Your conscience should bother you. What you did was wrong. To make up for it, you need to send them a new replacement copy now that the book is back in print. And send them another book as interest.
Hypothetically, of course, I would have no problem pirating a book that was out of print and that wasn’t easily available used. (If all extant copies are >$20 for a mass market paperback, that breaks my barrier of “easily available.”)
However, if it then came back into print I would feel morally obligated to buy a new copy. I’ve done that. (I don’t feel obligated to buy a new copy if I have previously bought an old used copy, though I sometimes do if it’s a book I really like and the old copy is pretty old.)
People I know operate on a try it -> buy it level of piracy without any moral qualms. If they don’t like it, they delete it and don’t buy it. If they like it, they go on to buy it. If there is no normal way to buy it, then that’s that, they just keep it.
Hypothetically, I have no problem with this method even though ethically/morally I would say it’s not squeaky-clean.
I came to the conclusion a while ago about a multitude of situations that I don’t mind people flouting the law in minor ways (ETA: except traffic laws. I shake my fist at folks who flout even minor traffic laws), so long as if they get caught, they don’t go crying about the injustice of it as if they did nothing wrong. Own the things you do.
This dilemma comes up surprisingly frequently in my corner of the academic world.
A lot of the scholarly works that we need are out of print, and cost either $500+ to buy, or cannot be found anywhere at any price. Luckily, there is such a thing as interlibrary loans, but this only takes care of the situation if there’s only one person who needs to use the book. What do you do if you have ten people who all need that one book to study for an exam? What if there aren’t enough ILL copies to go around?
I did. With “abandonware” games. Companies thought they had no interest in publishing them again, given the assumed very low number of potential customers for a 10-15 years old game, and had no particular reason or incentive to allow their free reproduction, either. Surprisingly often, nobody knew who was the actual copyright holder, given how many companies had been bought and rebought in all or in parts, over the years.
For the record, things have changed, and many oldies are now actually available for sale, companies having realized that there was, in fact, a market. Probably by noticing the traffic on websites that were offering pirated oldies.
I have no moral qualms about having done that. Thinking of it, there’s a book I want that has been out of print for years. The author had her time of glory dring the 60s and since fell into obscurity. Won’t ever be printed again according to my book seller because nobody remembers the author or the book (I found two tomes in my parent’s attic and would want to read the third). I would have no qualms downloading it, either.
Besides, copyright laws are intended as an incentive for creativity. Sitting on them because you think (rightly or wrongly) that it would cost you more to issue again the game/book than you would get from the sales has the exact reverse effect. Nobody will ever get anything from the product as long as you do that : the public won’t benefit from it, the author won’t benefit from it, etc… I think that distributing (illegally) free copies of it is a net benefit and doesn’t harm anybody in any way.
That is exactly the intent of copyright - to establish that the object is my work and I can sell it or not as I wish. Even if I have sold copies of it before, I am not obligated to continue to do so. I may have a perfectly legitimate reason to stop selling, I may not. It doesn’t matter.
Until one has made every effort to contact the copyright holder and establish why the (in this case) book is no longer in print and gain permission to copy, the copyright is legally and morally inviolable.
Whether current copyright covers too long a period of time is another debate altogether.
This happens frequently in my area of research, as well – sometimes with books published less than 15 years ago.
There was a new collection of essays out on Louis the Pious (ed by Judith Herrin) back when I was a grad student, and for those of us on the Carolingian history course, it was a must-have. It was something like $50 new, though, and for a poor grad student in the early '90s, a heck of a lot of money. So we had to photocopy the chapters we needed.
It goes now on Amazon and other used book places for crazy-mad prices due to being out of print. Peter Godman’s books on Carolingian poetry are just as steep.
ETA A quick flick on Amazon shows one of the Godman books ranging in price from £170 through to £400. I think it sold originally for $35.
My current favourite ‘Download this book for free!!!’ site is advertising a collection of essays to which I am a contributor. No way am I clicking on the pdf though, because 1. I’m sure it’s some horrible virus trap and 2. the book isn’t due to be published until February 2015. We’re still copy-editing it!
While in general I am in favor of strong copyright protection, I can also recognize there are abuses. I think there does need to be some provisions for “abandoned” content, and a means for interested parties to legally access such content. Such provisions would have to include an effort to contact the copyright holder, but if that is impossible I’d like to see a way to make such things available to people again.
Perhaps in return for the right to re-publish a contribution can be made to a trust of some sort. If the copyright holder comes forward they can claim that amount and re-assert copyright. If not, after a certain time period perhaps the money can be released to some sort of foundation that oversees the reclamation of abandoned works, or something.
No, the point of copyright is to give the creator some time to profit from their work before it enters the public domain. If you stop distributing, it should automatically go into the public domain after some set amount of years.
I pretty much agree.
My friend sent me a set of copied from TV VHS for Quark, years ago. I have no qualms about it, I doubted if anyone would ever issue a DVD of it- turns out I was wrong, but one day I’ll buy the DVD, so it’s all good.
One thing I kinda hate is when there is a DVD, but it’s not available on my “Region”. This annoys me all to fuck, and I’d happily grab a bootleg in that case.
If I found a safe site to play “The Ancient Art of War” I’d do it.
I find it hard, however, to believe that a book cant be found in a used copy.
Here’s what I do- I add it to my Wish List on Amazon, and check it once a week or so. Sooner or later the price gets acceptable.
For example- Why the hell cant I buy “The Almighty Johnsons - Complete Season 2”?
No, he paid for it, didn’t he? And you know what they will do with the “new replacement copy now that the book is back in print. And send them another book as interest”? Sell them for peanuts in the “Friends of the Library” sale.
That’s disputable. Copyright is a pretty artificial concept, and its intent isn’t as obvious as you say. You might desire, as a creator, to have total control over the use of your creation, but it doesn’t mean that’s the reason why it was thought it would be a good idea to create this concept.
For instance, you might want to have full control of your own image too, but as soon as you go out in public, you completely lose this control (at least in some juridictions), whether you like it or not. I can take a picture of you and publish it if I feel like it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you’re drunk and decide to climb on a soapbox and make a speech, I can publish it too, and if you regret what you said later, that’s too bad for you. By making them public, you lost your “moral” right on your image/words.
It’s not particularly obvious that originally legislators wanted you to be able to retain this control after you have made your work public. The simplest, most obvious view is that they thought it was fair that you could get some profit from your work. Which, in my opinion incidentally gave you the opportunity to prevent any further distribution (you were drunk when you wrote the book, and regret it).
Also, I believe it was thought as an incentive to produce works, serving a public good. People know they can make money with their books/music, so they will write more books/music. Society at large benefits from granting this peculiar right (pecliar because “you must not take this thing this guy made” is natural while “you must not make the exact same thing this guy made” isn’t at all), by getting more creative work done. Hidding it under a stone defeats this purpose. You get what I would call a priviledge (nobody can make again this thing even though they know about it, could redo it and could benefit from it, and it wouldn’t deprive you of it) and society gets nothing out of it.
Finally, your position is nice in theory, but in practice, the reason why these games/books aren’t reproduced isn’t that the noble creator has second thoughts about its creative work. It’s because the company owning the rights couldn’t care less about this product, don’t think they would make much money out of it, have forgotten it even existed, has better ways to use its limited time and funds, etc… In some case, it’s because it deliberatly wants to make it unavailable (in order to orient the demand towards another product, for instance). It’s a net loss, and in my opinion totally defeats the purpose of copyright.
Scenario back at cha.
Last year of college. Father Victory (aka the Divine, whereas Father Victori was known as the Humane) asks the three guys with longest arms to go to his office and bring back the three piles of books they’ll find on his desk.
The books in question were photocopies of a book that was out of print, virtually unfindable and, since the editorial house had been under for several years and the battle over the carcass expected to last for several more, unlikely to come back into print any time soon. Nobody was even sure who owned the rights.
He told us to please if we happened upon a copy of the book that wasn’t second hand, to buy it, and then proceeded to distribute them.
I’ll buy it if it’s available legally. But when it’s not because of a situation like that, or when I pay for a physical copy of the CD/DVD and Sony proceeds to call me a pirate if I try to play it on my computer… it’s “fuck this shit” time.
No, not exactly at all. Not even close.
It says right there in the Constitution* that the intent of copyright and patent laws is “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” The means by which this intent is to be accomplished is through laws securing you an exclusive right to your work for a limited time.
But it’s clear that a law that protects your exclusive right while you’re being a dog-in-the-manger with your creation flies in the face of the intent stated in the Constitution. A “use it or lose it” clause in copyright law, if such a clause were to be legislated, would be perfectly in keeping with the Constitutional intent.
*You’re welcome for the earworm, assuming you recognize it.
Yeah, but if they couldn’t replace the book at the time (which seems likely), he denied the opportunity to read that book to a whole bunch of other people. The fact that they dinged him for $4 for ‘losing’ the book seems rather inadequate.
Tru dat. He should donate money instead - and a good deal more than $4.
I’ve always been under the impression that it’s perfectly OK to download mp3s for CDs you already own. Would the same apply for books/ebooks?
Anyway, for something that’s out of print? I’d download it in a heartbeat. I’m not saying anyone else should, but I would–and have.
Abandoned copyright… I would have zero moral qualms.
Not exactly the right impression for either. IANAL but copyright law generally allows for fair use and backup. Ripping for personal use or backup is fine. Downloading you can make an argument it’s fair use/backup; I have no idea if that even comes close to holding up. Even if legal it exposes you to having to legally justify your case if you are caught along with the other downloaders.
Worse is that the usual method of distributing pirated works is not strictly a download, it’s called filesharing for a reason. It’s both downloading and uploading. If you go a route like using a torrent site you ARE infringing rights by making copyrighted work available to people without license to them. You become the pirate. That has held up in court even for those that claimed ignorance.
Keep in mind that unless you thwart digital copy protection or other specific violations of DMCA, copyright violations are not criminal; they’re civil violations that are up to the property owners to police, not the Feds. And the companies that hold these copyrights happen to be the biggest violators of copyrights, knowing that they aren’t likely to get successfully sued in most cases. It’s not “immoral”, it’s a “business risk”.
I agree. The current term is 70 years after the author’s death, or for works for hire where the author is not identified in the registration, 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation (whichever is earlier). That starts for works in 1978. The terms vary for works prior to that.
The fact is, for anything created after some date in the first half of the 20th century, it’s possible it may never expire, thanks to laws that keep changing to make the term longer. The guy behind Creative Commons licences wants to fix this, so that we once again have actual material going into the public domain, while still allowing companies to protect trade copyrights (like Mickey Mouse).
When people give me CDs they want me to copy, I load them. If I listen to them more than once or twice, I buy them. If I don’t, I delete them (I don’t archive them, so they don’t appear on my next computer.) When people ask me to make copies of CDs, I politely decline and say that I believe that songwriters and musicians deserve to get paid for their work.
Regarding the OP, I have at least one digital copy of an analog album that’s out of print, and I’m happy to copy it and give it to people. I researched it first and found that the artist wants to release it again but can’t get the necessary permissions (and hasn’t been able to for many years).
I don’t feel bad about copying things that nobody’s trying to make an honest buck by publishing. On the other hand, I don’t go looking for freebies on the Internet (unless you count the Gutenberg project, http://gutenberg.org , which is all public domain.)
I did the same thing, only once, way back when I was in high school. There was a book I’d checked out from my HS library, and I loved it. Apparently nobody else did, though, because nobody else had checked it out (you could see form the little card–remember those?) So I kept it, told them I lost it, and paid for it (and it wasn’t a token payment, either–I paid the cover price). The book was out of print then, and I don’t think it’s ever gone back into print. I still have it. The guilt has faded after over 30 years.
But I’ve never done it again since, nor would I. Hunting down hard-to-find books on the internet is part of the fun of the chase.