A little precision goes a long way in this kind of conversation.

Could be several people contributing to the bundles, and then one person bundling them up to get everyone the benefit of the added download speed of combined demand.

kdb

I’m like Beetlejuice that way. Or the Candyman.

But it’s your fault, O’Shea. Yours! My Busiek Senseâ„¢ is actually called “Google Blog Search”…

kdb

I’m not, of course, merely arguing that full-timers deserve their income protected, but that all comics creators deserve the benefit of copyright — that those who choose to can release their work online, but pirating the work of a part-timer struggling to make ends meet isn’t actually better than pirating the work of a full-timer. The point is the same for part-time actors or musicians or authors — the fact that they’re not making a living at it shouldn’t be used as justification to make what they do make off their efforts worse.

>> I suspect another of your arguments — putting items online will eventually make fewer comics available — also won’t sway those who aren’t publishing (scanning and releasing issues) but simply sampling what’s out there to read for free. Someone who just wants to read stuff may feel that it’s out there whether they look at it or not. >>

I don’t expect it’s going to sway many of them either, but that doesn’t mean it’s an invalid point, any more than the arguments that do sway them — “It’s free and easy!” — are valid justifications of piracy. But since P2P technology works better the more people are doing it, then each instance of it is helping other people pirate stuff, and the less it happens, the less convenient it is to do so.

And of course, “other people steal stuff, so I might as well too” isn’t much of a moral justification. And that does seem to be what we’re talking about — it seems pretty well agreed upon that whether rightly or not, it’s illegal, so what’s left is moral or ethical justification.

I do think the point that if you’re looking at something on your computer, you’re not just “looking at it,” you’re making a copy of a file on a server somewhere, is a fairly abstract point, but it’s part of the process. I hope it convinces some people, at least. I don’t expect it to convince many, but I think the lures of ease and low fear of reprisal are tough to overcome. Which doesn’t justify piracy either — it just acknowledges that people are more likely to swipe stuff if they’re unlikely to be caught, and it’s right there for the taking.

>> Personally, I don’t have a good guess what motivates those who release online copies.>>

I would assume it’s the idea of communal effort and benefit. If Pirate Joe buys 4 books a month, scans and publishes them online, and he’s part of a network of P2P file-sharers, he’s chipping in “his” books, and getting in return the ones that Pirate Pete, Pirate Sally and the the others in the network scan and publish that he now doesn’t have to pay for. His return on time and money spent ain’t bad.

It’s not as good a return as the people who don’t upload anything, and just read the stuff others pirate — but their advantage to the system is that the more of them there are, the faster the files download, so the core network benefits even from them.

There may be other motivations as well, but that’s the one that seems most likely to me.

kdb

I suspect another of your arguments — putting items online will eventually make fewer comics available — also won’t sway those who aren’t publishing (scanning and releasing issues) but simply sampling what’s out there to read for free. Someone who just wants to read stuff may feel that it’s out there whether they look at it or not. Personally, I don’t have a good guess what motivates those who release online copies.

It’s not actually a detailed law lesson — I pretty much only skimmed the surface of the concept. But if your point was that “theft” is the wrong term, then it certainly seems like you’re arguing for something more specific than colloquial usage.

>> When you say something’s been stolen, they don’t think in the fine distinctions you’re making, they think about taking objects.>>

Unless they’re talking about stealing cable, a common colloquial usage, or other such ideas — stealing my look, stealing his act, her idea, etc.

But my intent wasn’t to get off on a semantic sidetrack on te proper use of the word “theft.” It was that whatever erm is used, the practice still amounts to the taking of something (in this case, control) without permission. And that does does apply to online piracy.

>> Similarly, just because the law says something isn’t right doesn’t mean the majority agree with that law.

True. Which could set us off on a discussion of the purposes and effect of copyright in principle, but I’m not sure that’s really at issue here. I think the majority would agree that if Stephen King writes a book, it’s his property and he should be able to sell the rights to it, to publishers, movie studios, whatever.

So do the majority disagree with the concept of copyright law? Or, given the number of times people compare online piracy to library loans, is it more that they don’t seem to understand the difference between borrowing and republishing? Most people do seem to get the idea that they’re not allowed to print up a few thousand copies of LISEY’S STORIES and sell them or give them away, but they don’t see that putting it online amounts to the same thing. So I’m not sure it’s the law they’re disagreeing with.

There are people who do flatly disagree with the whole idea of copyright, but they don’t seem to be a majority.

>> Speeding is the most obvious example — people have “no right to do it”, according to the law, but just about everyone does.>>

And it’s not that great a comparison, to my mind, because people do recognize issues of scale in speeding. They may not seem to care about speeding, but it kicks in at the point the consider it a hazard, and really kicks in at the point that it causes damage — at which point, they will argue vehemently that that car shouldn’t have been speeding after all. Even if they don’t see the problem going 50 in a 45mph zone.

People take office supplies from work, too, but that doesn’t mean they don’t agree that there should be laws against stealing.

The issue of scale seems to be central to attitudes about what’s “harmless” and what isn’t when it comes to the law, but it doesn’t seem to be as central to arguments about online piracy — it’s regularly compared to minor infractions, while stealing a computer from the office wouldn’t as regularly be defended on the grounds that, “Well, Pete takes paper clips, what’s the difference?”

>> So as to Alan’s point, whenever someone asserts “this is wrong, no discussion required”, I start automatically thinking of exceptions, which exist for everything, even murder. Reductionist thinking doesn’t get very far with me.>>

I’m not sure I’d agree that’s what Alan said — and to some degree, you do have to get at the principle of things if you want to discuss them in principle, which involves some level of reduction. And you haven’t actually challenged the point he made, so much as the term he used. The exceptions you’ve discussed are exceptions to other laws — and certainly, there are exceptions to copyright, and many of them have been debated over the years, from the principle of fair use to archival copying and more. But rather than dismissing his point by calling it reductionist thinking, it seems to me to make more sense to address the point. Is online piracy the taking of something without authorization? If so — and given that there are cases where using copyrighted material without authorization is considered acceptible — is there a justification for it in this case?

>> I think copyright violation is near a similar tipping point as speeding, something almost everyone does in some form, whether it’s viewing an alternate region DVD or copying a track from a friend’s CD or reading a comic online or asking a friend to tape a TV show for you.>>

Even if it is, we’re back to that difference in scale — there’s a difference between a friend taping a TV show for you and publishing a bootleg movie on the internet, just as there’s a difference between going a few miles above the speed limit in light traffic on a highway and barrelling through school zones at 90mph at the end of the school day. Even people who commonly break the speed limit aren’t opposed to the idea of traffic safety laws, or the concept that speeding may be harmless in some situations but not in others. But the online piracy community regular defends broad distribution with the kind of comparison you give right here.

So why the disconnect in scale? I don’t think it’s because people are opposed to copyright any more than they’re opposed to traffic laws — I think it’s because online piracy is so easy that it feels small-scale even when it isn’t.

>> At some point, this discussion becomes academic, because it’s no longer possible to stop it, so the best question is “how do we cope with the new world?” >>

I don’t think so — or rather, I think the question you ask is salient and should be addressed, but I don’t think the issue of piracy is academic, any more than the issue of speeding is. To pick a different analogy, a farmer storing grain is going to lose some of it to rats, and whatever safeguards he takes, he’s always going to lose some of it. That doesn’t make the issue academic — it means that some losses are unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean there’s no point in defending against them. If you don’t, you’ll only have even more losses.

>> Trying to put a face on it may play on audience feelings of guilt or sympathy, but the alternate metaphor is, to use the cliche, buggy-whip makers. If one’s industry changes such that one can no longer make money the way one used to, then one needs to find alternate methods, not beg users to act contrary to their own interests out of emotion.>>

There’s a point there, too — though I don’t think the buggy-whip analogy works that well either, since the problem with buggy whips wasn’t that people wanted them for free and could easily get them that way. They didn’t want them at all, for the most part, so the market for them shriveled up. But it’s not as if the online piracy community wants Trish Mulvihill to go into another business — it’s in their interest for her to keep producing comics, because they want to read them. As such, at least one argument against online piracy is that the pirates are actually acting contrary to their own interests by making it less attractive to produce the material they want, but they don’t realize it. In that case, the solution (on that front, at least) is education; getting the idea across that people make these things, and if they don’t get paid (or don’t get paid enough) then the things won’t get made to pirate.

The reason to put a face on it is because the other side so often does, talking about sticking it to the RIAA or “The Man,” without taking into account who else gets stuck. That’s less an attempt to engage sympathy or guilt (though they’re in there, as surely as the flipside is engaging feelings of bravado and rebellion) than it is to communicate information — that there is a system here, and breaking the system won’t just result in just as steady a stream of free comics anyway. Creative work is made by people, and if the people aren’t compensated, fewer of them will do it.

So getting across the idea that everyday people — not just rich fatcats, who are easily dismissed by the argument that it doesn’t hurt them anyway — need an income to produce what the audience wants to consume doesn’t seem like an unworthy goal.

kdb

And appealing to people’s better side does not prevent an industry from also evolving; it is not an either/or situation.

I appreciate the detailed law lesson, but in colloquial usage, I suspect most people would call “theft of services” something more like fraud. When you say something’s been stolen, they don’t think in the fine distinctions you’re making, they think about taking objects. Which doesn’t apply to online copying.

Similarly, just because the law says something isn’t right doesn’t mean the majority agree with that law. Speeding is the most obvious example — people have “no right to do it”, according to the law, but just about everyone does. Another example: last time I read up on lie detectors, they said that they ask “have you ever cheated on your taxes?” and if someone says “no”, they use that as a baseline for a lie.

So as to Alan’s point, whenever someone asserts “this is wrong, no discussion required”, I start automatically thinking of exceptions, which exist for everything, even murder. Reductionist thinking doesn’t get very far with me.

I think copyright violation is near a similar tipping point as speeding, something almost everyone does in some form, whether it’s viewing an alternate region DVD or copying a track from a friend’s CD or reading a comic online or asking a friend to tape a TV show for you. At some point, this discussion becomes academic, because it’s no longer possible to stop it, so the best question is “how do we cope with the new world?” We may not have gotten there yet, which would account for the vehemence of the battle in some cases.

Trying to put a face on it may play on audience feelings of guilt or sympathy, but the alternate metaphor is, to use the cliche, buggy-whip makers. If one’s industry changes such that one can no longer make money the way one used to, then one needs to find alternate methods, not beg users to act contrary to their own interests out of emotion. (And I know you’re not doing that, but your comments reminded me of the movie industry PSAs, which I thought did.)

Not all categories of theft are about taking a physical object, though.

Theft of services, for instance, does not require that an object be taken — it covers the illegal obtaining of services, rather than goods, without proper compensation.

As such, copyright violation is the theft of something — it’s a theft of control. As Nat pointed out earlier, control is the essence of copyright, and it’s what authors and musicians and filmmakers and publishers truly deal in. Copyright is a limited monopoly on control of work one creates, granted by governments as a way of enriching the public good — the way the theory goes, if people create stories, songs, paintings and such, it enriches society, and thus compensating them for that by allowing them to profit by doing so gives them more reason to do it. [Patents are another version of the same thing, but they're of shorter duration because it's considered better for the public good for, say, a medicine to be available to all sooner than a novel. Novels can be waited for longer without it being a serious deprivation.]

Control is what creators sell — whether it’s a temporary and limited license, like when Stephen King sells the right to publish his books but not ownership of them, or a sale of all rights, like when someone writes an entry for an encyclopedia under work-for-hire terms. And use of that control is how publishers make money. When someone duplicates a creative work and publishes it online without permission, what they’re doing is taking that control, and asserting their own control over the work, even though they’re not entitled to it. And once that control is taken, it’s almost impossible to get back. You can recover a stolen car, but a stolen copyright can propagate forever, simply because it’s not a physical object.

That’s “theft,” at least in the way the term is used in the concept of theft of services. So it may not be as improper a term as all that.

But more to the point, and in the spirit of not missing the forest for the trees, Coil’s point is pretty solid, whether you quibble about his use of a particular noun or not. Call it “theft,” “theft of control,” “copyright violation” or “bleem,” it still seems to be a telling observation that doing something you have no right to do is still doing something you have no right to do, however you try to justify it.

Paul Worthington’s point seems even more central. Even if online piracy is actually helpful to publishers and creators (a concept open to debate, on both sides), the people doing the pirating don’t have the right to “help” in that way. If putting comics or music or movies or TV online for free will help sales, then that’s a choice the owner/controller of the material should be able to choose — or to not choose. And sure enough, some of them do choose to do that sort of thing, and some don’t. And those that do choose which material they want to distribute free and which they don’t.

And no, simply owning a comic book or DVD or whatever does not come with the right to republish it — and that’s not peculiar to publishing. I own a Honda, but I’m not allowed to duplicate it and sell it. I can’t even sell T-shirts with the Honda logo on it, even if I scan it directly from the object that I own. I own a house, but there are lots of bits to it — windows, locks, even the underlying blueprint design — that I can’t simply duplicate and sell, because what I own is the object, not the design. That it’s much harder to build a Honda CRV from scratch than to republish a Harlan Ellison story explains why the latter is more common, but it doesn’t alter the principle that yes indeed, it’s common to own things without owning the right to reproduce them.

That’s the heart of it — the right to reproduce them, control of the right to copy. A library pays for books, loans them out, replaces, sells or trashes them when they get beat up. A friend who loans you a DVD is loaning you the object he or she owns and (presumably) paid for, or someone did. Back issue sales are the sales of physical objects that have been paid for (in most cases, but if they haven’t been, there’s usually a theft or other violation involved somewhere). In each case, the copies involved were at least theoretically purchased at some point. Online piracy is not loaning, it’s republishing — and that’s what makes it different from those other examples. New copies are made without them being purchased or licensed. Call it “theft,” “theft of control,” whatever — it’s the republishing that makes it different from the legal transfer of objects bought and paid for.

So I think Brian’s absolutely right when he says that he sees those downloads and know they’re money out of his pocket (and his collaborators’ pockets). He may not know what percentage of downloaders are people who’d have bought the work, and what percentage are in essence saying, “Not wanting to pay for it entitles me to copy it for free,” but that percentage, whatever it is, is not only lost income on that project, it represents a devaluing of future projects. If BOOK X makes less money due to piracy, then the next book isn’t as valuable to the person paying for the rights to it, to the control that the online pirates appropriate.

And that represents more than a minor financial hit for millionaire publishers. Pirating movies won’t hurt Mel Gibson, but Paramount may make up the lost revenue by not raising salaries for grips, makeup artists and others. In comics, the dwindling sales of the initial releases have already resulted in letterers and colorists seeing their rates cut or frozen, and they generally don’t get back-end money on the TPBs. How much of that is due to piracy is unknown, but it’s not unreasonable to assume some is, given how widespread piracy is. Putting Trish Mulvihill’s face on it may better get the idea across that yes, it hurts people than putting Paul Levitz’s face on it, and there’s more of an argument that it hurts Trish than Paul.

I agree that publishers need to adapt to new media and new distribution methods, and find a way to make the Internet better work for them. For that matter, I think letterers and colorists should get royalties, if we’re moving more substantially to a royalty-based revenue system. But that doesn’t justify the piracy, or support the arguments that piracy has some arguably positive effects, so it’s okay.

Sorry for the long-winded post.

kdb

And I was actually responding to Alan’s “theft is theft”, not Nat.

The only person who can actually shut down comments is you, Johanna.

I doubt Nat means to shut anyone down literally, and I am somewhat bewildered by the seeming vehemence with which you’ve taken to replying to him. But hey, this is your house.

We can discuss this topic with the proper terms, instead of using incorrect equations meant to shut down anyone disagreed with.

And Coil is the Kurt Busiek of this thread. Alan Coil wins!

Seriously though, any rationalization of downloading comics for free that I read annoys me. (The system is flawed, so I can’t be really in the wrong…) When I read these defenses, all I can think of is seeing how many of these folks would consider going up to a creator at a con and taking one of their books for sale and just walking away without paying. When confronted, your defense? “I was just taking this one to see what it was like, but I may come back and BUY one of your other ones. I might even pay for this one, too, if I like it enough.”

On another note, without agreeing with everything he’s saying, I’m glad to see Nat continuing to comment here.

“Is there any objective harm, other than the loss of potential revenue, that is inflicted upon the copyright holder by someone who reads the copyright holder’s work online for free?”

(Oddly, the email for this post arrived after the email for post 44.)

I’m not sure what you consider “objective” harm. There is the control that is being taken from the legitimate rights holder. I’m not sure folks who aren’t emotionally connected to their creative work would understand this, but there can be a sense of violation in situations like this — much as one might feel violated if someone snuck into your house and looked around, even if they didn’t take or break anything.

And when a scan is distributed, it’s also taking away control over presentation. For some works (and to some creators), this might not make much difference; for something like, say, Howarth’s WRAB Pirate Television or Spiegelman’s Open Me… I’m a Dog, the effect can be quite tied to the paper, to the physical presentation. Altering the experience of the work can alter its reputation and the repute of the creator. It’s understandable that one might view that as either minor or as simply another impact on “potential revenue”.

My guess is that 90% or more of the people stealing comics from the web would not buy all of DC’s/Marvel’s monthly output for $20 if they could. Nor $10.

Their reasoning would be, “Why should I when I can get it free?”

Whether a person admits it or not, it is stealing. That is where all the arguing falls apart. Theft is theft.

One may not think the current status is fair, but that is no justification for theft.

Thad:
While I can certainly respect your choice not to support RIAA members, I hope you’re not locking out all labels because of that. RIAA boasts that 90% of all legit sound recordings in the country come through them… which means that 10% of them don’t. And considering the RIAA represents most of the stuff that sells the big numbers of units, then the number of different albums represented by those unaffiliated label is likely a good multiple of that 10%. I’m not saying that you give up buying some band you like, used, and instead buy some band you don’t like, new… but there is a lot of good other stuff out there.
If you’ve never checked out eMusic, last I saw (admittedly, a fair while back) their lineup was mainly made up of unaffiliated stuff, including some very enjoyable material (to my tastes)… and they’ve been offering DRM-free music since, well, before they were called eMusic.
Purchase-based advocacy works best when you don’t just take money away from the folks who don’t support your goals, but when you give money to those that do. (Unless, I suppose, it helps a teeny label grow so big that they think they should join the RIAA, I suppose.)