Internet Book Piracy Page 7

  Her rationale is that it is virtually impossible to stop the pirates, so you should do what you can to use them for promotional and sales purposes—a kind of “If you can’t beat them, join them” approach. Or as she puts it:

  “My view as a strategist is that it is very difficult to get the pirates to stop, so why not work with the pirates? Use your book as a loss leader to a certain extent. Obviously make the money where you can make money. However, you can also monetize what the pirates are doing by using them to bring people to your website.”

  Another way to monetize what the pirates are doing is by mentioning a product after you set up an affiliate link, so that any clicks on that link in a pirated copy of your book bring you income. As Shepard explains:

  “Say you’re talking about shopping carts, because you’re teaching people how to put a website up with a shopping cart. You could put a link to the cart and say: ‘Hey, here’s a fantastic shopping cart.’ Then, if they click on that link in your book, you get a percentage from the shopping cart people. Or set up a link to any products you like. So the whole point here is that it’s great if you make some money on the sales of the book. But if pirates take a hundred thousand copies, that’s great, too, because you are making money when people click on the links in your book and buy something as a result.”

  Still another way to monetize a pirated book, Shepard suggests, is to include a link to your website and an incentive to get people to go there, such as by inviting people to go to your website to learn more. Then, once they are there, you can get their email address or other information, say by having them fill out a form. As Shepard points out:

  “You want to get people to go to your website to see more, because the most important thing is to gather people’s information. If somebody downloads your book, whether they buy it or because they’re a pirate, you don’t get any of that information.

  “Say I download your book from Amazon. You have no idea that I’ve done that. So you need to capture me, but how do you do this? For that, you need me to go to your website and maybe do an opt-in or something like that to get more information they want. One way to do that is to place at the end of your chapter or in a smaller version of your book a phrase like: ‘If you want more information on this, go to my website.’ Then, you capture that person there by saying, ‘If you want the rest of this information, just give me your email address.’ Or you give them a chapter in return for their email address.”

  The strategy is to give out some information, causing the recipient to want more, but the only way he or she can access it is by providing some personal information or paying for the additional material, or both. As Shepard puts it:

  “In other words, the only way you can get whatever this thing is or to get more of it is for you to register on the author’s website.

  “It’s the same kind of approach used on many TV shows. Often a show will try to get people to go to their website, because they want to monetize them. It could be any TV show. Whatever it is, a little announcement comes up on the bottom of the screen that says something like, ‘Want to find out more about this? Go to www.cbs.com/underthedome’ or ‘thebridge’ or whatever the name of the show is.

  “You can come up with creative ways to get them to sign in at your site. For example, the new Hawaii Five-0 did a show where they had four different endings. They invited people to go to their website and vote for who they wanted to die. Then, they could win something. And the next week, at the TV show, they showed the ending with the most votes, although they had all the endings on their website. Thus, in this way they were trying to drive people to that website using their Hawaii Five-0–related swag and questionnaires to answer in return for an entry.

  “So in both cases, the filmmakers are capturing those people with an appeal to do something, such as join their cause, and that’s what authors need to do.

  “For example, musicians do this all the time with their own music, though you can’t take a quote or tiny piece of music you haven’t written. But if you wrote that music, you could put a little piece of it out there, like on iTunes, though when you click on iTunes, you only get a minute, or even a few seconds. Likewise, you can put out a short piece to everyone, such as on your Facebook page or YouTube account.

  “Then, when a person likes something of yours, you say in an email, ‘If you like this and want the rest of it, go to my website.’ Then, on your website, they pay you 99 cents and you send them the mp3, CD, DVD, or whatever.

  “So again, you are sending a little tiny piece of whatever you are producing creatively as loss leader. Then, you monetize what you would otherwise be selling on the backend.”

  This approach is very different from the “go after the pirates to defeat them” approach that is common. But in Shepard’s view, that approach hasn’t worked because it’s like the whack-a-mole effort, with an elusive target that keeps coming back again and again. As she explains:

  “You would think a lawyer would say, ‘Sue the bastards!’ to get rid of the pirates or be compensated for their damages. But the whole point of this alternate approach is that going after the pirates is like scooping a bucket out of the ocean. I think that a lot of lawyers and people seem to think that a creative work is like a pie, in that if somebody takes a little piece of the pie, then I don’t have that piece of pie anymore. But with copyrighted and digital work, pirating that work is like taking a bucket out of the ocean. But when someone does that, can you even tell? No, you can’t. It’s not like taking some physical property, because when you take that it’s gone. So that’s the problem. A pirate can take a copyrighted work online, but it’s still there and it’s so hard to stop the pirates from doing this. So the next question is how do you monetize it? How can you profit from your creative work other than this way?”

  While directing pirates to a website to buy other material might be one approach to monetizing piracy, another is providing an alternate platform where writers can gain compensation, such as a Netflix- or Hulu-type service for books. Still another approach to compensating writers for work that would otherwise be pirated is some kind of application that provides a small payment anytime a particular work is shared. An example of this is the AtContent system described by its co-founder and CEO Alex Semeny:

  “AtContent helps bloggers and writers protect their content from plagiarism and piracy outside of their own sites and blogs, so they get compensation for it.

  “For example, say you are a writer or blogger, and you have your own blog. There is a problem when a lot of people steal your content, but you know nothing about this audience outside of your blog or website who is reading your content. So you don’t know who is in the audience and therefore you don’t have any way to control this content or date who’s reading it and when. Also you lose the opportunity to build a partnership with these other bloggers who are copying and spread your material, because you don’t know who they are.

  “So what AtContent does is we allow bloggers to install our special plug-in on their blog and synchronize with our platform. After that, any other person can still illegally post their post to any other site, but with our content duplication, it is like embedding YouTube videos on any other site. And the author of this content then has the ability from another site to update, track, or write about this content on other sites. Plus the author can see the complete statistics and analytics about the audiences on all of these sites.

  “So this system is a way of bringing a whole new audience to the author of the content, and it gives him or her total control on this content outside of his or her own site. And he could even use this to contact those reading his material elsewhere, and let them know that he has other available content that they can purchase.”

  Plus, the AtContent team is developing still other ways that the original content creator can be paid for his work, which are still in the development/testing phase. For example, one approach is to provide a way to pay the author of content for every thousand views. As Semeny ex
plains:

  “One way this might work is if the author of an ebook publishes his or her chapter as an article by using Adcontent technology with plagiarism and piracy protection. Then, with this app in place, the other person can legally post the original author’s chapter to another blog, and if this chapter gets over one thousand views there, then the person who posted this chapter will pay the author of the ebook for each one thousand views of the material posted. In this way, the person posting the material will have an incentive to make money for him or herself by posting it, and at the same time the author will get paid.”

  In sum, these different approaches to monetizing pirated content are ways to deal with the seemingly impossible and time-consuming task of stopping the pirates. While some pirates may be put out of operation by the crackdown efforts through law enforcement of litigation, others take their place, and many pirates subjected to restrictions and penalties will find some way to come back again. But through these various strategies of monetization, instead of being victims of piracy, affected individuals can find ways to monetize by getting the pirates to buy other material. This can be material handled through referrals to the author’s websites or other content for sale. In addition, low-cost alternatives can make it easier for pirates to simply purchase something legitimately, or authors can create a legal platform for compensation from the poster, who is generally posting this material to make money from the author’s work. So it becomes a win-win for the pirates and the author, who is no longer a victim.

  PART II

  The Problem of Internet Piracy

  CHAPTER 8

  A Rebuttal to Book Piracy Advocates and Apologists

  GIVEN THE ARGUMENTS PREVIOUSLY CITED by the researchers and online community members featured in Chapter 5, I wanted to start this discussion of the problem of piracy for writers and publishers (as well as filmmakers and musicians) with this rebuttal to the piracy advocates. For under the cover of claims about how they are actually benefiting writers and publishers, they are taking their work, without any payment to or permission from the writer or publisher whose work has been taken. As noted in Chapters 6 and 7, some individuals have found ways to gain some benefits from piracy, such as by using it to publicize their work and gain more income by directing readers of their purloined work to their website or source of other books for sale. Or they have found work-arounds such as featuring their work on platforms where readers are charged a small amount for each download or streaming of their book.

  But whatever they choose to do to freely give away, distribute, or sell their work should be their choice, since they have written or otherwise created the work in the first place. The choice of what to do shouldn’t be up to others who pirate their work. The harms to writers and publishers can be very real, despite the claims of benefits to them made by pirates and online sharing communities that pirate their work without the creator’s permission. This is true regardless of what they may choose to call themselves, such as researchers and students, and regardless of the arguments they may give about the many benefits to writers and publishers.

  Writers and publishers, just like those in the music and film industry, know the harm the pirates are causing. Individuals as well as companies have lost millions of dollars because their work has been pirated, and some individuals are barely surviving because their income from books, records, and indie films has been severely reduced by the thieves who have made their work available for free or for a small payment that doesn’t go to them but to the pirates.

  Such pirates can wear many hats, from the owners of websites with pirated material to the uploaders and downloaders of copyright-protected work. But whatever their hat, they are violating copyrights and taking away income that belongs to the copyright owners. It is not just a civil violation, but a crime of theft—stealing from the copyright owner, and when multiple files are involved, generally valued at $500 or more, depending on the state, this is grand theft which is a felony (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_theft).

  Today the criminals are rarely caught and the crime is barely prosecuted, because intellectual piracy is so rampant, and the police and federal agents have other priorities in violent crime. Also, few civil suits have been filed so far, because of the time and energy involved in going after the pirates. But now there are new efforts to pursue the pirates through both criminal prosecutions and civil litigation, such as a 2010 lawsuit by Wiley and five other publishers against RapidShare, based in Germany, for pirating its books. The lawsuit requires them to monitor its site to ensure that copyrighted material is not being uploaded and prevent unauthorized access to the material by users, or be subject to substantial fines for non-compliance (http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-69777.html). And Wiley obtained one default judgment against one BitTorrent sharer for its Word Press for Dummies book for $7,000 for copyright violation and counterfeiting (http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/john-wiley-sons-wins-default-judgment-in-peer-to-peer-lawsuit), though for the most part, most civil litigation and criminal prosecutions have largely been targeting the pirates of films, music, and software, and the sellers of counterfeit goods.

  Though these efforts against the book pirates are still limited, such efforts against intellectual piracy are much needed, because the pirates are doing serious harm to the victims. Some of the other strategies to combat piracy—such as finding other platforms for selling books at a lower price to make pirated books less attractive or using pirated books to direct traffic to one’s website to sell other books—might work for some. But they ignore the critical requirement that authors and publishers need to have a choice on how they want to sell or distribute their books, and piracy takes away that option.

  It’s the distinction between someone choosing to give their property to someone, which is a gift, and someone taking their property without permission, which is theft. Certainly, the pirates have their defenders, primarily other pirates who are hosting, uploading, or downloading copyrighted material without permission. In effect, the uploaders and downloaders are like the receivers of stolen property, who are claiming they have committed no offense by using this stolen property themselves or claiming that they were entitled to take this property, because it is in a file that can be easily duplicated and shared, unlike a physical object. Another argument is that he or she was just making this material available for the common good. Or maybe the pirate cites the familiar refrain that “information wants to be free.”

  But it doesn’t matter how many mea culpas or excuses the pirates and their advocates give, including saying that the popularity of pirated books means that writers and publishers should recognize the new model and adapt to it. It is like arguing that just because criminal gangs have gained power in much of Mexico or that ISIS now has taken over certain cities in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria, residents should bow to the new overlords who are making the rules. But generally writers and publishers don’t want to submit to the pirates; they want to maintain or regain the power to control their work, so unless they give their permission, the pirates have illegally taken their work and infringed on their copyright—a position that law enforcement takes, too, as it seeks to fight back against the pirates, generally by targeting the most active pirates who are doing the most business, and thereby costing writers and publishers the most money.

  So now, it’s time to counter these common arguments and excuses. Following are the major arguments and rebuttals.

  It’s not stealing, because people who download free copies of the book wouldn’t have bought it anyway.

  But that isn’t true. There is an inverse relationship between piracy and book sales, meaning that the more a book is pirated, the more the sales go down. For example, in a March 20, 2013, article, “Book Piracy and Me,” which is no longer available online, Charles Sheehan-Miles writes, “In each case when a new title has been released sales dropped significantly, after the books made it only to the main book pirating sites such as Mobilism, TUEBL and Mobile9.”
In a March 14, 2013, discussion no longer online, “Online Book Piracy: The Myths and the Facts,” A. Giovanni points out the commonly recognized truth reported in multiple studies: “Numerous surveys have come to the same conclusion: piracy causes a drop in actual sales and deprives the authors and publishers of income” (http://voices.yahoo.com/online-bookpiracy-12048507.html).

  I have noted this sales drop myself in my declining royalty statements for a number of books, including A Survival Guide to Working with Humans and 30 Days to a More Powerful Memory, both published by AMACOM and widely pirated. On one site, scribd.com, which also has legal content, the books were repeatedly uploaded by multiple users with thousands of downloads. It is unlikely that many of these readers would have bought the book if they weren’t offered the chance to get it for free. Certainly, individuals have the option of not buying the book or of borrowing it from a library or a friend. They just don’t have my permission to steal it by getting a free pirated copy of my book.

  There would be no need for piracy if people could easily buy the book at a low cost.

  That’s not true either, now that most books are available on Kindle, Smashwords, and various ebook platforms and are priced at around $2.99 to $3.99 for most new books, and some are available for as little as $.99 or nothing, since new books are available for a few months for free through Amazon Prime and authors can elect to post their books there in return for a promotional push. Ebooks represented over a quarter of all book sales in 2013 (http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2014/ebook-growth-slows-to-single-digits-in-u-s-in-2013), up to about 30 percent in 2014 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/02/10/amazon-vs-book-publishers-by-the-numbers), and about 50 percent of all Americans own an ebook or tablet (http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/01/16/e-reading-rises-as-device-ownership-jumps). Those who want to read low-cost books can easily do so—and those who don’t yet have an e-reader or tablet can buy one for as little as $60 for an Amazon Kindle reader.