eBooks and ePublishing | EPIC

Pirates Steal from Readers, Too

by Brenna Lyons

I wish I could say I meant just the types of things Rob Preece talks about in his Scourge article…the pirates who are actually harvesting credit card and other personal information to steal, but I don’t. Stand by for some serious snark, dear reader.

I found an eBay seller who was selling e-books. I won’t get into the rant about how that’s illegal, unless they are your own e-books…or you’re the publisher or distributor and have contracted permission from the copyright owner to sell them. That goes without saying…or so I thought.

Now, what makes this one so very unique is that she was selling (among the true pirated copies of NY Times bestselling authors like Grisham) copies of free reads, offered by authors of Phaze.

The idiot… (I will explain why I believe this person is an idiot shortly.) The idiot doesn’t even have the excuse of believing it’s okay to resell a used e-book, as you would a print book, because she was offering five lots of the same ten books. How stupid do you have to be to actually believe you have the right to do that? It’s probably not stupidity, of course. She’s probably well aware of what she’s doing, but…

Now, why is she patently stupid? Beyond the fact that she was pirating NY Times bestsellers on eBay… Beyond the fact that she claims that re-selling e-books is fine… Beyond the fact that she was selling multiple copies of the same books… Aw, come on. I expect that from any pirate.

When contacted with a C&D from the publisher, she demanded proof that the books were contracted works. Uh…check the covers and the copyright page, anyone? When presented with that, she claimed she “purchased” them from ARe (as if we don’t know they are free reads?), so it was okay for someone to purchase them from her. eBay removed the offending lots, and my hope is that they will cancel her account for violations of law, the TOS…and rank stupidity. Stupidity should be painful.

But back to the thrust of my post today. Someone raised the following question of me, and I felt it deserved an answer.

If it’s a free read, wouldn’t you want people passing it around? Why would you stop a pirate who’s passing free books?

When I first found the pirate, I debated that question for about .5 seconds. This is what I came up with.

If they were giving it away for free, I wouldn’t say word one. They could put it on BitTorrent, and I wouldn’t care. Well, I would, but only because it sets a bad example, because people seeing it pass don’t know it’s a free read. Ideally, it would pass with a note that the author had given permission for it to pass, which is the best of all worlds. It’s a free read, and I want it to pass as far and wide as I can manage. In fact, I would gladly give direct links to every free read I have available and encourage readers to pass them, with a note of my permission.

Why a problem then? Because the idiot is selling them! They are free reads. They are my gift to readers and potential readers. Selling them is taking advantage of the readers I adore, and I can’t abide by that.

What I find immensely amusing about the whole thing is that pirates often say they are trying to help authors and readers by pirating books. Bunk, but… In this case, you have a self-serving pirate who is hurting other readers in pursuit of a few bucks. Pathetic.

Another question raised that I feel deserves an answer… But, don’t you forfeit copyright by giving it away as a free read?

The answer, as I understand it, is “no.” Let’s start at the beginning and work out from there.

You own copyright on anything you create. You don’t have to sell it to own it. For instance, if I played a piece of music in a free concert in the park (music I either composed and that I’d made a recording of personally…committing it to a permanent form that is copyright protected that way…even if I further gave that recording away), and someone illegally recorded it and sold it…or used the free recording I’d offered in his book video, he is still infringing on my copyright by doing so. If I write this post, and someone takes the thing (in its entirety, without my permission) and reposts it elsewhere, I can have it taken down on the basis of infringement.

Now, this may vary from country to country, but that’s the way she works, according to the legal discussions I’ve seen on the matter. In the same way, you can record songs off the radio, but you can’t sell the tape or CD you make for your personal use, though you don’t pay to access it. The artists and music companies still expect to get paid for the sales of their copyright materials.

Where it might fail the logic test would be that I’ve given blanket permission to reproduce (in its current form, with no changes) and distribute. I have not given permission for anyone to sell that story. So, no one has the right to sell it…ever, without my permission to do so. If someone takes that story and includes it (without my permission) in an anthology of work, I have every right to sue them.

Two different matters. One involves simply pirating, and I don’t care about someone pirating a free read. It serves my purposes. But any commercial use of my work is certainly my concern and should be.

From the actual Copyright FAQS…

“Publication” is the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. The offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display constitutes publication.

IOW, the Copyright Office does not set that something must sell to be copyright protected. Distribution is enough…even distribution with the intent of further distribution.

Now, while they say that public performance alone is not enough to copyright a work (notice my earlier example of the free concert in the park), if the composition is your own work and/or you have made available for distribution an “official copy” of the performance, you are still protected by copyright.

How Pirates Hurt Writers

by Brenna Lyons

Several months ago, Jude Mason posted a great blog post about e-books, piracy and the laws surrounding them. A few days before that, Charlotte Boyett-Compo posted one in Bitten By Books about the same subject. Over at EPIC, Rob Preece and I have articles on the subject. A few people with the subject on the mind at the same time? Unfortunately, no.

e-Piracy is rampant. Between those who don’t know better and really need to read one or more of the articles I’ve linked above…and those who do know better and get off on being the bad boy/girl online, stealing in such a way they think they can’t possibly be prosecuted for it…authors and publishers (especially the small fish who are trying to survive and make a career flourish) are being monetarily discouraged and/or destroyed.

How bad can it be? Even I can’t say for certain. I can say that I’ve found 800 entries for my books on a single pirate site and fought to have them removed. Multiply even a fraction of that number by the dozen or so pirates I’ve had to address in just the last year or so, and it’s easy to see that my losses from piracy (me…a very small fish in the big pond) are upwards into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Now, before some self-righteous pirate goes off half-cocked about that being a drop in the bucket to an author, it’s not a drop in the bucket for me. Like most authors trying to build that career, it’s a long hard road. I don’t make $10,000 in royalties in a year yet, let alone enough not to notice the loss of it. I’d be writing even more, doing more appearances, and so on, if I were seeing that $10,000 per year more in my budget.

Even a NY bestseller like Lynn Viehl is going to feel that much money gone from her royalties. As you can see, she took home $26,000 on her book and may not see more. She’s a NY Times Bestseller. Most authors don’t make a quarter of that up front on a book, and many will never see royalties past the advance. Pirates are one of the reasons why.

And before one of the pirates opines that I haven’t “lost” that in sales, because not everyone who pirated the book would have bought the book… Well, I know that’s true, but it’s still thousands of illegal copies made of my work, and the law says I have a right to prosecute for it. All the fancy footwork pirates do doesn’t change the fact that they are breaking the law, but they don’t want to hear that. It’s too gritty and real for their Pollyanna, pseudo-rebel personalities to take into account.

Lie #1 that pirates tell themselves and others… Some actually tell people they are playing Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. That is a load of crap. Even if we dismiss the NY publishers laying off editors, not buying new books, and so on… The fact is, there are only 7 NY conglomerates vs, 70,000+ indie presses. Half or more of the e-books pirated come from the latter. These people aren’t rich, publisher or author. Most are lucky to be clearing a few thousand dollars writing in a year. We’ll come back to that. But, the bottom line is, by pirating, these thoughtless, self-centered wastes of air are taking the food off the table and presents from under the Christmas tree from authors’ (publishers’, editors’) families.

So, why do pirates steal?

For many, it’s simple ignorance of the laws. For more information on the laws, read Charlee’s article and mine. Be sure to read the responses to Charlee’s post, as well, since it has even more information for the uninformed that will help you recognize pirates…as does Rob Preece’s article on the subject.

Many readers don’t realize that e-books are inherently different than paper books. You aren’t buying the e-book, as you do a paper book. You are purchasing the license for a piece of book software, as you purchase the license for Windows or Adboe or ReadPlease or some other program.

For others, it’s a matter of the entitlement mindset. What they were never taught (or have abandoned) is the solid fact that no one owes them anything, certainly not free entertainment they don’t want to pay for. These are the selfish wastes of air of which I speak.

So, what are the other lies pirates tell themselves and others?

“I love authors and books. I’m just giving them more readers.” Not! They’re hurting the authors and publishers. That means they might decide to stop offering the books the pirates claim to love so much. That’s right. Discourage, dishearten or monetarily strap an artist of any type enough, and he/she might decide to stop offering his/her creations, altogether.

Not only that, but a pirated copy is a copy that doesn’t sell. Okay, not every copy, because there is the rare individual out there who is going to purchase a copy of a book he read for free. Back to the subject.

The vast majority of pirated copies don’t sell. The choice of a publisher putting out the next book is highly entrenched in the subject of what sold before…previous books. If the books don’t sell, the publisher drops the author.

If you really love an author, give him/her word of mouth. Pass along the approved excerpt and blurb. Write a review of a book you like. Rate it on Fictionwise, Amazon, Library Thing and Goodreads. Encourage friends to buy it. I’d even go so far as to say letting a single friend read your copy of it is good, but don’t pirate to hundreds or more people. There is nothing helpful in that.

“Information wants to be free.” Or some other idiocy, loosely based on the Freedom of Information Act. All of that is bull. Sorry, but that particular law deals with public records, not IP (Intellectual Property, which includes copyright and trademark). Any spouting to the contrary is just that…mindless attempts to excuse breaking the law…copyright, at least, and possibly Millennium, if you are breaking DRM or using a hack or hacked copy to bypass DRM.

This is another entitlement issue. Because the law “frees” one type of information, these people feel it’s “unfair” that creative literature isn’t covered too. (Need I mention that life isn’t fair? It should be either equal or equitable, and this law is equitable.) Back to their twisted mindset… We’re infringing on their “rights” to freedom of information, if all printed material isn’t free.

I won’t go into my full discourse again, but… That’s not a right. It’s a privilege, and you only get privileges, if you use them responsibly, in the first place. Pirating books is not using the privilege of freedom of public records responsibly…or several other privileges, either. This is a good time to suggest you read Rob Preece’s article on the subject of pirates. It fits very nicely here.

“There is no close book store, so it’s okay for me to…” Even if you live in a place where you can’t order print books to be delivered to your door, which is true of some overseas readers, you can order e-books, in all likelihood. I’ve had friends stationed in (or ex-pat in) China and the Middle East (and not just on military bases), which are usually portrayed as the hardest places to access what you want to on the net… I’ve had these people check several key e-book resellers and publisher sites. They can, in fact, access the resellers like Fictionwise, even if they can’t reach certain publishers (and those are few and far between).

In fact, my friend who was ex-pat in China thanked me, because it saved him a monthly flight to Singapore to purchase English-language print books and the money to send those books home, when he was finished with them. Reading e-books on his laptop and/or PDA was the method of choice for him overseas. Friends in the UK also tell me they prefer e-books, because they don’t have shelf space to hold all of their paper favorites.

So, the lack of a physical English-language bookstore selling paper books is no excuse for stealing e-books. Buy the e-books…or borrow them from a reputable public library that offers e-books for lend. They exist, and authors do make a small amount of income from stocking and restocking them, since the reputable e-book libraries have wear and tear replacement built in.

“I can sell or trade or give away paper books. You’re infringing on my rights of ownership. Help! Help! I’m being repressed.” Okay, my own time to acknowledge copyright here… That final part is from Monty Python’s Search For the Holy Grail, Dennis the Annoying Peasant. See, always respect the copyright of others!

Back to the subject… Entitlement insanity again. The truth is that e-books have much more in common with software than with paper books. The pirates that don’t know better don’t understand this. The ones who do and are self-righteous entitlement freaks do know it and disregard it. Digital media is covered, at length, in my main article.

Authors love their readers. We sweat and bleed and go without sleep to give you the books you love to read. But any creative person eventually feels put-upon by pirates.

Don’t argue that X author specifically put his book out viral and… Sure, there are some who elect to, either to increase sales of a newer version of the book or the second book in the series… I’ve done something similar to the Baen’s Free Library model with one of my series, and it worked well. I won’t argue that it can work. But, as Rob Preece says, “If one restaurant is offering free pizza, it doesn’t give you the right to go to another restaurant and demand free steak.” It’s only common sense.

To end, I want to quote the lovely and talented (NY Times Bestseller) Angela Knight. On the subject of how lack of sales can harm a career and the psychological effects of pirating can affect a rising author, she commented: “Don’t steal from artists, whether it’s downloading pirated books, music or movies. It’s stealing, and eventually you will destroy the very artists whose work you enjoy.”

It’s MINE, And I’ll Do What I Want With It:

The Fallacy of e-book Lore!

By Brenna Lyons

The question comes up every so often. Why do people make such a big deal about someone reselling or giving away an e-book? It’s just a book!

Yes, and no. An e-book is, by definition, an electronic book. Aside from the formats it’s offered in, it varies little from a paper book. They come in fiction, non-fiction, educational… They are undeniably books, meant to be read on a desktop computer, laptop, handheld reader, smart phone or PDA.

But they are electronic medium. That means that, in addition to the Intellectual Property Laws such as copyright that protect them, e-books are covered by the electronic media laws and the Millennium Act (if they are DRM-protected).

The law for e-books is clear. You license the copy you buy for use on your machine. Now, the fact that I can use an HTML copy or PDF copy of a book and put it (additionally) on my own PDA is not a problem. You are allowed to make a boot copy of Windows as well. It’s licensed to you, and that is fine.

Now, think about Windows for a moment. If I buy a copy of XP and install it on my machine, I cannot take the install disks for 95 and hand them to my sister, so she gets 95 on her machine, even though 95 is no longer running on my machine. Why? It was licensed to me. Not to her. And MS knows that.

But she can come to my house and use my machine with XP on it, because who I choose to let use my machine is my choice. In the same way, I cannot give my copy of someone’s e-book to her, because I licensed it, but she can borrow my PDA and read what is on it the same way she can borrow a music CD from me for a car trip. You guessed it. The trick is in making copies.

Copies are constrained even in print books. If you take a print book and make a photocopy of the whole thing (or even a large amount of it) and distribute it, IP law steps in. If you take that book and cut the binding, use a recognition scan and offer it, for free or sale, as an e-book… Well, you are breaking both copyright laws and electronic laws.

The reader does not own the right to either reproduce or distribute copies of an e-book. With any book, e-book or print, the author initially owns those rights. He or she contracts those rights to the publisher and no one else. The publisher and author may agree, in that same contract, to allow a reseller like Fictionwise, ARe or Mobi/Kindle to reproduce and distribute for them, much as print publishers would contract to allow Barnes and Noble to distribute for them or contract with BookSurge or LSI to do POD reprints of their paper backlist.

Buying a book of any type, paper or e-book, does not give you the right to reproduce it. In the case of e-books, it does not give you the right to reproduce or distribute it. If you have not entered into a formal contract with the author or publisher of the book in question, you do not have these rights, save in cases where the author has given Creative Commons license to the work.

Okay, that may sound like a double standard. You can resell a paper book. No one has ever argued that. You cannot ever resell an e-book, unless it is a disc copy, unopened and in its original packaging. In other words, you can resell an e-book that was never opened but no other way. Well, that hardly seems fair on the surface, but let’s look at why that is. Remember copies? Copies are what it comes down to.

Now, here is where it gets sticky and some people don’t understand it. Just because I wipe the original from my machine does not make it the same thing as trading a used paper book. For one thing, unless you have a garbage overwrite, you cannot ever permanently delete something from your machine…and even then, a hacker can retrieve it in some cases. For another, the digital laws assume you have a copy. If you sent it by e-mail, there is a copy in your sent files, even if you deleted it from the hard drive. There is a temporary copy saved by your server. On the opposite end, there is a temporary copy saved by the receiver’s server, the e-mailed copy, and the copy he/she ultimately saves to the hard drive.

And, to put it bluntly… Who among us doesn’t back up our hard drives? (NOTE: If you say you don’t, I will lecture you on the possible loss of your WIP or your personal files!) If you have backed up your drive while the book was on there, chances are you captured that in the save as well. As will the person you sent it to.

Now, that is a fun portion of this act. It assumes you are guilty! It assumes you have kept a copy, with or without your knowledge. It is your burden to somehow (hint…it isn’t possible) to prove you haven’t. By sending it on, you have already made a copy of the original, because for that moment at least (when the book has been passed from your machine and not deleted from your machine yet), there are four copies, at least. That is against copyright laws and against the acts in question. You have created an illegal reproduction of the book.

In addition, paper books have a useful life. There are only so many readings before they wear out. The electronic media laws take this into account, since this is not the case with e-books. Making copies of copies of copies or passing a book on electronically doesn’t wear a darned thing out!

So, it’s electronic media! Someone out there is postulating, at the moment, that it should follow the same rules as a music CD. In other words, that person is postulating that you can buy a CD, listen to it and resell the opened case CD at a swap meet. By that argument, someone is thinking that you can buy a CD copy of an e-book, read it and resell it without breaking the law. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you’re still not in the clear.

A music CD is made to be enjoyed from the CD. You slip it into a player and listen. Though it is technically possible to make a copy of a CD on your hard drive, if you have the software to break the protection (which isn’t really hard to come by but breaks Millennium Act, in itself), it is not the usual way to listen to a CD. A copy isn’t expected. Selling the CD is assumed to be selling the only copy in existence.

When you purchase a CD copy of an e-book, you don’t read it from the CD. Well, you can do it, if you are reading on a desktop or laptop and don’t mind lags in updating, but it’s not the way it is usually done. You usually buy the CD and save a copy of it on your system, at least long enough to read it before deleting the file, much as you would install that copy of Windows. As such, the law assumes that you have made that copy.

So…that is the law. If you want to know more, ask.

What about security on e-books?

By Brenna Lyons

People who follow the internet news will ask about the problem of e-piracy, BitTorrent, and so on. What are the pros and cons of secured formats? Sadly, the pros are few and the cons are many.
Does DRM/Digital Rights Management affect sales of e-books. Yes, they do…and negatively. When one of the owners of Fictionwise was keynote speaker at EPICon in OK City, he stated the following. Secured formats cause ten times the number of customer service calls, when compared to unsecured formats. A customer who has a problem with a secured file is ten times less likely to purchase secured formats again.

In addition to problems opening the secured files and reading them, customer complaints about DRM include:

The inability to use a file they rightfully paid for on all devices they own personally. Secured formats are difficult or impossible to pass from device to device.

The inability to back up and safeguard those files, in anticipation of catastrophic loss.

The inability to cut or copy and paste from a resource book protected by DRM, when citing material in a scholarly study…or when using a recipe from an e-book version of a cookbook. Some might argue that you have to hand type in from a paper book, but the fact is the unique advantages of e-books are stripped away by DRM.

The inability to make the e-book into an audio book.

The inability to print and read on the go from paper.

The added expense of DRM, which is passed along to the reader, in the form of higher prices.

Some people in the industry believe that DRM is the only way to stop content piracy, but the truth is that DRM punishes honest purchasers, in a vain attempt to stop criminals. There is currently no DRM that cannot be broken. When a new form comes out, it is usually broken within a number of weeks and the hack…or the unlocked copy of the file is passed around.

Is piracy a problem? Yes…a major one, in some cases, but the DRM isn’t going to stop it. Further, it’s not just e-books that put up with pirates. Paper books are routinely scanned into recognition scanners and pirated as e-books. That’s why you can find e-book copies of Harry Potter, when Rowlings has repeatedly refused to release the books in e-book formats.

Thankfully, most indie presses do not use DRMd books, so readers don’t have to put up with the inconvenience and higher cost of secured formats, when dealing with indie press.

For a while now, determined readers have been able to sniff out errant digital copies of titles as varied as the “Harry Potter” series and best sellers by Stephen King and John Grisham. But some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire.

“It’s exponentially up,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, whose Little, Brown division publishes the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer, a favorite among digital pirates. “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented.”

Read the entire article (source: New York Times)

For many eBook authors, piracy is hardly news - it is an enduring problem that we battle on a daily basis. Some authors have banded together to form watchdog groups against sites that torrent eBooks for illegal download and consistently report these sites and cite their wrongdoing. Some readers might not think that downloading an eBook without paying is wrong, but as time passes you can see the numbers add up and the author’s loss is great.

Just one example: author L.E. Bryce illustrates here how much in royalties is lost due to piracy. For a writer who depends on royalty payments to handle bills, rent, food, etc., you will find that piracy isn’t about snagging a freebie, it’s threatening one’s livelihood.