Piracy and e-books (non-functional, average fiction book)

Why should you use your title to convey a part of your analysis in an obscure fashion that the reader outside our classroom almost surely won't understand?

When a friend first sent me a link relating to Brazilian author Paulo Coelho's phenomenal book sales despite online piracy of his works--in fact, despite his active promotion of piracy of his works--I was very intrigued. This sentiment has obviously stayed with me up till now, and I thought this class was an opportune time to explore the subject.

Why is this the right way to begin? Shouldn't you be presenting the reader with a reason why she should be interested, not an avowal of interest on your part?

So why is online piracy bad? Traditional piracy was bad because it necessarily excluded. Online piracy is different--it doesn't exclude. So there's a distinction between traditional piracy and online piracy. Is online piracy, then, so to speak, a misnomer? In some sense, online "piracy" is not really "piracy".

What is "piracy"? I thought it meant raiding commerce at sea. If it's not an appropriate word, why use it? Isn't the correct question whether sharing books is wrong if it involves making a copy while keeping your own? Is that what you mean by "it does not exclude"? The distinction you are making is otherwise obscure; but if that is the distinction you are making, it would appear to cut against your conclusion. Or do you mean that lost sales don't result in losing sales? If that's what you mean, then you have some more explaining to do.

The next thing is cost. Why do traditional books cost? Publishing, producing the physical book. And since online piracy rids us of the middlemen, ie the publisher, bookbinder, we should pay only the author or artist? So the cost should be dictated only by the mental labor.

Apparently, you think books aren't edited. Or copyedited. Or designed. You seem to make a distinction between mental and physical labor, and then ignore some of the mental labor. Why?

But how much of the price under the traditional scheme accrues to the author or artist? And how much does the average author earn under the traditional scheme anyway? According to an online comment, 8.5% of the cover price of the book.

Since when is "an online comment" the appropriate way to establish a fact? Surely you can perform enough research to learn about the standard terms of US trade book publishing contracts.

So that makes some 2 dollars per book sold if we take the average price of 20 dollars per book.

Where did you get that average price from? Wouldn't you expect a link to one or more reasonably-selected sources?

But let's say you're a J.K. Rowling--how much would you earn? Would piracy be hugely detrimental to you?

Is that a question to be resolved by asking the author? In that case, Ms Rowling being the copyright pig that she most definitely is, you will get an unambiguous answer. Unless you have a reason that it's not up to her to decide that question for herself? If you do, you have abandoned the idea that the copyright is her "property," by imposing a severe enough limitation to allow unlimited copying and distribution not under her control. If you don't, why does the first sale rule exist with respect to physical books?

And if we talk about paying for the author's mental labor, then what about library book sales and thrift stores?

Have you not considered at all the nature and structure of the system created by the first sale doctrine?

The earnings don't accrue to authors either. And what if the author is dead? Why should we pay for the work of a person who's dead? Whose labor is it supposed to be then? Why should we pay his estate?

Are you suggesting there should be no transferability of copyright interests? If yes, what becomes of the work for hire doctrine? If no, why are natural heirs particularly not suitable as transferees of copyright interests? What of the original term structure of the 1791 Copyright Act: fourteen years renewable for an additional fourteen if the author still lived: how does that "Founder's Copyright" system survive under your analysis?

And then again, who really deserves to be paid over and over again based on work they did in the past, often once-off? Why don't we pay architects again and again for the buildings they design that are used repeatedly by different people who inhabit or seek shelter in them?

Are you confusing who owns the copyright on the plans with who owns the house?

But in the end, are the earnings or the profit what drives authors? What exactly drives them? What drove the likes of: Tolstoy? Flaubert? Proust? Joyce? Pushkin? Shakespeare?

Are these rhetorical or biographical questions? If they have answers, are the answers more relevant because the people are considered to be more eminent? Dr Johnson said no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Do we have to disagree with him in order to agree with you? Precisely why do the motives of an author, or the diverse motives of all the authors, matter in determining what the copyright policy of the society should be?

Ultimately, I'm not sure what drives such people is the money--nor should it be. It's about sharing. I think (and it seems that this opinion is shared by artists themselves online)

You know this is deplorable. You're not even linking to the completely unscientific examples of "artists" saying something about themselves somewhere that are pretending to be evidence of something in this parenthetical you are throwing away in the middle of a graf which otherwise depends entirely on our agreement with a proposition you are presenting as a personal uncertainty.

that the main motivation is about sharing, about being appreciated. Coelho said himself that money is the consequence, not the cause. The cause should be an internal compulsion, an inner drive. People say his success is only due to the fact that he was famous to start with, but, to start with, he didn't set out writing to make money through writing.

And even if it isn't the inner drive that motivates the writer, there are other cases that repeat this Coelho phenomenon: Neil Gaiman was actually one of those who feared online piracy at the start, but later he found out that it's good because it's free publicity. http://ruthellenparlour.com/2012/07/16/thinking-differently-about-ebook-piracy/

On top of that, there's the nature of the physical book itself--it's different from music and films. Reading off a screen is just not sustainable. Not to mention the battery life problem.

What does this mean? What does some particular kind of hardware you are imagining have to do with the digitization of books?

So why is on-line piracy good? Free publicity. You can on top of this get out-of-print material through piracy (so the demands of the individual consumer are not subject to profit-making or cost-effective considerations). Also, piracy can be a way to winnow out real talent first, then have the text published in traditional book form. Because if something resonates with people, they probably will go out to get the real physical book. Or, to put it the way an online comment put it: If your ideas are good, the money will come. (Maybe not so much for music, but that's because of the inherent differences between the book and the song.) And if they aren't, maybe it's time to just start a blog and get a new job...?

Why is free distribution chosen by the author being called "piracy"? Why is the difference between voluntary free distribution and intentional copyright infringement being elided? Have you analytically established to your satisfaction that it doesn't ever matter whether a copyright holder licenses free distribution, because the issue is completely caught up in the obligation, vel non, to obey the law of copyright?

So at the end of the day, maybe my premises were wrong. The question isn't: Why is Paulo Coelho an exception? It's: Is he even an exception?

An exception to what? You haven't established any analytical proposition to which a particular set of circumstances you haven't fully described would or would not conform.

-- EugeneThong - 12 Oct 2012

This is indeed an appropriately bad first draft. Improving it requires ascertaining some facts and learning some law. Those steps will be in aid of some basic rethinking. The next draft will be differently constructed and will take an approach that either answers or avoids the questions I have raised.