Is the Digital Piracy Threat Real?

I've been discussing digital piracy here for the last few weeks--in this post I argued that pirating digital content is immoral because if everyone did it, it would blight our creative ecosystem. In this post, I went further, arguing that the very structure of the internet encourages immoral behavior, and that we need to redesign the internet to better serve the humans who use it. I also argued that digital piracy is a form of counterfeiting, not theft, and that "counterfeiters" is a better term than "pirates."

So the question might naturally arise--am I being a Chicken Little? I imagine that if the counterfeiters get the upper hand, we might wind up with a digital dystopia in which no content creators can get paid for their efforts and all content becomes amateur. Instead of Hollywood movies that cost tens or even hundreds of millions to produce, we'll have . . . YouTube. Novels will still be written, but many of our greatest novelists--those who make a living from their work--would write less or not at all due to the necessity of taking on other work to put food on the table. Could that really happen?

For an answer, I turn to a fascinating discussion I've been having with Tanvir Hossain on Goodreads. Hossain is a Bangladeshi, and graciously took some time to comment on one of my posts. You can read the whole discussion here.

Hossain begins his comment:  "You are right. Piracy isn't right. But still I pirate ebooks. So why I do it? The main reason is - there is almost no chance in getting caught. If I try to steal a book form a book store, there is 99% chances that I will get caught. But If I download a book from a pirate site there is almost no chance that I will get caught. But this is illegal and immoral."

In Bangladesh, counterfeiting digital work is so widespread that it has become a social norm. Hossain again: "My dad works on a Government office and the operating system of the computers of his office is pirated windows 7. So if government is using pirated software, what can you say about this country?"

Counterfeiting has decimated the creative community in Bangladesh. Take the film industry, for example:  "Yeah, piracy is destroying the country. It had destroyed the movie industry and disabled the music industry. It all started in 1990's. When the VCR hits the stores of Bangladesh, piracy of Video Cassette begins [...] when the bootlegged copy of Bollywood movies came to Bangladesh they were instant hit. People started watch movies in VCRs not in cinema halls. As a result attendance to cinema halls dropped. So the movie industry get less money and with less money they made low budget and lower quality films than before. Now if you ask a Bangladeshi what was last bangla movie he watched I don't think he will able to tell you."

Could this sort of digital dystopia spread to the rest of the world? Of course. All it requires is that those who counterfeit creative work believe they can do so without getting caught. If the social norm becomes that content is free, then most kinds of professional creative endeavor must end. And that world would impoverish both content creators and consumers.

What can you do? Don't frequent counterfeiting sites. Don't link to them. Report counterfeiting sites to authors and/or their publishers. Let your friends who download counterfeit content know that it's not okay to do so. An ultimate solution requires redesigning the internet and probably our copyright laws, but in the meantime we can all help to maintain the social norm that authors and other content creators deserve to be compensated for their work.

The Immorality of the Internet

Two weeks ago in this space, I posted about a discussion I had with the owner of an ebook pirating website, and went on to explain why I believe it's immoral both to consume and to provide pirated copies of copyrighted works.

I've continued to think about this issue because it's important to me both as a writer and as a reader. An environment in which the value of writing drops to zero would impoverish me personally and the literary world in general. Yet people who love to read pirate books. Why? I found my answer in the book I read today, You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier.

Part of the reason digital piracy flourishes is the fundamental immorality of the internet as currently designed. (No, I'm not talking about porn sites--I'm talking about this blog, YouTube, Facebook: the bits of the internet all of us use every day.) How can that be, you ask? Isn't the internet just a tool that can be used for good or ill?

While the internet certainly contains numerous tools, it's more than that--it has become an environment in which many of us spend a significant fraction of our lives. And that environment--or any environment, for that matter--has a profound influence on our actions.

The popular conception of morality is that it's something innate to individuals. Most people think of themselves as moral, but can readily identify others (a mother-in-law, a spouse's friends) who aren't. In fact, for most of us, morality has far more to do with our circumstances than any innate characteristic. A famous study Malcolm Gladwell discusses in The Tipping Point found that most seminarians would stop to help a person in distress if they were told they had plenty of time before their lecture, but only 10% of them would stop if they were told they were late. To a lecture on the Good Samaritan, no less. Similarly, cities have discovered that they can cut crime rates merely by cleaning up graffiti and broken windows--the people haven't changed, but the environment around them has.

Would thousands of people have stolen ASHFALL if they had to come into my house and look me in the eye as they took it? Of course not. The internet is immoral as currently designed precisely because it creates conditions in which immoral behavior is easy, anonymous (or nearly so), and so widespread as to become a social norm. (Lanier never calls the current design of the internet immoral, by the way, but that's the logical outcome of his arguments about transient anonymity and mob behavior.)

I can hear the howls of protest from pirates. File-sharing is not stealing, they will say. I'm not depriving anyone else of a book when I pirate it. And in a sense, they're right. Stealing is an inadequate metaphor for digital piracy. Lanier suggests a better one when he compares digital piracy to counterfeiting.

Currency and books only have value (except perhaps as fire-starters) when they're scarce. Counterfeiting doesn't take money from anyone--rather, it devalues all money in exactly the same way that digital piracy devalues all content. Counterfeiting is a worse crime than theft because it hurts the entire society, not just one individual. That's why faking a $100 bill (or even just holding a fake with fraudulent intent) is a felony that will get you 15 years, while shoplifting a $100 item is only a misdemeanor. Counterfeiting undermines the value of currency; digital piracy undermines the value of most types of creative endeavor. Piracy is far worse than mere theft. In fact, the term pirate has too much of a romantic connotation--let's call them counterfeiters instead.

I can hear more counterfeiter howls. Elitist, they will cry. Everyone should have ebooks, even if they can't pay! Information wants to be free! I actually agree with the first statement. Everyone should have access to books--which is why copyrights are issued for a limited period (and why recent expansions of that period should be rolled back). There are literally tens of millions of books that are free and legal to distribute. Recent titles should be distributed in physical and digital form by free public libraries which have paid for the rights to the books.

The second statement is so wrong-headed it's dangerous. It places information--bits in our computers--above the humans who consume and create it. And remember, "worthless" is a synonym for "free." True freedom demands a rich flow of information which can only be achieved by paying for the efforts of content creators--if information ever does become free, humans won't be.

What can we do? Lanier suggests that we redesign the internet, putting into place a system that rewards content creators and prevents the worst abuses to civility. He proposes placing content in the cloud, rather than on our devices, and charging a small fee that compensates creators when the content is accessed. Another idea he espouses is ending all forms of transient anonymity, so that bad behavior will follow its perpetrators, whether they're anonymous or not--i.e. you'd still be able to be anonymous on the internet only by assuming a persistent fake identity.

What do you think will help end counterfeiting and make the internet a more moral place? Let me know in the comments, please. 

The Costliest Price for Ebooks? Free.

My debut novel, ASHFALL, has become popular enough that it's being widely pirated. Oh. Joy.

For the last week or so, I've been having a remarkably civil conversation via email with the owner of one of the pirating sites. It's not so much that I think I'll change his mind--I'm pretty sure that the next time someone changes their mind due to the internet will be the first--I just want to understand what motivates him to take the considerable personal risk of owning a pirate site.

It turns out that he feels justified in what he does because he believes he is helping authors--he's tasked me with reading extensive selections from Cory Doctorow's writings about the benefits he gets from making his ebooks available for free. Now Doctorow is both smarter and a more accomplished author than I, and I have no doubt that making his ebooks free benefits him. But here's what he gets wrong about the ebook market: an environment in which the value of a book descends to zero hurts both authors and readers. In the long run, the costliest price for ebooks is free.

There's no doubt that copyright laws are in serious need of overhaul. As currently written, they excessively protect corporate interests at the expense of individual consumers and content creators. But the important part of copyright law--of any law, actually--isn't what's written down in the law books--it's the social norms and  habits that follow from the law.

I learned this viscerally during the year I was a foreign exchange student in Brazil. On my way out of the airport in Cuiaba, we slowed nearly to a stop at every green light. I tried to ask why, but my broken mix of Portuguese and Spanish wasn't up to the task. I had my answer soon enough though, as I saw cars ahead of us blowing through the reds at cross streets, full speed. Does Brazil have traffic laws? Yes, but the norm is that traffic lights are suggestions, not mandatory, so every intersection becomes a high-speed game of chicken. And to insure a car in Rio costs about a third of its purchase price every year. A similar phenomena applies to speed limits in the United States. The limit in Indiana, where I live, is 70 mph, but the norm is that people drive 75-80, and most of us tend to get annoyed at those going much slower or faster.

When laws work, they become a benchmark that sets a social norm and creates the habits that govern our day-to-day life. Right now, the social norm is that people who create and publish books deserve to get paid for their labor. Most people make sure the authors they enjoy do get paid, either by checking their books out from a library (which paid for the books) or by buying them.

Could I make more money giving ASHFALL away for free, like Cory Doctorow? Maybe, at least in the short-term. He's right when he says the biggest challenge facing new authors isn't piracy, it's obscurity. But my personal test for whether my behavior is moral or not is this question: If everyone behaved this way, what would the world be like? And if we all pirate books--or even give them away for free--the social norm becomes that books are free. And in a world where authors don't get paid for their work, I (and thousands of other authors) can't continue to write. Such a world would be considerably poorer for readers and writers alike. Which is why the costliest ebooks are free.

By the way, at least one of the sites pirating ASHFALL is charging for it. If you pay anything less than Amazon's price for ASHFALL, currently $8.98, I don't get even a penny.