#and that harm you avoid is less than what the piracy causes the author

[purplesaline]

Piracy is preservation, and authors would rather have their books in front of people who can't access many books for free instead of looking those people in the eye and saying "fork over your month's earnings"

Shut up

To be clear, I'm not against Piracy in general. In fact I'm not only an advocate, I'm a prolific pirate myself.

I'm sure you can find a handful of authors who feel that way, but those I know personally (one indie author and one traditionally published) as well as those I've seen comment on the issue are adamant that piracy has caused them significant personal harm.

They'd far rather people who can't afford their books use libraries to access them or, if the libraries they have access too don't carry the book(d), they'd rather people reach out to them personally to arrange for a copy within their budget (sometimes including for free).

Pirating books is not the same as pirating movies. It's the difference between attacking a Spanish galleon and a fishing sloop.

Bigger names like Brandon Sanderson, Steven King, Diana Gabaldon, etc have a entire fleet of sloops and are unlikely to miss a couple going missing, but the less famous (and thus less highly paid) authors can have their entire career ruined by their book being pirated. It can even prevent them from getting offered another book deal, meaning there won't be any more books by that author for you to read.

We aren't entitled to the intellectual property of others. Full stop.

If the author wanted their book to be free, they'd have made it freely available (as some do!). Maybe if everyone had a universal basic income that covered the cost of living we'd see more art available at no cost, but as it stands artists need to make a living too and that means they need to earn a profit to survive. If they can't do that with their art they have to find another way to do it which means less time and energy to make art.

Not to mention the advance an author gets is usual peanuts, and unlike actors who get paid by the time the movie is out, an advance isn't a wage and if the author doesn't sell enough books they have to give back whatever amount of the advance the sale of their books didn't cover. If they get a $5000 advance and only sell $3000 worth of books they owe the publisher $2000.

Again, I'm not against piracy. I am against harming individual artists to the point where it significantly impacts their career. I want more art in this world.

I'm also not telling people they can't, or shouldn't pirate books. I'm against it but I'm not trying to for e others to believe the same as me. I'm providing information so people can make a more informed decision and better understand the consequences of their choices.

So do what you will with the info I've provided. Just be willing to acknowledge the harm you cause with those choices. Even the piracy I take part in causes harm on a smaller scale.

I have no argument against "I don't care, I'm doing it anyway" and I won't bother trying to argue it.

[joannechocolat]

Why book piracy is killing libraries, indie voices, diversity and small presses.

Unless you were on vacation on Mars this week you can’t have failed to encounter the fracas about Travis McCrea, erstwhile founder (and seemingly the only member) of the grandly-named Canadian Pirate Party, amateur pilot, small-time website designer and creator of at least two websites promoting the illegal distribution of books.

His current enterprise claims to be an online library, claims to pay authors, and also claims that authors are donating their books voluntarily. None of this is true, of course, any more than it is true that Travis himself is a politician or a pilot, except in a very amateur capacity. The fact is, he’s just another douchebro trying to get faves on his site, but his latest activities have triggered yet another angry discussion about book piracy and what it means, with all the predictable responses.

So let’s talk about book piracy for a minute, and try to debunk some of the myths.  

First, it isn’t piracy. It’s copyright theft. Every illegal download is a copy of the book, distributed illegally, without the consent of the author (or their publisher).

 But isn’t it just sharing? No, it’s stealing. Sharing is when an author puts their own book online for free. Sometimes we do that, out of goodwill or to promote an occasion. But doing it without the author’s consent is something entirely different. The other party’s consent is what determines whether what you want is right or wrong.

 Authors can afford it! Maybe a few exceptional authors can. But most authors are struggling to hold down a day job as well as writing in their spare time. The average author earns £11,000 a year, and many earn much less than that. They have all the same expenses as you; the same financial concerns. They’re just as real as you are, even though they may deal in fiction. Sales are the only little bit of validation and visibility they’re likely to get, and illegal downloading sites are taking even that. Travis’ site has all my books on it, but it also has a book by a self-pubbed friend of mine, who has only sold a few hundred copies. She’s heartbroken, not because of the money, but because of all the love and work it represents. Book piracy is an act of contempt for books and their authors, which is why so many of the people who do it – so many of them affluent young white men like Travis – aren’t really readers at all. They’re fake social justice warriors, pretending to their friends that they’re somehow sticking it to the man, while actually they’re ripping off people much poorer (and more honest) than they are.

But doesn’t it help people who can’t afford to buy books? Actually, no it doesn’t. It does quite the opposite, and here’s why. One, while public libraries exist, anyone can get free access to books. But if people start relying on illegal download sites instead, libraries lose support, and get closed down. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve lost over 40% of libraries in my region. And people using this argument are spreading the toxic myth that poverty automatically leads to theft. There are plenty of well-off thieves in the world. Travis McCrea is one of them, and sites like this legitimize his behaviour. Being poor doesn’t make you a thief. Stealing makes you a thief. I know a lot of poor people (some of them authors) who don’t steal. There are plenty of places to get access to free books – libraries, legal online resources like Project Gutenberg – without harming anyone’s livelihood.

But how can it hurt anyone? It’s a virtual crime. Again, wrong. It hurts authors, most of whom don’t even earn a living wage, by eating into their sales. Especially in the cases of small and mid-list authors, this often means that they stop being commercially viable, and their publishers let them go. That means that if they lose too many sales, that emerging author you liked may not ever get published again. That series you like? Cancelled. It also hurts small publishers, and makes them less likely to survive in the face of their big competitors. It means less choice, fewer risks being taken by publishers to promote new, or diverse authors. It means more lucrative, ghostwritten books by white, high-profile celebrities, and fewer books by those Big Publishing considers to be a commercial risk: that’s LGBTQ people, POC, and diverse voices in general. It’s toxic to all the things passionate readers are clamouring for: new voices; self-pubbed authors; small publishers, indie bookshops.

Everyone’s doing it. It can’t be stopped! Oh yes, it can. If every reader called out copyright theft whenever they saw it, if every reader avoided these sites, then by next year they wouldn’t exist. That’s on you. Call it out. Report it. Twenty years ago, people smoked wherever they wanted to, including in restaurants and in nursery schools and on public transport, regardless of whose health they endangered. Now they don’t. And that’s not just because the law changed their behaviour. People changed it. People called out harmful, entitled behaviour. And then they stopped it. It can be done. All that remains is for you to pick a side. Do you want to aid the cause of selfishness and short-sighted greed, or do you want diversity, fairness and opportunity? Do you want our culture of diverse books and self-expression to survive, or do you just want to help entitled, arrogant young men like Travis McCrea to make a name for themselves? Because that’s what he’s using his social media platform for, such as it is. His own self-aggrandizement. That’s all he really cares about; not the poor, not the cause of literacy, and definitely not the issue of consent. Thanks to his Twitter thread, I can see that he has a girlfriend, a very nice cat; he likes going to air shows and flying his little private plane; he likes RT-ing soundbites that don’t quite stand up to scrutiny – and of course, he talks about himself a great deal - but not once does he mention readers, or reading, or books...

[neptunecreek]

What Really Does and Doesn’t Work for Fair Use in the DMCA

On July 28, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary held another in its year-long series of hearings on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The topic of this hearing was “How Does the DMCA Contemplate Limitations and Exceptions Like Fair Use?”

We’re glad Congress is asking the question. Without fair use, much of our common culture would be inaccessible, cordoned off by copyright. Fair use creates breathing space for innovation and new creativity by allowing us to re-use and comment on existing works. As Sherwin Siy, lead public policy manager for the Wikimedia Foundation, said in his testimony: “That fair uses aren’t rare exceptions to the exclusive rights of copyright law but a pervasive, constantly operating aspect of the law. Fair use not only promotes journalism, criticism, and education, it also ensures that our everyday activities aren’t constantly infringing copyrights. Especially now that so much of our lives are conducted on camera and online.”

Unfortunately, the answer to Congress’s question is: not enough. The DMCA, in particular, by design and as interpreted, doesn’t do enough to protect online fair uses. This is the case in both Section 1201 of the DMCA—the “anti-circumvention” provision which bans interference on technological restrictions on copyrighted works—and Section 512—the provision which immunizes platforms from liability for copyright infringement by their users so long as certain conditions are met.

Fair Use and Notice and Takedown

The DMCA was meant to be a grand bargain, balancing the needs of tech companies, rightsholders, and users. Section 512 embodies a carefully crafted system that, when properly deployed, gives service providers protection from liability, copyright owners tools to police infringement, and users the ability to challenge the improper use of those tools. Without Section 512, the risk of crippling liability for the acts of users would have prevented the emergence of most of the social media outlets we use today.

But Congress knew that Section 512’s powerful incentives could result in lawful material being censored from the Internet, without prior judicial scrutiny, much less advance notice to the person who posted the material, or an opportunity to contest the removal. For example, users often making fair use of copyrighted works in all kinds of online expression. That use is authorized by law, as part of copyright’s “built-in First Amendment accommodations.” Nonetheless, it is often targeted for takedown under the DMCA. 

For Section 512, user protections are supposed to be located in sections 512(g) and 512(f). In practice, neither of these sections have worked quite as intended.

Section 512(g) lays out the requirements for counternotifications. In theory, if a takedown is issued against a work making fair use, then the target can send a counternotice to get the work restored. The counternotice contains personal information of the creator and an agreement to be subject to a court case. If the person or organization doesn’t respond to the counternotice with a legal action within two weeks, the work goes back up. In practice, very few counternotices are sent, even when the original takedown was flawed.

512(f) was supposed to deter takedowns targeting lawful uses by giving those harmed the ability to hold senders accountable. Once again, in practice, this has done little to actually prevent abusive and false takedowns.

Columbia Law Professor Jane C. Ginsburg agreed, saying that these parts of 512 “may not always have worked out as intended.” She highlighted that automated takedown notice systems don’t take fair use into account and that there are relatively few counternotices. She allowed that “fear or ignorance” would cause users not to take advantage of counternotices, a point backed up by cases of trolling and the intimidating nature of the counternotices.

Evidence of how users avoid the process was given by Rick Beato, a musician who also has a popular YouTube channel that teaches music theory. He noted that he has made 750 YouTube videos, of which 254 have been demonetized and 43 have been blocked or taken down. Beato noted that he’s never disputed anything – it’s too much trouble.

Several witnesses urged the creation of some sort of “alternative dispute resolution” to make taking down and restoring content easier. We disagree. Section 512 already makes takedowns far too easy. The experience of the last 22 years shows just how much of the fundamental right to freedom of expression is harmed by extrajudicial systems like the DMCA. The answer to the DMCA’s failures cannot be yet another one.

As for the European model, there is no way to square the Copyright Directive with fair use. The European Union’s Copyright Directive effectively requires companies to ensure that nothing is ever posted on their platforms that might be infringing. That incentivizes them to over-remove, rather than take fair use into account. And to handle that need, filters become necessary. And so it creates a rule requiring online service providers to send everything we post to the Internet to black-box machine learning filters that will block anything that the filters classify as "copyright infringement." And, as Beato testified to in the hearing, filters routinely fail to distinguish even obvious fair uses. For example, his educational videos have been taken down and demonetized because of a filter. And he is not alone.

Witnesses also suggested that fair use has expanded too far. This is a reassertion of the old bogeyman of “fair use creep,” and it assumes that fair use is set in stone. In fact, fair use, which is flexible by design, is merely keeping up with the changes in the online landscape and protecting users’ rights.

As witness Joseph Gratz put it:

Nobody likes to have their word, or their work, or their music used in ways that they can’t control. But that is exactly what fair use protects. And that is exactly what the First Amendment protects. Whether or not the copyright holder likes the use, and indeed, even more so where the copyright holder does not like the use, fair use is needed to make sure that free expression can thrive.

Fair Use, Copyright Protection Measures, and Right to Repair

On balance, Section 512 supports a great deal of online expression despite its flaws. The same cannot be said for Section 1201.  Section 1201 makes it illegal to circumvent a technological protection on a copyrighted work, even if you are doing so for an otherwise lawful reason.

Sound confusing? It is. Thanks to fair use, you have a legal right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment. But thanks to Section 1201, you do not have the right to break any digital locks that might prevent you from engaging in that fair use. And this, in turn, has had a host of unintended consequences, such as impeding the right to repair.

The only way to be safe under the law is to get an exemption from the Copyright Office, which grants exemptions to classes of uses every three years. And even if your use is covered by an exemption, that exemption must be continually renewed. In other words, you have to participate in an unconstitutional speech licensing regime, seeking permission from the Copyright Office to exercise your speech rights.

Nevertheless, Christopher Mohr, the Vice President for Intellectual Property and General Counsel of the Software and Information Industry Association, called Section 1201 a success because it supposedly prevented the “proliferation of piracy tools in big box stores.” And Ginsburg pointed to the triennial exemption process as a success. She said it “responds effectively to the essential challenge” of balancing the need for controls with the rights of users.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that even if you have an exemption allowing you access to material you have a Constitutional right to use, you can’t have someone with the technological know-how to do it for you and no one is supposed to provide you a tool to do it yourself, either. You have to do it all on your own.

So if you are, for example, one of the farmers trying to repair your own tractor, you now have an exemption allowing you to do that. But you still can’t go to an independent repair store to get an expert to let you in. You can’t use a premade tool to help you get in. This is a manifestly absurd result.

We’re glad Congress is asking questions about fair use under the DMCA. We wish there were better answers.

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