Claire Ryan of The Raynfall Agency posted a pretty good article today on piracy; it includes the agency's thoughts about what authors need to know, along with some practical tips for avoiding piracy of their works. Ryan didn't cover anything new, but she did discuss the basics. I agree with most of what she wrote, but I think she weakened her argument right at the end. Removing DRM and making books available in all territories? That's excellent advice. Readers are far less likely to pirate if they can get your books in the format they like. And if the book is free of...

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is on the record with a comment over at GigaOM that password sharing among family members is not a big deal. I applaud him for his sensibility in recognizing this. I think too many content creators fail to make a distinction between casual sharing amongst members of a household, and uploading to a torrent for millions and millions of people to consume for free. I am delighted to see a big player like Hastings recognize this. He does concede that multiple users sharing an account is 'not ideal.' But he clarifies that what they are seeing is situations such...

One of the anti-DRM arguments people often make is that if you make it easy enough for people to buy content legitimately, they won't need to pirate anymore. Here is a case study in favor of that argument: Thorin Kiosowski over at Lifehacker has a great essay up about why he stopped pirating media and started paying for it legitimately. Kiosowski begins by explaining why he pirated to begin with, namely that at the time, 'legit' digital media was confusing, expensive and failed to provide a good experience. He then lists three things that changed his mind: • He stopped feeling the need to own...

In another story to make me wonder if April Fool’s is coming early this year, Pirate Bay is going to sue the Finnish group the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) for their anti-piracy campaign that copies the design of Pirate Bay. Not only do they copy the website design, their logo looks like the Pirate Bay ship sinking. Of course, the CIAPC site doesn’t point to any torrents. Instead it points to legal sources of content. Here’s the obviously tongue-in-cheek statement from a Pirate Bay spokesperson: “We are outraged by this behavior. People must understand what is right and wrong. Stealing material like this...

In my last post, I discussed what I've observed to be the three biggest reasons people pirate e-books. Now that we understand the reasons, how do we actually deter piracy of e-books? Let me answer that question for each of the three reasons. 1. I Like To Collect stuff Here's the bad news: There's not much you can do about this one. Collectors like to collect in quantity. They are unlikely to spend much money, if any, on the books. You can deter piracy by offering free books for download, but that will only solve the problem for people who are willing...

Piracy is an endlessly debated topic. Views on it range from "don't worry about it too much" to "it has a huge impact on sales." What is often ignored are the reasons why people pirate and, from there, what publishers could do about it. I've hung out in forums with e-book pirates. I've read about the subject, and I think I can distill my observations down to three main reasons why people pirate (or why they justify it to themselves). In this article, I'll examine them. In my next article, I'll discuss how understanding the reasons can lead to practical ways to reduce...

Remember how, back in 2009, Wizards of the Coast pulled all its PDF products from on-line gaming store Paizo and announced it was ceasing PDF sales altogether? Apparently it only took about four years for the company to change its mind again. Wired’s GeekDad reports that WotC has launched a new e-book store site, dndclassics.com, in conjunction with on-line RPG e-book seller DriveThruRPG. The site currently offers over 80 products ranging in age from the old red and blue books up to the latest 4E stuff, with prices ranging from $4.99 for older products to $17.99 for...

Digital Book World just published a report that piracy does harm sales and backed it up with a list of 25 studies that prove the point. Okay, splashy headline. You can agree or disagree with it, your choice. What I found interesting were the recommendations to publishers: 1. Make content available online 2. Use existing anti-piracy laws Those are excellent suggestions, and, oh, by the way, the exact suggestions many in the e-reading world have made for years. As I said in my introduction post, I used to be a pirate. Why did I stop? Because the books I wanted finally became available in...

When I was visiting relatives over the weekend, I had a fairly potent reminder of the enduring power of the public domain—and I finally succumbed to the inevitable realization, that in some cases, piracy is just too much work. On Saturday night of our stay, it turned out we didn’t have time to watch Marvel’s The Avengers as I’d hoped we could. So my sister-in-law instead introduced me to the first episode of an engrossing ABC television series called Once Upon a Time. The premise is that Snow White’s Wicked Queen worked a curse that trapped well-known fairy tale...

Is the era of the professional writer drawing to a close? At least one contemporary British author thinks so. In a recent article, the Globe and Mail quotes UK writer Ewan Morrison’s contention that advances from traditional publishers have declined so much in recent years that he is practically working for free. Morrison sees self-publishing, book piracy, rampant e-tailer discounting, free writing online, and the “free culture” movement as killing off traditional writing and publishing. While consumers may be happy to get a lot of stuff for free, he insists, they’re killing our culture, and “There will be no...

Reddit has an interesting thread soliciting reasons (or rationalizations) from people about why they pirate e-books. There are people who say things like “I'm poor and I like to read, but I can't pirate food, so I pirate everything else,” or “I limit myself to pirating things that are out-of-print or otherwise unavailable through a legal digital outlet.” And there are even some who admit, “I don't justify it, just like I don't justify speeding or rolling stops. It's wrong (in whatever way you want to define ‘wrong’), but there's an infinitesimal chance of getting caught, so I'm just...

Here’s something I just became aware of on Facebook. A number of authors are banding together to fight a popular e-book piracy site based in Canada. Author Stephen L. Wilson has been posting information to his blog, and to a Facebook community formed to coordinate efforts. The pirate site is called “The Ultimate Ebook Library,” which has a Facebook community of its own where it insists that it is “not doing anything illegal under US or Canadian law.” However, the site offers thousands of e-books available for one-click EPUB download, so that must be one of those creative definitions...