<p>Well yesterday's post about book theft (sorry -- I am determined to have a euphemism-free year) provoked quite a lot of interest. Thanks for the comments -- for, against or somewhere in the middle. There were salient points raised in many of those comments too so let me try to address them in a few posts here because this is a big subject.</p>
<p>First... what's wrong with ripping of ebooks when we all share books with friends and libraries share out books too?</p>
<!--more--><p>I wouldn't dream of stopping people sharing books with people they know. Or trying to ban the sale of used books. Or arguing against something like <a href="http://www.bookcrossing.com/" target="_blank">Bookcrossing</a>. I don't get a penny out of all those extra people getting the benefit of my work. But someone, somewhere bought the original book, and sharing physical copies is something that's been going on for centuries, part of the way we enjoy and spread the message of the printed media.</p>
<p>Libraries are the same, and in Europe authors are rewarded for their popularity by getting fairly modest sums of money in the form of public lending right. I'll be getting my own PLR statement later this month and will elaborate on that system when it turns up. It amazes me that there's nothing similar in the US when most other countries have adopted something similar.</p>
<p>The problem with digital media is that sharing suddenly becomes an awful lot simpler and utterly without cost to those involved in ripping off the original. With a physical book you have to pass it on somehow and the item itself is pretty much impossible to duplicate. An ebook file can be copied with a click of a mouse and sent round the Internet to millions in seconds. That said, I still don't object to books being shared among friends as digital files -- something I think is built into the new Barnes &amp; Noble ebook.</p>
<p>But cracking an encoded file and uploading it into the torrents is a very different thing. If you peruse the torrents you'll find my ebooks out there and all of my audio books out there, from the Audible files as far as I can see. Someone has hacked the copy protection on them and, in the case of audio, uploaded entire works lasting eighteen to twenty hours of audio. I spent a year of my life working on those books. They cost me time and money. Hosts of people at my publishers, people who also have the right to be paid for their work, were involved. My talented reader Saul Reichlin spent a month working on the script and a week in the recording studio performing them.</p>
<p>What gives some thieving toerag the right to take all that work we've put in, steal it, then regurgitate for the masses? How can they possibly compare handing that to passing on a printed book to a friend?</p>
<p>The sites we're talking about here are, naturally, lurking behind fake identities, based in countries where copyright laws cannot be enforced. Doesn't that give you a clue that something's not quite right? Doesn't that make the high-minded arguments of the thieves -- 'You're making enough money anyway' -- sound a little hollow? Torrents like these exist for the purpose of ripping off copyright material, be it music, video or books. The people running them want to make money out of that stolen material too. It's why they do it. And anyone who goes to one of those torrent sites surely knows why they're there -- to steal something they ought to be paying for.</p>
<p>As I've said before I hate DRM. I also think the music industry was deeply stupid to come down in the heavy-handed manner it did with some individuals caught with pirated music a while back. But let's not fool ourselves about what's going on here. It's a concerted attempt to make stolen material widely available for 'free' across the Internet, and make some money along the way for those involved. I don't pretend to have the answers, though I'll certainly try to throw out some suggestions here. But I do think a starting point is being honest about the problem and I wish people who steal things off the Internet would at least do us all the service of being frank about what they do themselves.</p>
<p>They can come up with an extraordinary number of excuses but the simple reason people thieve on the Internet is because it's easy and they know they will get away with it.</p>
<p>Feel free to add your opinions below, for or against. I'm happy to carry the thoughts of people who disagree with what I say but if it's nothing more than personal abuse -- funny how coming out in public against the idea of theft upsets some people -- it will get deleted.</p>