Life In 19x19

Mumble mumble... consequentialist reasoning! Mumble mumble mumble... deontologist reasoning!

Not everyone in this thread is thinking about moral issues with the same lens...

A few quick points here.

1. My opinion:

I think that, as Robert has said, it is the author of the work who should be able to decide (and enforce) the business model to best distribute his work. If it suits the author to give it away from free, so be it. If its short samples followed by possibility of full purchase, or time-restricted demos, it should be the choice of the author. If the decision the author makes lowers his/her sales, tough break - it is still his/her right to decide. Period. But arguing that you go against the wishes of the author because you know better what is good for the author (or for the market) is nothing but another layer of excuses.

I know there are tons of people out there who try to validate piracy by such murky arguments, like "I might decide to delete the pirated stuff and then but it legally if it is good" or even worse - "I think information is free and I feel justified in pirating and the author is a crook for trying to prevent me." There are all kinds... and I think they are all wrong, no matter how pseudo-logical their arguments appear on the surface.

2. The reality:

Having said the above, I do not think there is a good way to stop piracy of information in general. And with time moving on, the issue will become more and more prevalent... I see absolutely no way around it.

Still, there are small things we can do. For example - we can make it shameful to pirate things rather than glorifying it. If people are ashamed of pirating, they will pirate less, they won't brag about it, and generally people will be purchasing stuff legally. Sure, the problem will still exist, just like there are still thieves and other law-breakers, but it will be a fringe.

3. About comparisons:

I do not think that comparing book piracy and music piracy is appropriate. It is easy to see why the situation in music business is different. For those who do not see it - in music business artists make money in many different ways, concerts, endorsements, tv rights, and whatnot... True, some music piracy (or even legally giving away music for free) while lowering the income from record sales might actually increase income from other sources due to increase in popularity. Of course, there are extreme examples of whole huge markets being involved in illegal distribution (china?) of music, but this is another issue, I think.

When you write a book, unless you reach the stature of J.K.Rowling for example, all the money you make is from the sales of the book. If the book flops, you eat a loss (and so does the publisher, most likely.)

There might be a situation when giving away books for free is advantageous for the author (like giving away volume 1 in hope people like it and then buy volumes 2 and 3) - but this should be left to the author, as said in my first point.

I also do not think that pirating go books (or books in general) can increase the actually legal sales. I have never see any indication of that, any studies which would suggest that... and to me, common sense suggests that those who pirate don't buy, in general. Sure, there are some that still buy, but most don't, I think. One could argue, as many have, that those who pirate would not have bought anyways, but again - I see not indication of that. I am sure some would have bought the books if they were not available for free.

Araban wrote:

flOvermind wrote:I think that you should be able and allowed to do everything with an e-book that you're allowed to do with a dead-tree book. Not more, not less.

Lots of people would want this; but in the same world, people wouldn't need to lock their doors. It's impossible to enforce.

So what's morally right is not enforcable. How unfortunate...

So we have to find the next best thing that works. And that must be some compromise, weighing the interests of both sides against each other. Just abandoning the idea completely, and giving one side (authors/publishers) every right they want, may work, but it's definitely not the next best thing, not even near it.

topazg wrote:Firstly, don't confuse immoral and illegal, being one doesn't mean it is necessarily the other (nor necessarily should it be). Law is amoral by definition. Immoral is an absolute in theory, and comes down to personal definition and interpretation in practice.

Yes. But I'd still like immoral things to be illegal, and morally right things to be legal. I know that's not always possible in practice. That's why I wrote "... is immoral, and should be illegal". Two separate points, yes, but I'd like them to align wherever possible.

topazg wrote:Ask John F how he would feel about a Go club of 20 players purchasing one copy of one of his books, and they each read and study it at the club, eventually with all 20 consuming all the material to their satisfaction despite him receiving royalties for only one copy.

Ok, I'll concede that point 7) is morally speaking a border case. The way you formulate it makes it sound like the answer should be "no". The other extreme case would be the scenario where I buy a book, read it, and then use what I learned in teaching 20 people, but never actually showing them the book. Would I then need to buy 20 copies? Do I need to buy another 20 copies when I give the same lectures next year? Yes, an (intentionally) stupid example, but that just shows that this is one of these "where is the border?" questions, rather than one that can be answered with a definite "yes" or "no".

topazg wrote:Lending your books to other people so that they never feel the need to purchase is the exact opposite of protecting authors...

No. It's just not doing everything the way the authors would like. Except when you define "protecting authors" as "letting them do whatever they want, ignoring what everyone else wants".

That's exactly what I meant when I write "The law has to strike a balance between the interests of both sides.". The same goes for the moral viewpoint: You can't just say "that's against the interest of the authors", because everything is always against the interest of someone. I could reverse that argument and say that customers need some protection too. And "piracy is morally ok, because requiring the customers to pay money is the exact opposite of protecting the customers". Of course that's stupid, but it's basically the same argument.


So the real question is: Who is morally entitled to what? That the authors are entitled to everything and the customers to nothing just can't be the correct answer

Basically, it comes down to the question whether you think (a) someone who has an "idea" has some inherent right (remember, we're discussing morally here, not legally) to continuously get compensation for as long as someone is using it, or on the other hand (b) someone who has an "idea" has an inherent right to get compensation proportionally to how many implementations of the idea are produced.

Note that "idea" here is in a very general sense. Not only actual inventions, but also the content of a book, the code of a program, the content of a CD and so on, all qualify as ideas. In the same sense, "implementing the idea" is meant to be very general: Printing a book, making a copy of a CD, downloading a program from the internet, and of course actually building what the invention is about, all qualify as implementation of the idea.

I'm in the (b) camp, in case you didn't notice. I think an "idea" itself is worth nothing, unless you "implement" it by actually continuously selling the book as long as someone wants it, instead of just getting the money handed to you just because at some point in the past you sold a few copies

Or, put another way: I don't see why "changing the owner" should be of any concern to the author. If you really think morally speaking the author should continuously get money for every past work, even when the market is saturated and no *new* copies are sold, then you should outlaw selling books in general, and just demand that everyone pays rent for every owned book. Because what's the difference between me having a book in my shelf and reading it once a year, and a book being resold to another owner once a year?


@Bantari: I'm talking primarily about books, but I'm not really convinced that *morally* it should be any different for music or films. Of course, the existence of broadcasts, and the ability to record these broadcasts, makes the situation a lot more complicated and raises additional questions.

daniel_the_smith wrote:Mumble mumble... consequentialist reasoning! Mumble mumble mumble... deontologist reasoning!

Not everyone in this thread is thinking about moral issues with the same lens...

Fortunately, morality has been solved!

Derek Parfit's Triple Theory, quoted in the New Yorker wrote:An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable.

Fittingly, or ironically, this is behind a paywall: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/09/05/110905fa_fact_macfarquhar

A couple of points regarding the last few pages of comments.

The first sale doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine) has long established the right of the purchaser of something under copyright to resell the object they purchased. There is no difference between a library and a go club that lends the same book to potentially dozens of people. You may think this is wrong - and, in fact, in Europe, the way this is treated is different, as libraries actually pay small royalties to authors in certain countries - but it is the accepted way such intellectual property is dealt with.

Regarding this comment:

"When you write a book, unless you reach the stature of J.K.Rowling for example, all the money you make is from the sales of the book. If the book flops, you eat a loss (and so does the publisher, most likely.) "

This is actually quite wrong. I'd say that probably 90% of books don't earn out their advances. In other words, the author gets an advance, and the royalties from sales don't cover the advance, and they don't make any more. This means that most authors actually consider their books as works for hire, with a fixed amount paid to them, and realize that they won't make any more, because sales won't be enough to cover advances. (This doesn't mean that the publishers don't make money on sales, of course. The decks are stacked against authors.)

This doesn't answer any questions, but I think it's important to really understand the economics of publishing when discussing such things. Alas, most people don't understand how all this works. (And this gets much more complicated for music or movies.)

Addendum: Just after I posted the above, I got an e-mail from my agent, with a royalty statement for a book I wrote. I earned a whopping $3.04 this quarter, and I'm only $4,779.34 from earning out my advance on that book. Whoopee!

flOvermind wrote:Because what's the difference between me having a book in my shelf and reading it once a year, and a book being resold to another owner once a year?

They simply aren't the same. You could have a system where the charge is the same for each by only offering temporary licenses, but you could also have a system where different amounts are charged. Maybe perpetual licenses are offered, either solely or in addition to temporary licenses. On the other hand, you could have a system in which each license allows some number (or an unlimited quantity) of resellings.

Beyond the literal answer, these don't seem to be moral equivalents either. There is a difference between experiencing something the first time and experiencing it a subsequent time.

You could separately try to argue that some restrictions are not permissible for a seller to require, but surely the two things you mention are not identical.

kirkmc wrote:"When you write a book, unless you reach the stature of J.K.Rowling for example, all the money you make is from the sales of the book. If the book flops, you eat a loss (and so does the publisher, most likely.) "

This is actually quite wrong. I'd say that probably 90% of books don't earn out their advances. In other words, the author gets an advance, and the royalties from sales don't cover the advance, and they don't make any more. This means that most authors actually consider their books as works for hire, with a fixed amount paid to them, and realize that they won't make any more, because sales won't be enough to cover advances. (This doesn't mean that the publishers don't make money on sales, of course. The decks are stacked against authors.)

I am not in the business, so I won't try to argue the specific with you here, but...
Isn't this the same, though? Just two sides of the same coin, not really affecting the argument I was trying to make?

Regardless of the fact if authors get future royalties, and regardless if the royalties cover advances, the advance is give based on some predicted sales figure. In other words - a book which is expected to sell in millions will be more likely to induce a high advance from the publisher than a book which is expected to sell only in hundreds. In this case, the author is still getting paid according to topic, quality, stature, and maybe some other considerations, which ultimately translates into sales.

If you undermine these sales up front by allowing wide-spread piracy, the publishers will expect less profit, and thus they will give lower advance to the author.
So, be it as it may, that author's intake depends on how well the book sells or is expected to sell. Thus these two concepts are closely connected.

I think that you should be able and allowed to do everything with an e-book that you're allowed to do with a dead-tree book. Not more, not less.

I guess it's because I'm a shiftless young person but this statement is like, totally weird to me, man.

Thought experiment: Suppose we went in the other direction and at the birth of writing we had computers to write books into and Kindles to read them on. Once a book was written, instead of having to make imprints or transcribe it in a monastery or fire up a printing press, suppose it was always more or less free to make changes to the book, make unlimited copies of the book and distribute it to anyone who cares to read it.

Do you think, in that world, that we would decide that the best way to encourage writing was to make books harder to get, harder to read, and more difficult to copy?

The idea of doing so is completely at odds with my common sense, and barring some evidence that it actually makes life better for someone, I think it's mad.

There are gazillions of possible ways to encourage writing and the dissemination of knowledge. If we think it's a problem, then I suggest we try some of them that don't involve artificially crippling our ability to obtain and consume that knowledge.

Bantari wrote:

kirkmc wrote:"When you write a book, unless you reach the stature of J.K.Rowling for example, all the money you make is from the sales of the book. If the book flops, you eat a loss (and so does the publisher, most likely.) "

This is actually quite wrong. I'd say that probably 90% of books don't earn out their advances. In other words, the author gets an advance, and the royalties from sales don't cover the advance, and they don't make any more. This means that most authors actually consider their books as works for hire, with a fixed amount paid to them, and realize that they won't make any more, because sales won't be enough to cover advances. (This doesn't mean that the publishers don't make money on sales, of course. The decks are stacked against authors.)

I am not in the business, so I won't try to argue the specific with you here, but...
Isn't this the same, though? Just two sides of the same coin, not really affecting the argument I was trying to make?

Regardless of the fact if authors get future royalties, and regardless if the royalties cover advances, the advance is give based on some predicted sales figure. In other words - a book which is expected to sell in millions will be more likely to induce a high advance from the publisher than a book which is expected to sell only in hundreds. In this case, the author is still getting paid according to topic, quality, stature, and maybe some other considerations, which ultimately translates into sales.

If you undermine these sales up front by allowing wide-spread piracy, the publishers will expect less profit, and thus they will give lower advance to the author.
So, be it as it may, that author's intake depends on how well the book sells or is expected to sell. Thus these two concepts are closely connected.

Yes and on. Only a handful of authors get advances that really take into account how much the books will sell. Today, for example, a novelist, until they've developed a following, is most likely to get an advance of perhaps $5,000. This covers the minimum that publisher is willing to pay, and has no relationship to potential sales. Granted, most novels don't sell enough to earn out that advance, and I'd guess that many people would even take less than that amount to get a first novel published. But the publisher makes a profit even on relatively low sales, so the advance really isn't a simple calculation of sales times percentage.

I do agree that piracy will lead to lower sales, and indirectly to lower advances, but those advances are probably more a function of an initial print run than real projected sales. My point is, however, that individual sales don't earn money, at least for the author. It's much more complex than that. (And, again, in other types of media - music, for example - calculations are very different, taking into account studio time, promotion, video shoots, etc.)

cata wrote:
Do you think, in that world, that we would decide that the best way to encourage writing was to make books harder to get, harder to read, and more difficult to copy?

The best way to encourage writing is to ensure that authors get paid enough to want to write - or to be able to afford to do so - and to not charge too much for books so readers can afford them.

But, there's always the fact that there are authors who don't write for the money. There are many other reasons to write books - prestige, the desire to share information or opinions (assuming one is financially able to do so), etc.

kirkmc wrote:Addendum: Just after I posted the above, I got an e-mail from my agent, with a royalty statement for a book I wrote. I earned a whopping $3.04 this quarter, and I'm only $4,779.34 from earning out my advance on that book. Whoopee!

That reminds me of a story (a bit OT, but only a bit):

A colleague of me runs a wiki on games. Not computer games or anything fancy like that, but "real-life" games that can played by groups of people. He does that as a hobby. He's a leader of a local Scout group, and he just puts the games he's using online, for the use of other people who also work with children. All this is done under Creative Commons BY-SA, that is, anyone can use the material, provided a source reference is given and the result is also put under CC BY-SA.

A few weeks ago, he got an email from a German government agency. They notified him that someone used his material in a school book. Apparently, under German law, there is a copyright exception for school books: They may use any material without asking and also without being bound by the usual license terms, so they don't need to give attribution. But of course they have to pay for it. There seems to be some fixed rate per page and copy, something like a few Euro per page and 10,000 copies.

So they took 1/8th page worth of content from his wiki, made a first printing of 40,000 copies, and asked him for his bank connection, so they can pay him the 2.50€ they owe him

(Numbers from memory, they may be a bit off. The rest of the story is true.)

Back on topic: There is apparently a law that says "school books are more important than the rights of individual authors". Obviously that runs directly against the goal to protect authors . But that's fine, non-authors may occasionally have rights, too.

cata wrote:Do you think, in that world, that we would decide that the best way to encourage writing was to make books harder to get, harder to read, and more difficult to copy?

I'm not saying it should be made more difficult to copy. I'm just saying that the author should get something for every copy that is produced. At least for a verbatim copy, that sounds fair. Of course, if you have a workable alternative, we could also discuss completely different models of paying authors.

But all of that is missing my point: I'm coming from the other side, I see that the tendencies of copyright law are going in the direction of allowing less and less. There are lots of things I can do with a dead-tree book that I can't do with a (DRM-protected) e-book. So, a more accurate statement from me would be: "You should be able to do *at least* the same things as with a dead-tree book". If you can do more, fine by me, but of course you still have to find a way to reward the authors. Allowing unlimited redistribution without giving the authors something in return doesn't seem fair.

What I was saying is just a useful baseline comparison: I pay more or less the same price, and for that I expect more or less the same featureset.

cata wrote:... suppose it was always more or less free to make changes to the book ...

Derivative works is something that makes the whole discussion a lot more complex. There are at least two additional aspects:
- How do you distribute the benefits between the different authors? Surely, it can't be fair that the original author gets nothing for the preliminary work, in the worst case he gets nothing at all because everyone is buying the derivative work and noone the original. But, in a different scenario, it also doesn't seem fair that the original author, after the original work is sold out, suddenly gets additional money just because someone else did some additional work. That's again a question of finding a workable compromise.
- It may be desirable for the community as a whole to encourage production of derivative work, and in that spirit make rules that go against the interest of individual authors.

flOvermind wrote:Yes. But I'd still like immoral things to be illegal, and morally right things to be legal. I know that's not always possible in practice. That's why I wrote "... is immoral, and should be illegal". Two separate points, yes, but I'd like them to align wherever possible.

What about things where you think they are immoral and I think they are moral - do we have to live in different countries?

flOvermind wrote:The other extreme case would be the scenario where I buy a book, read it, and then use what I learned in teaching 20 people, but never actually showing them the book. Would I then need to buy 20 copies?

I consider this quite different. In the former case, the author is doing the teaching via their own written material. In the latter, you are teaching from your own knowledge base. There are grey areas here too, for example when an author comes up with an inspiring new way of doing something and it's copied by others, and the argument of intellectual property over ideas rears its head. However, I think there's a relatively clear distinction between people learning directly from the works of purchasable material, and people learning from another individual who just happens to have acquired his knowledge. Neither are completely clear cut, but they are different.

flOvermind wrote:No. It's just not doing everything the way the authors would like. Except when you define "protecting authors" as "letting them do whatever they want, ignoring what everyone else wants".

That's exactly what I meant when I write "The law has to strike a balance between the interests of both sides.". The same goes for the moral viewpoint: You can't just say "that's against the interest of the authors", because everything is always against the interest of someone. I could reverse that argument and say that customers need some protection too. And "piracy is morally ok, because requiring the customers to pay money is the exact opposite of protecting the customers". Of course that's stupid, but it's basically the same argument.

But that's my underlying point. Even ignoring the extended application of current anti-piracy and copyright laws, there is an inconsistency between digital and paper formats of books. Digitally, sharing your books with people is against anti-piracy laws, and sharing your paper books is not (if I give someone a digital copy of my eBook and delete it until they give it back, it's illegal, whereas if I lend them the book it isn't).

I agree with you completely that paper media and electronic media should be treated the same, even though it's pragmatically unenforceable - where we disagree is with the moral correctness of the amount of remuneration per copy read that the author should receive. I believe they should receive an amount for each person that gets "reasonable use" (definitely a grey definition) from their implementation, whereas you believe that this should have more flexibility, such as one copy for a study group, or club being perfectly acceptable (where only one copy was implemented, despite a number of people benefiting from the single implementation).

The irony is, despite my apparently less strict views on what is generally recognised as digital piracy, my approach offers more support to the Go book writing industry. One of the main points behind my original post was that digital piracy as it is currently defined may well be less detrimental - and according to some, have a positive impact - than currently accepted societal norms over sharing of non-digital media.

I'm not saying I'm in the right here, but it does make the argument that pirates are some form of parasite on the creative industries rather a shallow one (at least, without actual supporting data that exceeds the data that currently suggests otherwise).

flOvermind wrote:Note that "idea" here is in a very general sense. Not only actual inventions, but also the content of a book, the code of a program, the content of a CD and so on, all qualify as ideas. In the same sense, "implementing the idea" is meant to be very general: Printing a book, making a copy of a CD, downloading a program from the internet, and of course actually building what the invention is about, all qualify as implementation of the idea.

By this logic, you are implying that it's morally right to purchase an implementation of the idea such as a viewable and browsable CD of the book, and then hosting it as an interactively viewable webpage that you design yourself (taking the idea / material of someone else and redesigning it - but not adding additional material - in your own implementation) to share as you'd like with people online?

I feel pretty sure about how T Mark and John would feel if this was done with a rehashed and represented version of GoGoD.

Wow. I just lost at least 1000 words because of a login problem with PHPBB. It's embarrassing that in 2011, browsers don't save text in a form field for at least a few minutes. Ugh.

"Short" version:

@Topazg: If your position implies libraries are immoral, you've just refuted yourself. We know that libraries are compatible with a robust market for books, so what more do we need? Even if authors lose somewhat thanks to authors,

However, I think we have some obligations as a community of people who care about a particular activity to support our own.

[Insert anecdote: I have an idea on the backburner for some go stats stuff. I don't intend to make use of certain information that I'm legally entitled to take from GoGoD, just because I value John and T Mark's contribution to something I care about].

Academic publishing is almost the opposite. There academic publishers charge exorbitant sums to purchase books written and edited and refereed by academics who make very little money on the deal. Better models (open access, libraries taking over the work from presses) are possible, and probably will dominate in the next two decades. For that reason, the academics I've known almost all engage in piracy of academic works, even if they don't pirate anything else. If you eschewed piracy completely, you'd make it extremely hard to even educate grad students in some fields, thereby harming the industry's own source of labor.

The only convincing argument I know against piracy in a case like that is that you should follow the law regardless of your take on the morality of the situation. But I don't think that's always convincing (compare jaywalking).

@Bantari: In an absolutely free market, authors could institute EULAs reserving the rights currently given by copyright. But given that those rights are currently the default and are often retroactively extended, it doesn't make much sense to talk about the author's intent today.

(edit: Bolded two words, added a colon)

cata wrote:Thought experiment: Suppose we went in the other direction and at the birth of writing we had computers to write books into and Kindles to read them on. Once a book was written, instead of having to make imprints or transcribe it in a monastery or fire up a printing press, suppose it was always more or less free to make changes to the book, make unlimited copies of the book and distribute it to anyone who cares to read it.

Do you think, in that world, that we would decide that the best way to encourage writing was to make books harder to get, harder to read, and more difficult to copy?

Well, you stack the odds in your favor when you say "best way". Who knows the best way to do anything on the level of society? People who think they do are probably wrong.

The point is that writing, like a number of socially useful activities, has development costs that are not reflected in sales. There are two traditional ways to support such activities. One is by direct subsidy. We have some of that, but in general people do not want to subsidize bad writing. The other is by granting monopoly rights to authors. In general this is better, because a monopoly on a piece of bad writing is not likely to be worth much. Now, there may be something better, but monopoly copyright is a time tested method. It is not up to society to keep proving its worth. If you have something better, it is up to you to prove that.

daniel_the_smith wrote:Mumble mumble... consequentialist reasoning! Mumble mumble mumble... deontologist reasoning!

Not everyone in this thread is thinking about moral issues with the same lens...

It's worse. Neither deontological reasoning nor consequentialist reasoning give an easy verdict.