Okay, I'll admit it. I'm really pissed off. I don't pay attention to
what goes on on the #ruby-talk IRC channel these days all that much,
but something happened this afternoon that thoroughly pissed me off.
[0515/16.53] hatezilla: seriously, pick it up. if you're iffy, get
on emule and search
for "ruby for rails" ... there's tons of pdfs floating around if you
know where to look
I consider David Black a friend of mine. I am *seriously* pissed off
that some pissant little freak would advocate this action at all. I
was similarly annoyed that people reacted as badly to Dave Thomas's
announcement that the Rails 2nd Edition would be the same price. These
people have done a *lot* for the Ruby community.
They deserve your financial support. Don't be a pissant thief. Even
temporarily. There are "sample chapters" for a reason.
What really boggles my mind about this is, yes a book is easier and maybe you can't afford it, but its not like there aren't docs. You even have the source code.
···
On May 15, 2006, at 5:06 PM, Austin Ziegler wrote:
Okay, I'll admit it. I'm really pissed off. I don't pay attention to
what goes on on the ruby-talk IRC channel these days all that much,
but something happened this afternoon that thoroughly pissed me off.
[0515/16.53] hatezilla: seriously, pick it up. if you're iffy, get
on emule and search
for "ruby for rails" ... there's tons of pdfs floating around if you
know where to look
I consider David Black a friend of mine. I am *seriously* pissed off
that some pissant little freak would advocate this action at all. I
was similarly annoyed that people reacted as badly to Dave Thomas's
announcement that the Rails 2nd Edition would be the same price. These
people have done a *lot* for the Ruby community.
They deserve your financial support. Don't be a pissant thief. Even
temporarily. There are "sample chapters" for a reason.
Philip Greenspun has an innovative solution to this problem: List of Weasels
He is a (among other things) a photographer and web guru. His solution was an online hall of shame where he would post who has stolen his pictures.
Perhaps something similar might be in order for this if real names or net handles can be identified? I don't have David Black's book, but I do have several other PragProg books & these have a "Prepared for ..." at the bottom -- any idea whether the shared copies have this removed?
There really isn't a technical solution to prevent this from happening, but public shaming might work...
Matt
···
On 15 May , 2006, at 5:06 PM, Austin Ziegler wrote:
Okay, I'll admit it. I'm really pissed off. I don't pay attention to
what goes on on the ruby-talk IRC channel these days all that much,
but something happened this afternoon that thoroughly pissed me off.
[0515/16.53] hatezilla: seriously, pick it up. if you're iffy, get
on emule and search
for "ruby for rails" ... there's tons of pdfs floating around if you
know where to look
I consider David Black a friend of mine. I am *seriously* pissed off
that some pissant little freak would advocate this action at all. I
was similarly annoyed that people reacted as badly to Dave Thomas's
announcement that the Rails 2nd Edition would be the same price. These
people have done a *lot* for the Ruby community.
They deserve your financial support. Don't be a pissant thief. Even
temporarily. There are "sample chapters" for a reason.
Okay, I'll admit it. I'm really pissed off. I don't pay attention to
what goes on on the ruby-talk IRC channel these days all that much,
but something happened this afternoon that thoroughly pissed me off.
[0515/16.53] hatezilla: seriously, pick it up. if you're iffy, get
on emule and search
for "ruby for rails" ... there's tons of pdfs floating around if you
know where to look
I consider David Black a friend of mine. I am *seriously* pissed off
that some pissant little freak would advocate this action at all. I
was similarly annoyed that people reacted as badly to Dave Thomas's
announcement that the Rails 2nd Edition would be the same price. These
people have done a *lot* for the Ruby community.
They deserve your financial support. Don't be a pissant thief. Even
temporarily. There are "sample chapters" for a reason.
-austin
Agreed, we should support the PragProg guys so they can continue to do the great stuff they have been doing. Stealing is wrong and we shouldn't encourage it here or on irc. As an undergraduate, or what you might call "a pissant" student, I read a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer that I BORROWED from a professor, and I seriously believe it changed the way I approach life. Their lifelong learning approach, basically focused on making smart, conscious decisions at every step, is something I took to heart. That same dirty, bent-up copy was passed around between many of my friends, and we all regard it as classic. Now I own the book myself, as well the ruby, rails & subversion books they wrote since. Oh, but maybe I should never have looked at that copy my OS professor lent me. It was evil and wrong to not pay the authors for their hard work, wasn't it? What if he had just sent me the PDF to read instead? Would that have produced a substantially different outcome?
Life is not that black and white, and downloading a PDF to peruse, or to read in its entirety, is barely different from checking out a book from the library or borrowing from a friend. I think taking a hard line attitude like this is not only useless, because we will never digress back to "the way it used to be," but it is also counter productive. The way you succeed as an author or publisher is not by punishing your future clientele, but by trying to win them over as passionate fans. If you can get people engrossed they will end up buying much more than one book, and in the long run that is how you make a living.
Bands that have taken this to heart are succeeding, and I think the PragProg guys will continue too, unless they get worked up like you are and start making rash decisions. The String Cheese Incident, for example, releases on their own label and directly to the fans. You can download great recordings soon after live shows, or you can show up and record a less stellar copy for yourself. That is how you get people excited, and earn their respect. My hope is that the PDF model they are using now continues to get even more "live." Rather than buy a book I think it would be cool to subscribe to one. I'd eat up a new chapter of the pickaxe, for example: maybe some meta-programming, some more advanced discussion on networking, or even better some in depth discussion of the language implementation itself. How does YARV work? I'd pay for all that, but do I really want to pay for the rest of the pickaxe again, maybe with some typos corrected? No. It's a waste of paper, and I'm never going to read the first couple hundred pages of intro/tutorial again anyway.
In the end, building a larger community of rubyists, who will almost all buy books eventually, is the most important factor for the survival of the authors, like your friend David, that we would like to support. If a few people are first introduced to this world through ultra-illegal, black market copies of PDF versions, big deal. My guess is if they dig it they'll buy the next copy so they can read it in bed. I did.
A lot has been said about this but just a couple of points:
1. I fully agree with Austin
2. The Pragmatic Programmers have a really good approach on this: include
*your* name in the PDF. Everybody nows Paulo J. Dias is a moron: his PDF copy
of "Behind closed doors" is everywhere. I was really surprised Manning did
not adopt the same policy about PDFs including the name of the buyer.
Okay, I'll admit it. I'm really pissed off. I don't pay attention to
what goes on on the ruby-talk IRC channel these days all that much,
but something happened this afternoon that thoroughly pissed me off.
[0515/16.53] hatezilla: seriously, pick it up. if you're iffy, get
on emule and search
for "ruby for rails" ... there's tons of pdfs floating around if you
know where to look
I consider David Black a friend of mine. I am *seriously* pissed off
that some pissant little freak would advocate this action at all. I
was similarly annoyed that people reacted as badly to Dave Thomas's
announcement that the Rails 2nd Edition would be the same price. These
people have done a *lot* for the Ruby community.
They deserve your financial support. Don't be a pissant thief. Even
temporarily. There are "sample chapters" for a reason.
-austin
- --
Pau Garcia i Quiles http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to the amount of work, I usually need 10 days to answer)
···
On Monday 15 May 2006 23:06, Austin Ziegler wrote:
I
was similarly annoyed that people reacted as badly to Dave Thomas's
announcement that the Rails 2nd Edition would be the same price. These
people have done a *lot* for the Ruby community.
They deserve your financial support. Don't be a pissant thief. Even
temporarily. There are "sample chapters" for a reason.
-austin
I think it should be more due to succsess sure it is expanisve now but,
if you were him wouldn't you WANT to RAISE it? those ppl are idiots. LOL
On the other side, we should also promote the creation of free
software and _free documentation_. I'm already a big book buyer but
I'm always in favor to buy a book when the book (or the older
revision) is falling into the public domain (or under a free license)
after a short period like 2 or 4 years after its publication.
Just my 0.02 EUR,
adulau
···
On 5/15/06, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:
Okay, I'll admit it. I'm really pissed off. I don't pay attention to
what goes on on the ruby-talk IRC channel these days all that much,
but something happened this afternoon that thoroughly pissed me off.
[0515/16.53] hatezilla: seriously, pick it up. if you're iffy, get
on emule and search
for "ruby for rails" ... there's tons of pdfs floating around if you
know where to look
I consider David Black a friend of mine. I am *seriously* pissed off
that some pissant little freak would advocate this action at all. I
was similarly annoyed that people reacted as badly to Dave Thomas's
announcement that the Rails 2nd Edition would be the same price. These
people have done a *lot* for the Ruby community.
They deserve your financial support. Don't be a pissant thief. Even
temporarily. There are "sample chapters" for a reason.
I am sympathetic to your annoyance. I don't think it is OK to suggest/advocate downloading ruby books in the IRC channel or on this mailing list: most readers here can afford to buy programming books; it's bad to advocate illegal activities in public; free documentation, tutorials, source code, advice, etc is available; and it's discourteous to authors who regularly give free help here. But is every case of piracy deserving of the same great scorn? I realise this may be a tangential issue, but if someone can't afford a book and is not going to buy it either way, whom has he harmed by downloading it?
-- Elliot Temple
···
On May 15, 2006, at 3:26 PM, Logan Capaldo wrote:
On May 15, 2006, at 5:06 PM, Austin Ziegler wrote:
Okay, I'll admit it. I'm really pissed off. I don't pay attention to
what goes on on the ruby-talk IRC channel these days all that much,
but something happened this afternoon that thoroughly pissed me off.
[0515/16.53] hatezilla: seriously, pick it up. if you're iffy, get
on emule and search
for "ruby for rails" ... there's tons of pdfs floating around if you
know where to look
I consider David Black a friend of mine. I am *seriously* pissed off
that some pissant little freak would advocate this action at all. I
was similarly annoyed that people reacted as badly to Dave Thomas's
announcement that the Rails 2nd Edition would be the same price. These
people have done a *lot* for the Ruby community.
They deserve your financial support. Don't be a pissant thief. Even
temporarily. There are "sample chapters" for a reason.
What really boggles my mind about this is, yes a book is easier and maybe you can't afford it, but its not like there aren't docs. You even have the source code.
Okay, I'll admit it. I'm really pissed off. I don't pay attention to
what goes on on the ruby-talk IRC channel these days all that much,
but something happened this afternoon that thoroughly pissed me off.
[0515/16.53] hatezilla: seriously, pick it up. if you're iffy, get
on emule and search
for "ruby for rails" ... there's tons of pdfs floating around if you
know where to look
I consider David Black a friend of mine. I am *seriously* pissed off
that some pissant little freak would advocate this action at all. I
was similarly annoyed that people reacted as badly to Dave Thomas's
announcement that the Rails 2nd Edition would be the same price. These
people have done a *lot* for the Ruby community.
They deserve your financial support. Don't be a pissant thief. Even
temporarily. There are "sample chapters" for a reason.
-austin
[snip]
Life is not that black and white, and downloading a PDF to peruse, or to read in its entirety, is barely different from checking out a book from the library or borrowing from a friend.
[snip]
I kind of agree with this - 'check out the pdf and then buy the book attitude'. I also have a lot of sympathy for authors who get ripped off - but if anyone tries to tell me that 'copying a pdf' is the same as stealing a book from a store, I cannot agree with that - they are fundamentally different in that one is physical and one isn't, one is theft while the other is copyright infringement - one can get you a slap on the wrist, the other locked up (under current DMCA style laws). They are the same in that both deprive the author of revenue (in fact I'm not certain, but shop thefts probably don't deprive the author, although they do deprive the store).
I live in the developing world, and the fact is that there are no bookstores that carry Prag Prog titles here - they simply cost too much for the bookstores to carry. Sadly this means that most developers here don't even think about spending 25-50% of their monthly salary on a book when they can download a pdf from a p2p network. It will get harder over time as the government here is cracking down on software piracy and copyright issues, but that basically means that smart people are deprived from resources that are available to other people just because of personal finances. There are special copies of addison wesley and apress/wrox, but no prag progs. I know that some publishers (AW/apress) have a special 'third world' editions - usually printed on lower quality paper - which is *much* cheaper than the copy you can get from Amazon/Borders. For me personally I'd like to get hold of AWDwR and Rails Recipes, but they aren't available in shops here and the Amazon price is a little too much for me (personally) - I will try to get my company to buy them - we already imported Ship It! from Amazon Japan. And yes the sample chapters are great - the pragmattic project automation sample chapter is the perfect documentation for CruiseControl.
I do get paid enough to buy books (ebooks/dead-trees), so when I see a good book I try to get it - again though for most things here that means importing (which takes a while as it has to be inspected by customs). Ebooks are ok, but credit cards are a real rarity too, so payment methods are sometimes a problem for potential customers.
I don't want to piss people off and support people who rip off the developers/writers who have done so much for the ruby community, but I wanted to enlighten you all to the realities here - it's easy to demonize people for 'stealing' a pdf, but sometimes their circumstances warrant it - I'd never criticise students trying to learn new stuff so that they can support their families (and yes this is extremely common here).
Thanks
Kev
PS - most developers here do not own a PC, so this isn't a 'they can afford to pay for toys, why don't they buy our content' thing - it's simply that they generally have to pay for essentials first and when they want to improve their situation, they will take advantage of anything on offer to land a better job that pays more - this includes using p2p to get access to 'cracked' software or ebooks so that they can learn after hours
Okay, I'll admit it. I'm really pissed off. I don't pay attention to
what goes on on the ruby-talk IRC channel these days all that much,
but something happened this afternoon that thoroughly pissed me off.
[0515/16.53] hatezilla: seriously, pick it up. if you're iffy, get
on emule and search for "ruby for rails" ... there's tons of pdfs
floating around if you know where to look
I consider David Black a friend of mine. I am *seriously* pissed off
that some pissant little freak would advocate this action at all. I
was similarly annoyed that people reacted as badly to Dave Thomas's
announcement that the Rails 2nd Edition would be the same price.
These people have done a *lot* for the Ruby community.
They deserve your financial support. Don't be a pissant thief. Even
temporarily. There are "sample chapters" for a reason.
Agreed, we should support the PragProg guys so they can continue to do
the great stuff they have been doing.
David Black's book ("Ruby for Rails") is not published by the PragProgs.
[...] As an undergraduate, or what you might call "a pissant" student,
Pissant thief, not student. There is a difference.
I read a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer that I BORROWED from a
professor, and I seriously believe it changed the way I approach life.
[...] That same dirty, bent-up copy was passed around between many of
my friends, and we all regard it as classic. [...] Oh, but maybe I
should never have looked at that copy my OS professor lent me. It was
evil and wrong to not pay the authors for their hard work, wasn't it?
What if he had just sent me the PDF to read instead? Would that have
produced a substantially different outcome?
Borrowing a physical book makes it unavailable to others. This is the
basis of libraries (and libraries are going to have to find a new model
as more and more books are published electronically). You knew that the
book belonged to the professor. If there had been a PDF of it (and there
isn't a legal one as far as I know), the professor would have been able
to give you a copy with no inconvenience to himself and you would have
had no incentive to delete the copy of the book when you were done
reading it, and every incentive -- and example! -- of passing along that
PDF to other friends, each of whom would then have their own copy of the
book.
Life is not that black and white, and downloading a PDF to peruse, or
to read in its entirety, is barely different from checking out a book
from the library or borrowing from a friend.
No, you're wrong. With the borrowed book, you must return it. With the
illegally copied PDF, there's no incentive for you to delete it -- or
even do the right thing and *buy* the book. Consider Baen's successful
experiment of Webscriptions. There are books that I have read from the
free site and not turned around and bought anything further from that
author, or have not bought the paperback or hardcover books. There are
others, though, that I have done exactly that (David Weber's books,
certainly).
I think taking a hard line attitude like this is not only useless,
because we will never digress back to "the way it used to be," but it
is also counter productive. The way you succeed as an author or
publisher is not by punishing your future clientele, but by trying to
win them over as passionate fans. If you can get people engrossed they
will end up buying much more than one book, and in the long run that
is how you make a living.
This statement has *nothing* to do with the complaint. The reality is
that this is the way that *all* publishers have *always* had to succeed
... except maybe textbook publishers.
But this is David Black's first book, and one of Manning's first PDF
releases. Do we *really* want to discourage Manning from embracing a new
model of publishing which encourages unencumbered PDF releases? Not me.
[...]
This *is* black and white. The asshat who was speaking on IRC was
advocating theft. Temporary or no, it's still theft. I don't care if the
copying costs are nil: the price of the PDF is cheaper than the book
itself.
[...]
In the end, building a larger community of rubyists, who will almost
all buy books eventually, is the most important factor for the
survival of the authors, like your friend David, that we would like to
support. If a few people are first introduced to this world through
ultra-illegal, black market copies of PDF versions, big deal. My
guess is if they dig it they'll buy the next copy so they can read it
in bed.
Except that ... the conversion rate for that is minimal. Don't get me
wrong, I believe that the unencumbered PDF model is the right direction,
and that the pricing on them is good. But there are sample chapters for
perusing for a reason, and now that the book is in stores, you can
peruse it at the store if you want to see more than the sample chapter.
What I know is that the actions here strongly discourage publishers and
authors from writing and publishing books in other than traditional
formats.
-austin
···
On 5/16/06, Jeff Rose <rosejn@gmail.com> wrote:
--
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
* Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca
But is every case of piracy deserving of the same great scorn?
Yes.
I realise this may be a tangential issue, but if someone can't afford a book and is not going to buy it either way, whom has he harmed by downloading it?
That's like saying that you're stuck with someone, and you're not going to share your food either way, so what harm is there in killing the person now instead of letting him starve to death. That's just a silly way of thinking.
[snip] But is
every case of piracy deserving of the same great scorn?
Same? No. But some variable amount of scorn depending upon
circumstances? I believe yes.
I realise
this may be a tangential issue, but if someone can't afford a book
and is not going to buy it either way, whom has he harmed by
downloading it?
A writer works on their book based on the premise that they will be
reimbursed for each copy, thus making it worth their while --
otherwise they wouldn't bother writing it.
In a perfect world, the price of the book might depend some amount
upon circumstances such as, how much can the customer afford? Do they
do their best to help others in society (discount!), or do they
usually opt to screw the other guy (surcharge!) ? Have they had recent
hardships out of their control which might justify a lower price?
It goes the other way too. Suppose some company or person is producing
copyrighted material that's damaging to society. If you illegally
share their material, and if that sharing helps put them out of
business (i.e. potential buyers get a free copy instead of paying for
it), does that make sharing it right, albeit illegal? Hm... <insert
independent thought here>.
To keep this post on-topic, I bought David's book -- the dead tree
version. Manning gives you a complimentary pdf version to boot, but
it's generated on the fly and has your name and email address
emblazoned at the bottom of every page. So, if you leak your copy to
the 'net, everyone knows it was you.
Some might suggest that, what would make it even less likely to be
shared would be if they put your name, address, phone number, credit
card number, date of birth, and IP address somewhere on every page.
Then, if you leaked your copy, people could find you and throw rotten
eggs at your house. Though, that could also lead to privacy concerns
(ex. kid buys book on internet with Dad's card, shares e-book/pdf with
friends, and now folks know a little too much about Dad).
[...] But is every case of piracy deserving of the same great scorn? I realise this may be a tangential issue, but if someone can't afford a book and is not going to buy it either way, whom has he harmed by downloading it?
I think this has the makings of a False Dilemma, or Loaded
Question, or something of that ilk.
It's really postulating two separate conditions: a) can't afford
it, and b) not going to buy it *EITHER WAY*.
"a" is something one would i suppose have to examine on a case
by case basis to determine the, shall we say, veracity of the
claim. How many programmers can't afford to put away $10 per
month toward a book they want to buy. (Hint: unsubscribe to
bustygrannieswearingapronscookingnude.com)
"b" is the nice slippery slope -> convenient excuse used by
people who don't want to pay for something they can digitally
copy: Oh well, I wasn't going to buy it anyway, but I still
want the *value* from it. But: "EITHER WAY" means even if I
*could afford* it, I have no intention of paying for it, so
I'll just copy it and receive the value from it without paying
for it--I'm not hurting anybody.
I think that's inherently some kind of false choice, because
if you don't pay for it, you're not _entitled_ to the value.
So you don't *get* to decide to reap the value from someone
else's work because you _decided_ you didn't want to pay for
it.
Saying you weren't going to buy it either way but still are
entitled to obtain the value from the work, is just bogus.
If you aren't going to buy it, you don't get to read it.
(Or listen to it, or watch it, or play it.)
The problem is, I think the people who are truly in the "a"
/can't afford even $10-per-month/ category for programming
books is so slim, it usually comes down to people in the "b"
/decided I wouldn't buy it but still want the value from it/
category.
If you're really an "a", maybe you can send a note to the
author asking about student discounts or whatnot; for everybody else in "b" either unsubscribe to your pr0n sites
and buy the book, or have the honesty to admit that taking
the value from a commercial product without paying for it
is stealing from the author and publisher.
(Personally, I'm not campaigning for Sainthood. I've made
a few mistakes with digital media over the years; but I will never try to rationalize the few things I never did
pay for in the last 20 years as not hurting anybody.)
This person wasn't advocating permantly stealing David's book. He was
advocating a "try it before you buy it" approach. The problem is that
Manning took a risk by making a PDF copy of "Ruby for Rails" available
for purchase. I believe that they made the right choice in doing so,
but asinine approaches like this advocacy -- when sample chapters are
made available for a reason, and the book will now soon be available
in bookstores for perusing -- will only discourage Manning and other
publishers from doing what they should do, and it will discourage
other authors from following the same path as David did.
I won't pretend that I'm pissed off at every example of "piracy" (I
hate the term's abuse that way, but it does have currency), but it's
advocacy of immoral and illegal behaviour. It just so happens that I
know David and am that much more annoyed by this nonsense.
-austin
···
On 5/15/06, Elliot Temple <curi@curi.us> wrote:
On May 15, 2006, at 3:26 PM, Logan Capaldo wrote:
> On May 15, 2006, at 5:06 PM, Austin Ziegler wrote:
I am sympathetic to your annoyance. I don't think it is OK to suggest/
advocate downloading ruby books in the IRC channel or on this mailing
list: most readers here can afford to buy programming books; it's bad
to advocate illegal activities in public; free documentation,
tutorials, source code, advice, etc is available; and it's
discourteous to authors who regularly give free help here. But is
every case of piracy deserving of the same great scorn? I realise
this may be a tangential issue, but if someone can't afford a book
and is not going to buy it either way, whom has he harmed by
downloading it?
I kind of agree with this - 'check out the pdf and then buy the book
attitude'. I also have a lot of sympathy for authors who get ripped
off - but if anyone tries to tell me that 'copying a pdf' is the same
as stealing a book from a store, I cannot agree with that - they are
fundamentally different in that one is physical and one isn't, one is
theft while the other is copyright infringement - one can get you a
slap on the wrist, the other locked up (under current DMCA style
laws). They are the same in that both deprive the author of revenue
(in fact I'm not certain, but shop thefts probably don't deprive the
author, although they do deprive the store).
Actually, they're both theft and they both unlawfully deprive the author
and publisher of their rightful income from the sale. In a theft from a
bookstore, though, there's an additional aggrieved party. (Your
characterisation of the difference between the possible judgements is
incorrect. I deplore the DMCA and am quite thankful that I don't live in
a country that has such insane copyright laws.)
It's *easier* to steal from the author in one case rather than the
other, but it still deprives the author of income to which they are
entitled.
I live in the developing world, and the fact is that there are no
bookstores that carry Prag Prog titles here - they simply cost too
much for the bookstores to carry. [...]
Has anyone mentioned this to the PragProg? Every impression that I've
ever gotten of Dave and Andy is that they would care about this, and I
think that their authors would feel the same. Why don't you suggest it
to them as a possible approach for the developing world?
-austin
···
On 5/16/06, Kev Jackson <kevin.jackson@it.fts-vn.com> wrote:
--
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
* Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca
Austin Ziegler wrote:
>> Pirating a pdf is not theft. Stealing something implies that the owner is no
>> in possession of that object. I.e. I steal your car, you no longer have a car.
>> Pirating is copyright infringement. There is a difference, even if
>> some people in this thread are implying copyright infringement is
>> tantamount to murder.
>
> When you unlawfully deprive someone of something that is rightfully
> theirs, that is theft. The *act* which leads to that theft may be
> copyright infringement, but the end result is that something *has*
> been stolen from the publisher and, in turn, the author.
Actually, nope. In Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985) it was ruled in a case dealing with bootleg records that "18 U.S.C. 2314 [transport of stolen property in interstate commerce] does not apply to this case because the rights of a copyright holder are 'different' from the rights of owners of other kinds of property." It is still a criminal offense under the Copyright Act, but it is not theft in the same way that taking a physical object would be: primarily because you are depriving someone of purely hypothetical gain, what they would have made had you purchased the copyrighted work, rather than something they already owned.
[--- cut from other message ---]
>> Life is not that black and white, and downloading a PDF to peruse, or
>> to read in its entirety, is barely different from checking out a book
>> from the library or borrowing from a friend.
>
> No, you're wrong. With the borrowed book, you must return it. With the
> illegally copied PDF, there's no incentive for you to delete it -- or
> even do the right thing and *buy* the book. Consider Baen's successful
> experiment of Webscriptions. There are books that I have read from the
> free site and not turned around and bought anything further from that
> author, or have not bought the paperback or hardcover books. There are
> others, though, that I have done exactly that (David Weber's books,
> certainly).
First, I want to say that I understand and agree with you. The moral thing is to purchase the book. What I want to get across is that the value in a book is largely in the knowledge that it contains. That knowledge can be ascertained just as well from a borrowed version as from a digitally copied one, and the fact that the lender doesn't have access to it temporarily has no effect on the copyright holder. This is not only a gray area morally, in my opinion at least, but it is still a sticky point in common practice. Apple's iTunes, for example, will only stream songs over the network to other computers 5 times per day. That was arbitrarily put in the software to appease the record labels, and it is trying to come somewhere between music "piracy" and "sharing". (Well, I think in the EU you can copy an album up to 5 times total, or something like that, but this is 5 times per day, which is just a decision Apple made.)
This is definitely not black and white.
That being said, I don't envy the position of an author today. DRM is virtually guaranteed to fail no matter what hair-brain scheme is created, and for the vast majority of consumers it is just a major pain in the ass. This is why I think creators of copyrighted works that can be digitally copied are going to need to find new ways to add value, which compel people to purchase the work. Computers, the internet and P2P are disruptive technologies to be sure, but the benefits far outweigh the harm. (When farming became mechanized lots of people lost their jobs... Should we have stopped it?) The thriving musicians are touring and sell directly to their fans, for example. Oh wait, that's basically what Dave Thomas does too...
I'm currently teaching a course based on ruby and rails, and David's book looks like it could be a perfect fit for the next time it's taught. Know where I can download it to check it out before buying 30?
-Jeff
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On 5/16/06, Tim Becker <a2800276@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't get this attitude at all. Either pay the asking price or forgo the use of the book. It is really that simple. Otherwise you are taking the work of another without any compensation. I don't see how your location or income changes the ethics of the situation.
Gary Wright
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On May 16, 2006, at 5:21 AM, Kev Jackson wrote:
I live in the developing world, and the fact is that there are no bookstores that carry Prag Prog titles here - they simply cost too much for the bookstores to carry. Sadly this means that most developers here don't even think about spending 25-50% of their monthly salary on a book when they can download a pdf from a p2p network.
Whether he has "harmed" anybody or not is quite irrelevant, and a false argument (except for purposes of how much extra money you owe the creator if you violate his/her copyright). US Copyright law, in both principle and practice, with a few specific and notable exceptions, says that what a person creates belongs to them. If I create some fabulous work of art or brilliant programming book, it is my right as the person who did the making to
give it away for free
give away the right to copy it for free
sell or lease the right to publish it to a third party
publish it myself and charge people some nominal fee
publish it myself and charge an outrageous fee
not share it with anybody but people named "Fred."
If you don't happen to like what I'm doing with my creation, that's just too bad. Make your own. The fact that you can steal it without "harming" anybody because you wouldn't have paid for it anyway (or I wasn't going to sell it to you in the first place) is a bogus argument, because it's not your right to decide who will or won't be harmed by stealing my work. It's my work, it's my time/energy/money in the making, it's my right.
Music, BTW, is one of the specific and notable exceptions; specifically the performance of somebody else's composition. There's also a time limit on ownership, which is currently very long (I believe it's creator's lifetime + 70 years, but I'd have to check; they keep changing it). Finally, there's "fair use," which I'd guess about 94% of the people who claim this don't understand, and which is widely abused.
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On May 15, 2006, at 16:03, Elliot Temple wrote:
But is every case of piracy deserving of the same great scorn? I realise this may be a tangential issue, but if someone can't afford a book and is not going to buy it either way, whom has he harmed by downloading it?
The harm there is that he would die sooner than he would if he were left un-murdered. He loses that amount of his life. But the thing is, who is harmed in the hypothetical case I described?
-- Elliot Temple
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On May 15, 2006, at 4:07 PM, Jeremy Tregunna wrote:
On 15-May-06, at 7:03 PM, Elliot Temple wrote:
But is every case of piracy deserving of the same great scorn?
Yes.
I realise this may be a tangential issue, but if someone can't afford a book and is not going to buy it either way, whom has he harmed by downloading it?
That's like saying that you're stuck with someone, and you're not going to share your food either way, so what harm is there in killing the person now instead of letting him starve to death. That's just a silly way of thinking.
