(Can You?) Steal This Book

An evergreen debate concerns the piracy of artistic expression and What Should Be Done about it. You might think that copying is theft. I don't.

It is my opinion that Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a bane on society, and when I let my imagination roam, it can destroy civilization. DRM only seems reasonable, that if a work of art is valuable, then that value should be preserved by restricting access to it to paying customers. But art is not a commodity like bread.

The hungry man who cannot feed his children may steal a loaf of bread to feed them, but when he does so he takes it from the baker who needs the money to buy shoes for his children. And so on. Theft of tangible goods victimizes the person from whom the item is stolen. When Moses brought down from the mount the tablets of the Law everyone understood "Thou Shalt Not Steal" in these terms.

Economics is the dismal science of scarcity and how people cope with scarcity. Scarce goods command higher prices and common goods do not. Laws against copying protect and maintain scarcity.

If you copy my work, you don't take bread from my mouth. You will just reduce the scarcity of my work in this world. I had my work before you made a copy, and I have just as much of it afterwards. That's different from a loaf of bread.

Now, don't get the wrong idea. I believe in private property and I believe Intellectual Property law is--in principle--legitimate. Though Moses did not carry copyright law down from the mount, those fellas in powdered wigs who wrote "We the people" included Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution that we know as the Copyright Clause wherein Congress is empowered to:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

This is no emanation of any penumbra, but black-letter law. The principle is as legit as the US Constitution, which I regard as more legitimate than any President, Congress, or Court that it establishes.

You may be confused. I said that copying is not stealing, but I asserted the legitimacy of copyright law. There is no contradiction if you remember that the moral law can differ from the civil law. I remember driving home from college and agonizing over the 55mph speed limit. (I was altogether too earnest as a youth.) When someone asked my philosophy teacher why he had a radar detector in his car, he mentioned this distinction.

If you drive 56mph, you should manfully pay the ticket like Socrates drank the hemlock. That is the way of civil disobedience: do what's right and don't cry if John Law catches you and takes you to court.

Is file sharing a victimless crime? Almost. You are disrupting artificially created scarcity. Is it wrong to artificially create scarcity? Yes. Is file sharing both illegal and unconstitutional? Probably.

Today the purchaser of an ebook or song spent his money to become an owner, not a licensee. Owners of books or records lend them to friends and sell them at flea markets. But publishing companies call that theft, they have devised DRM schemes, and have lobbied Congress to pass laws to help them make cultural artifacts like these one-use-disposable. Is this wrong? Yes.

One sign that the GOP is just as corrupt as the Democrats is its continued support of legislative schemes to take rights from consumers, despite Hollywood's monolithic support of the Democrat party.

I think this is a situation where the morality that inheres within nature (right and wrong) is inconsistent with the civil law of the United States (legal and illegal). If you make illegal copies of my work, I'm not going to squawk about it, provided it's the right thing to do.

There's an 18 Percent Gratuity?

Sorry i don't have anything really useful to say right now. I'm just going to rant about what makes me angry. I like to eat at restaurants and I know the staff at restaurants are paid in large part by tips.

When I was an impoverished college student I went to a conference with the girl I was dating at the time--now my wife. We walked with our friends a long way to the nearest Pizza Hut restaurant. The place was a zoo! And the service was incredibly slow. There was one waitress for the entire restaurant and she was completely overwhelmed.

And we waited and waited. I grew angry about the wait. And I got over being angry. I'm a little fuzzy about how, either I just got so bugged that I turned it into a joke, or maybe my dear girlfriend informed me that the restaurant was seriously under-staffed. I hope it was the latter.

You see, when you start out angry, and then you understand, whatever's left of your anger evaporates. Suppose a guy cuts you off on the freeway. But then you learn he's rushing his mother with a heart-attack to the hospital. You understand and that changes your paradigm. Anger is transmogrified into sympathy. But if you don't understand, you'll stay grumpy.

So, I'm waiting for my pizza for a very long time. And then I understand that our waitress is dancing as fast as she can and that is not fast enough. And all her customers are as grumpy as I have been and she's likely to get zip in the way of tips. She's working much harder for much less money. Did I say I was an impoverished college student? I gave her a $10 or $20 tip. I forget which. It was enough to hurt back then. I thought it was the right thing to do and I still do.

That got me started giving generous tips in restaurants. I usually try to pick up the tab because the cheapskates I work with are less likely to give as generous a tip. My rule of thumb starts at 20% and goes up from there, because it's easy to calculate with some serious rounding upwards. I figure servers don't make as much as Engineers and generous tipping is Privatized Socialism.

However, there is one circumstance when I do not do this. If I see the check has been rung up with a gratuity included, then screw you. Your demand was for less than I planned to give, but you're not getting a penny more than that.

I think this is part of human nature. If you insist upon a surcharge above the stated price, you'll get exact change and I'll never come back. But if you are open to generosity, you'll be pleasantly surprised. By me at least. And I think most people are generous when they can afford it.

That's why I hate the various Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes and love indie artists.

The DRM scheme is like the gratuity that's been tacked onto your bill. It is a hidden tax on your purchase. You paid for a song or an ebook or something, and you get something less something with restrictions that keep you from transferring it to your new computer/e-reader/ipod or something. You did not bargain for those DRM restrictions and there they are diminishing the utility of the goods you've received.

That's why I avoided Apple and Amazon when they put DRM on their tunes and ebooks, and why I ripped my own CDs and bought DRM-free books from Baen--that is until Apple and Amazon dropped their DRM schemes. And sometimes, I'll buy something extra from some author or singer just because I want to encourage her.

By the way, you may have noticed that I am selling The Aristotelian and Finding Time. If they look like ebooks you'd like to read, I'd appreciate it if you bought them. And if you can't afford it, lemme know and I'll sneak a copy to you gratis. They're not DRM encrypted to feel free to share.

Reverse Engineering ePubs

When you publish an ebook, you should study what others have done. There are some serious adults out there who can do some marvelous things in ebook design. And when you try to do the same, it can end up looking lame. The way to save yourself from looking lame is to learn what the serious adults did and so something similar.

I am a firm dis-believer in DRM. I think it is the tool of the devil and I will never willingly use DRM in anything that I publish. Moreover, DRM is something that one can easily defeat with just a fair amount of Googling. I mention DRM not because I want a flame war but to explain why you might not be able to reverse engineer some of the smart-kids' ebook designs. If you try to study an ebook that's DRM encrypted, you'll have to first defeat the encryption.

I think the great strength of Sigil is how well it works at opening up an existing ebook and showing you its structure. Sigil reads and writes ePub files. But what if the ebook you want to study is in MOBI (Kindle) format. Not to worry. Load the ebook into Calibre and ask it to convert from MOBI into ePub. You do use Calibre to manage all your ebooks, don't you? I've even heard rumors that those sneaky Russians have a way to circumvent DRM with a Calibre plug-in.

Once you have an ebook unencumbered by DRM, open the ebook's ePub file in Sigil and look around. You'll see a table of contents, a cover, content, and metadata. Take notes of what you see.

For instance, study the copyright page of your ebook. How can you make yours look cool and professional? What Tor Science Fiction did was to create an image of exactly the right size and on this image they put text and line-art consisting of the requisite info in the perfect typeface and size. Good idea. I can do the same in my ebook's typeface with my ebook's text.

How about the metadata for your ebook? What should you put in? Grab two or three other ebooks and look at what those guys included. Just make sure that your exemplars should be comparable to your own ebook. If you're making a cookbook, don't study a thriller's metadata. And if you're making a thriller, don't glom onto a cookbook's metadata.

Pay attention to the sequence that the other guys used to organize their ebooks. Do you really need to put the Table of Contents at the front of the ebook? Or the title page? Often times people will look at the excerpt at the front of your work. You don't want this clotted up with a bunch of non-prose that doesn't help the reader toward a buying decision.

Do your chapters have titles that look like "Chapter One" or "The Adventure Begins"? Which do you want to appear in your Table of Contents? What did someone smarter than you do in a similar circumstance?

If you see an ebook that looks amateurish, notice what it is that makes it look that way. Then look at a professional ebook to find out how it creates the opposite impression. Usually, when I see an ebook that looks amateurish, it doesn't have a snazzy enough cover. This is why I prefer to hire out cover design.

The main thing you want to do from this step is to build up checklists of things you don't want to forget to put in your ebook, and to raise questions for which you need to research the answers you'll need later.

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)