Pirated digital books

Why would I care about the one instance? Have we spent all this time arguing about whether it's harmful for you, just you, only you, Samuel Lighton, a person of special importance whose needs are more important than the rest of ours, to steal books?

Well, no. If that were the extent of the issue, I suppose we could arrange for the Library of Congress to send you (you you you you) one copy of every book published. That ONE book won't hurt the rest of us.

But there is a rest of us. Lots of us. See us out here, waving? It's a big crowd, isn't it? While you might prefer a scenario that's just about you, you, you, and only you, and also you, that's not an interesting scenario for the rest of us. Who exist. I promise, we really do exist.

Ethical behavior is very often about whether it's ethical when generalized. It's harmless if YOU cheat on your taxes. It's harmless if YOU rip the catalytic converter out of your car. It's harmless if YOU throw a soda can on the side of the highway. There are lots of areas where no meaningful harm would occur if we made rules that only applied to you.

So what?

And if an author wants to distribute their work for free, that author can do so. It's not anyone else's place to make that decision for them.

 

So it's inconceivable that if you borrow a book from a friend, someone else, deprived of that opportunity, might go buy it instead? Really? Can't happen? Do your friends have no other friends but you?

Yes, I now understand that this whole argument is about THE GREAT AND POWERFUL SAMUEL OF LIGHTON and the rest of us are irrelevant.

That's not an interesting argument.

 

Okay, if I pirate your book, are you going to know about it?

If I borrow a book from a friend, are you going to know about it?

No, you're not. I put that there for that reason, now would you kindly answer the question?

 

My point is that this isn't about whether or not the victim is aware of the crime. The point is whether the crime is moral behaviour.

I would say it's immoral to pee in someone's soup, whether or not the person knows you peed in the soup. Similarly, it's immoral to steal from someone, whether or not the person knows the theft occurred.

So the whole argument is a red herring. Morality is not determined by whether I know about it.

Taking something without the owner's consent (or without good reason to believe that consent would be given if requested) is immoral.

It's that simple.

 

First of all, if you're not going to pose a counter-argument about what was being argued, you're arguing about something different. That's a logical fact. You weren't arguing about what was being argued and applied your own set of views to it.

In acknowledgement of your first point though, yes they might go buy it instead. They also might not buy it. Or they might go pirate a copy and then decide whether or not to buy it. These are 3 different scenarios:

One person borrows and decides whether to buy.

One person pirates and decides whether to buy.

One person decides whether to buy it with no previous knowledge.

What I have been trying so hard to get across to you is that none of these means there will be no sale, nor does it guarantee a sale. The author as at the mercy of a persons choice to buy the book, the only difference is that the first two people are informed about their decision. This in itself could increase the chance of a sale happening. If you know what you're buying, and you like what you know, then you're more likely to buy.

Secondly, you're being insulting to me personally now. I have been fairly patient so far and held my tongue, so kindly at least do the fucking same. Who I am has no relevance to the argument.

 

Yes you're not talking about cumulative effect, but then you keep asking about why pirating a book is worse for the author is worse than borrowing a book, and the easiest way to answer that is to compare the cumulative effects of both choices.

If there is a cumulative effect to doing something, then one instance is by a definition a contribution to that cumulation, whether you want to talk about it or not.

And I'm not talking about the people distributing I'm talking about the choices of the people receiving books.
The pirated books are out there, they're not hard to find if you want them. The only reason that authors are getting any sales is because not everyone chooses to get their books that way.

 

But the argument is meaningless. Why does it matter the least little bit whether a single action by you is harmful, if that action multiplied by many people IS harmful? If it's harmful when multiplied, it's harmful. We're not all going to get together as a nation and decide that this is the year that YOU are allowed to steal books, or cheat on your taxes, or throw litter on the highways. The rules apply to everybody. You're part of everybody.

 

I agree, it's a crime. This is where my frustration is coming from. I acknowledge that it is a crime, I know that it is a crime, but I can not acknowledge that it is ONLY a detriment to the author. Awareness of a product changes whether a person will or will not buy the product. Going into a book store and knowing that author XYZ made a good book, regardless of how you came across it, will encourage you as a buyer to purchase a book by that same author, based on your previous experience.

The argument has never been about it being a crime, but about the actual end effect it has on the author - whether it is entirely bad or whether there is some benefit from it. Piracy's existence isn't going to go away, that's a fact. It's going to happen. If you publish a book, it will most likely be victim to piracy. At the same time, people who are going to buy a book are going to buy a book. People who aren't going to buy a book, aren't going to buy a book. They may pirate it though.

You aren't going to lose out because by and large, people who are more inclined to buy the book are going to buy it, and those who aren't inclined, well, aren't. People who can buy a book generally don't leap into piracy. They buy the book. People who can't buy the book but want the book, may go into piracy to get it, but at the same time they can't buy the book in the first place. In the end you have more people reading your book, which means more exposure, which garners more potential to make a sale.

 

Every one of your statements of fact in this post require substantial statistical proof. Can I assume that the cites to studies are coming?

 

Look, what's happened is that I've been arguing my hypothetical, you've been arguing your reality. They don't match, which is where all of the stuff on the last few pages came from between us. I'm letting my argument go and moving into your argument.

 

https://torrentfreak.com/online-piracy-is-not-hurting-music-revenues-european-commission-finds-130318/
https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-can-boost-digital-music-sales-research-shows-160121/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21856720
https://www.rt.com/news/music-piracy-online-sales-572/

Two of those are from the same source, so please feel free to consider them as one source.

Now, are you done being flippant towards me? Can we continue like adults?

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/sideshow/new-study-says-online-piracy-isn%E2%80%99t-hurting-entertainment-industry-220006729.html?ref=gs
With a link to the study.

 

Okay, ignore the word "crime" and focus on the actual content of what I'm saying.

Let's rewrite the post with the word "behaviour".

My point is that this isn't about whether or not the victim is aware of the behaviour. The point is whether the behaviour is moral.

I would say it's immoral to pee in someone's soup, whether or not the person knows you peed in the soup. Similarly, it's immoral to steal from someone, whether or not the person knows the theft occurred.

So the whole argument is a red herring. Morality is not determined by whether I know about it.

Taking something without the owner's consent (or without good reason to believe that consent would be given if requested) is immoral.

It's that simple.
​

So this isn't about whether people are going to buy the book anyway or whether pirates are actually doing the author a fucking favour; I will not even entertain that bullshit with a response.

This is about you yipping about how you don't want to discuss legality, you want to discuss morality. (See, for example, your post #283 - "Once again, someone arguing the legality of the situation in the argument when the argument was never about the legality of the argument. It was about the morality of the argument.") So let's discuss morality, not practical impact.

[I know, you've got two different arguments going on - @ChickenFreak is making more of a practical argument, but I'm still making the one you said you wanted to make. If you want to give up on the morality argument, I think you should state it really clearly - otherwise it just seems like you're shifting goalposts.]

 

I don't think the "if a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" argument really works here.

"If I don't pay for your book one way or the other, does it really matter which way I obtained it?"

Yes.

Let's say the value of one book isn't its shelf price (this applying to both regular and eBooks) but the price payed divided by the number of people who have read that singular sold book.

Making sense? No? I'll give ya an example.

Book costs £10. Man buys book, reads it, puts it on shelf and never looks at it again. Author gets £10 (for the sake of simplicity, lets leave out publisher cuts and all that) from one person reading their work and author is happy with that sale.

A woman buys book, reads it, lends it to a friend who also reads it. Author gets £5 per person who read their book. They accept this, they'd rather the £10 per person enjoying their book but understand that a limited number of people do this. Hell, they don't even really think about it.

Now a pirate buys the book for £10. Uploads it online where a thousand people all download and read the book. That would be £0.01 per person reading that book. Now some might buy the book after reading it, but there's no telling how many. The author doesn't think £10 is unreasonable for a person to pay for a book, and if all of those people had payed that fair price, the author would have made £10,000 (not including the original sale). Instead, all they have is that £10 and no guarantee of anything else, despite their hard work in writing and the number of people reading it.

Author in that last one probably feels quite screwed over.

Am I making more sense now?

If every single person thought "it's okay if I download this book for free, I mean it's just like I'm borrowing it from a friend really," then how much money will the author make from a million people reading their works? Simple, the market price of a single copy.

 

That appears to be all about music. Didn't we veer back to books? I think that was right after we entered, and then left, the idea that this was all about what you and you alone do, disregarding the rest of the population. The argument seems to shift as soon as you start having trouble.

 

No, no - I'll happily engage, but again this is a different argument because there's no possibility of a positive outcome. The only outcomes are negative and neutral.

My case was pointing out that while it is viewed as a crime, it's allowed me to go and make an informed decision about a purchase. The ability to make an informed decision is a very good moral standpoint, one which we all try to make all our decisions on. I'm saying that although the means by which I came to that decision are illegal, the outcome is a positive for me, and a potential positive for the author. In my case, I won't ever go into a purchase uninformed. I use more conventional sources, opinions of friends, reviews on websites, etc. It still stands that I reached my decision, and it wasn't affected by the means at all. Just because I pirated doesn't automatically mean I'm less likely to buy. It has the same and equal opportunity to affect my spending as any other means.

 

It may be a good practical measure, but practical is not equal to moral. The fact that you benefitted in a practical way from theft doesn't make the theft moral.

Again, the fact that something benefits you does not make that something moral.

Morality is not measured against what's good for Samuel Lighton. It's not even measured against what's good for the person committing the moral or immoral behavior--if it did, embezzlement, as long as it's not detected or prosecuted, would be moral.

 

Has nobody else seen the commercial?

I'm not kidding.

It used to be on older DVDs all the time and TV

 

You're blurring the moral into the practical.

Let's start with the moral precept that it's wrong to take something without the owner's consent.

There are ways to disagree with this - a socialist/communist challenge to the principle of private ownership, a related-but-distinct social justice argument that while private ownership is fine if there's economic equality, it's problematic in a world without that fairness. But you haven't made those arguments, and if you do, I'll obviously expect you to extend the principles to all private property, since surely nothing can belong to anyone more intrinsically than the fruits of an artist's labours belong to the artist.

You could also challenge the moral precept based on need. Is it morally wrong to steal medicine to save your baby's life, assuming you had no other way to get the medicine? I would say it's not wrong. I think this is closer to the argument you're trying to make. But obviously "want to know if the book is good or not" in no way approaches the "save your baby's life" level of need. In fact, I would say it's not a need at all. It's a want. Not even a very significant want. So, no, I don't think this line of arguments will work, either.

Was there some other way you wanted to challenge the basic moral precept that it's wrong to take something without the owner's consent?

 

I haven't had trouble in my points at all ChickenFreak, you've habitually twisted my points until they're not related to the original argument. You've created new arguments and then stuck with it. You haven't even given me anything new to argue against, you've just dribbled the same information back into a new post, in a different way.

More to the point on hand though, yes the studies I linked to you are focused on the music industry. No they are not about books. Well caught.

However, the studies themselves aren't just about the music industry, but the entertainment industry. That covers books.

In searching for sources, I have found the following:

https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-takedown-notices-increase-e-book-sales-140606/

This one benefits your argument, kind of. It argues both for and against piracy in different cases. Getting exposure for less well known books, while generating some losses for the more well known ones.


https://zeeconomics.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/the-effect-of-piracy-on-sales/

This one confirms (with no holds barred on the research front) that piracy is a non-issue.

http://venturebeat.com/2010/03/02/book-piracy-costs-u-s-publishers-3b-says-study/

This one says there's a loss. Although then again it's not a study, it doesn't confirm or deny that the people who pirated wouldn't buy anyway, and not because piracy was available.


https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/book-piracy-a-non-issue/

This one is my favourite, in that it basically says everything I've said, meaning that at least I'm not alone in my views.

 

This gave me so much rage as a teenager. It was on every DVD. Every single one. And I couldn't skip it. Every. Single. One.

 

Just to clarify, are you saying 'To take someone's property without their permission just for the sake of the taking" ? If so, I agree with you. It's wrong and negatively impacting behaviour.

Is it morally negative to have taken it in the first place, then decided to pay what was due, but additionally spread the good word towards it's quality to promote further purchases from others? It served a purpose that benefited the original owner in the way that the owner had intended. What's more is the question of whether the end result for the owner is different in either case.

 

But hey!

Now we know not to do it!

It is always the first thing I think about when I hear someone mention pirating lol

 

I downloaded TONS of songs, movies, books and T.V. shows illegally as a kid.

I'm not saying it was right of me, but I wouldn't have been able to experience these things legally.
As a minor i couldn't work, I was stuck in school 8 hours a day (with around 4 hours of homework)
Even if I'd been able to get a job, that would have left no time to actually watch or read what i downloaded
My parents were unwilling to pay for anything like this, they did just about anything they could to pressure me more towards sports.

I've haven't downloaded anything illegally since getting to work, but a starving mind cares as much about the legality of theft as a starving mouth.

 

Well, it turns out that original argument was (apparently?) about you, just you, no one else but you. That's really not a normal focus in the context of a cultural and societal issue.

Most people, when they talk about ethics and morals and economics and society, recognize the existence of other people--lots of other people. If the argument is supposed to ignore the existence of other people, it would be good, next time, for you to make that very clear from the beginning. Most people are likely to drop out of the discussion at that time, but it would at least save time.