The publishing industry is abuzz about a blog post that appeared over the weekend asking whether it is right to read an illegal e-book of a work that is out of print. (Remember, neither the author or the publisher gets any money from the sale of second-hand books.) The post generated a huge number of comments, which I haven’t had time to read through, but quite a few seemed to be variations on this sentiment:
It’s not wrong, it’s only illegal, the two are not the same.
That’s not a healthy view for people to have of their society’s laws, but it is the sort of view you will get if you pass lots of laws that are seen as protecting vested interests or as forcing the views of a minority on the majority.
The same issue comes up with movies that are unavailable to buy or view or legally download. Lots of classic films and even some otherwise lost ones are available on bittorrents. In some cases, even the studios don’t have good copies of them, so people tend toward expediency and swap them online. If legal copies became available, a certain percentage of the illicit viewers would buy and part of that reason is because they’ve already seen the movie and want a better copy. There’s not really a downside for anyone.
The publishing industry is abuzz? Over a little ‘ol blog post written by little ol’ me? Really? Wow. Mind if I ask in which circles? I didn’t think the publishing industry paid that much attention to random blog postings!
To be honest, I didn’t think the question I raised were that original, especially, say, given some of the conversations that got started after the scribd/SFWA brouhaha a year or so ago. My intention was to be thought provoking, and hopefully to spark some interesting conversations — it seems that I’ve succeeded!
There’s nothing unhealthy about considering a law unjust or just plain wrong-headed. I think you would be hard-pressed to find someone who thought every law was great.
There’s a strong feeling that copyright terms and periods have grown ridiculously, and that’s stifling the public domain. There’s also a strong feeling that the benefits of this extension aren’t going to the folks who created the works. I would be lying if I didn’t say I agreed with these sentiments.
There is also the practical consideration. Artists have an agreement with publishers to make their works available. When the publisher stops doing so, what happens to the artist’s ability to earn revenue from the work? How many authors have the kind of contract that reverts their rights back when their publisher takes their work out of print (well, besides Alan Moore, whom big publishers are extremely careful to make sure never goes out of print)? In these days of eBooks and print-on-demand, any author could keep his or her back-catalog in publication as long as they wished. Does that happen? Doesn’t look like it.
The folks who are equating illegal downloads with civil disobedience wouldn’t know civil disobedience if it bit them on the nose, though.
Theodore: I saw it first on the blog of FinePrint Literary Management, a New York based agency, but then it turned up on GalleyCat, which is a must-read for anyone in publishing. I’d watch your hit counters with joy if I were you.
I suspect that some of these people have Google alerts on terms like e-book and copyright.
Hmm have to put e-book and copyright in my podcast tags….
Andy:
Obviously no one is going to agree with every law, but it is quite another thing for lots of people to have the view that the law is not about wrong and right. If society (in general) believes that the law (in general) is unjust then we have a problem.
@4 Cheryl:
I love sprigltd’s righteous indignation in his comment on GalleyCat. It gracefully dances right around the basic issue that the publisher and the author are doing nothing to provide any sort of edition for sale to a potential customer.
Peter Rubie’s response on FinePrint is more thoughtful but only slightly less absurd with his snarking on the second-hand book market. It’s very much the software publisher’s view of licensing rather than sale. Still, his suggestion that publishers and authors are missing out by not tapping the wealth stored up in their back-catalogs and producing cheap digital editions is great.
Andy:
You’ll have noticed that sprigltd didn’t even bother to understand the question.
Cheryl: For the record, Galley Cat has only been responsible for 63 visits, according to my Google Analytics report. Fine Print referred 12, and booktrade.info referred 15. None made the top 10 referrers; they were beaten by Teleread (#10, with 73 referals, readdit.com (#6, with 389 referals), and stumbleupon.com (#5, with 516 referrals). Of course, Slashdot was #1, with a total 7,196 referrals.
It was really good having some people from the publishing community participating in the discussion, though!