Comment by docker_up
7 years ago
I have a close friend who published an engineering text book. He worked a couple of years on it and it was well received in his particular field. The book was pirated within months and is freely available on PDF. It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free.
So yes, having books shut off sucks but so does piracy.
DRM is a ludicrous solution to preventing ebook piracy.
One of the first things I learned as a teenager online was that anything that can be read, seen or heard can also be copied.
It's only with interactive things like games and programs that pirates have a real challenge.
There is a big difference between copying physical objects and digital ones.
Books can be copied for sure, but the cost of copying a digital book is negligible compared to the cost of copying a real book. Zero cost of copying makes it possible to give it away for free (e.g. to drive traffic) and monetize otherwise (most digital piracy is business, not charity).
In the physical world, copied books are not given away for free typically because the cost of copying a book is relatively high.
Copyrighting digital items is a fundamental problem which has no good solution so far.
A physical book can readily be hand-scanned in an hour. There are numerous guides to processing the scans from that point. Two of the besst I've found:
https://natecraun.net/articles/linux-guide-to-book-scanning....
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Creating_a_DjVu_file
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Does it matter what the cost is if it's cheaper and the money doesn't go to the owner? Seems like reasoning in search of a real world difference rather than a real world difference in search of reasoning.
It being "unfair" seems to hinge on the assumption piracy = lost sale. Unless your friend simply laments people learn when they otherwise wouldn't have paid anyways in which case I'm not particularly sympathetic but at least understand the reasoning.
As an hypothetical.. If it were impossible to pirate Windows, would all of those users switch to BSD or some other free OSs? If even a single person goes out and buys Windows, then there is a definite argument that piracy resulted in the loss of at-least one sale.
As another hypothetical... if it were impossible to pirate Windows, would it be nearly as popular around the world? If even one person/business would have used something else that was free as a result of having never used Windows before then there is a definite argument piracy drives sales.
Of course the world is more complicated than ideological arguments about individual sales. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2017/09/21/europ...
I'd argue it's exceptionally rare that a digital good be so unique as to be a "buy legitimately or have nothing" item and any DRM designed to treat software like that does more harm to sales through difficulty to purchase or use than it saves.
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So what you're saying is the mechanism they put in place to prevent your friends book from being pirated failed within months?
Yet all those who purchased it legally could one day be left with having their purchase shut off? They might be lucky and get refunds but they still lose access to the book.
To me that seems like an utter failure for everyone.
There was no DRM put on the book, it was book-form only. Someone copied it, made a PDF of it, and distributed it for free. His royalties plummeted to almost nothing.
So.. I am confused what your point is? DRM wouldn't have helped this situation, which I think actually HELPS the case against DRM... it only hurts legitimate readers, pirates would have gotten it anyway.
Can you disclose which textbook it was? I'm curious. Was it a good textbook?
The textbook market is a predatory scheme to fleece money out of students who are usually pretty close to broke, by making the books more important even than healthy food.
Not releasing a new edition every few years would have the same effect as "piracy", once the used market is large enough to supply each new class.
Professors and professionals who write textbooks should treat them as a marketing and career advancement exercise. Write a good book, get noticed by tenure committees or potential consulting clients. Most people who write books like that already have relatively secure jobs, and the book, if it's not awful, improves their career trajectory even more. It builds their reputation or brand.
It's tough to side with them over broke college students slavishly scanning thousand-page textbooks while eating ramen.
What was the price of this. book? Numerous engineering texts run $100s, some north of $1,000. Pure rent-seeking.
Reasonable pricing has proved the best piracy.
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At this point we've seen this play out so many times that using DRM to "stop piracy" is like tossing the virgin into the volcano to stop the eruption.
Yes losing all of those pretty girls sucks but so do volcanoes destroying the village...
Does your friend get royalty for each copy of the book? Could your friend have negotiated an upfront fee from the publisher and no royalty? This way, only the publisher would be exposed to piracy risk, a risk it can manage much better than an author ever could.
DRM has a long history of failing to stop piracy.
Further, pirated works have a long history of not getting shut off or otherwise made inaccessible, unlike "legitimate" DRM'd copies. :-/
[EDIT] what I'm getting at is that DRM doesn't just fail to stop piracy, it also makes the pirated version much better than the original.
Works pretty well for Steam. I bet most people here don't even know that they can't play their Steam games if they don't connect it to the internet every 30(?) days. Yet people boast about their massive Steam libraries. :)
Because Steam is DRM done right (in terms of ease of use). With Steam, you just press a button, and the game is yours to play. Zero friction.
99% of the time DRM is used, it makes the product less convenient to use by people who bought it legally, as opposed to those who pirated it. An example that comes to mind, all those blu-rays with bajillion of warnings and ads before the movie starts vs. just watching the movie right off the bat without any ads or wasted time if pirated. Don't even get me started on Denuvo or any other video-game DRMs, those are creatures straight out of UX nightmares.
Steam gets around by having an amazing UX. Press button get game. It's easier than pirating, while most other drm solutions are generally more difficult than pirating.
Steam doesn't even have particularly good drm. The media isn't encrypted, only the executables, so you can generally just get a nocd crack and overwrite the encrypted binary in the install folder.
Note that some Steam games are DRM-free and do not require Steam for anything beyond first download. Sadly this isn't mentioned anywhere in the game page so unless you already know about if a game uses Steam's DRM or not, it is a gamble.
> It's unfair that his hard work is being used globally for free.
It's unfair? Sounds like a dream come true to me, I'd love for my work to have such incredible reach. Is your friend starving, or living on the street or something?
The lack of empathy in the responses is staggering to me. It's as if the idea that a content creator should be financially rewarded for his or her hard work is some sort of moral crime. Yes, DRM sucks, but what other way can content providers ensure that they get rewarded for the hard work and good content that they provide?
We can agree that content creators should get paid AND that DRM sucks. The key point is that DRM DOESN'T REDUCE PIRACY, IT JUST MAKES LIFE HARDER FOR LEGITIMATE READERS.
DRM isn't super hard to break, it is just annoying. But for piracy, only ONE person has to break it, and suddenly it is available, DRM free, for everyone. Legitimate readers continue to be forced to deal with DRM annoyance while pirates get a DRM free experience.
How does this help the situation of content creators not getting paid?
Maybe that's because these sob stories were already accounted for by the _original_ copyright length of 28 years? The vast majority of DRM is protecting some corporation's right to profit off of the work of content creators almost indefinitely.
Most DRM is there to protect it during the initial sales window when demand and awareness of the product are at their highest.
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It shouldn't be when you consider that the topic is textbooks. I agree, work hard, give good content that's better than the competition on the market, and I'll gladly pay for that value. However, textbooks are not a free market. They are a captive market, where the professor decides what textbook is ordained for the course.
Students usually have the choice of the brand new print edition $$$ that they can resell for $, the ebook edition ($$) that expires after the term and you cannot resell, or fighting for one of the two copies of the book on 2 hour loan from the main campus library. Some professors do not let you use an older copy, and for some classes, they make you do your homework on proprietary publisher websites that charge for temporary access codes. So even if you pirated your book you would still have to pay McGraw Hill their cut to get full points in the class.
Curious how well textbook prices correlate to the maximum federal loan you can apply for.
It is rather bizarre to see some people feel entitled to content which isn't distributed as per their own personal wishes. A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with.
Not saying I'm some Mother Teresa type.. but I'm against online ads, and I don't run an ad-blocker. I simply don't visit sites which feature blaring in-your-face ads. I filter Google results to exclude domains which I will never visit because of their ad policy.
> It is rather bizarre to see some people feel entitled to content which isn't distributed as per their own personal wishes. A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with.
Couple counter-points:
1) It's reasonable that I'm expected to compensate the creator for the content. It's not reasonable for the publisher to dictate how I get to consume that content, especially not by forcing me to use particular format, software or hardware. DRM is enforcing the latter, not the former.
2) Having personal wishes wrt. content distribution is part of the market game. There is huge demand for bullshit-free content distribution, which is evidenced by the success of Steam and Netflix (especially relative to Torrents!), who cut out most of the crap and left the "you're now renting the content, not buying it".
3) Most content is non-substitutable. You can't just "take your business elsewhere", because there's nowhere else to take the business to! If Disney decides that the newest Star Wars is DRMed, there's shit all I can do - it's going to be DRMed everywhere, I can only choose from providers that enforce that DRM, and I can't exactly go and watch some cat videos on PeerTube instead - I wanted Star Wars, not smelly cats. This applies to books, movies, TV shows, video games, and to a large extent, to music.
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You can't dismiss it all as entitlement. Imagine that you have a gym membership and someone is offering a service to life your weights for you for a fee. Do you have a right not not lift weights without paying this fee? Of course you do.
Some of these things that people want to charge fees for are things that you can participate in for free naturally, so long as nobody is gate-keeping you. So it's very hard to justify spending money on them... particularly if you consider them bad for you, (like, say, binging on Netflix.)
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> A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with.
A principled person would follow their own principles which may be different from yours.
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Perhaps if text books didn't cost $200 each, broke college kids would actually be able to afford them.
>$200 each
Sadly, you are dating yourself with that comment.
Especially when it comes to an engineering textbook. While my university's selected electrical engineering books were all sub-$500 (usually in the $300 range), most of the "core" civil engineering books were at or over $1,000. Just insane for anyone who was not on scholarship. (And this was 20 years ago!)
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Has the price changed recently?
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Piracy sucks for creators, but I also don't think it's fair that poor people should have less access to text books.
DRM isn't the answer. It's always been trivial to break DRM on e-books, and I wouldn't be surprised if DRM actually increases pirating. Why buy something that restricts your ability to use it and is inconvenient when you can pirate a version that doesn't do that?
This definitely sucks. Why do you think people are buying this book? Is it required for a course?
When there is a book I need, but don't want, I'll get by with a PDF. When its a book I want, I buy the real thing, because I enjoy having it. Just curious, what the intended use of the book is, and whether you think a similar attitude might have had any effect.
Who do you think pirates textbooks?
Chances are, your friend would have made dimes per book while the publisher pulled $180 a pop from broke indebted students trapped in a captive market. Textbooks have gotten so costly because students are just the publisher's delivery device for the huge amounts of federal loan money awarded every year.
I don't understand your comment. So was your friends book not DRM'd or how could people share it illegally?
There was no DRM put on the book, it was book-form only. Someone copied it, made a PDF of it, and distributed it for free. His royalties plummeted to almost nothing.
Paying for books is the old model.
I really believe that books should be mostly free and people should//would pay based on usefulness. I will gladly donate 200$ for a book that helped me. I would also never have bought that same book if it was 10$ to start with.
> I will gladly donate
Everyone says. Nobody does.
Most authors of anything other than best selling trash don't make anything worth caring about. Almost all the money goes to publishing, including ebooks. Does piracy still suck?
Perhaps he should publish his next book in dead-tree format.
It was in dead-tree format only.
So are you suggesting authors shouldn't sell hard-copy books, because they don't have DRM? I am REALLY confused as to what you are advocating.