The Truth About Piracy1 July 2002 We've heard a lot about media piracy, but the truth about why it happens and who is really at fault may surprise you. This may come as a surprise to some of my readers, but I'm actually a big fan of copyright. I think the current term is ridiculously long, but the core concept of granting creative people a limited time to profit from their work is a great idea. Not only would I love to live off the income that my creativity generates, I honestly believe I can make that happen. Of course, pundits in the media-- myself included, alas-- have told you that copyright is dead, that anything digital will be cracked and pirated, and that there's no profit in selling to a culture that expects to get everything for free. After taking a good, hard look around, I disagree. Lemme esplain. I live on sites like Baen, Fictionwise and Palm Digital Media, because I love books. I'm well familiar with what's available for sale online, and I'm buying books as fast as I can afford them. Several times during my recent stint of unemployment, I decided to forgo dinner just so I could go to Palm Digital and buy another book. Over the last three years, I've also become familiar with all the "pirate" channels on the Internet: newsgroups like alt.binaries.e-book, peer to peer services like Kazaa and Morpheus, and the multitude of short-lived pirate web and ftp sites that seem to pop up as fast as the publishers's lawyers can shut them down, like a giant digital "whack-a-mole" game. I've made it a habit to scan the Usenet groups every day just to see what's out there. Over time, a surprising revelation has washed over me. While the volume and breadth of the pirated works is quite impressive, and the diligence of the pirates is uncanny-- Stephen King's new book From a Buick 8 appeared last month, though the hardcover won't hit the stands until September-- something is missing from the pirate library. Legitimate ebooks. That's right, there is almost no overlap between the titles available from legitimate online booksellers like Palm Digital and Fictionwise and the titles floating around on the pirate networks. There are a few exceptions to this, of course, but out of the thousands of books I've seen pirated, I can think of less than a dozen that I've actually seen somewhere for sale. What does this tell us? It tells us that the conventional wisdom regarding digital piracy is wrong. It tells us that Cary Sherman (of the RIAA), Jack Valenti (of the MPAA) and Pat Schroeder (of the AAP) are working Congress into a lather over nothing. While I'm not condoning what the pirates do, it seems that they're only stealing what they're not allowed to buy. Given the chance, the public, even the digital generation of the Internet, who allegedly expect everything for free, is willing to pay for what they enjoy. In general, people still seem to respect the right of an author to make a living, and will gladly support the artists they enjoy. I've even heard of people meeting authors at book signings and handing them a buck or two for books they found online but couldn't buy legitimately. So who's really at fault for piracy? One could make a compelling argument that it's the content owners themselves that drive the pirate market, not through what they make available, but through what they choose not to make available. In other words, if you want to guarantee that your book will be pirated, don't sell it as an ebook. After all, there's a reason the vast thundering majority of pirate editions are scanned from paper originals rather than cracked digital editions. Which brings me to another hoary myth of piracy, the myth of "lost sales." Content owners would love to have you believe that piracy is taking food off their table, losing them money, putting good people out of work and therefore must be stopped at any and all costs. This is a bald-faced lie. Piracy, generally speaking, doesn't cost them a dime. You know why? Because you can't lose money on the lost sale of something you don't actually sell. Even setting aside the fact that they can't lose money by not selling ebooks they don't sell in the first place, they usually don't lose money on paper, either. Most of the pirate editions out there are books that are either out of print or too difficult for the average consumer to track down given the modern bookstore's "only stock books that move" policy. If someone wants a book, and the publisher doesn't make that book readily available for purchase, who's really responsible for any lost income if the consumer finds the book somewhere else? Whether it's a nefarious pirate edition or a legitimate used bookstore, the publisher doesn't make a dime, because the publisher didn't make the effort to sell the book in the first place. So publishers, wake up and smell the toast burning. If you want to sell books, sell books. Make them available as ebook editions at reasonable prices, and people will buy them. Let's face it, most people are just lazy enough to prefer buying a professionally formatted, easily available ebook to tracking down a pirate edition filled with OCR errors. If you sell it, they will buy. If you don't, then don't complain when your would-be customers go elsewhere. Jeff Kirvin
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