digital piracy |

Synchronicity, much? On Friday, I was part of a government-run workshop on the reform of New Zealand’s copyright laws. On Sunday, I discovered my House of Thorns on two ‘free book’ websites. Both seem to be run out of the same country, but the perpetrator’s name is only on one of them.

He’s a man who is part of a political movement to get rid of all intellectual property protections. He claims that books are ‘loaded by readers with the permission of authors’, but his own site says, ‘we assume in good faith that those who load books have permission to do so.’ He replies to authors who ask for their stolen material to be removed from his site with some version of: ‘I will obey the current law which says I have to take this down, but I’m doing you a favour finding you readers, and if you can’t make money without interfering with my business, you need a new business model.’

I heard some of the same arguments at the workshop: pirate sites help authors by exposing them to readers who can’t afford to buy their books; copyright law currently stifles creativity and economic growth by limiting access to works; people should be able to use work created by others in order to create something new.

So let’s take those points one by one.

Pirate sites do not help authors

The thieves who take our books like to refer to Neil Gaiman, who famously responded to the widespread theft of his books by making American Gods free for three months, and seeing his sales go up. He compared pirate sites to libraries, or borrowing a book from a friend, and those comments been quoted ever since. This was the best-selling and rightfully admired Neil Gaiman, right? With the 10th anniversary expanded edition of a book that was best-selling and multi-award winning on its original release. With all due respect to a magnificent writer, his test doesn’t tell us a lot about the impact of piracy.

Others have had very different experiences. Maggie Stiefvater, a best-selling fantasy author, saw a huge drop in sales when her books were pirated, which led her publisher to cut the number of book copies for the next in series. So she also did a test, creating a book that had the first four chapters, over and over, plus a message about book piracy. Read the linked article to find out what happened.

The pirate sites aren’t doing this for love. They make money from ads and other digital products associated with the site. The pirate that stole House of Thorns commented in an interview I found that he is running a successful business (his pirate site) that pays him well.

Every book people download from his site is a loss to the author, and even a couple of hundred downloads might be enough to change an author’s career, sending the signal ‘no one wants to buy this book’. I have friends who have changed genres or stopped writing altogether because they’ve poured their heart and soul into a book for the hundreds of hours needed to bring it from conception to birth, put in more grueling hours marketing it, and had little or no interest. Good books. Well-researched, well-written, well-edited books. The books they might have written are now lost to readers.

It is professionally hindering advancement of people who would follow the footsteps of great authors who have significantly contributed to the creative narratives that societies need regardless of geographical boundaries and situations.

No one will be encouraged to be authors or to dream big of having their works published because they are not compensated or recognized. The monetary side of publishing a book, for instance, is a manifestation of a person’s recognition of another person’s ability and creativity. By trivializing the act of downloading a material without properly compensating the author or publisher, you are, in effect, putting a big stop to the wheel of what we know as a creative process. [Independent Publishing Magazine]

Most readers who download from pirate sites can afford to buy them

Readers who can’t afford books don’t, by any means, make up the bulk of those who download from pirate sites. The Guardian article notes research showing that most such thieves belong to the higher socio-economic groups and are better educated than average. Even if they don’t want to shell out for a book, thus helping to support creativity and innovation, they have alternatives.

Cash-strapped readers are able to belong to libraries, borrow from friends, buy second-hand. Each of those instances depends on an original sale, and — in the case of libraries — potentially an on-going payment based on the number of copies in libraries (at least, that’s the case in New Zealand).

I read voraciously. I buy books and I borrow from my library, because I expect my author accounts to fund my reading and I just don’t earn enough to pay for all the books I read. But I well know that every pirated book that is downloaded is a lost sale. I won’t do that to another author.

The pirates argue that I’m getting my books to people who otherwise wouldn’t read them. That wasn’t Maggie Stiefvater’s experience, but let it pass. Where did the idea come from that people are doing me a favour by reading my books? Don’t get me wrong. I love my readers, and I’m glad they enjoy my stories. I reckon we’re in a partnership, where I provide the words and you provide the images. But if you don’t think I’m worth the pittance I charge for each book, then do yourself a favour and read someone else.

By the way, I always enable the loan function when I load a book on Amazon, so if you want to lend a book of mine you’ve enjoyed to someone else, you can do it. Amazon has instructions for how that works. I also have a special price set for libraries in the book aggregator I use to reach the places where libraries buy books, so if you’d like your local library to carry my stories as ebooks, tell them that all the novellas are free to libraries, and the novels are 99c (US dollars). I’ve been poor, and I love libraries.

Copyright law protects creativity so people can get on with writing books

If you’ve been around on this journey with me for a while, you know that my goal is to make enough from writing so I can leave my day job. I’m not blaming pirates for my failure to get there so far. It’s a very complicated market, and well oversubscribed with books, including those ladled onto Amazon by people who are gaming that giant’s algorithms. But it bears repeating, every book of mine downloaded ‘free’ from a pirate site is a lost sale — a few cents that would have taken me closer to my goal.

I figure I can at least double my output if fiction was my full-time job. If you think that it’d be a good thing for your favourite authors to write more, then not downloading stolen books, and reporting digital piracy when you see it, is one thing you can do to help.

People should get permission before remixing the creative works of others

The workshop on Friday included creators of content from the gaming industry, musicians, photographers, and artists. I was the only author in the three table-sessions I attended, though others might have been in the room. The other creative types all agreed that their industry had benefited from remixes — games that used characters from popular games, clips of music put together into a new work, images that provided a base from which an artist created something original. I guess the fictional equivalent would be fan fiction.

Under New Zealand’s current copyright law, getting permission to do this kind of work is tortuous and often (when the creator died forty years ago or is unknown) next thing to impossible. I can buy changing the law to make it easier for orphan works to be used in this way, but I still think that some kind of regime that requires best efforts to get permission gives the original creator the protection that encourages creativity.

And I think the moral rights of a creator not to have their work used a way that offends their belief system is pretty important, too.

I write my own stuff; don’t steal it

So those are my random thoughts this sunny morning in a New Zealand autumn. I write my own stuff, and I’m going to continue doing so, despite the sea monsters, dragons, and pirates that infest the wild corners of the indie publishing digital world. I can’t stop the thieves. I barely have time to notice when people steal my stuff and put it up online for other people to pinch. But don’t expect me to be grateful. If you load a book onto a pirate site, you’re stealing. If you run a pirate site, you’re stealing. If you download from a pirate site, you’re stealing. The justifications such sites use are a pack of lies. Don’t be a thief.

Time to go to the day job.