companies exist only to make profit and they cannot help it, then you should also take it as law that when companies do things people don't like, people will get upset, and this will, hopefully, reduce the company's profits. This is how people can try to make companies do what they want, and this is how markets work. So, using your logic, there is nothing wrong with people getting angry and blaming the company - it is part of the system to make the market produce what people want.

But we were talking about morality, and I'm afraid markets aren't moral when it comes to externalities. Most people don't care if slaves picked their strawberries or if children made their shoes.

Business transactions are business transactions - I give you $$$, you give me laptop. Whether or not you dumped toxic waste on villagers halfway around the world to make it just isn't part of the equation for most people.

[AGAIN: Not saying this is right, or optimal, it's just reality folks, with no way I can see of changing it]

Are you unfamiliar with the usage of wrong, as in bad; morally wrong, unhealthy and pernicious?

As a matter of fact I did go to college. That does not mean that I had my conscience removed. It also means that I can debate someone without resort to vituperation.

You said: """Again, this is like talking about the myth of gravity after a rock falls on your head. Fiduciary responsibility is the law under which corporations like publishers operate."""

Fiduciary responsibility is considered to be breached when the officers of the corporation place the assets of the corporation at risk by violating the law; is that not so?

Allow me to state a hypothetical, you are the CEO or a board member of a company and one of your direct reports brings you a plan that would involve selling lollypops with a physiologically addictive additive to young children. He presents complete documentation that no one will be harmed unless they stop consuming the product and provides an assurance that an industry consortium can have this additive declared legal before the product is marketed. He also presents projections that make it obvious that this would be the most profitable undertaking the company could do at this time.

So this plan would be legal and profitable.

Would it be morally correct? Obviously not.

Would you do this?

It is in the narrow sense you have described what you must do to fulfill your fiduciary obligations. It is also blatantly unethical.

I look forward to hearing your answer.

Fiduciary responsibility is considered to be breached when the officers of the corporation place the assets of the corporation at risk by violating the law; is that not so?

The problem with the term "fiduciary responsibility" is that it is a vague term that is ever changing. You don't have to violate the law to breach a fiduciary responsibility. With that said, the extent to which you are responsible for some financial matter is usually determined by the lawyer suing you and the judge overseeing your case.

I am fully cognizant that fiduciary responsibility is a guiding principle and not rote procedure, the point I am attempting to elucidate for those who throw the term around so freely here. Is that fiduciary responsibility is not a substitute for moral judgment, and too narrow a construal of it leads inevitably to a place where a strict by the numbers construction of what fiduciary responsibility is demands that you take actions that are so wrong that your company should be dissolved since it is actively harmful to society.

"but they're simpletons who don't understand the Internet"

Sorry if I made it seem that way. I don't mean to call them simpletons. They're very intelligent, thorough, but optimizing very different constraints than people think. In the situation they're in, decision makers become extremely risk averse, and in this context, their actions make complete sense.

"the CEO has to answer awkward questions from other simpletons if he doesn't insist upon the right to 'unpublish' a book"

The questions about "un-publishing" aren't awkward - they're perfectly natural from the "minimizing risk" perspective. What smaller risk is there than being able to undo all sales?

Publisher relations are a B2B sale with professional career sales-people. A sale from a big copyright owner is negotiation with hours of meetings, decks of power point slides, loads of cost/benefit analysis, and various value propositions (depending on whom in the organization you're talking to). Being able to say "if you change your mind, there's an undo button" is a big deal for someone trying to minimize risk.

the whole point of being a publisher is to publish books

By the same logic as the point of a record label is to sell records with their label on them, or by some other?

Well, from the various followups on the original story, it looks like the reality was much more complicated than this article (and your comment) make it out to be.

Specifically, it looks as if the publisher of the Kindle edition was an outfit that distributes digitized public-domain books. The specific books in question are in the public domain in Canada, but not elsewhere. Therefore:

1. Neither that publisher nor Amazon had the right to offer these books for sale outside of Canada, and

2. The publisher receiving the payments for these books was not the entity which owned the rights to them in countries where the books are still under copyright.

The exact means by which the screwup happened, I don't know; maybe the public-domain publisher mistakenly thought the books were PD everywhere, maybe they forgot to check a box for "only sell to Canadians", maybe Amazon mistakenly listed the books where it wasn't supposed to.

But regardless of how the situation came about, this is not the publisher of a book trying to "unpublish" it, or changing their mind about whether to offer an electronic edition. This was copyright infringement which was discovered and remedied.

Did Amazon do it in a way that sucks? Yeah. Should anybody be surprised that this functionality exists in the Kindle? Absolutely not. Hell, even Google -- striving for openness and fairness and not-being-Apple -- built a remote kill switch into their app store for Android.

Hell, even Google -- striving for openness and fairness and not-being-Apple -- built a remote kill switch into their app store for Android

You know, I'm really glad they did. They'll know first if an application has a virus or remote exploit, I want them to take it off my device. I trust that they won't do anything shady (and I trust Amazon won't do anything shady) because (1) they're bound by laws that keep them in check and (2) they want my business.

I bet it would gravitate toward his next meeting with the board, the part where someone asks, slowly:

So copyright law gives us rights over our content that you decided to waive why, exactly?

But that would never happen, because if there’s one thing he knows how to to best, it’s to avoid risk.

What about most obvious risk--the one the article conveniently overlooks--the risk of customers not buying your product? Would you buy a book that included a remotely operated kill switch which could dissolve the pages at the wishes of the publisher?

the risk of customers not buying your product

I agree that the world would be better off if this were true. But considering it's their careers on the line, I imagine they do a lot of research into customers' behavior and how it related to DRM. I imagine that the biggest competitor to a DRM-ed e-book is the dead-tree version of that same book, in which case, it's all a win-win for them.

But again, while I imagine people do buy e-books, I agree that most of them don't realize the fine print of the transaction. Morally speaking this isn't fair, in a way, Amazon is facilitating a fraudulent transaction between their customers and the publishers.

But corporate law isn't written by ethics philosophers, it's written by lobbyists, lawyers, and politicians (hopefully). And so corporations don't behave according to a human's sense of morality, but according to corporate law.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com