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...

We reported that it was coming, and now it is here: Tor announces, via Tor.com, that all Tor e-books currently being sold anywhere are now DRM-free. Any Tor e-books bought from now on from any retailer that sells them will have no DRM. (Whether previously-purchased Tor e-books include DRM is up to the individual retailer. I tried downloading a previously-bought version of Kitty Goes to War from Amazon and it showed up as still protected.) Separately, John Scalzi discusses the effects going DRM-free has had on sales of his latest novel Redshirts. While he can’t attribute the improvement entirely...

On Publishing Perspectives, Rod Younger of European e-book store Books4Spain had a guest column a few days ago discussing what might become of DRM. Younger discusses difficulties in e-book distribution (wanting to carry a book from a publisher not currently available through the distributor his store uses) and notes that, as difficult as distribution questions are already, DRM adds a layer of complexity that is both unnecessary and unwanted. Younger notes how smoothly Amazon has locked customers in with its Kindle DRM—it’s all so easy and seamless customers never even notice their books are locked up, until they want...

TorrentFreak has the latest word on the John Wiley & Sons peer-to-peer piracy lawsuit. A judge has entered a default judgment against one BitTorrent sharer of Wordpress for Dummies in the amount of $7,000—$5,000 for for copyright violation, plus $2,000 for counterfeiting Wiley’s trademarks. (The sharer failed to respond to the lawsuit, hence the judgment was by default.) This is a far cry from the maximum statutory damage of $150,000 Wiley had requested, but over twice as much as the average settlement amount. Wiley mainly launched the suit as a way to get the contact information for hundreds of...

Here are two articles that expressly discuss pirated music, but a lot of the same issues of morality and artist compensation apply to any pirated media—movies, games, and, yes, e-books. They make an interesting presentation of two sides of the piracy argument: what can be done to get artists paid for their music? On one side is 21-year-old NPR All Songs Considered intern Emily White, who penned a piece at the NPR website discussing how she’d accumulated her 11,000 song music collection largely by copying CDs from the radio station she ran, mix tapes from friends, and so on. She writes: As...

Novelist and music-industry expert Rob Reid has written an amusing satirical look at the high price of (being found guilty of) copyright violation on Ars Technica. When damages are set at $150,000 a song—more than the price of a five-bedroom home—it can start to seem a little ridiculous. This means, Reid points out, that a $249 iPod Classic can hold about $8 billion worth of music. (While it’s written from the perspective of digital music, it applies equally well to digital books. Indeed, since e-books are so much smaller than songs, a single Kindle or iOS device could probably hold...

Brian Stauffer, founder of 1999 digital music startup Listen.com (better known by the name of its music service, Rhapsody), had an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago comparing and contrasting the response of record labels and publishers to the digital changeover of their respective media, and the piracy issues these engendered. He begins by noting that e-book sales have largely made up the shortfall digital books took away from paper ones—but the music industry refused to sell digital music for years, depriving themselves of a stream of revenue and contributing to piracy. In...

Publishing Perspectives reports that figures from a publishing industry lobby in Spain purport to show that the piracy rate for e-books has risen from 40% in 2010 to 49% in 2011—that is, almost half of all e-book content available online in Spain is being distributed without the copyright holders’ permission. While some challenge the neutrality of the figures, newspaper reporter Antonio Fraguas Garrido, who has been following copyright issues for a while, points out that they are the only numbers anyone has so far been able to provide. It seems to me that since English-language e-books have driven the...

It’s no secret that I’ve lately enjoyed laughing at the travails of copyright troll Righthaven, whose efforts to build a business model out of copyright infringement incensed free speech advocates, copyright lawyers such as Marc Randazza, and eventually judges in several states. But I’ve come across an interesting article by reporter Eriq Gardner, who has the distinction of having been (briefly) sued by Righthaven himself, that takes a look at the issues behind Righthaven and considers the question of whether Righthaven had good reasons for doing what it did. And the answers might be surprising. Beyond a...

Yesterday was a day for reactions to the Tor DRM-free announcement, for sure. John Scalzi has a post in which he applauds the move, while featuring a quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden in which pnh indicates that Tor will in no way be scaling back its efforts to fight piracy just because it’s dropping DRM. Scalzi feels this is a victory for people who “just want to own their damn books” and suspects that other publishing houses will be following suit. Charlie Stross has another lengthy post to his blog, following up on his post last week about Amazon’s...

In Mike Shatzkin’s latest essay about publishing, collecting his insights about this year’s London Book Fair, an interesting paragraph leaps out at me. Shatzkin was talking to Pottermore CEO Charlie Redmayne about the DRM-free release of the Harry Potter books, and reports being startled by what Redmayne had to say about Potter piracy: Apparently, Potter ebook files started showing up on file-sharing sites pretty much right away after they opened. But before they could serve any takedown notices, Charlie says the community of sharers reacted. They said “C’mon now. Here we have a publisher doing what...