Licensing restrictions for ebooks

It's safe to say that I read a ridiculous amount of material every day. I'm a speed reader by nature, so the 300-500 items I get daily through my RSS feeds don't seem like much. I read so fast that I'd probably be bored otherwise.

It has its drawbacks, of course. It's very nearly pointless for me to buy books casually anymore; they'll last me a few hours, if that, and then I have to either keep them and reread them, or take them to a second hand store or a willing friend. I do enjoy them, but it gets to be a little bit wasteful.

Ebooks were the perfect answer. I could download books to my little iPod touch, and read them when I have an hour or two to spare. I have classics like Sherlock Holmes that I never get tired of, and a few other free titles from Harlequin and whatnot. I didn't feel the need to buy any ebooks, because I hadn't seen any that really caught my interest - or that would justify the cost.

They're very much something to fill the time when I'm bored and out somewhere that has no books or other diversions around. I have said that I'm not all that enthusiastic about ebooks, but again, that's mostly to do with the price vs. functionality; I always have my iPod with me, and although I prefer real books, it doesn't cost me anything to download an app and grab a few out of copyright titles to keep me amused.

All that might have changed today.

I was reading through my feeds, and I happened to come across a post by Natalie Whipple which mentions a book called Into the Wild Nerd Yonder by Julie Halpern. Well, suffice to say, she had me at the title - I wanted to read it, and I immediately dropped everything to look at it a little more. Then I decided I really, really wanted to read it - but it looked like the kind of book that would only last me a few hours. No problem, I thought, I can get it on the iPod if it's not too expensive. I won't have another book clogging up the house, and I'll have another happy little diversion for the next time I'm out and about.

After a further investigation, this is what I found:


In case you can't read it, that's Amazon telling me that I can't have the ebook. It's not available in Europe. I could buy the hardback version from Amazon.co.uk for a mere £9.61, but I don't want the hardback. I want the damn ebook, and I want it downloaded to my iPod so I can read it tonight, if I choose - not in two days time when it ships to me.

Hello, Julie Halpern? And her publisher? I want to give you money. I want to buy your ebook. More than that, I want your ebook to be the first one I actually spend money on. Right now, you're stopping me from giving you money, and I have to question what exactly is going on if you're happy with that.

I mean, I do understand that there are licensing restrictions for physical books. You want to be able to sell the rights to publishers in different countries and different languages, even if the distinction between the US and the English-speaking parts of Europe is largely irrelevant. But really, ebooks? From Amazon? The product is exactly the same. The company you're dealing with is exactly the same. The company sells your book outside the US. Why on earth would you only allow them the ebook rights for within the US?

If this were a movie that had just been released in the US and wasn't expected in other markets for a while, people would already be going to their preferred method of piracy to find it. This is because people will get what they want, when they want, in the form that they want, and trying to sell them what you want them to buy is a waste of time if it doesn't match up.

As for me, I'll have to settle for Sherlock Holmes, and accept that I will not be giving my money to Julie Halpern and her publisher for the time being.

[added by edit]

Alright, after reading Natalie's comment below, and commenting myself, I want to set the record straight here. My post above implies that I'm blaming Julie for the lack of her ebook over here.

That's not what I intended.

I apologise for being a bit of a jerk. No excuses; I take this stuff seriously, and getting frustrated is no reason to get pissy as well with someone for a situation out of their control. So - sorry, Julie. Really. I don't blame you at all.

When I asked, "why on earth would you only allow them the ebook rights for within the US?" I thought I was addressing the publisher. It doesn't look like that though, and for that I apologise. I'll be more clear in future.

As penance, I shall order the hardback from Amazon immediately.

'Three strikes and you're out' is not a game

This isn't baseball, and I wonder if perhaps the Irish High Court should really take note of that.

Three strikes laws are nothing new. They are the type of law, however the wording actually states, that disconnects a person's Internet connection after they have been accused of a third copyright infringement. They are law, or are in the process of becoming law, in Sweden, the UK, and France.

They are also a waste of time and money, a threat to human rights, and a threat to the livelihood of anyone involved in the creative arts.

In January 2009, Eircom signed a deal with the major music labels to disconnect persistant filesharers. This is not a law, per se, but a simple agreement between them and the IRMA - if they receive notice of evidence of filesharing against a particular connection three times, that connection is cut off. There was a High Court challenge regarding the legal status of an IP address as personal data, but that has now been resolved, and the agreement can go into full force. This is even worse than a law - there is no oversight, no accountability. And with Eircom signing up to this, the IRMA will have the leverage to bully other ISPs into accepting the same deal, or face being sued.

So. Let's hypothesise. Eircom receives a notice that a particular IP address has downloaded an infringing file. They duly send out the notice to the mailing address associated with that IP - they have no way of knowing whether the notice is accurate or not, and little reason to care.

But is that evidence accurate? It may not be, if it's similar to the system used in the UK by ACS:Law. The Internet Service Providers Association in the UK was not convinced. See BeingThreatened for more information on this. The content in question also may not be infringing - in Viacom's lawsuit against Youtube, for example, there were a hundred clips listed as infringing when Viacom had uploaded them itself! Fair use is not mentioned, so background music in a home video you share with your relatives abroad may get you disconnected (legally, it's still infringing material) - and we have no assurances as yet that the IRMA will not pursue people in that fashion. This, by the way, is the same organisation that claimed that people who copied music to their iPods from their CD collection were breaking the law.

Does the evidence actually point to your computer? It may not. The IP address points to your connection; your gateway to the Internet, as it were. Several computers in one house all use the same gateway. They have no way of telling which computer connected to that gateway actually did the infringing.

What if the gateway belongs to a business with a dozen employees? Maybe a rented accomodation, where students are coming and going all the time? A school? How do you tell who actually did it, and who is just a bystander? What if the culprit hacked into the connection, as many savvy users can, without the owner's knowledge - through a wireless router, for example? The IRMA apparently doesn't care, and Eircom stands to lose more through getting sued than it does by losing one customer's business.

But nothing can change the fact that this is punishment on accusation; the customer is guilty until proven innocent. It's like getting arrested for being nearby when a crime occurs, and the actual criminal is let free to break the law again. And Eircom will likely lose many customers as they move to other ISPs, but that is a stalling tactic at best if the IRMA manage to foist their agreement on all Irish ISPs.

I did state, though, that this is a waste of time and money. Allow me to expand on that.

The entire point of this agreement is to discourage copyright infringement, and encourage the legal sale of creative works. I'm sure it looked good on paper, but in practice, it simply does not work. Sweden saw a drop in filesharing traffic after implementing the IPRED law, but the levels simply bounced back and even increased. People moved to streaming sites, or bought VPNs that encrypted their activity and essentially let them fileshare with impunity. And the question of whether IPRED actually increased legal sales is up for debate; an increase was seen, but was that a result of the law, or of better availability of legal music through sites such as Spotify? Correlation does not equal causation. Attitudes to filesharing remained largely the same, and to date there have still been no IPRED convictions.

The lesson to be learned here is, as I've said before, that people will get the content they want in the manner they want, and laws that are easily circumvented by the technologically astute are hardly going to stop them. The time and money spent by the IRMA and Eircom on this is simply a waste - it will not even slow down piracy, if the figures from Sweden are anything to go by, and it is certainly not guaranteed to catch the actual pirates.

That the three strikes laws are a threat to human rights is quite clear; they are a threat to free speech, and the free access of individuals to information. Internet access is considered so important by the EU that it adopted an Internet freedom provision in the Telecoms Package last year, in which "the right to an effective and timely judicial review shall be guaranteed" in the case of disconnection because of copyright infringement. Alas, this provision only applies to states, not private ISPs... Technically, what Eircom and the IRMA are doing is legal, but that doesn't make it right.

But these laws are also a threat to people involved in the creative arts. I think I should know about this, as I am a person involved in the creative arts. The reason is simply this: the law disconnects people from the Internet. It cuts them off from the greatest communication medium the world has ever seen.

Without access, they cannot talk about my books on their blog. They cannot tweet about me, the author. They cannot buy a paper copy of my book as a present for someone. They cannot discuss my books with other fans. They cannot buy merchandise from me. They cannot find out about book signings.

They certainly can't buy my damn ebook.

The greatest challenge facing me, as an aspiring author, is obscurity. It's the same challenge facing all but the biggest names in music, books, and movies. And it makes me goddamn furious that the IRMA and licensing authorities like them feel that they can cut me off from my fans because of filesharing. Piracy isn't right, and I know I'd rather not see my books pirated, but this is not the answer! Removing one major avenue for people to consume and purchase media will not encourage them to consume and purchase elsewhere; in fact, if they're disconnected because they have an infringing copy of my work, it could damage my reputation as an author because they are likely to blame me personally!

I do not want my name connected with such idiocy, especially when there is money to be made by creative individuals who understand the power of the Internet. The Irish High Court certainly don't have a clue, judging by the comments of Mr. Justice Charleton. They should have done even the most basic research on other implementations of three strikes, and how they affected filesharing. They might have noticed how an IP address may not correspond to the infringer, and how there is enormous scope for innocent people to be disconnected. They might have considered other effects of disconnection such as inability to pay bills online, inability to complete coursework, inability to do business, inability to spend money on legitimate sites.

The fact that they seem to have ignored all this suggests to me that they are not treating this issue with the respect it deserves. They are not acting in the best interests of Irish citizens.

'Three strikes and you're out' is not a game.

Read any good ebooks lately?

The brouhaha over Amazon and the larger publishers setting the price of ebooks has become rather deafening lately. Doom and gloom all around; writers lamenting the death of traditional publishing; the impending Apocalypse. You'd think that everyone has stopped buying books in dead tree form altogether.

Well - it could just be me. I read a lot of publishing blogs, and I get the feeling that many people are uncertain and worried. The Internet wreaked havoc with the recorded music industry after all, and the publishers have had long enough to see how well EMI and Sony are doing with the digital medium. Perhaps they see their own business suffering in the same way. Perhaps they're already forecasting the rates of ebook piracy. Perhaps, perhaps.

The New York Times has an interesting article on the ethics of pirating ebooks when you already own the title in hardcover or paperback. This has already gone around the writers' blogpsphere, and opinion in general seems to be that the Mr. Cohen is talking crazy. The first thing I noticed about the article, unfortunately, is the improper use of the word 'illegal' - downloading a pirated copy of an ebook is copyright infringement, to the best of my knowledge. Illegal and infringing are not the same thing. He also refers to it as theft - again, not the correct term, as theft implies that you have deprived someone else of ownership of an item. A digital ebook copy cannot be stolen, but it can infringe.

Anyway, pointless word games aside - Mr. Cohen states that it is indeed ethical to download a copy of an ebook if you have already purchased the dead tree version, and the writers and publishers that I like to keep tabs on take serious issue with that. Their position, predictably, is that writers and publishers deserve to get paid regardless - that Mr. Cohen seems to be advocating that if you buy a book once, you should automatically gain free access to every version of that book, such as in audiobook format or as a movie or what have you. On one level, they do have a point - but, of course, I don't fully agree with them.

Writers and publishers should get paid, but the point that seems to be missing here is that arguing about being paid will not stop people from pirating books. People will justify it to themselves using Mr. Cohen's rationalisation, or they will do it out of convenience, or they will do it because they have no money, or just because. It can't be stopped, and trying to slow it down may backfire spectacularly - see the RIAA shutting down Napster, for example. People went to the bittorrent networks, and now that that's being restricted or throttled in some places, they're going to VPNs that cannot be traced. The lesson that should be learned here is that trying to get people to pay for music after they've spent years getting it for free is just not a good use of your time, especially when the pirated version is better than yours.

With the price fixing going on at Amazon for ebooks, I'm very much of the opinion that the publishers have not really learned anything. The recorded music industry might be in much better shape if they had made music available cheaply and easily online. It would have sent a great message to consumers - here's the music you want, when you want it; all high quality, with extras like cover art, and it costs very little for this great convenience. But they chose to keep it expensive, and DRM made it inconvenient, and people had no reason to go back to their services no matter how hit and miss pirate material was.

Publishers have the opportunity here to avoid that mistake, but it's not going to happen. Amazon have set the price of ebooks around $9.95, $12,95, $14.95. It varies depending on the release. And you'll buy a Kindle copy that you can only read on your Kindle device, that you can't give to someone else, that you can't doodle in, that is far more fragile, that needs to be charged, that may delete your books without your consent at any time. If it breaks or is stolen, you lose access to your library. And the main trade off is that you can have hundreds of books on one device.

Colour me unimpressed, to be honest. Part of the reason I don't own one already, despite being a geek, is that I don't want to pay for what I view as less functionality. I'd rather have a paper book that doesn't need batteries, that I can spill coffee on without it being a disaster, and that I can sell to a second hand store or give away once I'm done with it. I'd rather have a library all around me instead of one locked up into one little white tablet.

I really think they should drop the average price of ebooks to about $3 to $5 across the board, and less for out of print titles. They should be portable to any device, and DRM free. Publishers should concentrate on making ebooks bought from them a hundred times more convenient than trawling bittorrent networks, and set the prices good and low wherever possible. Offer ebook discounts to book clubs and libraries, for example. Bundle the ebook with the paper version. Let schools pay a set fee for all ebooks released, and let their students order the paper version or audio books at a discount - and include bonus material where you can. Make it simple, make it cheap, make paper books worth hanging on to - and believe me, they have not gone the way of the dodo yet, so there's plenty of space there for a company with a great marketing team to make money.

It galls me that publishers have the most powerful communication medium in the history of mankind at their disposal, where their customers are closer than ever to them and to each other, and all they seem to want to do is drive people farther away. From the perspective of someone on the outside looking in, they seem to want to stop people from spending money on their books; they seem to be working very hard to kill all the wonderful possibilities of the Internet with shortsightedness. I hope I'm wrong, and the Amazon price-fixing works out, but... well. Time will tell, I guess.