A Rebuttal to Book Piracy Advocates and Apologists
GIVEN THE ARGUMENTS PREVIOUSLY CITED by the researchers and online community members featured in Chapter 5, I wanted to start this discussion of the problem of piracy for writers and publishers (as well as filmmakers and musicians) with this rebuttal to the piracy advocates. For under the cover of claims about how they are actually benefiting writers and publishers, they are taking their work, without any payment to or permission from the writer or publisher whose work has been taken. As noted in Chapters 6 and 7, some individuals have found ways to gain some benefits from piracy, such as by using it to publicize their work and gain more income by directing readers of their purloined work to their website or source of other books for sale. Or they have found work-arounds such as featuring their work on platforms where readers are charged a small amount for each download or streaming of their book.
But whatever they choose to do to freely give away, distribute, or sell their work should be their choice, since they have written or otherwise created the work in the first place. The choice of what to do shouldn’t be up to others who pirate their work. The harms to writers and publishers can be very real, despite the claims of benefits to them made by pirates and online sharing communities that pirate their work without the creator’s permission. This is true regardless of what they may choose to call themselves, such as researchers and students, and regardless of the arguments they may give about the many benefits to writers and publishers.
Writers and publishers, just like those in the music and film industry, know the harm the pirates are causing. Individuals as well as companies have lost millions of dollars because their work has been pirated, and some individuals are barely surviving because their income from books, records, and indie films has been severely reduced by the thieves who have made their work available for free or for a small payment that doesn’t go to them but to the pirates.
Such pirates can wear many hats, from the owners of websites with pirated material to the uploaders and downloaders of copyright-protected work. But whatever their hat, they are violating copyrights and taking away income that belongs to the copyright owners. It is not just a civil violation, but a crime of theft—stealing from the copyright owner, and when multiple files are involved, generally valued at $500 or more, depending on the state, this is grand theft which is a felony (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_theft).
Today the criminals are rarely caught and the crime is barely prosecuted, because intellectual piracy is so rampant, and the police and federal agents have other priorities in violent crime. Also, few civil suits have been filed so far, because of the time and energy involved in going after the pirates. But now there are new efforts to pursue the pirates through both criminal prosecutions and civil litigation, such as a 2010 lawsuit by Wiley and five other publishers against RapidShare, based in Germany, for pirating its books. The lawsuit requires them to monitor its site to ensure that copyrighted material is not being uploaded and prevent unauthorized access to the material by users, or be subject to substantial fines for non-compliance (http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-69777.html). And Wiley obtained one default judgment against one BitTorrent sharer for its Word Press for Dummies book for $7,000 for copyright violation and counterfeiting (http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/john-wiley-sons-wins-default-judgment-in-peer-to-peer-lawsuit), though for the most part, most civil litigation and criminal prosecutions have largely been targeting the pirates of films, music, and software, and the sellers of counterfeit goods.
Though these efforts against the book pirates are still limited, such efforts against intellectual piracy are much needed, because the pirates are doing serious harm to the victims. Some of the other strategies to combat piracy—such as finding other platforms for selling books at a lower price to make pirated books less attractive or using pirated books to direct traffic to one’s website to sell other books—might work for some. But they ignore the critical requirement that authors and publishers need to have a choice on how they want to sell or distribute their books, and piracy takes away that option.
It’s the distinction between someone choosing to give their property to someone, which is a gift, and someone taking their property without permission, which is theft. Certainly, the pirates have their defenders, primarily other pirates who are hosting, uploading, or downloading copyrighted material without permission. In effect, the uploaders and downloaders are like the receivers of stolen property, who are claiming they have committed no offense by using this stolen property themselves or claiming that they were entitled to take this property, because it is in a file that can be easily duplicated and shared, unlike a physical object. Another argument is that he or she was just making this material available for the common good. Or maybe the pirate cites the familiar refrain that “information wants to be free.”
But it doesn’t matter how many mea culpas or excuses the pirates and their advocates give, including saying that the popularity of pirated books means that writers and publishers should recognize the new model and adapt to it. It is like arguing that just because criminal gangs have gained power in much of Mexico or that ISIS now has taken over certain cities in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria, residents should bow to the new overlords who are making the rules. But generally writers and publishers don’t want to submit to the pirates; they want to maintain or regain the power to control their work, so unless they give their permission, the pirates have illegally taken their work and infringed on their copyright—a position that law enforcement takes, too, as it seeks to fight back against the pirates, generally by targeting the most active pirates who are doing the most business, and thereby costing writers and publishers the most money.
So now, it’s time to counter these common arguments and excuses. Following are the major arguments and rebuttals.
It’s not stealing, because people who download free copies of the book wouldn’t have bought it anyway.
But that isn’t true. There is an inverse relationship between piracy and book sales, meaning that the more a book is pirated, the more the sales go down. For example, in a March 20, 2013, article, “Book Piracy and Me,” which is no longer available online, Charles Sheehan-Miles writes, “In each case when a new title has been released sales dropped significantly, after the books made it only to the main book pirating sites such as Mobilism, TUEBL and Mobile9.” In a March 14, 2013, discussion no longer online, “Online Book Piracy: The Myths and the Facts,” A. Giovanni points out the commonly recognized truth reported in multiple studies: “Numerous surveys have come to the same conclusion: piracy causes a drop in actual sales and deprives the authors and publishers of income” (http://voices.yahoo.com/online-bookpiracy-12048507.html).
I have noted this sales drop myself in my declining royalty statements for a number of books, including A Survival Guide to Working with Humans and 30 Days to a More Powerful Memory, both published by AMACOM and widely pirated. On one site, scribd.com, which also has legal content, the books were repeatedly uploaded by multiple users with thousands of downloads. It is unlikely that many of these readers would have bought the book if they weren’t offered the chance to get it for free. Certainly, individuals have the option of not buying the book or of borrowing it from a library or a friend. They just don’t have my permission to steal it by getting a free pirated copy of my book.
There would be no need for piracy if people could easily buy the book at a low cost.
That’s not true either, now that most books are available on Kindle, Smashwords, and various ebook platforms and are priced at around $2.99 to $3.99 for most new books, and some are available for as little as $.99 or nothing, since new books are available for a few months for free through Amazon Prime and authors can elect to post their books there in return for a promotional push. Ebooks represented over a quarter of all book sales in 2013 (http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2014/ebook-growth-slows-to-single-digits-in-u-s-in-2013), up to about 30 percent in 2014 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/02/10/amazon-vs-book-publishers-by-the-numbers), and about 50 percent of all Americans own an ebook or tablet (http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/01/16/e-reading-rises-as-device-ownership-jumps). Those who want to read low-cost books can easily do so—and those who don’t yet have an e-reader or tablet can buy one for as little as $60 for an Amazon Kindle reader.
Authors should actually thank the pirates for helping to publicize their books.
Absolutely not true either. In some cases, writers have chosen to give away all or sections of their books to publicize them—such as Cory Doctorow, a Canadian sci-fi writer and journalist who has offered many of his books for free through a Creative Commons download (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow)—but that’s by their own choice. So if writers want to share their book, they can upload the book themselves. But no one else has the right to make that decision for them. While these free offers have gained some writers publicity, particularly when the idea of giving away a book for free was relatively new, generally the publicity value of free pirated books is nil, as Charles Sheehan-Miles notes in his article “Book Piracy and Me,” which is no longer online. I found this to be true myself. Despite many thousands of downloads, I never got a single call or email from an author, journalist, or broadcaster about any of my books they had seen on a pirated site. Moreover, as A. Giovanni notes in his article “Online Book Piracy: The Myths and the Facts,” which is no longer online, “Publishers establish their own marketing system … When books are stolen and resold or given away by thieves, the author and publisher are robbed of their strategy.”
Information should be free and sharing is natural on the Internet.
Yes, certainly, a lot of information is given out for free, including material in the public domain and assorted books, papers, and documents that individuals, institutions, and companies contribute to the mix. Also, Wikipedia and other sites that compile these materials are certainly doing a public service. However, if the information is the property of an author or publisher who chooses not to share it freely, then that isn’t offered for free. It’s the difference between someone who chooses to give away no longer wanted property by putting it in front of their house for anyone to take, and someone who decides to have a garage sale. In the first case, you are free to take what you want; in the second case, anything you take is stealing. Moreover, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of writers and publishers to spend their time tracking down their stolen property from hundreds of sites where it might be posted; anyone posting copyrighted material should have to ask for their permission to post it.
If I buy a book, I should be able to share it with others; so why can’t I upload it on a file-sharing site?
Here the big difference comes from sharing a physical object versus posting a file of a book that can be duplicated or downloaded hundreds or thousands of times. In the first case, a single object is passed around by friends, family members, or from a library. But sharing a file is akin to becoming a publisher of that book yourself and then giving it to others for free, or in some cases, getting money from those who download it, such as subscribers paying a premium for a multiple-download service. But this is publishing without permission and without paying any money to the original publisher, or to the author who has assigned the copyright to that publisher for the term of publication.
Everyone’s doing it and you can’t stop it.
As one writer commented in an email to me: “This has been a long ongoing battle for over ten years … but I fear there is little anybody can do about Internet piracy. It will always exist in some form. If you look hard enough, you can find pretty much anything … and books of all kinds. The huge corporations have not been able to stop it as a whole. There have been some arrests, some sites closed down. But there are always more cropping up with better security. Unless the Internet is policed … this is the way it’s always going to be, unfortunately.”
Still another writer, Dan Graziano, commented in an article “Digital piracy cannot be stopped” (http://bgr.com/2012/08/06/online-piracy-authorities-struggle): “Each day more and more users are turning to peer-to-peer file-sharing websites … and online pirates always seem to be one step ahead of the authorities.”
However, just because thousands if not millions of people are doing it, that doesn’t make stealing anything right. When people text on their phone while driving or cheat on their income tax, the authorities don’t look the other way, just because something has become common practice. And if you own a home or a car, you don’t leave your door unlocked, because the burglars are likely to get in anyway once they target your house or car. So individuals and the authorities do what they can to keep the criminals from committing their crimes, even though filing lawsuits, making arrests, getting convictions, and sending offenders to prison won’t stop the crimes entirely.
In sum, despite the various arguments supporting piracy, it is a crime and a violation of copyright under civil law. Though little has been done to stem the piracy tide, the various efforts to stop it through criminal penalties and civil litigation will at least help to reduce the actions of the pirates to some degree, though an even more active effort is needed to go after the book pirates. Such an approach helped the music and film industry reduce the problem and ultimately develop low-cost alternatives, such as iTunes, Hulu, and Netflix, which have provided a legitimate way to get online content. Now writers and book publishing companies might do the same by ignoring the excuses and apologists for piracy, because these crimes and civil wrongs are costing writers and publishers billions of dollars in lost income. It is time to say stop the pirates and ignore those who would give excuses or apologies that encourage piracy to continue.