We here in Iran have an extra problem. I'll explain:
Apple's App store, does not work in Iran, you cannot download anything from the app store (you get the famous 1009 error). But many people like myself have iPhones and iPads. Is it okay to pirate iOS apps?
Mathwork's website will not load if you try to access it from an IP address form Iran. Neither they sell their widely used software (Matlab) in academics to Iranians. I wonder am I guilty to pirate Matlab?
Also many other services including Paypal, Google's Android Market and Amazon are the same.
I wonder what if I want to read the famous `Art of Computer Programming`? Am I guilty if I pirate it?
We have similar problems in Belarus. I can not talk for Iranians, since it might be different there. But in Belarus, country close to the center of Europe continent, located on intersection of major roads between east and west, we are in a quite similar position. No PayPal, no Apple, even Microsoft is represented only via Ukrainian office (i.e. office located in another country!)
And this happens there because people do nothing about it. We have corruption there, presidential clan, which holds most of valuable businesses out there (oil refining, minerals extraction, weapons trade). I've been there, I had an great idea, that together we can change situation, get new government, build businesses. But after 2 years I realized - simply nobody care.
Let put it this way - If I live in bum's family, should I blame fancy restaurant management for not giving me access to it? Probably, no. Same case with Belarus - it is not an excuse for pirating software. Instead, Belorussians should fix their country first.
And in the mean time, if you really need to make work done, there is bunch of open source software. Use it. It might sucks comparing to propriate ones, but you can use it to make work done. There is no excuse for stealing.
If you otherwise support the concept of intellectual property, you are. If you believe that Matlab is MathWorks "property", MathWorks is not obliged to sell you their property, and if you take what you believe is their property against their will, you are guilty. If you dont believe in intellectual property, then everything is allright.
The article points out the valid complaint from people who do not have access to legitimate ways of obtaining books/information, and makes a point of saying he does not endorse the way library.nu operated.
I'd disagree. We're presented with a technology which is slowly replacing the institutions we take for granted and made a great improvement on society. I'm thinking about both libraries and radio.
As Neil Young said, piracy is the new radio. Except that it is better and easier to access. And library.nu functioned as my library, except that it is better and easier to access.
If the music I was interested overlapped with the mainstream, then radio would probably be good, and if the library had the technical books I like, then that would too. Alas, they don't, and both internet and library.nu are (latter: were) my substitutions. I've downloaded all the books I've purchased after graduating a year ago (which is around 5). Even after owning a book, I've downloaded the same at work and shown it to a colleague, who also ended up purchasing it. When I look for a book on a topic of interest, I search amazon, read a few reviews, then download it on library.nu. The decision to buy it is done after going through the book and see if I like how the author writes, how the example code is, and especially how it covers my specific topic, before buying it. Usually, if it is a broad topic, I do this for about 3-5 books, and decide on which one to buy.
I'm going to go further than the author, and endorse library.nu for all its worth. Both as a library and for those who cannot afford, or don't have access. As for the freeloaders, or more precisely the actual losses: I believe they are small enough that it outweighs the cost. And honestly, if they didn't, the marked would adapt.
The decision to buy it is done after going through the book and see if I like how the author writes, how the example code is, and especially how it covers my specific topic, before buying it
You're basically saying you'd walk in to a restaurant, have a bite of every dish and then maybe decide to pay for it.
I do this for about 3-5 books, and decide on which one to buy.
Now you walk into three restaurants, eat a bit at every one of them and then decide to pay for the one you liked the most.
I agree with the original article and I think there are times where piracy is valid, but let's not think that a valid solution is to pay for what we think we should pay and nothing else.
Can we just agree that it's wrong to do market segmentation for electronic goods based on geographic location? It's an anachronistic model that has no justification other than for padding BigCo's(tm) profit margins.
If the big media companies actually cared about piracy they would abandon this system and see piracy drop significantly overnight. Then again I think we all know that's just an excuse to try and hang on to the overinflated profits they're accustomed to for just a little bit longer.
While I too think that market segmentation as it exists for digital goods is stupid, I don't think it is done just for the money.
Different countries have different laws, different taxes, and your home country has different treaties and export control regulations that all need to be accounted for when selling to other countries. In some cases there could be markets/services that abstract some of this away, but it is not a trivial problem.
If it was trivial to do, then the only segmentation you would see would only be differentiating on price (getting the most that someone in that region would pay for it), instead of not selling it in those countries at all.
Now, the RIAA/MPAA has deep enough pockets and plenty of lawyers that they could have figured all this out for themselves already, and could have built a great online distribution system for themselves. So for them, segmentation is purely a play for money, though (hopefully) it will hurt their profits in the long run.
With a 8x difference in wages [1] the price of the book in India should surely be $4 if it is $32 in the U.S. Are suggesting it should be $4 everywhere? which means it's still cheaper in the U.S. compared to salaries.
> it's wrong to do market segmentation for electronic
> goods based on [..] location
I think it's OK to do it, so long as you do it in a way that doesn't leverage the government to be your enforcer.
I worked on an education publishing system. They were concerned about customer organisations photocopying the books. They implemented an online learning system, where each book came with one license being a serial number printed inside the cover. Now the students could tell when they were being short-changed.
IP laws exist to promote publication, not reduce it. If IP owners aren't publishing in a country, why should that country protect their IP?
Oh, wait, there's an international treaties, and pro-copyright UN organization administering it. That UN can't ban the execution of children, but can enforce 70 years plus life of the author says a lot about the power of vested interests.
Agree with your sentiment but not the underling logic.
If IP owners aren't publishing in a country, why should that country protect their IP
Property rights don't vaporise automatically due to lack of use, e.g. in India squatters could, at one time, claim ownership to property after illegally sitting there for a certain period. This seems wrong to me. On the other end if Merck or Pfizer were to get pissed off at say Libya and deny its people certain drugs I would support suspending their property rights.
I agree that this situation is ridiculous and that the black market is often a solid incentive for legislators to re-consider ridiculous regulation. But the suspension of property rights is something that should be thought out meticulously before implementation; in this case it fits into the greater debate on the nature of IP as a "true" property.
Pro-copyright UN organization administering it
I don't think the UN was actively involved in any of these decisions nor overtly in their enforcement any more than it is in other issues - the author was simply quoting UN statutes to underline how this is an evolving debate.
I agree with your logic & deduction. I wonder if this is a problem with the first global copyright treaty? The Bern Convention of 1886. Maybe it's time to roll back that? You only get copyright in a region if you're commerically exploiting the copyrighted work in that region (plus a sensible, few year buffer period)
I would gladly pay $100 for K&R's C Programming Language, but sadly I can't do that (It's against US export laws to sell to me). Yesterday I spent almost an hour trying to find an offset copy of Dragon Book (Compilers), but I couldn't find it (there are none), so I have to bury myself in ebooks on my iPad (which is not a great experience).
I totally agree with the comment on the OP's blog:
"books have basically been my singular source of investment, more because of the site than in spite of it."
I can't seem to remember how many books I've purchased after downloading them from library.nu. Being in India, library.nu was a gem when a substantial number of books aren't available at Rupee prices.
I also bought the books which I would never had I not had library.nu. Don't tell me about the preview in Amazon, for these particular books I had to see more other pages than "legally" available to make a decision.
I buy a lot of books in english. Currently I live in South America. Last book I bought from Amazon-US (Thinking Fast and Slow) took 2 months to arrive.
I love ebooks but those cost almost the same as hardcopy and you lose the right to lend or sell. Also, the quality of the content is usually very inferior. Recently I did ebook management software so I know the ins and outs.
The temptation to use unpaid electronic copies is bigger than ever. Specially after noting the higher management on publishing businesses is usually in the 55+ age range and repeat how they only want to keep the status quo until they retire.
I was a big fan of library.nu. As a student in Mexico, you just cannot get some of the books that were available in there, so it was incredibly useful. I no longer used the site so much, but I'm still grateful that this site was live when I went to university. It kind of marvels me how artificial are the limits that humans put on knowledge that can be useful to others, I hope we can solve this problem someday.
Not completely true. It is trivial to buy dead-tree books from Amazon.com (US) and send them to Mexico (books do not pay taxes when entering Mexico). I have done it for more than 10 years.
The real problem is the cost. Imagine that, if people in the USA, earning it US dollars think that a text-book (http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Management-14th-Philip-Kotle...) costing USDd$168.72 is crazy. Imagine what people in Mexico (where the average yearly income is about USD$7,300) , India, China or other development countries think.
Quite simply, a lot of the people who pirate books are not a market for the publishers simply because it is impossible to pay.
Are they entitled to get such knowledge for free? legally, they are not. Morally... it is subjective.
Whenever anyone talks about copyright and piracy they seem to include a sop "Obviously I'm not against piracy and don't support breaking the law". Why do they always do that.
I'm in favour of piracy when it's for the greater good.
Perhaps because if they don't, the discussion tends to gravitate towards "you are breaking the law if you are pirating", instead of focusing on the main point they are trying to make.
Let's leave aside the fact library.nu was illegal under current laws, but for many books it was the only reasonable option to obtain it.
library.nu offered extreme convenience for those outside of US especially in the education sector.
When I lived in US, it was quite inexpensive to order physical books. I used to order older editions of university books for a few bucks each and shipping was very inexpensive (think Amazon Prime now).
Now in Europe it is quite hard to bargain shop for books. Perhaps anyone have any tips?
Shopping on Amazon is physically painful, when you see how much you end up paying for extra costs.
Then there is the matter of buying experience for e-books.
Buying e-books on O'Reilly feels the best out of all current e-book sellers, you actually feel like an owner of the e-book(even though of course you really are not).
Still the ideal would be that e-books would be inexpensive to purchase and that buying a physical book would qualify one for e-book version.
> Shopping on Amazon is physically painful, when you
> see how much you end up paying for extra costs.
That's not my experience. I recently bought a stack of ancient machine code and assembly books and paid 2p for some, with two pounds of shipping on top of that. The books are practically free to me.
> Buying e-books on O'Reilly feels the best out of all
> current e-book sellers
Nostarch are pretty good. You can go in and download your books when you like from them. If a book you already own subsequently gets a new electronic format release, they open up access to that to you automatically.
Whenever I read anything about piracy I often think of Gabe Newell's ubiquitous speech which underlines one single thing: Piracy is a service problem. And books are not an exception.
It seems to me that, especially with India, there's a big question which nobody is asking. When foreign companies can't or won't supply the market at a suitable price, where is the local replacement? Why isn't this being fixed by local competition? India outpopulates the US four to one - is it credible that Indian engineers and publishers are somehow incapable of producing output that is to the same, or better, standard as that from the US at a price more commensurate with the local market?
Back in the 80s we had Pergamon Press, started by Robert Maxwell of subsequent ill-fame. He located experts in eastern European countries, paid them to write university level texts on science and aspects of technology, paid an English speaking academic to check the translation of the texts and published the editions quite cheap. I think it helped that Maxwell actually bought a printing company.
I worked through a lot of Landau and Lifshitz's volumes on theoretical physics that way, including the imfamous footnote on shockwaves in rock (think nuclear tests).
Another note: An LPE of a book that is available for INR ~500 would cost anywhere from INR ~4000 to ~6000 if the original publication is ordered. Generally the original is not stocked so there is a wait period of ~5 weeks from placing the order.
Back in the 80s we had Pergamon Press, started by Robert Maxwell of subsequent ill-fame. He located experts in eastern European countries, paid them to write university level texts on science and aspects of technology, paid an English speaking academic to check the translation of the texts and published the editions quite cheap. I think it helped that Maxwell actually bought a printing company.
I worked through a lot of Landau and Lifshitz's volumes on theoretical physics that way, including the imfamous footnote on shockwaves in rock (think nuclear tests).
Seems like there's an opportunity for some kind of middle ground.
Books are emotive. Why not embrace the community's desire to make titles available in different markets, but manage it in such a way that the publisher is involved in the process and has ultimate approval over a digitized version? Active community members get books for free based on the degree of their participation. Everyone else gets to buy designated "community editions" of titles with a proper cut going back to the copyright owner. The community platform takes enough money to keep itself ticking over, including a cut for partner services that make it possible to sell in hard-to-reach global markets.
Sounds crazy, perhaps, but only because publishers still want a one-way relationship. A deep participative relationship with their global community of readers would only be a good thing. And it's less crazy for the publishers / authors than not making any money from these markets at all.
I really think (and hope) open source textbooks are going to solve this. While it might be difficult for OS books to catch on in places where there are market pressures from textbook publishers, in the countries this post mentions where the information just isn't available, there's going to be very little pushback/meddling. I'm really excited to see what this open source initiatives can do outside the US.
You might be right about publishers taking a smaller cut and thinking it's better than nothing- but my guess is that the publishers would rather get no cut (while shutting down anyone who monetizes by pirating their content) than let the information be available in places that can't afford it at their inflated prices (and for other reasons, I'm sure - not trying to oversimplify the complexities of this market). Publishers are already mad enough that they don't get their cut everytime Amazon sells a used version of their textbooks. But this is part of what Apple will solve in their textbook initiatives.
manage it in such a way that the publisher is involved in the process and has ultimate approval over a digitized version?
Is that not what we have now? Publishers have final say about whether or not to enter a market? If not, how am I wrong? If I'm right then this system (which is the current one) is broken.
The solution is to not have markets. Have a market. One global market.
Same pain, there is always times that I wanted to buy an old book from amazon, but told me it is only available in US. Then I always turn to library.nu for help. Sad it is gone.
The only complaint I have about copyright protection is they should try to make their work accessible. Otherwise, there will be another library.nu given time.
[+] [-] ya3r|14 years ago|reply
Apple's App store, does not work in Iran, you cannot download anything from the app store (you get the famous 1009 error). But many people like myself have iPhones and iPads. Is it okay to pirate iOS apps?
Mathwork's website will not load if you try to access it from an IP address form Iran. Neither they sell their widely used software (Matlab) in academics to Iranians. I wonder am I guilty to pirate Matlab?
Also many other services including Paypal, Google's Android Market and Amazon are the same.
I wonder what if I want to read the famous `Art of Computer Programming`? Am I guilty if I pirate it?
[+] [-] pavelkaroukin|14 years ago|reply
And this happens there because people do nothing about it. We have corruption there, presidential clan, which holds most of valuable businesses out there (oil refining, minerals extraction, weapons trade). I've been there, I had an great idea, that together we can change situation, get new government, build businesses. But after 2 years I realized - simply nobody care.
Let put it this way - If I live in bum's family, should I blame fancy restaurant management for not giving me access to it? Probably, no. Same case with Belarus - it is not an excuse for pirating software. Instead, Belorussians should fix their country first.
And in the mean time, if you really need to make work done, there is bunch of open source software. Use it. It might sucks comparing to propriate ones, but you can use it to make work done. There is no excuse for stealing.
[+] [-] muuh-gnu|14 years ago|reply
If you otherwise support the concept of intellectual property, you are. If you believe that Matlab is MathWorks "property", MathWorks is not obliged to sell you their property, and if you take what you believe is their property against their will, you are guilty. If you dont believe in intellectual property, then everything is allright.
[+] [-] okamiueru|14 years ago|reply
I'd disagree. We're presented with a technology which is slowly replacing the institutions we take for granted and made a great improvement on society. I'm thinking about both libraries and radio.
As Neil Young said, piracy is the new radio. Except that it is better and easier to access. And library.nu functioned as my library, except that it is better and easier to access.
If the music I was interested overlapped with the mainstream, then radio would probably be good, and if the library had the technical books I like, then that would too. Alas, they don't, and both internet and library.nu are (latter: were) my substitutions. I've downloaded all the books I've purchased after graduating a year ago (which is around 5). Even after owning a book, I've downloaded the same at work and shown it to a colleague, who also ended up purchasing it. When I look for a book on a topic of interest, I search amazon, read a few reviews, then download it on library.nu. The decision to buy it is done after going through the book and see if I like how the author writes, how the example code is, and especially how it covers my specific topic, before buying it. Usually, if it is a broad topic, I do this for about 3-5 books, and decide on which one to buy.
I'm going to go further than the author, and endorse library.nu for all its worth. Both as a library and for those who cannot afford, or don't have access. As for the freeloaders, or more precisely the actual losses: I believe they are small enough that it outweighs the cost. And honestly, if they didn't, the marked would adapt.
[+] [-] fbuilesv|14 years ago|reply
You're basically saying you'd walk in to a restaurant, have a bite of every dish and then maybe decide to pay for it.
I do this for about 3-5 books, and decide on which one to buy.
Now you walk into three restaurants, eat a bit at every one of them and then decide to pay for the one you liked the most.
I agree with the original article and I think there are times where piracy is valid, but let's not think that a valid solution is to pay for what we think we should pay and nothing else.
[+] [-] slavak|14 years ago|reply
If the big media companies actually cared about piracy they would abandon this system and see piracy drop significantly overnight. Then again I think we all know that's just an excuse to try and hang on to the overinflated profits they're accustomed to for just a little bit longer.
[+] [-] colonelxc|14 years ago|reply
Different countries have different laws, different taxes, and your home country has different treaties and export control regulations that all need to be accounted for when selling to other countries. In some cases there could be markets/services that abstract some of this away, but it is not a trivial problem.
If it was trivial to do, then the only segmentation you would see would only be differentiating on price (getting the most that someone in that region would pay for it), instead of not selling it in those countries at all.
Now, the RIAA/MPAA has deep enough pockets and plenty of lawyers that they could have figured all this out for themselves already, and could have built a great online distribution system for themselves. So for them, segmentation is purely a play for money, though (hopefully) it will hurt their profits in the long run.
[+] [-] rythie|14 years ago|reply
[1] see top item on (Sr. Software Engineer...): http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Country=India/Salary and http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Country=United_States/Sa...
[+] [-] cturner|14 years ago|reply
I worked on an education publishing system. They were concerned about customer organisations photocopying the books. They implemented an online learning system, where each book came with one license being a serial number printed inside the cover. Now the students could tell when they were being short-changed.
[+] [-] wisty|14 years ago|reply
Oh, wait, there's an international treaties, and pro-copyright UN organization administering it. That UN can't ban the execution of children, but can enforce 70 years plus life of the author says a lot about the power of vested interests.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|14 years ago|reply
If IP owners aren't publishing in a country, why should that country protect their IP
Property rights don't vaporise automatically due to lack of use, e.g. in India squatters could, at one time, claim ownership to property after illegally sitting there for a certain period. This seems wrong to me. On the other end if Merck or Pfizer were to get pissed off at say Libya and deny its people certain drugs I would support suspending their property rights.
I agree that this situation is ridiculous and that the black market is often a solid incentive for legislators to re-consider ridiculous regulation. But the suspension of property rights is something that should be thought out meticulously before implementation; in this case it fits into the greater debate on the nature of IP as a "true" property.
Pro-copyright UN organization administering it
I don't think the UN was actively involved in any of these decisions nor overtly in their enforcement any more than it is in other issues - the author was simply quoting UN statutes to underline how this is an evolving debate.
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pooriaazimi|14 years ago|reply
I would gladly pay $100 for K&R's C Programming Language, but sadly I can't do that (It's against US export laws to sell to me). Yesterday I spent almost an hour trying to find an offset copy of Dragon Book (Compilers), but I couldn't find it (there are none), so I have to bury myself in ebooks on my iPad (which is not a great experience).
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
Really? How? why?
[+] [-] krat0sprakhar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acqq|14 years ago|reply
I really mourn the loss of library.nu
[+] [-] alecco|14 years ago|reply
I love ebooks but those cost almost the same as hardcopy and you lose the right to lend or sell. Also, the quality of the content is usually very inferior. Recently I did ebook management software so I know the ins and outs.
The temptation to use unpaid electronic copies is bigger than ever. Specially after noting the higher management on publishing businesses is usually in the 55+ age range and repeat how they only want to keep the status quo until they retire.
[+] [-] altxwally|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtracto|14 years ago|reply
The real problem is the cost. Imagine that, if people in the USA, earning it US dollars think that a text-book (http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Management-14th-Philip-Kotle...) costing USDd$168.72 is crazy. Imagine what people in Mexico (where the average yearly income is about USD$7,300) , India, China or other development countries think.
Quite simply, a lot of the people who pirate books are not a market for the publishers simply because it is impossible to pay.
Are they entitled to get such knowledge for free? legally, they are not. Morally... it is subjective.
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
I'm in favour of piracy when it's for the greater good.
[+] [-] prakashk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sireat|14 years ago|reply
Let's leave aside the fact library.nu was illegal under current laws, but for many books it was the only reasonable option to obtain it.
library.nu offered extreme convenience for those outside of US especially in the education sector.
When I lived in US, it was quite inexpensive to order physical books. I used to order older editions of university books for a few bucks each and shipping was very inexpensive (think Amazon Prime now).
Now in Europe it is quite hard to bargain shop for books. Perhaps anyone have any tips?
Shopping on Amazon is physically painful, when you see how much you end up paying for extra costs.
Then there is the matter of buying experience for e-books.
Buying e-books on O'Reilly feels the best out of all current e-book sellers, you actually feel like an owner of the e-book(even though of course you really are not).
Still the ideal would be that e-books would be inexpensive to purchase and that buying a physical book would qualify one for e-book version.
[+] [-] cturner|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f4stjack|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] regularfry|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithpeter|14 years ago|reply
Back in the 80s we had Pergamon Press, started by Robert Maxwell of subsequent ill-fame. He located experts in eastern European countries, paid them to write university level texts on science and aspects of technology, paid an English speaking academic to check the translation of the texts and published the editions quite cheap. I think it helped that Maxwell actually bought a printing company.
I worked through a lot of Landau and Lifshitz's volumes on theoretical physics that way, including the imfamous footnote on shockwaves in rock (think nuclear tests).
So where are all the Indian/Pakistani authors?
[+] [-] dhruvbird|14 years ago|reply
Another note: An LPE of a book that is available for INR ~500 would cost anywhere from INR ~4000 to ~6000 if the original publication is ordered. Generally the original is not stocked so there is a wait period of ~5 weeks from placing the order.
[+] [-] keithpeter|14 years ago|reply
Back in the 80s we had Pergamon Press, started by Robert Maxwell of subsequent ill-fame. He located experts in eastern European countries, paid them to write university level texts on science and aspects of technology, paid an English speaking academic to check the translation of the texts and published the editions quite cheap. I think it helped that Maxwell actually bought a printing company.
I worked through a lot of Landau and Lifshitz's volumes on theoretical physics that way, including the imfamous footnote on shockwaves in rock (think nuclear tests).
[+] [-] reitblatt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benwerd|14 years ago|reply
Books are emotive. Why not embrace the community's desire to make titles available in different markets, but manage it in such a way that the publisher is involved in the process and has ultimate approval over a digitized version? Active community members get books for free based on the degree of their participation. Everyone else gets to buy designated "community editions" of titles with a proper cut going back to the copyright owner. The community platform takes enough money to keep itself ticking over, including a cut for partner services that make it possible to sell in hard-to-reach global markets.
Sounds crazy, perhaps, but only because publishers still want a one-way relationship. A deep participative relationship with their global community of readers would only be a good thing. And it's less crazy for the publishers / authors than not making any money from these markets at all.
[+] [-] dmils4|14 years ago|reply
You might be right about publishers taking a smaller cut and thinking it's better than nothing- but my guess is that the publishers would rather get no cut (while shutting down anyone who monetizes by pirating their content) than let the information be available in places that can't afford it at their inflated prices (and for other reasons, I'm sure - not trying to oversimplify the complexities of this market). Publishers are already mad enough that they don't get their cut everytime Amazon sells a used version of their textbooks. But this is part of what Apple will solve in their textbook initiatives.
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
Is that not what we have now? Publishers have final say about whether or not to enter a market? If not, how am I wrong? If I'm right then this system (which is the current one) is broken.
The solution is to not have markets. Have a market. One global market.
[+] [-] DTrejo|14 years ago|reply
http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/hrgmv/tracker_with...
[+] [-] chj|14 years ago|reply
The only complaint I have about copyright protection is they should try to make their work accessible. Otherwise, there will be another library.nu given time.
[+] [-] urza|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joska|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] joska|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]