I pirate all my books now, except for the ones sold with no DRM as epub.
I would like to reward the authors, but I refuse to allow the publishing industry to get away with this bullshit. If the authors choose to publish their books DRM-free as epubs, I will (and do) happily buy them.
The same. I only buy DRM-free epubs (e.g. on Gumroad, Humble Bundle and directly), also pirate some which are not available this way. If I really were to buy something I would unDRM it. If I found out I can't unDRM it I wouldn't buy. Needless to say I only buy games at GOG.com.
Manning is another publisher without DRM. I used to buy Oreilly books without DRM, but they’re subscription only but some books do show up on humble bundle from time to time.
Manning does put a “licensed to my_email” on the pages of the digital copies but it’s not onerous.
- I'm sending a message to publishers that physical books are in demand (not the case)
- I have to deal with the physical book (giving it away to a charity shop is probably the solution, but it's still hassle)
- It doesn't solve the problem - publishers still think everything is good. Only by depriving the publishers of revenue until they start respecting their customers can we solve this.
And I think my attitude is a lot less entitled than the publisher's. If I pay for something, I should own it, not have it subject to the publisher's whims. The attitude that they can disrespect their customers and keep control of the book even after it has been purchased is more than entitled. It should be illegal.
Entitled, eh? Some assumptions being made about people's ability to afford and access the physical books.
I've got cash, plenty of people around me don't and I don't begrudge their piracy. I pay, see below, when I was young and broke I pirated everything. I'm surrounded by people for whom a US minimum wage would be a stonking income, why shouldn't they pirate?
The big issue for me personally is shipping. I live outside the US and EU, and it's a real problem getting books out. I often pay more for shipping than I do for the books themselves, and I have to wait up to a month, and there's the ridiculousness of getting a book shipped across the US/EU, then to my third country.
My approach is that I pirate freely and happily, without a shred of guilt. Most of the books on my reader only get read up through the first few chapters, some I'll finish completely.
I do however like books, real books. If I'm getting into an author I've pirated, I'll then buy some of their other stuff, and I buy frequently.
This comes back to the old thing with music pirates being the biggest spenders on music. A classic case, I think.
So please, leave your moralizing out of this. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to pirate, much of it ending up with money in author and publishers pockets.
I think that this makes sense if you want a physical copy (possibly in addition to the ebook); if not, then I think that you do not need to buy it and waste paper etc.
When I want to read a book, I usually prefer a physical copy (and I am willing to pay for it, if I do not merely want to read it for a few hours at the library (if the library has a copy)); sometimes it is helpful to have it on the computer too, and in that case I would only accept non-DRM files, and possibly even piracy. However, some books might be difficult to find, or maybe I only want one page, etc.
Companies need to remember at their heart that their business model should rely on being at least a bit more convenient than piracy.
I believe authors deserve to be rewarded proportionally to the quality of their work, I also believe good publishers can add a lot of value to an author's work, and even more I believe that DRM-Free publishers have shown it's possible to base their core business model on being more convenient than piracy. I buy a book, it's mine to use on my devices, no strings ttached.
The hubris of some companies make them refuse to see the reality of the market, and instead stubbornly push for wider copyright laws, harsher punishment, DRM, and higher walls for their gardens.
same here, I actually love it when publishers publish epubs, it encourages me to purchase more stuff from them. Same with bandcamp stuff with music files. A lot of times publishers are very ambiguous about the nature of their ebooks and I have to email their sales team or customer service to get a square answer about what exactly I would be buying from them. If it's some complicated morass of third party obscure e-readers and other clunky interference I just end the conversation there and move on.
Just 5 cents, thats why I always trying to buy any games on GOG. No "install necessary launcher" bullshit and 100% confidence that backup of any purchased game will work in next decades, or even in next next decades without internet.
Maybe unpopular opinion, but I worked at "mega-coorporations" and nobody cares what you buy. You are just a number in a system that at most uses your buying history to suggest you books to buy.
Right now we are seeing video games disappear after only a few decades. When the business model is for the copyright owner to issue restrictive licenses, most information will eventually disappear. DRM further exacerbates the situation.
Moreover this is inherent in the nature of a capitalist system itself - it's Schumpeter's creative destruction at work. It is normal, regular, and otherwise healthy for all businesses to eventually end.
But if that business was the only entity with the right and ability to copy, distribute etc. - then the creative work they produced is highly likely to disappear, lost to us forever.
It's tragic enough that the early history of video games may simply disappear. That future generations will have no idea how it all got started. With copying and distribution cheaper and easier than ever before, we're somehow still at risk of losing this era of history.
It's far, far, FAR scarier to think of this happening to the repository of human knowledge contained in BOOKS. The future which is now unfolding is a sort of permanent, rolling version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, where the collective wisdom of the human race just sort of fades away over time. Where we lose the ability to learn from our past, because we've lost the ability to make an enduring recording of it.
Ironically, with technology, we have unlocked infinite, practically free distribution of copying and information. It can be done with a keystroke. The problem lies in our legal, political and economic systems - the iron boot has become so heavy it's crushing the larynx of the past and future alike, in a way never before seen in human history.
DRM is bad, most of us agree on this. Also, copyright laws were written for bygone era where things didn't move so fast. I think it's the case of the "lawful" not being aligned with "ethical".
But the tragedy of games disappearing? There's more than 30 games released on Steam _each day_, let that sink in. Writing and publishing books has never in history been so easy. A vast majority of these are archived and easily available to anyone, in many more magnitudes of scale than our capacity to consume them.
In fact, I'm seeing the opposite of your claims, with Meta and OpenAI publicly admitting of breaking copyright laws while training their LLMs, and also the widespread movement for self-proclaimed librarians hoarding books, ROMs and other software in terabyte scales. I'm not passing judgements about any of this, just saying that copyright law is not always strictly applied and the iron boot is more like a fluffy slipper when it comes to availability of historical content.
There was a recent article about 87% of "classic" games no longer being commercially available - well that's still above the Sturgeon's law ("ninety percent of everything is crap"). Why would anyone expect publishers to offer content that is only interesting for historical reasons? For games that are still relevant, there is an added effort to run them on modern systems and to offer customer support.
Yes, I agree. But I don't see any other way around it that works.
Publishers need to stop doing this, or we end up in a world where everything is rented. They will only pay attention to what affects their revenue.
I repeat: I'm happy to pay for books if they're DRM-free. It's not like I'm pirating everything because it's free; I'm happy to pay for it if I can actually own it.
I've taken a principled stand against Crunchyroll and Kindle - the result has been basically dropping reading nonfiction books and watching anime as a hobby for over a decade. Who does this benefit?
I wouldn't even buy those. Who wants a bunch of shitty ebooks that they don't even bother to include cover art for? Sure, lately, the way they do contracts for the cover artists must include ebooks, but any title prior to about 2018 still has the shitty generic cover for whichever Random House imprint it is.
And as juvenile as it sounds, I'd actually like my copies of The Dark Tower to include the interior art too. Completely absent.
We finally got to a point in the future where theoretically they could siphon tens of thousands of dollars out of me (because I wouldn't first have to spend x20 that amount buying a home with a large enough library proper), and their authorized, authentic ebooks look no better than some half-assed scan downloaded from a #bookz DCC bot.
The arguments for pirating ebooks are very similar to the arguments in Uniquenameosaurus's "you should pirate anime" video (originally uploaded in, IIRC, 2018?). This:
This. I move country a lot, and Amazon/Kindle just wasn't happy with that. Books kept being unavailable despite the fact I'd bought them. Spotify does the same, but at least Spotify doesn't pretend that I've bought the music.
I on the other hand am absolutely happy to buy ebooks via kindle. In fact most of the time I just borrow them via Kindle Unlimited, read them and effectively return them.
Don't need to own a book I'm going to read once and never read again.
Baen sells thier ebooks DRM free if you get them direct from baen.com. They used to distribute CDs full of DRM free ebooks, back when Jim Baen was still alive. Handed 'em out at cons with instructions to copy and share. You can still find ISOs of them online.
I was living in Germany, but don't speak/read German, so that was tricky. Moving country a lot doesn't help with this - a lot of the time you have to be a citizen or permanent resident to join the library and rent ebooks.
In Germany, Austria and Switzerland all local Book store chains got together to create Tolino, a competitor to kindle.
It got the same nice features like apps and sync. And the devices themselves are very good too.
But the one thing that sets them apart is that they give you the opportunity to download the EPUB files for e-books and MP3s for audiobooks.
Also you can just upload EPUB Files via the web interface.
Sure you sometimes pay more, but at least you own what you buy.
Google Play Books allows you to download an EPUB, but only if the book is from a DRM‐free publisher. Tor Books is one such (sci‐fi) publisher, so I buy their books through Google Play.
I don’t know a way to check in advance if a Google Play book is DRM‐shackled. Hopefully, if a purchase does turn out to have DRM, Google would let you return the book for a refund if you haven’t read it, but I haven’t tested that.
Kobo does too. Usually it says something like "At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied." and below in the download options it will tell you DRM-free.
In addition to that, many public libraries offer a service where one can lend ebooks. And this is integrated in the tolino.
This is based on some DRM system from Adobe, though.
But still, a nice thing as an additional source for ebooks.
I didn't know Tolino offered DRM-free ebooks, will definitely have to check them out. (According to the FAQ there are some Adobe protected ebooks, but that's rare)
I have to buy through one of the bookstores, right?
I got both my AWS and Amazon accounts banned a few months ago, because I was living in Eastern Ukraine and ordered some books there in 2014 (before the postal services stopped working). Apparently, that address was saved somewhere and now it is under sanctions, even though I left that place in 2014. My Kindle library is gone because Amazon's support can't do anything about it.
I was mostly ignoring the fact DRM exists, because what could go wrong? Well, it was a refreshing reminder that our "R" in "DRM" are much more fragile than we got used to think when nothing bad happens for years. At least until we forget about it once again. That's it folks, gotta go buy a few limited use licenses on Steam while they're on sale!
The author touches on revocation - to me this is a MAJOR problem with "licenced" media. Publishers have shown, again and again, that they will not continue to "sell" (distribute) their product.
Despite storage and transmission being very cheap, it is almost impossable to find many classic films, music, and books. Aparently it is legitimate can claim a "loss" if they cease to sell an item (presumably having destroyed the master copy).
It might make perfect commercial sense to drop low selling items and claim large tax losses, it may be legal, but how is this moral? For classic items, this is nothing less than destroying cultural artifacts.
(This is yet another case where modern copyright is out of step with modern morals and expectations. Personally, I'm for short copyright terms, perhaps requiring explicit registration, and requiring licence holders to maintain a copy for historical purposes - perhaps in some kind of escrow at the internet archive.)
I just had an old account closed by Amazon and lost 15 or so books a couple movies, some purchased music and a bunch of old mobile apps from the Amazon app store. The total value was probably $500. After an hour of going circles with contact center people, I was told there was no way to transfer my content to another account, and there was no recourse to restore access to the account and the supervisor couldn't help either.
This experience was a customer service horror show, and really soured me on buying any electronic content from Amazon, ever again. I really don't care about how piracy affects Amazon and mega-industries. I care a lot more about having $500 worth of content taken away on the whim of a call center agent. In fact, it might just be time to start working on getting legislation in place that forces companies to at a minimum, refund they buyer (with interest) if they cut off access to DRM protected content.
The HN crowd largely consists of people who make a living creating or working for businesses that create material which is protected as intellectual property rights.
Source code to computer programs is protected under copyright law (and in America often also patent law). Databases such as the core of social networks are protected under a version of copyright law. Algorithms and procedures are often protected through confidentiality agreements and laws requiring confidentiality from employees and business partners. Names of companies, websites, URLs, games, characters, URLs (google.com) etc. are protected under trademark law. I can't just register "google.con" and make a search engine and sell ads from that domain. Google will come after me. And those on HN that don't work yet, often study at expensive universities that awarding fancy degrees. Not everyone is free to say they graduated as a Ph.D. in engineering from Harvard.
Yes, many developers on HN open source part of or all of their work. But then the get paid creating some other intellectual property right. Very, very few people just give away all their work.
Yet, that's literally what most commenters here seem to ask that publishing houses and authors do. Publishing houses make little money compared to many other businesses and especially compared to big tech. Authors typically make next to nothing.
If publishing houses don't try to protect their digital works, they will not be paid enough to cover costs, yet alone turn a profit. Simple as that. An e-book can be copied and spread much easier than a print book. Without publishing houses, there will be less screening of published works, and less marketing of authors and new books.
At the end of the day, people have to eat. We're going to have to pay people somehow, either by buying a product, buying merchandise, paying taxes / donating to fund grants, or through patreon or github sponsors. The topic is fairly broad, and so it's less one system than a bunch of different industries with their own funding models, so this is going to be speaking fairly generally. A lot of our present funding models are a hybrid of these systems. Some combination of ads, small dollar donations, institutional sponsorship, and public grants broadly help pay for anything from a new software library to webcomics. Sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it's not, but there are alternative funding models to the present winner-take-all model of big publishing houses. It's good to recognize that a lot of open source can only exist because a lot of us work in high paying tech jobs, and that model will not work for traditional books, but that doesn't mean we should give up trying to find a better solution than the patchwork system we have today.
So, why don't we just subsidize authors?
Arguably, access to more information drives more technological growth, which benefits us all. How many discoveries have been delayed because journal articles are behind a paywall? How many wasted manhours were spent on that? Grad students make even less money and arguably spend even more time creating intellectual property. It's frankly ludicrous to gate scholarly articles behind a $20 paywall, because for one, the burden of payment in those cases tends to fall upon those least able to pay for it, who are students and researchers, while the publishers make all the money by extorting institutions who can pay, all while profiting off of publicly funded research. This is the least morally objectionable point, and probably why newer fields (especially in compsci) post all their articles for free on arXiv, or else host somewhere else, since the price of hosting is extremely cheap compared to the actual work.
Less arguably, art itself is the same kind of public good; We have PBS, for programs that one can broadly say is "enriching" because a bunch of people a hundred years ago said so; we surely recognize that Shakespeare ought to be publicly funded. Why not modern forms of entertainment?
Failing that, let's look at this purely from a cost perspective. We'll assume if we're paying 100% of a writer's salary, their work is in the public domain, and that counts as savings to consumers. Let's suppose we wanted to fund every single writer in America to do writing full time. Let's do some back of the envelope calculations here. Supposing I spent $40 on books per year, for the sake of argument. There are 330m people in the US, median income for writers is around $20k USD [1] (but those are poverty wages) to $50k USD [3] (I think those include industry), and there are anywhere from 50k to 200k active writers right now [2][3], depending on how you count. So, that's anywhere from $3.3 (probably add an extra few cents for admin costs) to $33 per person per year in additional taxes, if we literally subsidized every single writer in the US. I'm certain I spent more than $33 on books this year, though one could probably quibble on that. 'course, that's probably overkill, and it doesn't account for support staff, admin, editors, marketing etc, but evenly naively taken, it doesn't seem out of the realm of economic possibility.
Of course, we probably won't pursue such an extreme solution. So let's look at another one. Consider the question of the library. Surely every author would be against an institution distributing their work for free (even having paid the publisher for one copy). For sake of money, should Stephen King be removed from circulation of libraries? But that fails to recognize that physical libraries target a market segment that cannot afford to buy a book; when it is more convenient, people tend to want to buy books for themselves. Digital removes these inconvenient constraints and will require a renegotiation in this space as it shifts to much in the other direction; the internet archive's unilateral action is at best, controversial. Streaming services like spotify initially gave a lot of consumer surplus at the expense of the artists (and is now, like every platform, trying to claw that surplus to themselves). The library model may not work for digital. Consumers or publishers can capture all the surplus in this new shakeup, but some balance is probably the most acceptable/optimal solution to most people.
And like it or not, with AI, artists will be devalued, even if that work isn't done. Amazon is already killing traditional publishing houses with its own platform. While we're having a debate on copyright, the market is going to shift even more in favor of consumers and less in favor of authors. We're going to have to address these issues anyways, like it or not, because we're already on this path, so we might as well figure out a more robust solution now. Failing everything, why not have a national system of grants for writers to produce public domain works?
(And yes, I know this naive solution probably has many holes in it. I'd be delighted to be corrected, even more so with another solution. But at the very least, shouldn't we at least try something else than the endless morass of DRM and copyright?)
Well, it’s not that big of a mistery actually, even less a psychological manipulation to increase revenues. If I completely own an e-book, I can duplicate it, quadruplicate it, post it online for 10000 people to have it for free. And this would bring the company just the 3$ that I gave to them.
If you want to live in the olden days, buy the hard copy, share it with a friend, donate it to a library. Nothing has changed there.
Is the prevalence of DRM actually preventing ebooks from being pirated? I don't pirate books myself but I get the impression that the answer is very much 'no'.
Pretty much every single paper and research repeats the fact that DRM is completely ineffective and has practically no effect on piracy or revenue loss.
It loses revenue by itself by inconveniencing paying customers (lowering sales), restricting addressable market (by limiting purchases to compatible DRM leaden hardware) and demanding R&D costs.
Of course, facts rarely challenge belief when it comes to business owners - just see the RTO push.
It has prevented it to a certain degree. If don’t have the know-how, you can’t find the book you’re after. And I know very few people that actually know where to find for free the book they want to read.
Anyway, my poin was: if this solution isn’t working, or looks unfair, how are we going to solve it differently?
It isn't. It's been a while that I've seen a (English at least) book I can't find a pirated version somewhere, unless it has a really small, niche audience or it just isn't published in a way that's much harder to use (vendor provided applications, etc). All it takes is one user with the know-how to remove the DRM and a willingness to share the file, which as the history of the internet shows, is almost an inevitability with even semi-popular books.
It is not at all preventing this. There for instance 2 major sites with millions of books and wikipedia entries and all efforts to shut done is change the tld they are offered at which is linked on Wikipedia.
If DRM were banned maybe things wouldn't be different. So long as publishers have the option, I think they're more comfortable publishing e-books with DRM than without, and more comfortable publishing more obscure e-books from unknown authors than paper books from the same as the investment is lower. So there could be a catalog of books that wouldn't be available without DRM in the picture.
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I would like to reward the authors, but I refuse to allow the publishing industry to get away with this bullshit. If the authors choose to publish their books DRM-free as epubs, I will (and do) happily buy them.
Manning does put a “licensed to my_email” on the pages of the digital copies but it’s not onerous.
- I'm sending a message to publishers that physical books are in demand (not the case)
- I have to deal with the physical book (giving it away to a charity shop is probably the solution, but it's still hassle)
- It doesn't solve the problem - publishers still think everything is good. Only by depriving the publishers of revenue until they start respecting their customers can we solve this.
And I think my attitude is a lot less entitled than the publisher's. If I pay for something, I should own it, not have it subject to the publisher's whims. The attitude that they can disrespect their customers and keep control of the book even after it has been purchased is more than entitled. It should be illegal.
I've got cash, plenty of people around me don't and I don't begrudge their piracy. I pay, see below, when I was young and broke I pirated everything. I'm surrounded by people for whom a US minimum wage would be a stonking income, why shouldn't they pirate?
The big issue for me personally is shipping. I live outside the US and EU, and it's a real problem getting books out. I often pay more for shipping than I do for the books themselves, and I have to wait up to a month, and there's the ridiculousness of getting a book shipped across the US/EU, then to my third country.
My approach is that I pirate freely and happily, without a shred of guilt. Most of the books on my reader only get read up through the first few chapters, some I'll finish completely.
I do however like books, real books. If I'm getting into an author I've pirated, I'll then buy some of their other stuff, and I buy frequently.
This comes back to the old thing with music pirates being the biggest spenders on music. A classic case, I think.
So please, leave your moralizing out of this. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to pirate, much of it ending up with money in author and publishers pockets.
When I want to read a book, I usually prefer a physical copy (and I am willing to pay for it, if I do not merely want to read it for a few hours at the library (if the library has a copy)); sometimes it is helpful to have it on the computer too, and in that case I would only accept non-DRM files, and possibly even piracy. However, some books might be difficult to find, or maybe I only want one page, etc.
I believe authors deserve to be rewarded proportionally to the quality of their work, I also believe good publishers can add a lot of value to an author's work, and even more I believe that DRM-Free publishers have shown it's possible to base their core business model on being more convenient than piracy. I buy a book, it's mine to use on my devices, no strings ttached.
The hubris of some companies make them refuse to see the reality of the market, and instead stubbornly push for wider copyright laws, harsher punishment, DRM, and higher walls for their gardens.
A) I don't see a reason why some mega-cooperations should know about every book I buy.
B) You don't know if they have been watermarked. I don't want every book I own to be watermarked with god-knows-what metadata about me.
Let me pay with Bitcoin, and I'll buy books again.
Moreover this is inherent in the nature of a capitalist system itself - it's Schumpeter's creative destruction at work. It is normal, regular, and otherwise healthy for all businesses to eventually end.
But if that business was the only entity with the right and ability to copy, distribute etc. - then the creative work they produced is highly likely to disappear, lost to us forever.
It's tragic enough that the early history of video games may simply disappear. That future generations will have no idea how it all got started. With copying and distribution cheaper and easier than ever before, we're somehow still at risk of losing this era of history.
It's far, far, FAR scarier to think of this happening to the repository of human knowledge contained in BOOKS. The future which is now unfolding is a sort of permanent, rolling version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, where the collective wisdom of the human race just sort of fades away over time. Where we lose the ability to learn from our past, because we've lost the ability to make an enduring recording of it.
Ironically, with technology, we have unlocked infinite, practically free distribution of copying and information. It can be done with a keystroke. The problem lies in our legal, political and economic systems - the iron boot has become so heavy it's crushing the larynx of the past and future alike, in a way never before seen in human history.
But the tragedy of games disappearing? There's more than 30 games released on Steam _each day_, let that sink in. Writing and publishing books has never in history been so easy. A vast majority of these are archived and easily available to anyone, in many more magnitudes of scale than our capacity to consume them.
In fact, I'm seeing the opposite of your claims, with Meta and OpenAI publicly admitting of breaking copyright laws while training their LLMs, and also the widespread movement for self-proclaimed librarians hoarding books, ROMs and other software in terabyte scales. I'm not passing judgements about any of this, just saying that copyright law is not always strictly applied and the iron boot is more like a fluffy slipper when it comes to availability of historical content.
There was a recent article about 87% of "classic" games no longer being commercially available - well that's still above the Sturgeon's law ("ninety percent of everything is crap"). Why would anyone expect publishers to offer content that is only interesting for historical reasons? For games that are still relevant, there is an added effort to run them on modern systems and to offer customer support.
Exactly, as I said in my post we need a new political movement to fight the problem.
Now, you could choose to not read books that don't meet your high moral bar for distribution. But screw that, you can have your cake and eat it too!
Publishers need to stop doing this, or we end up in a world where everything is rented. They will only pay attention to what affects their revenue.
I repeat: I'm happy to pay for books if they're DRM-free. It's not like I'm pirating everything because it's free; I'm happy to pay for it if I can actually own it.
Self-flagellation is not a moral imperative.
And as juvenile as it sounds, I'd actually like my copies of The Dark Tower to include the interior art too. Completely absent.
We finally got to a point in the future where theoretically they could siphon tens of thousands of dollars out of me (because I wouldn't first have to spend x20 that amount buying a home with a large enough library proper), and their authorized, authentic ebooks look no better than some half-assed scan downloaded from a #bookz DCC bot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmi3akNnqis - You Should Pirate Anime (Reupload)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXiQJWT442I - You Should Pirate Anime 2 (Reupload)
Don't need to own a book I'm going to read once and never read again.
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I don’t know a way to check in advance if a Google Play book is DRM‐shackled. Hopefully, if a purchase does turn out to have DRM, Google would let you return the book for a refund if you haven’t read it, but I haven’t tested that.
Atleast the web interface makes it clear in what format the book is downloadable in.
In my defense: Thalia is the only remaining book store chain here in Austria.
That works for Kindles via E-Mail.
I have to buy through one of the bookstores, right?
I was mostly ignoring the fact DRM exists, because what could go wrong? Well, it was a refreshing reminder that our "R" in "DRM" are much more fragile than we got used to think when nothing bad happens for years. At least until we forget about it once again. That's it folks, gotta go buy a few limited use licenses on Steam while they're on sale!
Despite storage and transmission being very cheap, it is almost impossable to find many classic films, music, and books. Aparently it is legitimate can claim a "loss" if they cease to sell an item (presumably having destroyed the master copy).
It might make perfect commercial sense to drop low selling items and claim large tax losses, it may be legal, but how is this moral? For classic items, this is nothing less than destroying cultural artifacts.
(This is yet another case where modern copyright is out of step with modern morals and expectations. Personally, I'm for short copyright terms, perhaps requiring explicit registration, and requiring licence holders to maintain a copy for historical purposes - perhaps in some kind of escrow at the internet archive.)
This experience was a customer service horror show, and really soured me on buying any electronic content from Amazon, ever again. I really don't care about how piracy affects Amazon and mega-industries. I care a lot more about having $500 worth of content taken away on the whim of a call center agent. In fact, it might just be time to start working on getting legislation in place that forces companies to at a minimum, refund they buyer (with interest) if they cut off access to DRM protected content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman
Source code to computer programs is protected under copyright law (and in America often also patent law). Databases such as the core of social networks are protected under a version of copyright law. Algorithms and procedures are often protected through confidentiality agreements and laws requiring confidentiality from employees and business partners. Names of companies, websites, URLs, games, characters, URLs (google.com) etc. are protected under trademark law. I can't just register "google.con" and make a search engine and sell ads from that domain. Google will come after me. And those on HN that don't work yet, often study at expensive universities that awarding fancy degrees. Not everyone is free to say they graduated as a Ph.D. in engineering from Harvard.
Yes, many developers on HN open source part of or all of their work. But then the get paid creating some other intellectual property right. Very, very few people just give away all their work.
Yet, that's literally what most commenters here seem to ask that publishing houses and authors do. Publishing houses make little money compared to many other businesses and especially compared to big tech. Authors typically make next to nothing.
If publishing houses don't try to protect their digital works, they will not be paid enough to cover costs, yet alone turn a profit. Simple as that. An e-book can be copied and spread much easier than a print book. Without publishing houses, there will be less screening of published works, and less marketing of authors and new books.
At the end of the day, people have to eat. We're going to have to pay people somehow, either by buying a product, buying merchandise, paying taxes / donating to fund grants, or through patreon or github sponsors. The topic is fairly broad, and so it's less one system than a bunch of different industries with their own funding models, so this is going to be speaking fairly generally. A lot of our present funding models are a hybrid of these systems. Some combination of ads, small dollar donations, institutional sponsorship, and public grants broadly help pay for anything from a new software library to webcomics. Sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it's not, but there are alternative funding models to the present winner-take-all model of big publishing houses. It's good to recognize that a lot of open source can only exist because a lot of us work in high paying tech jobs, and that model will not work for traditional books, but that doesn't mean we should give up trying to find a better solution than the patchwork system we have today.
So, why don't we just subsidize authors?
Arguably, access to more information drives more technological growth, which benefits us all. How many discoveries have been delayed because journal articles are behind a paywall? How many wasted manhours were spent on that? Grad students make even less money and arguably spend even more time creating intellectual property. It's frankly ludicrous to gate scholarly articles behind a $20 paywall, because for one, the burden of payment in those cases tends to fall upon those least able to pay for it, who are students and researchers, while the publishers make all the money by extorting institutions who can pay, all while profiting off of publicly funded research. This is the least morally objectionable point, and probably why newer fields (especially in compsci) post all their articles for free on arXiv, or else host somewhere else, since the price of hosting is extremely cheap compared to the actual work.
Less arguably, art itself is the same kind of public good; We have PBS, for programs that one can broadly say is "enriching" because a bunch of people a hundred years ago said so; we surely recognize that Shakespeare ought to be publicly funded. Why not modern forms of entertainment?
Failing that, let's look at this purely from a cost perspective. We'll assume if we're paying 100% of a writer's salary, their work is in the public domain, and that counts as savings to consumers. Let's suppose we wanted to fund every single writer in America to do writing full time. Let's do some back of the envelope calculations here. Supposing I spent $40 on books per year, for the sake of argument. There are 330m people in the US, median income for writers is around $20k USD [1] (but those are poverty wages) to $50k USD [3] (I think those include industry), and there are anywhere from 50k to 200k active writers right now [2][3], depending on how you count. So, that's anywhere from $3.3 (probably add an extra few cents for admin costs) to $33 per person per year in additional taxes, if we literally subsidized every single writer in the US. I'm certain I spent more than $33 on books this year, though one could probably quibble on that. 'course, that's probably overkill, and it doesn't account for support staff, admin, editors, marketing etc, but evenly naively taken, it doesn't seem out of the realm of economic possibility.
Of course, we probably won't pursue such an extreme solution. So let's look at another one. Consider the question of the library. Surely every author would be against an institution distributing their work for free (even having paid the publisher for one copy). For sake of money, should Stephen King be removed from circulation of libraries? But that fails to recognize that physical libraries target a market segment that cannot afford to buy a book; when it is more convenient, people tend to want to buy books for themselves. Digital removes these inconvenient constraints and will require a renegotiation in this space as it shifts to much in the other direction; the internet archive's unilateral action is at best, controversial. Streaming services like spotify initially gave a lot of consumer surplus at the expense of the artists (and is now, like every platform, trying to claw that surplus to themselves). The library model may not work for digital. Consumers or publishers can capture all the surplus in this new shakeup, but some balance is probably the most acceptable/optimal solution to most people.
And like it or not, with AI, artists will be devalued, even if that work isn't done. Amazon is already killing traditional publishing houses with its own platform. While we're having a debate on copyright, the market is going to shift even more in favor of consumers and less in favor of authors. We're going to have to address these issues anyways, like it or not, because we're already on this path, so we might as well figure out a more robust solution now. Failing everything, why not have a national system of grants for writers to produce public domain works?
(And yes, I know this naive solution probably has many holes in it. I'd be delighted to be corrected, even more so with another solution. But at the very least, shouldn't we at least try something else than the endless morass of DRM and copyright?)
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/books/authors-pay-writer....
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/572476/number-writers-au...
3. https://datausa.io/profile/soc/writers-authors
It loses revenue by itself by inconveniencing paying customers (lowering sales), restricting addressable market (by limiting purchases to compatible DRM leaden hardware) and demanding R&D costs.
Of course, facts rarely challenge belief when it comes to business owners - just see the RTO push.
These theories are hard to test.