"Folks like the OP" mentioned they use GOG, No Starch Press, etc, so they presumably don't mind paying as long as the experience is reasonable, DRM- and bullshit-free.
That's the thing with piracy: it's often more convenient than buying the thing. If the pirate book/game/music is unencumbered and easier to use on more devices, but the legal book/game/music is DRM-laden and requires proprietary devices or apps to use, which one would you choose?
I can lend or give a real book to whoever I want. Forever or temporarily. I can buy used books I find at discount used book stores.
And how could you even possibly compete with a book piracy site such as z-lib? You can get any book you want, for free, within seconds with virtually no fear of legal repercussions.
>I can lend or give a real book to whoever I want. Forever or temporarily.
Because the physical limitations on lending make it unfeasible to share it with absolutely everyone. The same goes for sales of used books. A 'used' digital book is just as good as a new one and would directly compete with the original seller.
I feel like this is intentionally ignoring the previous lifetime of experience which led to the OP's decision to attempt to pirate first.
After Google Play Music was announced to be shutting down a few years ago I've been trying to rebuild a (legal) lossless music collection. It's shocking how difficult it is to find some tracks and artists in a lossless format legally.
Some CDs I used to own years ago are now going for $250 used. Sites like HDTracks have apparently never heard of those bands, there's no Bandcamp site, the band site now redirects to facebook, all I can buy is 160kbps mp3.
Some CDs I used to own are available for $6.99, but it's the George Lucas style remastered content where they changed the lead-in and chorus and everything sounds wrong.
And that's not to mention the disks I still own that are copy protected. Sure I'll just pop this CD into my new car.... Oh wait it doesn't have a CD drive because it's 2020 and why would the manufacturer even consider including one? Is it okay to copy that CD? Why or why not?
So I still can't listen to some of my favorite bands, on whom I've spent $$$ on merchandise and concerts and their original CD releases, because I'm restricting myself to following the law. I cannot begrudge someone for choosing to pirate in the slightest.
i think you gotta realize that at least a lot of people dont really pirate to save money. they pirate because they cant be arsed to deal with the shitty other platform that are plain inferior and take way too much effort to figure out.
wrt books/ebooks: i actually do occasionally buy them on amazon, drm be darned. but i dont actually try to create an archive either. thats the big difference - if you actually wanna keep what you read/watch available forever... you just gotta pirate it. there is no other way. a lot of people enjoy building an archive. they're all forced to pirate almost everything.
Not just enjoy, many times you'd have to if you want to keep your citations and annotations. Otherwise it's the same type of fiascos over and over again
from last year: Microsoft's eBook store: When this closes, your books disappear too https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367
However, for TV and movies, I find the pay site experience to be too poor (last I checked you couldn’t even stream from Amazon video if you run Linux). So I pirate everything.
I think Bandcamp is the perfect site for purchasing music. They’re transparent about what they pay artists and labels, and a purchase nets you unlimited streaming plus DRM-free downloads. This is the model the sellers of these other mediums should be following. I buy a lot of music, all because bandcamp is so great.
I would say your post is reality-denial.
His experience was shit, total shit. Knowing his experience, I would avoid the site he chose like the plague. But now, let me ask you this, should I test each and every ebook retailer to try to find one that isn't shit, paying every time?
Should customers start maintaining their own index of which ebook providers are shit? Who pays to have someone go back and check them all once a week to see if they've changed their behavior since the last $7 purchase to check their DRM practices? Should customers pay a monthly subscription to some kind of digital mystery shopper service to find out who's webstores are just the fucking worst?
Your customers have _no_ reasonable path to control over shitty DRM practices. The only person in this entire conversation who has influence is Turukawa, because Turukawa is an author, and gets to choose who sells his books.
Bad news everyone: piracy exists, and provides a pretty great user flow. If authors want people to not pirate ebooks, they need to demand a not shit ebook option that /has a strong brand of being not shit/. Yeah, short term that might be really hard. Maybe authors need to form some kind of union and demand better from their publishers.
Because customers don't care. You can rant and rave about how they're immoral subhumans stealing from the mouths of authors children all you want, but piracy still exists and it's a much easier way of getting high quality ebooks that work on all platforms and devices. It's not the customers fault that zlib has a better reputation than your ebook retail partners, nor is it zlibs.
“Imma pirate something. Whoops doesn’t work. Well I’ll pay for it. What?!? DRM?!? In my computer?!?”
I went to download an album and was immediately greeted by a popup saying I could only authorize three devices or something and asking which device I was downloading for. Well... I'm downloading from a laptop but I'm going to mostly be listening from a phone, how do I even authorize either device?
Fifteen minutes of reading later I closed the tab and waited for the disks to arrive in the mail, since I can do whatever I damn well please with my ripped .FLAC files.
Plus my playlists are full of tracks that were available in Google's subscription service that I didn't upload.
Also, the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons are switched in the yt music ui vs GPM. Bad ux across different products... Par for Google, I guess.
People used to say the same about movie and music piracy. The problem was never piracy itself, but publishers offering an inferior product.
It's called a library.
Yeah, this has been an issue for me as well. If I have a real book that I bought, I'm perfectly allowed to lend it to a friend for some period of time. Public libraries have done this on a mass scale for eons.
Amazon's DRM on the other hand only lets you lend a book for 14 days. WTF? A real book isn't going to care how long you lend it for. Even many libraries let you extend book loans for months as long as no other patron has placed a hold request for it. The solution? Strip books of their DRM.
I'm not out there to cheat authors of money. I'm not going to take my ebook files and post them everywhere on the internet for free. I'm support giving authors money when I buy an eBook. But I want the same freedom that a paper book gives me. The concept of borrowing books, and even photocopying a section or two from books for personal use, shouldn't disappear in the digital age just because we've gone digital.
When institutions use Adobe's platform to lend out books, they utilize a waiting list for borrowers to que into. You can, in fact, just re-borrow it after 14 days and if nobody else is in line, you get access back immediately. So in reality, the Adobe bloatware solution for a title nobody else wants to read works the same as a physical format in that sense.
While this certainly used to be true, I think this is an arguable point. You posit two choices in the next sentence:
- the pirate book/game/music is unencumbered and easier to use on more devices
- the legal book/game/music is DRM-laden and requires proprietary devices or apps to use
But: if I buy a Kindle book, DRM or not, it is very easy for me to buy and it is very easy for me to use on any device that runs the Kindle app. Buy it one device and it's in the library on all of them; at worst I have to just tap to download it.
This is the way most companies have effectively competed with piracy: make it more convenient to get something legally. I've gone the whole "set up automated scripts to scan piraate sites and wait for specific videos of a certain quality to show up, download them via torrent, tag them with proper metadata, convert them and put them in my iTunes library" route. It was clever and cheap and just super, super fragile and finicky. Pirate sites go up and down, metadata is wrong, something somewhere in the chain breaks mysteriously. You know what was more convenient? Clicking "Season Pass" in iTunes. Boom. Done. Convenience is also the proposition of streaming video and music, in a very real sense: it's all technically DRM-encumbered, but your Spotify music is available on every device that supports Spotify with almost no effort on your part beyond logging the device in. If you have a strong enough philosophical objection to DRM that you find Spotify, Netflix, et. al, unpalatable, that's great, but while it's pretty easy to move DRM-free music files around it's not as easy as just streaming -- and DRM-free video files are still kind of a pain in the butt compared to streaming, or even any centralized library system like Amazon or iTunes. The same is basically true for books: I appreciate Calibre, but "It's so easy to manage your ebooks and reading devices through Calibre compared to using the native Amazon Kindle or Apple Books apps" is not a sentence most people are ever going to utter with a straight face.
I don't really need to read Finnish literature (although it would be nice to be more well versed in my own culture) but I can't recommend ebook readers to my family and friends because there's no way for them to enjoy any content on them. Which is a shame as they're dope.
DRM is still a step backwards. I like law-enforced laws ( :) ) because if they overstep I can ignore them. DRM/tech enforced laws often overstep, and it's harder to ignore them, and it's ultimately my business what I do with the stuff I bought. I can share paper books, and I can damn share digital books I bought if I so want. When did we let this nonsense of DRM happen?
That is actually a feature built into some ebook formats & proprietary software packages. Adobe's bloatware supports this feature, and it is actively utilized in academia, libraries, and archive.org.
Basically how it works is the software sets a limit on how many people can use the file at once. When more people want to use the file than that limit, they go onto a waiting list. In the case of libraries & archive.org, your access times out after a predefined amount of time (say 2 weeks), after which the app no longer allows you to use the file and you must get back in line to use it again. However, if you finish with it earlier, you can "return it" by volunteering to loose access sooner.
With individually "owned" copies it works basically the same way, only with only "one copy" in circulation between you and your friend who is borrowing it (while they're using it, you can't access it yourself), and access for the owner does not time-out.
They clearly say this is the first time they have paid. So they like the products they have from those companies because they are easy to not-pay-for.
Some people will pirate no matter what, but I think piracy is mostly a matter of convenience. And it's pretty convenient to just buy GOG games...
If there were a big, well-known DRM-free ebook store I'd be all over it. I use GOG, Bandcamp and other similar businesses whenever possible
Yes, he actually released his eBooks for free onto the piracy sites - with a twist: he included the entire first portion (quarter or third, cannot remember) of the book, gave info on where to buy the full copies (with zero recriminations - just the facts!), and then repeated those same early chapters to plump out a fully-sized eBook. He then flooded all the file sharing networks with this copy so as to make it difficult to find legitimately complete copies.
The entire first quarter or third was used to get readers heavily enough invested into his novel to _want_ to run out and buy the official copy -- he _justified_ the effort and expenditure to his readers, and they responded (mostly) positively by actually doing so!
Granted, there was a lot more to it than that, but this was the basics, and it pushed a lot of people towards not just his eBooks but also his physical sales. And there are probably many other strategies out there as well that utilizes the “piracy” platforms to your benefit instead of leaving you tilting impotently at windmills.
If you have an anecdote that goes against the narrative the fault is apparently still yours. The grand parent commenter made it as easily as possible to buy their book, which is what you’re “supposed” to do, yet that didn’t fix the problem. And somehow the recommended solution to poison the piracy well with basically content marketing for your book is somehow less “antagonistic” than what the gp commenter did.
This seems more like FUD for nagware than a proven system for not dealing with piracy.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/01/paulo-coelho-r...
https://www.facebook.com/notes/maggie-stiefvater-really-its-...
Non-FB: https://www.thepassivevoice.com/a-story-about-piracy/
Author Maggie Stiefvater regarding her work The Raven King.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/16/lloyd-shepherd...
There is a reason real authors and musicians have agents (who are actually reachable unlike the YouTube service ...).
The actual profession is a full time job.
But the actual professional isn't 100% writing, just as being an independent software developer isn't 100% coding. Half of your time (or more!) may be spent on other aspects of the profession.
But there are still those of us who still (maybe naively at this point in history) believe that if you do things honestly, in good faith, and play by the rules, you should be able to make money too.
This isn't a knock toward cynicism or dishonesty. Rather a knock toward the fact that sales, and self-promotion are necessary if you want to make money (why are people going to buy your stuff if they don't know about it and its benefits to them aren't communicated clearly). Also realize that some people are bad actors (pirates) and you need to emotionally and financially protect yourself.
It isnt unreasonable or wishful thinking to expect to never be robbed. I shouldn't have to lock the door to my apartment, I could probably get away with not locking the door to my apartment, but I lock it anyways.
That discussion needs to happen, and bad actors who won't recognize that they're bad actors are a huge problem.
But when an honest author games a system that tries to take advantage of them and manages to make that work, that's something I applaud.
A focus on 'greed' or 'honesty' is missing the mark on what I'm saying here. We currently have an economy built on a foundation of historical expropriation, enclosure, colonialism, subsidy, regulatory capture, rent-seeking, etc, and heavily biased towards the resultant monopolies/oligopolies. As a consequence, prices are set at this inflated level of profit, and those who perform labor outside of the interests of these corporations typically aren't able to afford the costs of living (especially without breaking the law). "Greed" isn't really the issue here; the issue is systemic privilege born through violence.
>History has shown me that it doesn't matter what economic and political system is instituted
It's pretty intuitive that a political system is generally going to be favorable towards those who instituted it, outside of happenstance benevolence from a political elite.
As someone who has pirated things in the past and ended up being pissed that it didn’t finish/wasn’t complete/etc. I don’t think that would send me screaming to spend money on it.
Quite the opposite, what this is proving is that providing an intro to your work to prove to the customer that they actually like it (like Amazon’s “try a sample”) is hugely valuable.
So what? You weren't going to buy it anyway, eh? What are you going to do, pirate harder?
It's entirely fair. You've got no business being pissed about something you got for free on a piracy site. Especially not when it actively points you where you can get the legitimate version.
I don't understand how your last line proves the opposite: if it's hugely valuable, that shows that this is a good idea, doesn't it?
I found the answer and posted in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23312970
The first part, or first book in the series, is published for free, then a reasonable (key being reasonable) price to buy the rest of the series or book
I like this model, especially for fiction works
The patreons just get that free content a bit in advance. And in pdf form.
It took him around a year to reach that number.
He writes utter shit, sub-mediocre literature.
Check other top writers on royalroad, they also make lots of money.
The reason books don't sell isn't because of piracy, is because there's TON of free content (not only books) or almost free content (netflix, let's say).
I'm someone who has read that story, at least the public parts of it, and I object slightly to your quality assessment... ;) I don't argue it's great literature or anything, more like the literary equivalent of popcorn - a fun and interesting story with not a lot of depth. So, entertainment, not life-changing prose...
And while I'm surprised he gets $13k a month, I'm not _very_ surprised. I'm one of his $1/month patrons, and I also give $1-$3 a month to a lot of other writers, YouTubers, and other creators. For another internet serial writer, see https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow
One of my criteria for supporting such creators is for them to make their creations public, even if some do it after a time delay. My rationale is that, this way, I both support the creators, and the creation of "culture", for a certain definition of that word, that other people would be able to enjoy for free. And while this might never replace traditional publishing and isn't suitable for everything, you've demonstrated that some people can certainly make a living this way.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/26294/he-who-fights-with-m...
It has a "Statistics" drop down. Expanding that out shows:
Total Views : 7,598,887 Average Views : 32,063
Guessing the average views is per chapter, which they seem to have 237 of at the moment.
Looks like they're fairly popular in their area, and have turned that into a good revenue stream.
---
Their "Scribble Hub" site is showing 760k views for the content there too:
https://www.scribblehub.com/series/41306/he-who-fights-with-...
A similar thing that surprised me is 'reaction channels' on youtube. It's often very small youtube channels with say, 10k subscribers, but they have a few hundred paying patreon followers and pull in 3-5k per month just doing tv show reactions.
Not implying anyone is doing that, just that it looks possible.
P.S.: BTW, all this money is "donations", aren't they? So under a lot of legislations you wouldn't even have to pay taxes on that.
lol. try that in the USA. I dare you.
also: one could just as easily create a 'x rights activism' group as a tax-free non-profit so why single out religion specifically?
I'm not sure how applicable it is for books, because generally prices are more uniform for books than they are for software, but in the case of software I wonder if the ones who lose sales to piracy are the makers of more affordable software?
Imagine a world where piracy was effectively impossible for most people, and you want to do some occasional image editing. You look at Photoshop and it is way out of your budget. But you don't actually need most features of Photoshop. You find that Pixelmator Pro can do everything you want, and at $40 you can afford it and it is a good value. So you buy Pixelmator Pro.
In a world where piracy only takes a little time and effort you pirate Photoshop.
In both scenarios Adobe doesn't get any of your money so we can't say that pirating Photoshop in the second scenario cost Adobe a sale. But it did cost Pixelmator Team a sale.
In general, I suspect that the main effect of piracy is to change our allocation of spending within certain categories or groups of categories, without changing the total we spend in those categories.
But at $0 vs $0, Paint Shop Pro was a lot less appealing that it would have been at $99 vs $399 or whatever Photoshop used to cost.
a) People who can't afford to buy it, and use a pirated copy, might become a professional in the future, and
b) If you can't afford to buy Photoshop, they'd much rather you pirate it than pay a competitor!
Charles Piller, "How Piracy Opens Doors for Windows", *Los Angeles Times8, April 9, 2006
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...
If you do the right thing, you're out say $30 for a book. If you do the wrong thing, you get the book and still have your $30. Some people don't care about others, and that mindset continues. (its kinda a Tragedy of the commons where the "common" is the market place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons).
DRM makes it worse, not only did you do the right thing and buy the book, now its not as useful as the copy someone "didn't pay for". So pushing people toward the free and better.
I used to generally believe this as well, but then services like Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, etc. came along and put an end to the golden age of music piracy. Maybe these people wouldn't have bought the book at a full retail price, but there is very likely a price they would have paid to get the book in a convenient manner. Even the article basically admits as much. The author's complaint isn't the price, it is the convenience.
Which are all subscription-based and not unit-based. There is no cost to explore and listen to random songs when you've already paid your subscription anyway. Switch to unit-based and suddenly way less exploration. So it's unit-less pricing + convenience.
I do remember reading a twitter thread of creator who sold books and earned a six figure income when a youtube creator chimed in and reported earning less than $300 for more than million views. Not an apples to apples comparison but you quickly see how youtube/spotify would actually create market pressures which discourage people from creating works of cultural and social significance.
In such a world, books like GEB and Piketty’s Capital would never see the light of the day.
Also, what's noticeable with cultural works or "products" is the purchasing behavior is very much a crowd-effect. Very few people are inquisitive about such products; they will likely commit to a buy through word-of-mouth, and even then it may be after the 2nd or 3rd different person recommended a film or book. So the "psychology" of such purchases also favors the mass consumer who is looking for some temporary amusement, rather than a soul pathfinder looking for their chords to be plucked.
It might in some situations. With music for example, some bands have successfully encouraged people to buy their releases by including "rare" tracks that, if they were released previously, were done so on obscure titles that even collectors have a hard time finding. If everything an artist creates is easy to find online through piracy, there's no trove of "rare" material unless it's stuff that's never been released (like practice sessions or stuff that didn't make the cut for previous releases, much of this stuff is simply subpar and doesn't encourage purchases much).
Its hard though to carry that idea over to books though. What would be the extra material, unabridged versions? Not many books have abridged/unabridged versions to choose from.
I guess the closest parallel would be books people buy because they have to, not because they want to. By that I mean things like textbooks where, if they were available easily on pirated sites, everyone would just download. I kind of think publishers know this, and that's why so many now carry a one-time use only keycode to unlock online content. If you have to retake the class you can't access the online content again without repurchasing, even if the book itself has not changed.
If I'm being honest, if there were no piracy options I would be buying alot more books. Probably not as many as I pirate but still probably 500 dollars a year or so worth.
The catch is that it is true that if a book is unable to pirate I will probably not buy it. This is probably true for a lot of people. The reason is that there are other books available to pirate. That is the key distinction. If there were no piracy options I would be forced to buy some, but because there are piracy options I buy almost none and therefore you could say I wouldn't buy them anyway if they arent available to pirate.
The problem is that every retailer I can find that sells it sells a DRM'd version. Adobe Digital Editions isn't available for my operating system. There's no way for me to purchase a digital copy of your book that I can actually read.
If you sold a DRM-free epub on your website, I'd be reading Lament right now. I wouldn't have batted an eye at paying you $10 for a book Amazon sells for $5.
If I want to read your book on my Kindle, the only option is piracy. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pirate your book. I'll just end up purchasing an ebook from an author that has a DRM-free epub on their site.
Your books sound interesting and I hope you find commercial success as a writer. I just can't contribute to that success until your work's available in a format I can read.
It's not the only option, a Kindle can read Kindle books from Amazon that you've admitted sell for $5.
As far as I know, you can't use the ACSM files Amazon on it. I can't convert them to anything because Adobe hasn't released a version of Digital Editions for my operating system.
Technically, I could set up a Windows vm. But requiring a customer to use a particular OS to read a friggin' book is lunacy.
P.S. I am very aware that your operating system doesn't support Adobe Digital Editions; I just don't understand why your operating system needs to get involved at all.
This is what I run on my Kobo - it's quite nice! It has an RSS reader, Wallabag integration, cloud storage integration, a Lua plugin API... but it can't open DRM'd ebooks.
This is what's frustrating about DRM for me: it restricts the software you can use to only software from huge corporations. Want to make a small tweak to your reader? Nope, you're not allowed.
I only buy ebooks when I can find a DRM-free source for them, which pretty much means Tor/Baen/Humble/etc. I could buy DRM'd books and strip the DRM, but I'd rather not support the practice; I'm more likely to buy a physical book in that case.
I switched to it from Koreader.
It's in the kindle store... what am I missing?
> Thanks OP.
Is that the most appropriate thing you can say to someone who bought a book and (somewhat expectedly) got screwed by DRM? Maybe there's a reason they won't support writers. Maybe they'll eventually write a blog post about that!
Seems appropriate.
There is also no need to put 'lend' in quotes; it is perfectly legal to lend someone a book.
How else would one build up a library of e-books without purchasing them?
books.google.com and archive.org have a lot of content. Depending on his interests, its possible if not probable that he has not pirated anything because most of his collection is too old to be under copyright.
Maybe his ebook collection consists primarily of product user manuals (pdfs straight from manufacturer websites), or pre1926 trade manuals (hey, I know a guy who collects antique light fixtures...), or he dabs in genealogy and has a few GB of pre1926 genealogies (not all surnames have had their genealogies re-done in print since then).
Its a stretch, sure. But its possible.
>There is also no need to put 'lend' in quotes; it is perfectly legal to lend someone a book.
Yes, and making copies doesn't fall under any normal definition of lending.
DRM is not the solution because the solution doesn't exist. The problem of the impoverished writer predates digital publishing, it's hard to make a decent living by writing anything interesting other than through indirect benefits. Sorry but writing something interesting is a luxury, writing something slutty is the only direct business prospect in writing.
Consider this: did Charles Darwin make a living through the royalties of "the origin of species"? No, he was bankrolled, the book was simply the fruits of his investment.
I clicked on the title for it, saw that you had some chapters laid out in HTML and figured, "Oh, I guess an HTML book is DRM-free". I clicked through and eventually had to login with Facebook to continue. That rankled, as I hate Facebook, so I checked out the rest of the site, thinking I missed the store page. I did not. I cannot pay you for a DRM-free version of your book on that site. This makes me feel like you're generating drama or something with your comment? I couldn't figure out an easy way to pay you real money for an ePub file.
I'm not going to go pirate your book, but the same result ended up happening: I'm not going to buy it either.
Remember, piracy is a customer service issue. So perhaps buying your book isn't as easy as you thought, or your marketing is faulty, and you're not reaching the intended audience as well as you hoped.
FWIW, I was quite surprised by your comment that "Folks like the OP won't support writers". The OP writes about _only_ being able to purchase a book in a way that involves submitting to very restrictive, platform-dependent DRM and not wanting to do it again. OP specifically contrasts this experience to buying from publishers who sell DRM-free ebooks as a counterpoint to the awful experience buying her/his book.
Publishers announce the books they'll be releasing a year in advance,and - seriously, this is a rabbit hole I knew nothing about when I started - people were offering bounties to pirate my book before it was available. I have a Google alert for my books so I can read reviews, so all this chatter was turning up. These are people who had no intention of paying for the work, no matter what, but also seemed to be going out of their way to make sure no-one would have to pay.
You can talk about DRM and clunky websites, but that comes across as post-hoc justification. The pirates seem simply to hate the idea that creators might earn anything, no matter how little.
Or maybe he just likes them because they're easier to pirate from? In a prior paragraph he admits that it was the first time he bought an ebook.
Presumably because nobody has taken the time to strip the DRM and post it to their "library" yet.
For what it's worth, Tim O'Reilly notes, in "Piracy is progressive taxation"[0], that:
>> Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
[0]: https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...
The real number that would help you is finding out how many unique user downloads there were of your book and asking yourself if your marketing was strong enough to get that number of sales naturally? Or worse, is it that no one is downloading your book even with it being free?
I am biased since I write free content and believe in getting sponsored by supporters, but being the distributor of my free content and able to view download statistics, I can see that marketing is my biggest problem and no one wants to consume even my free content
OP bought the book?
And then pointed to a piracy site and said he'd never pay for a book again.
On the other hand, you can get Thinking, Fast and Slow for free: https://b-ok.cc/book/1214612/224dc8?dsource=mostpopular
Or Hackers and Painters, ANSI Common LISP, and On LISP.
It is surprising that as a writer you engage in this misleading usage of the English language. People copying files without your consent may be financially inconvenient for you, in bad taste, even illegal in some jurisdictions, and definitely an ass move. But it is not stealing. You can firmly condemn this behavior without using metaphors.
Nevertheless historical usage includes, "stealing someone's idea", etc. which is as least an applicable sense.
Illegal copying is not stealing. Sad to see this narrative won in the end, I thought we were past this. I though we -- the users -- had won.
If it was only that, it may be somewhat justified. But in this case the "thief" is not making any profit from the stuff he has "stolen", he has just given away a copy to another person. The correct verb in this case is "sharing".
I refuse to partake in the orwellian newspeak of using the verb "stealing" for the act of sharing. This is a hill I'm happy to die on.
Meanings change over time.
One can argue all they want about whether IP laws should exist, but as it stands right now (in re. to language and the law) it’s stealing.
Both novels were stolen and uploaded to ZLib within the first week of release: https://b-ok.cc/s/gavin%20chait
Here's how I - as author - experienced it:
- Within the first week someone buys the book via Amazon using a stolen credit card;
- Book is uploaded to ZLib;
- I complained to Amazon, raising both the issue of the stolen work and the stolen credit card;
- No response from Amazon, although they were quick to reverse the charge (I'm assuming as soon as the card is reported stolen);
- I complained to ZLib using their DMCA reporting tool;
- ZLib care about as much as Amazon, and my novels are still up.
I made it as easy as possible to read my work on my website and pay me direct. I released it as a DRM-free epub for use on any device or platform. You can even buy anonymously. Still doesn't matter. Folks like the OP won't support writers.
And, while this won't stop me writing, it makes it impossible to afford to write as often as I'd like. Two years after my second, I'm still trying to save up enough to afford to write my third.
Thanks OP.