/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2362729]

/lit/'s feelings on ebook piracy?

[Anonymous No.2362739]

Piracy is not immoral. Information and knowledge does not belong to anyone unless they never tell anyone about it.

[quetzalcoatlus !!bqLYk1wQY+I No.2362741]

no different than my thoughts on fraud and theft and other forms of piracy

it's against the law and is ruining the economy

[Anonymous No.2362742]

>>2362739
p.s. I buy all my books because I have the money for it and I prefer paper over eink.

[Anonymous No.2362745]

>>2362729
I'm pro-piracy
Fuck niggas who charge for their art.
Art should be shared, not sold.
>mfw when bands like Radiohead are pro-piracy and bands like Limp Bizkit are Anti-piracy

That's not to say you shouldn't support writers/bands/cinematographers. You should, just don't feel like guilty when you don't.

[oh pee No.2362750]

>>2362741

that... that image. so, quentin came around here too, i see.

>>2362745

that being said, anyone have any leads on solid ebook sites? something like what.cd for books. [white problems] i'm finding an amazing number of very poorly formatted books. [/white problems]

[Anonymous No.2362749]

Good, if the author is dead and his works are not available legally in the public domain.
Bad, if the author is still living.

[quetzalcoatlus !!bqLYk1wQY+I No.2362753]

>>2362750
>so, quentin came around here too, i see.
/lit/ is my home board newfriend

[oh pee No.2362754]

>>2362749

i'll side with that to a large extent.

[oh pee No.2362755]

>>2362753

good thing i'm just passing through then.

[Anonymous No.2362756]

Also, if you notice, art as a career is a fairly recent invention. Artists like Michelangelo and Da Vinci basically lived off of charity. Many other artists worked as professors or advisers. Art is not a profession and by transforming it into one we get shitty works of "literature" by hacks such as Stephen King and Stephanie Myer.

[Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ No.2362757]

This will lead to less book printings and more self publishing. Publishers are going to have to become more of a PR firm for their titles. It will only seem like more "crap books" are gettign published, but it'll only be an illusion.

They're starting to really crack down on piracy it seems, and we may have to fight to keep the internet the way it is. I'm not sure how all this is going to play out, but I know the sharing of data isn't going to go away. Its the Christmas spirit after all!

[Anonymous No.2362763]

Piracy is immoral, I mean, sure, some pirates here and there won't hurt anything, especially if they wouldn't have been able to afford that which they are pirating anyway.

But what would happen if it was totally allowed? Everyone but a few moralfags would get their games, books, songs, etc. through piracy. What would happen if everyone had the newest game from Square Enix, and it was absolutely amazing, but the company made no profit because no one bought it? Or if everyone just pirated the newest Harry Potter book? It takes money to sustain whoever it is that's making all those things that you're pirating.

if you pirate, you should feel bad

[oh pee No.2362762]

>>2362757

that image perfectly compliments your post on a few levels.

[Anonymous No.2362764]

>>2362757
>This will lead to less book printings and more self publishing. Publishers are going to have to become more of a PR firm for their titles. It will only seem like more "crap books" are gettign published, but it'll only be an illusion.

This has already happened to the music industry.

[Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ No.2362765]

>>2362753
But you've only read around five books in your life

[Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ No.2362776]

>>2362764
Exactly. And there's still great music out there.

>>2362763
>pic

[Anonymous No.2362779]

>>2362763
So you agree with me saying that drug companies being allowed to hold patents on drugs that could save millions of lives so they could sell those drugs for ludicrous prices is moral? You sir are an idiot. Information can never be owned by anyone. You should not feel pride for having come up with something because the only reason you were able to create that is because millions before you have worked on perfecting whatever field you are working on.

[oh pee No.2362780]

>>2362763

i pay for video games. (i prefer the hassle-free patches and support)
i pay for ALMOST all of my books. (a few dead authors on the ebook side)
i pay for concerts and merch but not cds. (support the artist, fuck the labels)
i pay for movies but not tv shows. (the networks made their money, fuck them for trying to gouge more on disc releases)

i don't feel much of anything.

[Anonymous No.2362782]

>>2362763

So no more Square or Harry Potter

what's the down side of this again?

[Anonymous No.2362789]

>>2362779
>lrn2economy
people need money, did you consider at all what would happen if everyone pirated their shit? Just think about the suggestion, this time, instead of replying as if you hadn't read my post.

And I'm talking about books and vidya. Not life-saving drugs, those are entirely different

[Anonymous No.2362793]

>>2362782
Those are examples. Replace them with your favorite book series then reconsider

[Anonymous No.2362801]

I use a library whenever I can. I'll pirate a book if the library doesn't have it, they're usually overpriced anyway.

[Anonymous No.2362803]

>mfw I refuse to contribute to the death of print media

[Anonymous No.2362806]

>>2362789
>those are entirely different
That is a classic dodge. You immoral libertarian scuz

[Anonymous No.2362807]

>>2362789
You can't take one side and ignore all the side effects. Read this post here >>2362756

Art has thrived for a thousand years before the invention of these stupid laws. Do you think people had copyrights on their works during the renaissance?

[person !.avztqSy6I No.2362813]

>>2362780
I buy 90% of my video games
I buy 97% of my books in physical format (that said, not always new)
I go to concerts and buy vinyl/cd (The small indie-recs need money too, they are the ones who often help bands 'get out there'.)
>(the networks made their money, fuck them for trying to gouge more on disc releases)
Fuck movies, they made their money. Fuck them trying to gouge more on disc release.
No seriously, I buy both. Especially TV shows I didn't see on tV because lol premium cable.

[Anonymous No.2362810]

If you don't respond to the demand, if you take the product out of reach you are not helping neither the author or the reader. We consume in a very different way now, today I feel there are things we don't want either way (Twilight book or something), things that we want to buy and we will when we get the money to and things that we don't mind consuming it virtually and the biggest illusion is to think that this third kind of product is avoiding people from consuming on the classic way. If I find book X online and read it, I might say it's bullshit and not buy (and it's alright, I wouldn't buy it anyway), I might like it a lot and search for a good edition of it to buy (and this I might never have known if I didn't download it) or I might read online but not feel it's worth the price (and this is a book I would NOT buy anyway).

Anti-piracy only works for one thing: confusing people. You know those books that are protected by plastic covers and that you can't open on the bookstore? They have a point in protecting the material from greasy hands, but they lock the information too. Those who will buy these books are those who are familiar with it, who knows it's worth it. And it's of very bad faith to count on dissapointing others who wouldn't actually want the book if they had a chance to read a page of it. Do you see what I mean? The virtual copy is different in the sense that you don't have paper to be ruined, but it's similar in that access to information. I'm sure you can go to a bookstore and read an entire book like you were in a library, without paying for anything, but you can't wrap all the books in plastic and expect people to buy from that bookstore.

[Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ No.2362814]

>>2362803
Its okay Conan. I will cry for you.

[Anonymous No.2362815]

The internet provides free avenues for circulation.

One person can mix, edit, cut, print, record, and sell their work from a laptop with a little know-how.

Publishers, Producers, Agents, and all the other strings have become unnecessary.

The customers do the marketing for you, opinions are heard and spread like wildfire with the click of a button.

Industries aren't feeling the weight of "piracy," they're feeling the weight of the internet. With information so easily spread, accessed and assimilated, it's nearly impossible to rip customers off now. They are losing money because their shitty business paradigms don't work on the internet.

People don't pirate because they don't want to pay for shit, they do it because they don't want to spend money on shit they know nothing about. Companies release one, maybe two trailers, a couple of blurbs and pre-release reviews - but they all focus on the same shit. The product you get is rarely the product you buy when it comes to media.

Piracy works as demo content. Open circulation of media is unlimited, world-wide advertising for very little money lost. +85% of pirates purchase content if they enjoyed it. The rest of the money lost is probably less than the advertising equivalent.

(cont.)

[oh pee No.2362819]

>>2362803

>mfw you loyally supporting print media

honestly, it's a dead format... egon told us as much back in 1984.

[Anonymous No.2362818]

I don't give a shit.

[Anonymous No.2362821]

>>2362741
>reading on a kindle fire
>books on an lcd
Shit, Quentin, get it together.

[Anonymous No.2362824]

>>2362813

faggit

[oh pee No.2362827]

>>2362821

i have a kindle fire. T_T

it was a birthday present, and i love it.

(but some days i secretly wish i had an eink device.)

[Anonymous No.2362828]

>>2362813
>vinyl
Fuck off.

[Anonymous No.2362829]

>>2362815
This is all true but you are missing the point. The point of this argument is whether piracy is moral or not. Not what advantages it adds and how it screws over big corporations. Everybody and their mother has pirated before but for the most part, they all agree that it is immoral. This doesn't make sense but it begins to when you take into account the fact that the average IQ is around 100.

[Anonymous No.2362830]

>>2362827
I hope you don't pretend that its an ebook reader, its just a tablet. And not even a good one at that.

[rangabrunnsiegfriedhagen !KJKZ7n2h3I No.2362832]

Copyright in general is retarded. If it existed much earlier, you wouldn't have these nice things like folk tales or The Odyssey or Paganini on der Themen von Rachmaninoff or any Variations on Theme

[Anonymous No.2362835]

>>2362827
>mfw next year's Kindle Fire 2 will have full color lcd and e-ink

[Anonymous No.2362837]

>>2362832
Yeah, I'm with Stallman on this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fh7ZcunNDA

[Anonymous No.2362839]

>>2362835
>full color lcd and e-ink
That's like saying "your monitor will be plasma and lcd".

[Anonymous No.2362845]

>>2362815

It's not the customers that need to change, it's the industries. Media isn't like other products, and shouldn't be sold like other products. When you go to the movies expecting something in particular, and you don't get it, you will be less likely to return to the movies. You will be less likely to see movies written by the same person. You will be less likely to see movies by the same director. The same is true with other media.

When people like media, though, there is no force on the fucking force on the planet that can stop them from talking about it. When people enjoy media, they define themselves by it, and they will be loyal to the associated companies and individuals for life. Genuine enjoyment is the best source of sales and advertisement.

Most industries spend +40% of their budgets on advertising and circulation.Create a unified service for ALL types of media. Offer 3 free full listens of streaming albums. Offer the first 20 minutes of a movie free. Offer 3 free hours of playtime for videogames. Offer the first 25 pages of books free. Make it infallibly easy to find and get. If the industry does this - outside of a few disgruntled teenagers without credit-cards, piracy will end. Period. Unlimited circulation at no cost, no stealing, no customers being angry and not getting what they paid for.

Drop the inordinate amount of money spent on advertising, use it to make your product better... profit. Apple had the right idea, wrong implementation. It can be done better.

[Anonymous No.2362848]

>>2362829
I think it is in the same way that vegetarians might say any meat eater supports animal torture or that having children means you are supporting over population.

The system has troubles and it is an illusion to think that the iniative should be on this end, I'm not saying that we should conform, but that we should try to fix the system exactly because we make use of it. Whether you pirate or not is not going to change piracy policies, it really is not, it comes from the idea that "well, if everyone thought that way..." but they never do. The collective should be seen as collective, the individual should be seen as individual. Supporting a candidate for an ellection, for example, is more than just voting for him, but discussing his ideas and his values and helping on several other ways.

[oh pee No.2362844]

>>2362813

>Fuck movies, they made their money.

yeah... but in that case i pay for the convenience of just unwrapping a disc and popping it into the player. tv shows i watch infrequently enough to just stream them from my laptop. (and the gf isn't the most technologically able person i know.) i do have a job, i just selectively choose what to pay for these days... it's a trick the rich people use, so why not?

[Anonymous No.2362851]

itt: poor people trying to rationalize their criminal behavior

[Anonymous No.2362855]

There's got to be a better system than the current one, considering the piracy and all.
I do pirate somewhat. It depends on how well something is avialable. I pirated Ulysses at the time, because there's only a translation in the library, and I pay for the library anyway. Eventually I did buy the English one as ebook by the way, 2 euros so why not.
Aside from ebooks I play games which I have bought or will buy later. It feels much nicer having bought the thing. I know many others don't do that, but I'm sure even more get the stuff they value legally. I mostly pirate first, to see if it's any good.

If art and entertainment is well available there's no need for this nonsense. A good library is all I need in terms of books, movies should have the same place in a library and music as well. Perhaps with proper DRM there could be a nice selection of what you want.
Bookloans for x a month, ebook/paper because of DRM. Movies can be on disc or through stream, perhaps even download if it's protected enough, for y a month. Music the same as movies, for a different price.

I'd like that.

[Anonymous No.2362857]

>>2362851
itt: blindly accepting morals placed on to you by society and brushing off any well made argument as rationalization of criminal behavior

[Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ No.2362867]

>>2362819
Defense Samuel T. Cogley

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6kDMFp2teY
Libre!

[Anonymous No.2362875]

Don't allow literature to be plagued by monetary gains

Then literature will be created from pure passion, and then, perhaps, we'll finally have a damn new classic.

[Anonymous No.2362877]

>>2362829

Well, I wouldn't argue that piracy is "moral." That word doesn't really imply anything to me outside of a biological context. I would argue that it is a necessary loophole to a broken industry, though.

I don't mean that in a "fuck the evil corporations!" kind of way. Evil, no. Stupid, yes. Purchasing media is a fucking nightmare. It could be done better, and it won't be unless we make them lose money.

Not that they ARE losing any real type of money. Companies just use it as a cop-out when they make shitty products. AGH I MADE AN EXTREMELY NICHE HORROR ADVENTURE GAME WITH A STEEP LEARNING CURVE. NO ONE BOUGHT IT, MUST BE PIRATES!

Fuck the police.

[oh pee No.2362879]

>>2362867

i'm sorry, i don't understand your weird moon language.

[Anonymous No.2362878]

ebook piracy in my opinion is different from all the other types of media piracy. Decent books are often completed solely by the writer with minor help from the editor whereas all the other types of media are produced by massive teams funded by greedy corporations. They are often artificial and fake, using tropes and formulaic structures to appeal to a wide audience. Books on the other hand are created by one person investing all their time and passion into it and the only way which they can be rewarded is through the sales of their books.

I don't understand how people can justify it, it's extremely hard to even get published in the first place let alone make a decent living from it and here are all you retards trying to justify your rampant piracy by claiming 'herp derp all nowlej shud be free 4 evree1'. Works of fiction are not sources of knowledge you frickin morons' and even textbooks need to be written by people who need to pay the bills. Don't give me that shit about 'I can't afford it', media is dirt cheap nowadays and if you truly can't afford it you shouldn't be consuming it, hell you shouldn't even be paying for internet right now. Don't even lie to yourself, you pirate it because you can. Either that or you are some teen who is used to not having to pay or work for anything.

[Anonymous No.2362886]

>Be good writer
>Publish book
>Everyone pirates your book
>Can't afford to write for a living
>Spend your days working to feed and cloth yourself
>No time or energy to write
>Society is deprived of your work

[Anonymous No.2362891]

>>2362763
> Piracy is immoral
> music

You do know that the majority of musicians make a shit load of cash from touring, right?

[Anonymous No.2362894]

>>2362855
>I pirated Ulysses
How the fuck did you end up pirating Ulysses, when it's available to download at Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300

[Anonymous No.2362895]

Liberals trampling on property rights. No surprise here.

[Anonymous No.2362899]

>>2362886
Chekov was a doctor primarily, and writer second.

You think your little 8 hour a day shift compares to the stress and time doctors have to put into their work?

Hhohohohohohoho

[Anonymous No.2362898]

>>2362891
You couldn't be more wrong

[Anonymous No.2362896]

>>2362886

That is how writing has always been. Unless your work is universally accessible, you will be starving artist. Not the fault of piracy.

Pirating books is like going to the fucking library.

[Anonymous No.2362897]

>>2362886
>be good writer
>can't publish book because editors are a bitch
>put book for download for free in website
>people like it
>editor sees, like the attention and decides to publish said book

Happened to my uncle. He was trying to publish his books since the 80's. They are quite nice 8/10 books.

[Anonymous No.2362900]

saved myself hundreds of dollars I do not have (High School who study's in spare time). I have the intention of buying everything I stole once I have disposable income. But for now I desire knowledge, and that is the best way of attaining it.

[Anonymous No.2362902]

>>2362896
The library pays for those books. It's nothing like that.

[oh pee No.2362905]

>>2362902

>The library pays for one or two copies of those books

wanna read that back to me?

[DeadSunshine !!3DODQ2wnTJt No.2362904]

>>2362756
You mean patronage. It is something that is still around. Not as much anymore but it is something that is still around in the classic sense. But if you really like some writers work you really should fork over a bit of cash.

[Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ No.2362911]

>>2362895
Anarchists, muffin. Anarchists.

[Anonymous No.2362912]

>>2362897
Kafka never made a living off his works either, still produced great classics. He had unfinished works, but also many others that were complete. Even writers who made money from their literature has uncompleted works, so don't try to argue against my point through that context.

[Anonymous No.2362910]

> 2012
> not stealing expensive leather bound classics from the library
> fuck your faggot e-readers

[Anonymous No.2362909]

>>2362902

>library pays for a few copies of a book
>hundreds, perhaps thousands of people read it over its lifetime there

>few people buy an ebook
>they post it on the internet
>hundreds, if not thousands of people read it over its lifetime there

Please explain, I'm a bit daft.

[Anonymous No.2362908]

>see preety cover and good wikipedia entry for book
>download book
>might like or not
>might buy or not buy later

>see preety cover and good wikipedia entry for book
>can't download book
>go to bookstore
>can't open book
>it's expensive, I can't blame them, but I don't have all that money
>save money for another book instead

[Anonymous No.2362913]

>>2362902
They pay for those books once. Probably discounted.
To pirate a book you merely have to buy it once, and then distribute it.

[Anonymous No.2362919]

>>2362911

that's a lot of chairs man.

chairs, chairs everywhere.

where'd you get all those chairs, man?

[Anonymous No.2362922]

I only buy books used when they're dirt cheap on amazon. I've gotten tons of books for under five dollars with shipping that are worth 20-30 dollars new. It's worth the luxury of having a physical copy when they're so cheap, but when a book is expensive I look for a download. I don't care about piracy because I believe intellectual property rights are absurd. If I ever produce a book I'll make sure to setup a torrent for it, but if someone wants to purchase and support me I'll have that option open as well.

[Anonymous No.2362925]

Pirating will help trim away all those money grubbing authors and hopefully allow literature to once again be an arena of passion.

[Anonymous No.2362931]

I'm a librarian, ask me anything.

[Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ No.2362945]

>>2362729
OP. Where did you get that illustration of George Bush as a high schooler?

[Anonymous No.2362951]

>>2362931
There is a book that was never taken by anyone since '86. Someone stole it in 2009 and still no one asked for it, but you end up discovering a note on a book next to an empty place on the shelf. The note says "Mr Librarian, I saw the book next to this one by the name of [ ] and I've been looking for it since 1973. I'm taking it with no intentions to return, but I make a moral promise to take care of its physical condition for as long as I live and make good use of its content. Sincerely, anonymous passionate reader."

Do you get mad?

[oh pee No.2363083]

>>2362951

not the one you're asking, but:

no. not at all. i might actually feel a sense of hope. might tear up a bit, never can tell.