Recently I was bemoaning on Facebook the fact that several favorite books from the 1980s were out of print - as in, no ebooks or dead tree editions are to be found anywhere.
Someone posted a link to a couple of sites where the books could be downloaded “for free”.
No, I didn’t download them. I don’t trust such sites - too concerned about viruses or copyright-violation-catching honeypots, and I don’t like encouraging copyright violators.
So the scenario is:
A book (or music, or software, or other intellectual property) is out of print and unlikely to be reprinted for whatever reason.
Therefore, the publisher / owner is not losing any money by such ad hoc distribution
But the item is presumably still under copyright, since that doesn’t expire for decades
And it’s something that could be easily duplicated for sharing (photocopying, electronic copies, or whatever)
Would you?
Should you?
For what it’s worth, I own real dead-tree version of both books, purchased at full-price retail (one in hardback) decades ago, so the authors got my money. Therefore moral qualms don’t apply in my mind in this scenario. Nonetheless, I did NOT download them for the reasons above.
Disclaimer: such sharing is illegal in the US, don’t discuss methods as that’s against board rules, I’m more interested in what people think of the moral issue at play ere.
I would make a further distinction regarding whether it is ever likely to be in print again. If it’s truly abandoned, then, well, morally, I’m not that squeamish about people stealing it.
I pick up objects along the roadside that have been thrown from cars: the “rightful owners” are out of luck. But that doesn’t apply to objects that have fallen out of the backs of trucks.
I agree with you about not violating copyright, and I would not want to reward copyright violators. The proprietors of those websites are presumably making money somehow from offering these downloads; if not from viruses or other malware that they are installing on your system, then from advertising or something else.
The rules of this board, I believe, preclude us from advocating illegal activity, so no, don’t violate copyright laws. I understand the temptation though. A generation ago, the motivation to violate a copyright was just to save money. Now in many cases the pirated product is actually superior in some way … free of DRM and/or advertisements, available in different formats, or even available at all.
SomeoneWhoIsn’tMe has pirated a lot of books, in print and out of print, He knows it is, well, similar in some regards to stealing, but due to his limited financial resources, and thirst for knowledge, he believes piracy is less unethical than ignorance. He tells himself he’ll buy the books that helped him once his situation improves.
It’s an interesting question. If it’s copyrighted but not in print and there is no avenue in which to pay for it then how can the holder of the copyright demand restitution?
I’m a huge believer in paying for someone’s work but I would like a legal opinion on it.
I’ve only ever done this once: back in the early 90s, I borrowed copies of a couple of long-out-of-print game books and made my own photocopies of them. These books were pretty much impossible to find at any price (I looked–and I would have been willing to pay a lot of money for them) so I figured nobody was losing any money on the deal. This was in the pre-web days of the internet, so stuff was hard to find even if it existed.
I wouldn’t do it now, though–too easy to find a copy to buy, even if it might take a while.
Well, its a slippery slope, but I’ve always felt there was some innate truth in the old saying “You can’t steal what you can’t buy”. At least as far as items that were once mass-produced & sold are concerned…
It drives me crazy when content isn’t accessible due to content-creator’s laziness or lack of effort to bring the content to market. When I would gladly pay. So someone in my situation might pirate because it’s not a financial hardship on the content-creator. But it seems like a real missed opportunity for people who deserve the money.
I laud things like HBOGo and more writers reclaiming their eBook rights from publishers, it’s easier, and safer as someone pointed out, and more heartening, to just pay the pittance. I think this problem will largely, though not entirely, go away.
As a publisher, it’s flattering when our books end up on free eBook sites, and I have had to hold back one author from putting his own books up on those sites for the attention. No problemo.
Hypothetically, if a work is out of print and I can’t find any used copies (which I would gladly pay a reasonable price for) I would have no problem with finding an alternative means of acquiring it.
Hello?!?!? Tell library I lost it, and give them their $4 for it!
I did this once, in the 90s, with “The Morning of the Magicians”(Talk about hard to find pre-Internet!)and my conscience bothers me to this day, even though the book is now back in print, and, I’m sure, that nobody is reading the new edition any more than they did the old edition!
Save your soul and balance your karma Handsome Harry: send that library a tax-deductible donation.
We have the technology for print on demand. If the market has abandoned the property, I say help yourself.
PS: Dear publishing industry: get it together, fools!
I probably wouldn’t have any qualms. In fact, someone who isn’t me was once given a much-loved children’s series on downloaded DVD when it wasn’t available legally (and was apparently really hard to find even illegally) and was very happy about it. It’s since become available legally and SWIM bought it, but actually the downloaded one was better because it included the CBBC introductions to the series and the host singing along with the theme tune so was basically a replica of SWIM’s childhood enjoyment of the show. Or so I heard.
But, unlike video media, another option with a book, if you have time to wait, is to email the publisher or even the writer and ask if there’s anywhere you could get a copy. The writer might have some old copies saved from the furnace after a run failed to sell and the publisher might be interested in putting it out in e-book format.
In Canada, there is a provision in the copyright law for something like an “abandoned” copyright. If the book is out of print and you have made a serious effort to find the copyright holder and cannot, then you can apply for a licence to copy it. I used this once (except I didn’t bother to ask for a licence). There were three authors, one of whom was in the office next door and was enthusiastic about reprinting it, a second was in California and gave permission. The third had died ten years earlier. I could not locate his wife or his daughter, although I tried and finally, I just reprinted it. Actually, a group of volunteers retyped it and it is now on my web site. I have no regrets. All three authors are now dead. It was published in Canada, although two of the authors were American.
I’ve been known to photocopy entire books that were out of print, especially older ones. I don’t feel bad about it – if I bought them from a used book store (even assuming I could find copies of these rare books there) the author wouldn’t have gotten a dime anyway.
When I was in grad school there was a particularly good textbook that went out of print. Students REALLY wanted it. They ended up copying the whole book and effectively printing their own copies of it. Book piracy on a pretty large scale. But the publisher wasn’t about to print new copies for them, and the library only had a couple of copies, so what else were they going to do?
I have never pirated anything, but IMHO the copyright laws we now have are the result of moneyed interests pushing changes in the laws through Congress before we, the people, had any idea what was happening. (I thought 28 years, renewable once, was the law for at least a decade after it had been changed to the current life-plus-several-decades.) As such, I regard these laws as morally illegitimate. (And arguably unconstitutional: how do century-long copyright periods, and abandoned but still copyrighted works, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”?)
And the current copyright regime has created damnable problems with abandoned works, in the absence of any need for the holder to periodically renew the copyright to keep it in force.
The principle of copyright is a good idea. But its actual practice has become screwed up and needs a lot of fixing.
This thread illustrates one area that’s a problem. Somebody can hold a copyright and simply choose not to use it - but at the same time prevent anyone else from legally using it. I don’t see how giving somebody the power to keep a work out of print serves the purpose copyrighting was designed for.