this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Imagine spending years writing a book for the benefit of others, only to have it downloaded, stripped of it's licensing and given away to others for free and being robbed of compensation for the time you invested.
Imagine buying a physical book, reading it, and putting it on the bookshelf in your living room, only to have family members and friends borrow it and read it for free.
I imagine your circle of family and friends is a lot smaller then posting it on the web and have people downloading it.
Yes because that's totally the same as xeroxing someone else's work and handing it out in the street to anyone who wants it, all day every day.
Lol
Dinosaur detected
Lmao
As soon as they stop using DRM to force you into a specific ereader ecosystem, you'll have an argument.
Until then, I'm going to strip the DRM off of a book I buy on Amazon and read it on my Nook. All other parties involved can fuck all the way off.
Those public libraries are ruining it for everybody!
Those public libraries pay to have those books on their shelves 🤦♂️
Do they pay every time someone checks out a book?
I recently listened to a decent podcast related to this very question (link)
Probably the wrong forum but I will say it’s… complicated. Physical books wear surprisingly fast, so popular books actually make money for publishers and authors, even by being in libraries.
I’m not of the opinion that DRM is good, but I do understand that writers have to make a living. But it’s the markets fault for not providing unobtrusive DRM or solving this economic problem in a way that doesn’t suck for end users.
I don't know, that's between them and the publisher.
E: weirdly enough, I happen to have just got a library card a couple days ago so I hopped on Libby and, sure enough, they have a finite number of copies of each book that you can "borrow". So pretty much the same as renting them from the library without the pfaff.
I mean the original comment was about buying digital books. :)
Guess what? They pay for those too.
Imagine buying a book only to find out that you can't read it anymore because the store you bought it from decided to remove it from sale and stop all downloads of it. You can't restore it from a backup because the DRM prevents that.
Imagine going on the piracy Lemmy community and preaching the moral wrongs of copying.
Seriously though, DRM is a cancer. I usually pirate my books from LibGen, but I buy them on the Kobo store at the same time to support the author. It's easy to strip DRM from Kobo and they're better than Amazon, but I would really prefer not to support a store with DRM in the first place.
Can anyone recommend a DRM-less store? Something akin to GOG for books.
Imagine being so entitled that you think you have a right to others' work for free.
Why do people join communities for things they hate just to shit on everyone? Are you addicted to being angry?
I didn't join anything. It's just at the top of my "all" feed.
I speak out because the sense of entitlement among people in this community is fucking insane.
@HughJanus @snowbell
Piracy is more often then not a symptom of the problem rather than a problem itself.
For example, game piracy was much more common prior to steam as it was just much much more convenient to pirate at that time.
Good luck with your moral crusade then Mr or Ms HughJanus
It sounds like you wrote a book for profit then, not for the benefit of others.
It sounds like you’d prefer a world where only well-off people spend the time writing books, since making money from writing is obviously not cool
Yes, most people do.
What a very depressing view of human nature you have.
...so doing work and expecting to be compensated for said work is depressing to you? That is Olympic grade mental gymnastics.
I'd say every book was written for profit.
Then you'd be saying something that's incorrect
Imagine selling someone a book and then later clawing it back without a refund and without giving the victim a big fat warning that you're going to do so.
God that would be awful. Good thing that's not what we're talking about.
That's what will likely happen when this company eventually goes out of business. The DRM server will go offline, and the books will be inaccessible. Cracks like this one are an insurance policy for that eventuality.
In what meaningful way is this different?
@HughJanus
@cupcakezealot
this is not how compensation for writers works, generally, and also the whole idea is to break a traditional publishing system that exploits writers in favor of one where people directly pay the authors.
Go on then, tell us how compensation works. Authors don't get paid when they sell books, is that it?
What's preventing authors from selling directly?
Unless the book is being bought directly from the writer, isn't it really the publisher who is gaining the rewards? My understanding is that the writer is paid a lumpsum for rights of a book by a publisher.
If the entire motto is "benefit of others", the writer themselves can publish it for the public to read openly, or make it a collaborative project where their and other people's contributions are added together.
It's not black and white, both sides of a piracy debate (much like anything else) have their arguments, and could have had reached a better medium.
Sir this isn't a Wendys