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The ethics of "pirating" out-of-print books
November 30, 2008 | 1:35 pm
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By Chris Meadows
This morning, Slashdot had a link to a blog post pondering the ethics of downloading illicit (“pirated”) e-books of out-of-print books that are not available as legitimate e-books. The post generated a large number of comments, both on the blog post itself and on the Slashdot discussion of it.
[A]ccording to Russell Davis, former chair (and now president of the Science Fiction Writer’s Association) of the SFWA’s Copyright Committee, “electronic infringement is theft”. From a legal perspective, I suppose that is true. And given that as an Open Source programmer, I depend on Copyright Law to assure that my wishes as an author are upheld, it would be hypocritical for me assume that I should be able to ignore Copyright Law just because it is inconvenient.
The blogger lists several possible alternatives—just buying the dead-tree version, buying it and OCR’ing it himself, buying it and also downloading the illicit version, just downloading the illicit version and sending the author a money order for what it would have cost—and solicits readers’ advice. He gets quite a bit of it, and much of it seems to be tilted toward going ahead and downloading it, whether he buys the dead-tree version or not.
Of course, the entire problem might possibly be avoided when Google Books’s settlement finally comes through and Google is able to sell electronic versions of out-of-print books that they scan. (Although Google’s books would be PDFs, perhaps they could be converted into the blogger’s preferred format of choice.)
Update: The blogger has posted a follow-up entry to his e-book ethics question.
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Comments:
“Although Google’s books would be PDFs, perhaps they could be converted into the blogger’s preferred format of choice.”
Bwahahaha! Not as easy as it sounds, Chris. Distributed Proofreaders spends a lot of time and volunteer effort converting images (PDFs, PNGs, etc.) into text. Only text is reflowable, resizable, and easily searchable.
In this case the blogger at least has the option of purchasing the book. But there are many thousands of old books which are simply not available for purchase any more — the only reading copies left are in libraries, and if the books ever come up for sale on eBay or Amazon they are priced as collector’s items at many times more than their original price. Who loses from copying a book that you can’t buy any more?
@Jon Jermey: “Who loses from copying a book that you can’t buy any more?”
The general arguments you get are “it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, it’s simply wrong” and “you might have bought a similar book by someone else, so that other author might have lost.” I don’t buy these notions, but others profess them.
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DhamuNo Gravatar Says:
November 30th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
@Jon Jermey: “Who loses from copying a book that you can’t buy any more?”
The general arguments you get are “it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, it’s simply wrong” and “you might have bought a similar book by someone else, so that other author might have lost.” I don’t buy these notions, but others profess them.”
Thanks Dhamu. The first argument is a completely Kantian nonsensical formulation of “rulez iz rulez.” Kant argued it was *never* okay to lie, for example. An immediate objection is what if lying would save someone’s life — for example, if you know where Anne Frank is hiding and a Nazi officer asks you if you know where any Jews are hiding, do you tell the truth and condemn Frank and her family, or do you lie in order to save her life?
I assume almost everyone would lie in that case (in fact I think it’s fair to say we have a moral obligation to lie in that case and ones similar to it), but Kant argued that even in cases like that you had a duty to tell the truth because lying is *wrong* with no exceptions.
Under old pattern practice intellectual property in invention was protected by royalties. You could use an invention but you had to pay for doing so.
Current copyright protects publishers more than authors. Which author wants to be out of print and unobtainable? Being out of print does mean the work remains an unrealised asset to the publisher, it also means a restriction on the author that I do not believe is acceptable any more.
When print was the only option, that was perhaps excusable, but copyright was always designed to protect publishers first and authors second — but times have changed.
Authors need to be paid and works need not only to be published, but become permanently available to the public.
Now people make a big mistake bestowing law with moral authority. The copyright laws as they stand are against the public good — which makes them fundamentally immoral, but enforceable.
Law arises from conflict and when it interferes with the public good then it is the law that must change. That is the nature of law as regulatory function.
Good sense and forward thinking is not in the domain of law and has not proved a strong point in legislative government.
Piracy in this area is not a moral question but a legal risk. The “pirates” of out-of-print-works, whether intentionally or not, are at the practical forefront of forcing much needed legal reform.
They are, ironically, working for the public good and for better copyright protection, because they are defying a law which is denying authors income because their works are no longer being sold by print publishers.
That is the current problem with copyright — effectively it denies authors their income and denies the world the ability to read their works. It secures their work as an idle asset for publishers NOT publishing (something they should be punished and not rewarded for doing — losing the asset is a fine and natural punishment in my book).
Historical change is never easy. My suggestion is that we take ethics seriously. Therefore while I have no intention of illegally publishing copyrighted works, I do so out of cowardice, plus not having any solution to properly paying the author their due (that part is ethical).
For those that do illegally publish works that are out of print for whatever reason, I ethically support because I cannot support unethical copyright laws that have out-lived the public good they were meant to protect.
I really wish people would stop asserting “piracy is theft”. It’s not, it’s copyright infringement. They’re totally distinct legally, and they don’t even bear much resemblance from a lay point of view.
Nick you are so right.
The difference is that a published and copyrighted work is put in the public domain under special protection, a license in other words.
Theft is removing a possession (abandoning possessions in the public domain is to abandon possession of them). If I accidentally lose something, or am forced to abandon something against my will; and someone picks it up — there is no theft. I would have to legally prove my case to regain the goods (until then the new possessor has rights in the goods and may even charge for keeping them intact and in good condition).
There is thus a big difference between placing something on a public foot path or on my own property even if that is right next to a public place. Hence I have a wayfarers right to reach across a fence and pluck fruit, so long as part of body remains on the public domain (this is probably different in USA).
In such complexity, copyright is not a property right as such but a tort of law. I may sue, I may even be able to call in the police, but it is not theft! Well at least that was once the case.
> I really wish people would stop asserting “piracy
> is theft”.
I agree. Maybe we should start claiming that “copyright is theft”. Copyright is an incursion into property rights (it restricts what you are allowed to do with your property), and as such it’s IMO more similar to normal theft than copyright infringement is.
My personal opinion, in that case is, I’ll pirate the ebook and not feel bad about it. On the other hand, I don’t share that pirated copy with anyone.
I do wish we had a better system. On the one hand, I feel bad that the author isn’t getting money for that copy, but on the other hand, there is no possible way for me to buy a legal copy of that book since it’s out of print. (I assume that we’re assuming that we can’t find even a used copy for sale for the sake of the exercise.)
It’d be nice if more publishers followed Baen’s lead and put up old titles for free on their website.
If the book is out-of-print I’ll just go ahead and pirate it. Since I only read non-DRM’ed e-books I regard a book to be out-of-print if it isn’t available anywhere in some non-DRM’ed digital format.
(The actual format doesn’t matter much. In the unlikely case it’s some weird format for which I can’t find a converter I’d just reverse-engineer it and write a (simple and stupid) converter myself. (It’s quite easy to do basic conversions as long as the source isn’t compressed in some non-standard way.))
“The entire problem might possibly be avoided when Google Books’s settlement finally comes through and Google is able to sell electronic versions of out-of-print books that they scan. (Although Google’s books would be PDFs, perhaps they could be converted into the blogger’s preferred format of choice.)”
This is misleading: the Google Settlement allows only for buying perpetual access to a book through a Google account. You will not be able to download their out-of-print, in-copyright scanned books in any form (or format). You will, however, be able to print up to twenty pages of the purchased book in a single print command and, similarly, copy and paste up to four pages. The Google Settlement solves nothing with regard to the digital use of out of print books; it only proffers a yet-to-be-proven revenue model that holds off the publishers and authors for a few years while Google completes its scanning.