Copyright and Piracy Issues
Surrounding E-books.

Piracy is the unauthorized copying and/or distribution of copyrighted material, be it computer software, e-books, or any other item which is copyrighted. It can also take the form of bootlegged articles of clothing (in which case it falls under the form of trademark infringement.), but we shan’t concern ourselves with that in this discussion. With respect to e-books, the issue of piracy is of paramount concern. As authors, we make our money off of sales of our e-books; whenever someone illegally copies them and/or distributes them, we lose. As authors, we are capable of losing big money to piracy when it comes to selling e-books. As e-book publishers, we are especially vulnerable to piracy and illegal copying/distribution of our e-books. E-books are computer files, and they can be copied with the same ease as any computer file. Since e-books are typically small, they can be copied to floppy disk. Even the large e-books can be saved to what are known as flash drives (or thumb drives, so named because the storage device is literally no bigger than the size of your thumb.). As a small publisher, we have a duty and obligation to education the public about copyright, under what circumstances our works can be copied, what the punishments can be…most importantly, we are also in a position to encourage the public to follow the copyright law through education. It is the strong belief at New England Press that an educated public is the best defense in preserving the copyright law, in a form that is fair to all parties concerned. For you, the reader, your right to make archival copies and reuse e-books in whatever computers and/or readers is threatened by the current copy-protection schemes designed to keep you from printing e-books and limiting the number of machines from which you can read your e-books. I always balked a bit at that possibility when buying e-books, and it took me a bit of time before I got used to the idea. But I’m still not used to the idea of not being able to print an e-book (even in part), nor use it on any computer I see fit to use it on, and I think it hurts us as authors and publishers in the long run if we insist on encryption schemes that limit the buyer from using e-books wherever they see fit to use them. The right for the purchaser to make copies of books is something assured by the fair use doctrine; encryption schemes run directly counter to that and tend to generate badwill toward publishers and businesses who use such a scheme to prevent their works from being illegally distributed. In order for copyright to work to the advantage of all, each person or entity has to do their part. In order to allow publishers to continue selling their e-books and software with no copy protection, consumers have to do their part by refraining from distributing their e-books to others, unless you get rid of all the copies you’re holding on your computer or floppy diskette (or whatever storage medium you have your e-book on.). The end user is supposed to have the freedom to do with his book whatever he sees fit to do. That has been an established proposition of copyright law for a long, long time (try to research that.). That is what allows people to sell their old books to the library (or to others) when they no longer want them. The principal was simple: The publisher already made his money on the sale of the book, and so the buyer got the right to dispose of the book in whatever manner he wanted to. The thing was, the person was getting rid of his copy of the book, and didn’t have another copy (or if he did, that copy was already paid for.). Computer files allow you now to hold more than one copy and distribute the other, to infinity. By holding to the law, we authors benefit…and you, the reading public, benefit as well from e-books that don’t have file encryption and can thus be used anywhere the proper software is installed. It is easy to think you are doing no harm by copying an e-book and giving it to a friend, but actually…you are.
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Let me give you an example. Let’s say I sell a copy of my scholarship book for $12.95, and the buyer then makes a copy to give to a friend of theirs. Let’s say 100,000 people do this. I’ve sold 100,000 legitimate copies, and each of those 100,000 people makes one copy to give to a friend, which I don’t get paid for. If the buyer buys the e-book on Amazon.com, I (as the publisher/author) make $5.83 for each e-book sold (publishers discount their price 55% in order to sell on Amazon.com presently. If the e-book sells for $10.00, your profit is $4.50.). For each of those books given away, I’ve lost a total of $583,000.00, if 100,000 copies of the book are circulated without payment to me. 200,000 copies of my book are out there, and only half of them are paid for. That’s a serious economic loss to my business…and to me, collaterally. You might not like it if you lost 100,000 sales, and $583,000.00, yourself. This is exactly why e-book publishers encrypt their e-books: They figure people are going to redistribute the e-book they buy to a friend, and every time that’s done, it’s a lost sale to the publisher and the author. It doesn’t take long for

Today, you have various copy-protection schemes for computer software, for DVDs, and for e-books. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or DMCA) makes it a federal crime for any person to defeat the copy-protection schemes that are a part of computer programs or DVDs. E-books are specifically exempted from the law…not because of a provision written in the law of itself, but by the Library of Congress, which was given the authority to grant exceptions to who can defeat the copy-protection schemes put in place by publishers. The reason: owner-exclusive file encryption of e-books prevents them from being playing properly for the blind. Microsoft Reader has an audio component in it that allows the user to listen to e-books…as long as owner-exclusive encryption isn’t used to protect the book from being copied. Any e-book compiled in .LIT format (the one that Microsoft Reader^®uses) can take advantage of that feature. If a blind person gets an e-book that was encrypted using owner-exclusive encryption, they are legally allowed to use software to defeat and strip the encryption, so that the e-book can then be played—and heard (Note—only the blind can legally do that. Any questions about stripping away copy protections should be asked to a competent attorney.).
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According to the Bureau of Justice statistics, businesses lost over a billion dollars to copyright and trademark infringement in 2004. The rate of copyright infringement is around 28% by some estimates, but that rate could be higher, since the official statistics on copyright infringement suggest a relatively small problem (I think if the problem were really that small, businesses wouldn’t be spending the money they are in order to keep their works from being copied.). Few people are prosecuted for copyright infringement, but when they’re prosecuted, the monetary losses for the businesses involved are huge. One case that went to trial for copyright infringement of videos and DVDs reported resulted in losses of over 10 million dollars to the companies affected. For 2002, the number of persons and/or businesses tried and convicted of copyright infringement were…(quote statistics from the BJS home page.)

E-books are stunningly easy to copy and redistribute, especially over the Internet. This ease poses special challenges to the entire idea of copyright…just as the printing press did upon its invention over 500 years ago. Before then, books were handwritten by scribes. The printing press made possible the mass dissemination of books and the ideas they contained. Now…the next major revolution in the printed word is here, and with it comes issues the authors of the copyright law didn’t even begin to consider. Because e-books are so easy to copy and redistribute, it also makes it easy to violate copyright law, accidentally or otherwise.

The entire idea of copyright as to allow artists and authors (and other creative types, including software programmers) to profit on their works by selling them—without fear of someone else taking their works and also selling or otherwise distributing them without pay to the original author. At the same time, copyright also allows for the public who buys copyrighted works to be able to use and/or reproduce them, to a certain extent. This is the idea behind the “fair use” doctrine, which has been a part of U.S. case law for over…years (track down the copyright law’s evolution). Fair use basically allows any person to reproduce portions of a copyrighted work without fear of violating the copyright law. Fair use is what allows you to legally copy books for private use without penalty to the buyer; it is considered fair to be able to use the purchased work as you wish, for private use, without personal gain (or to be precise, loss to the author.). It’s also why you can copy books in the library (as long as you don’t copy the entire book!) without fear of violating the copyright law. Finally…it also allows you to quote some else’s work and words without being in violation of the author’s copyright (otherwise, you’d be breaking the law by using the author’s word without attribution to him or her.). The marketplace of ideas has been expanding for quite some time; this country does a lot of business in the production of ideas, which are sold as books (either traditional, or e-books.). We are moving to an information economy, where the production and sale of ideas is now fueling economic activity. The invention of the e-book has now opened new frontiers for authors, and fresh challenges to copyright. I think the final part of the solution is to offer affordable products, be they e-books, or CDs, or DVDs. While cheaply priced products might not end all case of copyright infringement, I should be interested to see if the rates of copyright infringement fall as the prices for e-books and other digital products falls. It is cheap to reproduce CDs, DVDs, and other digital files; it has been for quite some time. For a long time, record companies made a killing, because it would cost only a dollar or so to rip a CD, and then they’d sell it for up to $25.00; then the courts moved against the record companies and forced them to sell their CDs at the same price as cassette tape (or close to it.) or albums. For e-books, the overhead and cost to produce them is nearly nonexistent: All the publisher has for cost is the price of the computer and monitor. Period! Spread the cost over 10,000 copies of an e-book, and the cost is indeed negligible. Even when web hosting is factored in, the cost is still negligible. It is pure profit for author and publisher; especially for the self-publisher. As e-book publishers, we are in a unique position to control the prices of our e-books, and make them truly affordable to all who have the readers (both the hardware and the software) in their possession to enjoy e-books. They can easily be the poor man’s book of tomorrow…if we keep it that way. In so doing, we take away the incentive for copying and distributing e-books.
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Ultimately, copyright protections expire, and those works we create become a part of the public domain. That was also the goal of the copyright law. It was intended to be only temporary, allowing creators to profit from their works while they were alive, and for a number of years afterward (now, it is 70 years after the death of the author.). All of these works that now have copy protection and schemes to limit where they can be played will all have to be released in unencrypted form one day as it is…consider that for a moment.