“Hello, Sears? I need repair on my washing machine. No, I didn’t buy it. I just stole it out of one of your stores. Even so, I’m demanding that you help me and provide warranty service.”
No, I’ve never stolen a washing machine. I’ve never stolen anything, other than Wayne’s girlfriend back in the 1980s. At least, he accused me of “stealing” her, although it was her decision and not his.
When it comes to theft, however, I’m pretty familiar with it. My books are stolen every day of the year. They’re not purloined from a bookstore, although that might happen. No, thieves steal them by using bittorrents on the Internet. Often they’re not aware of what they’re doing, which is no excuse.
Just last week, I received an email from a self-confessed “little old lady.” She was having trouble with her Android phone and couldn’t find the answer to a question in my book. She wrote, “I downloaded your book.”
Now lots of people “download” my book. I assume it’s an eBook, one that they duly paid for. So I wrote back, “I provide support only to people who buy my books.”
For a moment I thought I was being rude. But no: I had to know whether or not she was a legitimate reader. I will offer help and assistance to somehow who checks out one of my books from a Library, but a thief is a different matter.
At least she had the honesty to reply and say, “I read a recommendation for your book and so I found a free copy on the Internet, which I downloaded.”
No help for you.
It’s amazing. Sometimes I wonder — but not often — how much money I don’t make because scumbags on the Internet steal my stuff. And I’m not alone.
Music. TV shows. Movies. Artwork. Lots of material is pirated — outright stolen from the artists who create it. Our loss is our income, but also the incentive to create new stuff.
In an interview recently, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd said that he was happy to be in the Music industry from the 1970s through the 1990s. He actually made money from his work. Today, he lamented, artists make a few hundred dollars where he made thousands or millions. The rest of the money goes to the eggheads who make the apps or run the online services. And no money comes from anyone who plows the bowels of the Internet for a “free” copy of something they’d otherwise have to pay for.
Seriously: What’s the incentive to create anything when jerks on the Internet just steal it?
I’ll continue my anti-Internet rant on Wednesday.
Hi
While I agree that pirating work is bad, I think the fault isn’t just with the end user. This is also a problem created by the content distributors – and the dynamics are very different based on the media.
Take television shows – cable bundles don’t make much sense to the end consumer. While I get HBO by itself, I can’t get the one sports channel I want. I have to get 50.
Books are very interesting – I bought a lot of your books in my home country (Eastern Economy editions, priced fairly for the country) in the 90s. But digital distributions of books are priced the same for all regions. As far as I can tell, there is no EEE for e-books. This prices out customers. In an ideal world, if I couldn’t afford it, I would either find a substitute or do without. But in the digital age, I can have my cake and eat it too (with a healthy self-justification on how greedy the publishers are, and how they deserve it).
Music (and to a certain extent books) also have the DRM problem, but they are largely worked out. Again, the pricing in certain countries needs to make sense, but I often buy music (either digitally, or CD for my collection) after watching a “free” version on YouTube.
Movies are another interesting case – I watch some movies in theaters (esp. if the graphics and effects are worth it), but sometimes I miss one I would have liked to see. Then I have to wait for several months before it comes out online.
Again, none of these are really justifications for piracy. Unlike stealing in a store, this is more like getting bootlegged copies – and the people losing out (authors, artists, actors) are abstract in a digital age. But apart from the buyers (if I get a copy for free, why wouldn’t I), some blame must go to the distributors.
Also, I believe some of it is cultural – for people who have been brought up with the internet, the concept of everything being freely available is natural. The idea that you have to pay for books or movies when you’ve got it free your whole life is a strange concept.
Comment by sriksrid — June 1, 2015 @ 8:21 am
Excellent comment. I expound on this whole idea of the “no marginal cost” economy in my next blog post (Wednesday).
Coupled with the “you’ve got it free” mentality is also the “look it up on Google” concept. A lot of people today are completely unaware that knowledge is concealed in books. They don’t think to look for a book on a topic when you can Google an instant answer. That also bolsters the notion that quality doesn’t play into the equation; obviously a book gives you a better, more thorough answer than Google, but no one really cares about that anymore.
Indeed, we are embarking onto uncharted waters.
Comment by admin — June 1, 2015 @ 8:31 am
Just my 2 pence (or cents) worth, I have seen and bought digital copies of books and weren’t really impressed, a book like ‘Bebop To The Boolean Boogie’ as a E-book I found not really worth reading, however I got a paper copy and read it cover to cover, when it came to moving house I realised what my love of printed word cost (a lot).
The issue is Google, Yahoo(?) & Bing(??) are peoples first source of answer these days when they get pointed toward an answer they go for it legal or not. Roger Waters (moaning so & so he is) has a good point! My thing is if I spend £10 on a music I like something for it (I also have a CD collection that is large) the same with books, this attitude of download it, will go the same way as the recording pop songs off the radio on to blank cassette tape. I think (I hope).
Comment by glennp — June 1, 2015 @ 10:00 am
Yes, I once recorded my music off the radio. I believe that happened so often that the DJs were encouraged to talk over the intro. Toward the end, I just recorded a whole hour and played it back.
eBooks are new. The pricing model is horrid. Worse, technical books just don’t look right in the eBook format. I’ve sold a few copies of my own eBooks, but the numbers are painfully low.
Comment by admin — June 1, 2015 @ 2:52 pm
Try reading a Circuit diagrams from an e-book! you will go cross eyed in two minutes
Comment by glennp — June 2, 2015 @ 2:37 am
Dan- I know you take the ‘moral high road’ on piracy by just saying its wrong and no one should do it, but I dont think bashing people for being thieves is going to work because that is not the whole story, their are serious problems that punish people for being honest and drive normally honest people to piracy. This issue affects me because I want to become a professional programmer
1) People are confused as to how they should buy movie and tv content (as mentioned above). Things like Hulu and Netflix are sort of addressing the issue, so now cable companies are suffering.
2) Companies use price gouging to recoup costs lost on sales because of piracy, so in a sense you are punished for being honest. Best example of this is the ‘record industry’ (yes they are still trying to force people to buy ~records~ (CDs) instead of download online content). So everyone I know has gigs of music on their mp3 player. And the joke is everyone says the stuff is all rips of CDs they bought. So do you expect me to believe everyone who has about 1000 albums on their computer payed $25 per CD which equals $25,000 dolars worth of music? Lets face it, everyone downloads music, even Barak Obama probably has gigs of pirated music on his mp3 player.
What Im trying to say is that the music/movie/tv/software industries all have to learn how to properly monetize their content online. I honestly believe that the reason a lot of people pirate is that the pricing for online content is in turmoil. Its very hard to know how to buy movies/tv, much of the content is bloated with adware even though people paid money for it. Music is impossible to buy online because they are forcing CDs. Software is priced for the rich or for business, so its impossible to be honest without going to the poorhouse.
Comment by BradC — June 2, 2015 @ 3:04 pm
Another theory I heard is that people who pirate stuff would never buy it in the first place. In fact, back when Napster first came out, people ripped hours of music and never listened to anything. So that’s one theory, but I believe today many people, such as the granny who stole my book, would have purchased it otherwise.
Comment by admin — June 2, 2015 @ 3:39 pm
That argument is true with something like video games, there are a lot of dumb games that people would never buy unless they got it for free. But this is not true for the music industry. Everyone listens to music, but there is no place to buy music online except for iTunes because the music industry keeps trying to force CDs which is a dead format. I cant feel sorry for rock bands who are too dumb to sell their stuff online and complain no one is buying their CDs.
Comment by BradC — June 2, 2015 @ 5:43 pm
I actually buy CDs when I can. In fact, I’ve lost money buying media from the (now defunct) Samsung Media Hub because they no longer exist. If I have the music on a CD, I can always rip it to a player.
Comment by admin — June 2, 2015 @ 8:27 pm