The researchers in this paper use an astonishingly biased "fake paper detector", requiring only two conditions to be met for any paper to be considered "fake":
1. Use a non-institutional email address, or have a hospital affiliation,
2. Have no international co-authors.
And they acknowledge 86% sensitivity and 44% specificity. It's a coin-toss which biases massively against research from outside the US and Western Europe.
No. They use 400 known fakes and 400 matched (presumed) non-fakes to estimate the sensitivity and specificity of their indicator, then apply that indicator to the full universe, then employ the estimated sensitivity and specificity to the obtained measurement to estimate the approximate actual rate of false papers.
If you know the true prevalence of a disease in a population, and the sensitivity and specificity of your test, you can predict how many positive measurements you obtain. Vice versa, from the (flawed raw) measurement, given sensitivity and specificity, you can estimate the true prevalence.
Furthermore, they’re explicitly saying that “red flagging” by their simple indicator doesn’t mean that the paper is fake, but that it merits higher scrutiny.
ETA: I mean, it could still all be bullshit (by virtue of some bias or so), but you’ll need to argue a bit harder to establish that.
ETA2: Actually, not sure that’s what they’ve done. They might have just reported the raw (very bad) measurement (that they call “potential red flagged fake paper”), without doing the obvious next step outlined above, and without applying any confidence intervals. So, it might actually be a pretty crap paper (though possibly technically correct) coupled with some mediocre reporting layered on top. Isn’t basic statistics taught anymore?
I've worked on research estimating prevalence from imperfect tests, and something that concerns me about this study is that they aren't showing the error bars for their estimates. Typically, you would report a confidence interval for prevalence rather than just a point estimate, and the confidence intervals can often be fairly wide. There's two sources of uncertainty here, the assumed probabilistic nature of the diagnostic test, and uncertainty in our estimates of the sensitivity and specificity.
I think this paper by Peter J Diggle [0], gives a solid methodology. Instead of treating sensitivity and specificity as fixed values using sample estimates, you can model them as each having a beta distribution. In this case these beta distributions can be found using a Bayesian treatment of Bernoulli trials.
Amazing. Reading more carefully, as FabHK pointed out above, they aren't even applying the obvious correction. They're just reporting the positive rate of the imperfect test. I've implemented Diggle's method [0]. When I have time, I'll see if they've provided enough data to do a proper analysis, and maybe write a blog post about it or something.
> Furthermore, they’re explicitly saying that “red flagging” by their simple indicator doesn’t mean that the paper is fake, but that it merits higher scrutiny.
Then they and science should change their sensationalist headline. It's ironic that a paper about fakeness of something uses a borderline misleading title.
So it's ok to lie in a portion of your work? Where do you draw the line? I draw it when someone starts communicating. Being wrong is ok, being deceitful isn't.
Is this headline really deceitful though? Certainly the research is flawed, but the statement "[bad thing] is alarmingly common" is basically just a subjective statement that lets you know what position the author is going to argue.
I will never understand why everyone bends over backwards to justify lazy af journalism. This a magazine which is supposed to do scientific journalism, yet it didn't even mention the points that readers in HN comments were able to figure out on a cursory look. Peer review isn't just the 3 reviewers who accept or reject something in a journal. It's everyone in the scientific community.
You can’t directly calculate both sensitivity and specificity using equal numbers of positives and negatives groups unless the actual population has that ratio.
A completely random test given equal populations results in 50% accuracy and 50% specificity. Things don’t look nearly as good if only 1% of the actual population has the condition.
So, in other words, the signal they get from it is around 70% of the noise, but it's ok because you can indeed do that with good enough statistics?
They better have a flawless methodology, because any tiny problem is enough to ruin their analysis. And well, just flagging almost any paper not from the EU or US as fraud doesn't usually come together with a flawless methodology.
Paper mills are a $3-4 billion dollar industry that is growing rapidly. That money isn't coming from nowhere. There are a lot of fake papers, and the fake paper industry is growing steadily.
So then the question becomes "where are those fake papers being published, and by whom."
You can converge on answers to those questions in a lot of ways. The fake paper detection method is suggested as one tool to aid journals tackle fraud.
If you don't think the conditions are valid, well, ok. But why not? How would you improve on the validation methodology? Obviously having more known fakes would be nice.
Saying the article is "bigoted nonsense" doesn't make a lot of sense without more information (to be fair, I might be lacking crucial context). Are the authors known bigots with history of pushing bigotry? What I read seemed to be a sincere attempt to improve scientific publication practices by identifying the scope and scale of the fraud problem, while also developing means to address it. That doesn't strike me as bigoted nonsense.
That said, the headline of the article is pretty click-baity, and shame on science's editors for that.
> The researchers in this paper use an astonishingly biased "fake paper detector"
I havent looked at the details here, but if you make a prediction model and if that prediction model is robust enough to explain with great accuracy something with 2 or 3 variables, it's not going to be "biased", it's just going to be robust and right more often than not using only these few variables (as long as the training data was broad enough).
I developed https://qwyre.com as a PWA offline app-based epub reader. You're welcome to give it a go. It even imports links to epubs direct and stores them in your browser. There is no central online storage, no tracking, and here's the privacy statement https://qwyre.com/privacy-rights
I haven't implemented search inside the work. Only for searching the library (it's ultimately meant to be a self-publishing app, but that's a work in progress). It uses https://github.com/futurepress/epub.js/ Eventually, I'll get all its API working, but there's not much of a how-to guide, so it's slow.
I was one of the people whose first reaction was to look on gov.uk to understand the scope of the new lockdown, rather than some rehash of it in the media. It took me just two mouse clicks (open gov.uk favourite, click on a link [0] near the top of the page) to find this info. This is just awesome.
I've been teaching data curation for open data managers in governments around the world for the last decade. All the issues identified in this BBC article are covered in my syllabus.
I've written two novels, formally published in the UK, self-published in the US. Books available on Amazon, and DRM-free on my website https://gavinchait.com.
- Within the first week someone buys the book via Amazon using a stolen credit card;
- Book is uploaded to ZLib;
- I complained to Amazon, raising both the issue of the stolen work and the stolen credit card;
- No response from Amazon, although they were quick to reverse the charge (I'm assuming as soon as the card is reported stolen);
- I complained to ZLib using their DMCA reporting tool;
- ZLib care about as much as Amazon, and my novels are still up.
I made it as easy as possible to read my work on my website and pay me direct. I released it as a DRM-free epub for use on any device or platform. You can even buy anonymously. Still doesn't matter. Folks like the OP won't support writers.
And, while this won't stop me writing, it makes it impossible to afford to write as often as I'd like. Two years after my second, I'm still trying to save up enough to afford to write my third.
> Still doesn't matter. Folks like the OP won't support writers.
"Folks like the OP" mentioned they use GOG, No Starch Press, etc, so they presumably don't mind paying as long as the experience is reasonable, DRM- and bullshit-free.
That's the thing with piracy: it's often more convenient than buying the thing. If the pirate book/game/music is unencumbered and easier to use on more devices, but the legal book/game/music is DRM-laden and requires proprietary devices or apps to use, which one would you choose?
I can lend or give a real book to whoever I want. Forever or temporarily. I can buy used books I find at discount used book stores.
I don't buy it, the OP's first instinct was to see if they can pirate it. Only when they couldn't, did they pay for it.
And how could you even possibly compete with a book piracy site such as z-lib? You can get any book you want, for free, within seconds with virtually no fear of legal repercussions.
>I can lend or give a real book to whoever I want. Forever or temporarily.
Because the physical limitations on lending make it unfeasible to share it with absolutely everyone. The same goes for sales of used books. A 'used' digital book is just as good as a new one and would directly compete with the original seller.
> I don't buy it, the OP's first instinct was to see if they can pirate it. Only when they couldn't, did they pay for it.
I feel like this is intentionally ignoring the previous lifetime of experience which led to the OP's decision to attempt to pirate first.
After Google Play Music was announced to be shutting down a few years ago I've been trying to rebuild a (legal) lossless music collection. It's shocking how difficult it is to find some tracks and artists in a lossless format legally.
Some CDs I used to own years ago are now going for $250 used. Sites like HDTracks have apparently never heard of those bands, there's no Bandcamp site, the band site now redirects to facebook, all I can buy is 160kbps mp3.
Some CDs I used to own are available for $6.99, but it's the George Lucas style remastered content where they changed the lead-in and chorus and everything sounds wrong.
And that's not to mention the disks I still own that are copy protected. Sure I'll just pop this CD into my new car.... Oh wait it doesn't have a CD drive because it's 2020 and why would the manufacturer even consider including one? Is it okay to copy that CD? Why or why not?
So I still can't listen to some of my favorite bands, on whom I've spent $$$ on merchandise and concerts and their original CD releases, because I'm restricting myself to following the law. I cannot begrudge someone for choosing to pirate in the slightest.
I can understand pirating content you've bought and I'm sure there are a bunch of people who only pirate because of this reason, but the OP flat out admits that this is their first ebook they've bought. What possible lifetime of experience could they have had?
personally, i hardly consume movies/tv shows anymore. if i did, i'd likely pirate them nowadays. I did use netflix when it actually had content through vpn. They removed that (as well as almost all content) which made me terminate that sub. I dont really miss these shows that much, but if i did... i most certainly wouldn't subscribe to several portals jumping between just to figure out where is what and how much time i've got to watch it to the end before they're removing the content again.
i think you gotta realize that at least a lot of people dont really pirate to save money. they pirate because they cant be arsed to deal with the shitty other platform that are plain inferior and take way too much effort to figure out.
wrt books/ebooks: i actually do occasionally buy them on amazon, drm be darned. but i dont actually try to create an archive either. thats the big difference - if you actually wanna keep what you read/watch available forever... you just gotta pirate it. there is no other way. a lot of people enjoy building an archive. they're all forced to pirate almost everything.
> a lot of people enjoy building an archive. they're all forced to pirate almost everything.
Not just enjoy, many times you'd have to if you want to keep your citations and annotations. Otherwise it's the same type of fiascos over and over again
Well, the article does describe another way. I’ve been buying ebooks and stripping the DRM for years just so I can have an archive. It sucks, but I feel it’s worth it to support the authors (I recently switched from kindle to kobo, under the impression that this process would be a little improved - but it’s not).
However, for TV and movies, I find the pay site experience to be too poor (last I checked you couldn’t even stream from Amazon video if you run Linux). So I pirate everything.
I think Bandcamp is the perfect site for purchasing music. They’re transparent about what they pay artists and labels, and a purchase nets you unlimited streaming plus DRM-free downloads. This is the model the sellers of these other mediums should be following. I buy a lot of music, all because bandcamp is so great.
It was their first time ever buying an ebook so they didn't have a lifetime of experience in buying an ebook.
The first time they buy an ebook legally they become filled with moral outrage about how dreadful DRM and write a blog post about how they'll never buy one again. It's just utter self serving hypocrisy.
His experience was shit, total shit. Knowing his experience, I would avoid the site he chose like the plague. But now, let me ask you this, should I test each and every ebook retailer to try to find one that isn't shit, paying every time?
Should customers start maintaining their own index of which ebook providers are shit? Who pays to have someone go back and check them all once a week to see if they've changed their behavior since the last $7 purchase to check their DRM practices? Should customers pay a monthly subscription to some kind of digital mystery shopper service to find out who's webstores are just the fucking worst?
Your customers have _no_ reasonable path to control over shitty DRM practices. The only person in this entire conversation who has influence is Turukawa, because Turukawa is an author, and gets to choose who sells his books.
Bad news everyone: piracy exists, and provides a pretty great user flow. If authors want people to not pirate ebooks, they need to demand a not shit ebook option that /has a strong brand of being not shit/. Yeah, short term that might be really hard. Maybe authors need to form some kind of union and demand better from their publishers.
Because customers don't care. You can rant and rave about how they're immoral subhumans stealing from the mouths of authors children all you want, but piracy still exists and it's a much easier way of getting high quality ebooks that work on all platforms and devices. It's not the customers fault that zlib has a better reputation than your ebook retail partners, nor is it zlibs.
Some of the CDs I bought to rebuild came with `.mp3` downloads on Amazon. I thought "Oh sure, I'll download these since some of these disks are taking over a week anyway I can listen to these in the meantime."
I went to download an album and was immediately greeted by a popup saying I could only authorize three devices or something and asking which device I was downloading for. Well... I'm downloading from a laptop but I'm going to mostly be listening from a phone, how do I even authorize either device?
Fifteen minutes of reading later I closed the tab and waited for the disks to arrive in the mail, since I can do whatever I damn well please with my ripped .FLAC files.
My account isn't ready to transfer to yt music yet, but I'm already dreading it. Yt music streams at a lower bitrate, and you cannot download the highest quality (but you can stream it??)
Also, the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons are switched in the yt music ui vs GPM. Bad ux across different products... Par for Google, I guess.
> And how could you even possibly compete with a book piracy site such as z-lib? You can get any book you want, for free, within seconds with virtually no fear of legal repercussions.
People used to say the same about movie and music piracy. The problem was never piracy itself, but publishers offering an inferior product.
> I can lend or give a real book to whoever I want.
Yeah, this has been an issue for me as well. If I have a real book that I bought, I'm perfectly allowed to lend it to a friend for some period of time. Public libraries have done this on a mass scale for eons.
Amazon's DRM on the other hand only lets you lend a book for 14 days. WTF? A real book isn't going to care how long you lend it for. Even many libraries let you extend book loans for months as long as no other patron has placed a hold request for it. The solution? Strip books of their DRM.
I'm not out there to cheat authors of money. I'm not going to take my ebook files and post them everywhere on the internet for free. I'm support giving authors money when I buy an eBook. But I want the same freedom that a paper book gives me. The concept of borrowing books, and even photocopying a section or two from books for personal use, shouldn't disappear in the digital age just because we've gone digital.
> Amazon's DRM on the other hand only lets you lend a book for 14 days. WTF? A real book isn't going to care how long you lend it for. Even many libraries let you extend book loans for months as long as no other patron has placed a hold request for it. The solution? Strip books of their DRM.
When institutions use Adobe's platform to lend out books, they utilize a waiting list for borrowers to que into. You can, in fact, just re-borrow it after 14 days and if nobody else is in line, you get access back immediately. So in reality, the Adobe bloatware solution for a title nobody else wants to read works the same as a physical format in that sense.
> That's the thing with piracy: it's often more convenient than buying the thing.
While this certainly used to be true, I think this is an arguable point. You posit two choices in the next sentence:
- the pirate book/game/music is unencumbered and easier to use on more devices
- the legal book/game/music is DRM-laden and requires proprietary devices or apps to use
But: if I buy a Kindle book, DRM or not, it is very easy for me to buy and it is very easy for me to use on any device that runs the Kindle app. Buy it one device and it's in the library on all of them; at worst I have to just tap to download it.
This is the way most companies have effectively competed with piracy: make it more convenient to get something legally. I've gone the whole "set up automated scripts to scan piraate sites and wait for specific videos of a certain quality to show up, download them via torrent, tag them with proper metadata, convert them and put them in my iTunes library" route. It was clever and cheap and just super, super fragile and finicky. Pirate sites go up and down, metadata is wrong, something somewhere in the chain breaks mysteriously. You know what was more convenient? Clicking "Season Pass" in iTunes. Boom. Done. Convenience is also the proposition of streaming video and music, in a very real sense: it's all technically DRM-encumbered, but your Spotify music is available on every device that supports Spotify with almost no effort on your part beyond logging the device in. If you have a strong enough philosophical objection to DRM that you find Spotify, Netflix, et. al, unpalatable, that's great, but while it's pretty easy to move DRM-free music files around it's not as easy as just streaming -- and DRM-free video files are still kind of a pain in the butt compared to streaming, or even any centralized library system like Amazon or iTunes. The same is basically true for books: I appreciate Calibre, but "It's so easy to manage your ebooks and reading devices through Calibre compared to using the native Amazon Kindle or Apple Books apps" is not a sentence most people are ever going to utter with a straight face.
Sadly, Kindle only really provides English content. Finnish books only really get released on Finnish propietary platforms that, like Op's experience, are laden with DRM.
I don't really need to read Finnish literature (although it would be nice to be more well versed in my own culture) but I can't recommend ebook readers to my family and friends because there's no way for them to enjoy any content on them. Which is a shame as they're dope.
It's no longer the case only because some companies understood what piracy offered and adapted (note that the most reactionary parts of the industry fought back even against this -- they thought every one of these services encouraged piracy. The movie industry is noticeably backwards, which is hilarious when they themselves thrived thanks to breaking laws. But let's not digress). A lot of game devs I know (some semi-well known) cut their teeth with pirated games. I wonder how many will openly admit it.
DRM is still a step backwards. I like law-enforced laws ( :) ) because if they overstep I can ignore them. DRM/tech enforced laws often overstep, and it's harder to ignore them, and it's ultimately my business what I do with the stuff I bought. I can share paper books, and I can damn share digital books I bought if I so want. When did we let this nonsense of DRM happen?
They said that for the first time in their life they bought an ebook. Yet they have a library of ebooks and let people "borrow" from it. (How do you return a borrowed ebook I wonder?) Yet despite not having the physical copy of the book in question they somehow thought it possible that they might have it in their ebook library, lol. Just like the no starch press books they never bought either I'd say.
That is actually a feature built into some ebook formats & proprietary software packages. Adobe's bloatware supports this feature, and it is actively utilized in academia, libraries, and archive.org.
Basically how it works is the software sets a limit on how many people can use the file at once. When more people want to use the file than that limit, they go onto a waiting list. In the case of libraries & archive.org, your access times out after a predefined amount of time (say 2 weeks), after which the app no longer allows you to use the file and you must get back in line to use it again. However, if you finish with it earlier, you can "return it" by volunteering to loose access sooner.
With individually "owned" copies it works basically the same way, only with only "one copy" in circulation between you and your friend who is borrowing it (while they're using it, you can't access it yourself), and access for the owner does not time-out.
Hmm. Maybe you're right. I didn't read it that way because pirating GOG (or Humble Bundle) games is seriously going out of your way just to pirate stuff. They provide (mostly) unencumbered games, provide a platform popular for indie titles, support multiple platforms (when possible) and are relatively inexpensive. And run frequent discounts. And they give you permission to back up to whatever storage you want.
Some people will pirate no matter what, but I think piracy is mostly a matter of convenience. And it's pretty convenient to just buy GOG games...
There's also the issue of discovery. It's not easy nor obvious that an author is also selling a DRM-free version elsewhere, meanwhile all the big ebook stores sells DRM-protected copies.
If there were a big, well-known DRM-free ebook store I'd be all over it. I use GOG, Bandcamp and other similar businesses whenever possible
Sounds like you are employing a reactive, defensive and antagonistic approach to eBook “piracy”. Which puts you into the very position you described - at a loss, angry, and frustrated; instead of fuelling your sales and playing a direct hand in your success.
Unfortunately I don’t have the article on hand, but about a year ago I ran across a description of how an author _dramatically enhanced_ his sales by leveraging eBook “piracy” in order to drive people to official channels.
Yes, he actually released his eBooks for free onto the piracy sites - with a twist: he included the entire first portion (quarter or third, cannot remember) of the book, gave info on where to buy the full copies (with zero recriminations - just the facts!), and then repeated those same early chapters to plump out a fully-sized eBook. He then flooded all the file sharing networks with this copy so as to make it difficult to find legitimately complete copies.
The entire first quarter or third was used to get readers heavily enough invested into his novel to _want_ to run out and buy the official copy -- he _justified_ the effort and expenditure to his readers, and they responded (mostly) positively by actually doing so!
Granted, there was a lot more to it than that, but this was the basics, and it pushed a lot of people towards not just his eBooks but also his physical sales. And there are probably many other strategies out there as well that utilizes the “piracy” platforms to your benefit instead of leaving you tilting impotently at windmills.
If you are going to tell someone how they are doing their passion incorrectly please put in the additional effort to dig up the source you feel like justifies your opinion.
It’s frustrating to see people pushing the narrative that content creators should fully embrace piracy and that anything else is simply wrong. Here you have someone telling us the difficulties they faced as a content creator, and then you have responses from people who are not themselves writers, armchair-quarterbacking the parent poster on what they did wrong.
If you have an anecdote that goes against the narrative the fault is apparently still yours. The grand parent commenter made it as easily as possible to buy their book, which is what you’re “supposed” to do, yet that didn’t fix the problem. And somehow the recommended solution to poison the piracy well with basically content marketing for your book is somehow less “antagonistic” than what the gp commenter did.
Yes. It is literally just an anecdote about shareware, not a proven system for dealing with piracy. It could lead to more sales, or you could really piss off a troll who has nothing better to do than DDOS your site and try to hack every account you own.
> It could lead to more sales, or you could really piss off a troll who has nothing better to do than DDOS your site and try to hack every account you own.
This seems more like FUD for nagware than a proven system for not dealing with piracy.
I'm a mid-list author formally published by one of the world's largest publishing houses. Deliberately seeding pirate sites with my novel would place me in breach of contract. It's an interesting idea if I were entirely self-published, but not realistic for me.
What if you start a whole new story, which is similar to whatever you have published, and after a few pages just tell the reader, "actually, you're not reading "The Adventures of Foobar"...
The economics of mid-list writing don't really make this feasible ... very few writers get to do more than buy coffee off their work. Creating a whole dummy book just to mess with pirates isn't worth it. Not when I'm going to spend a year writing a new novel in the first place. Then, once that's done, I've somehow got to get back into industry so I can earn a living and recover the money lost while writing ... this isn't something you do because you expect to earn anything from it. Making a few dozen extra sales from pirates?
But the actual professional isn't 100% writing, just as being an independent software developer isn't 100% coding. Half of your time (or more!) may be spent on other aspects of the profession.
That's exactly what I thought. If you need to go through all this gimmick to sell books, when are you going to have time to write them? I much prefer to suffer the monetary loss in writing and make decent money with something else.
Jeez, mocking up a book to post on torrent sites is so much effort it eats a measurable chunk of time usually reserved for writing a novel? This is like an afternoon of work, compared with the months or years of writing a book.
Most fiction writers aren’t living from it. A lot of others books (educational material for instance) are written by people who have a job like researcher. So, writer is a professional job for some, but they largely don’t produce most of the work out there.
That's fine and dandy that author was able to go through those hoops to find success.
But there are still those of us who still (maybe naively at this point in history) believe that if you do things honestly, in good faith, and play by the rules, you should be able to make money too.
You can make decisions based on the way wish the world operates or you can make decisions based on the way the world actually operates. Both are valid options, but be honest about what you are doing.
This isn't a knock toward cynicism or dishonesty. Rather a knock toward the fact that sales, and self-promotion are necessary if you want to make money (why are people going to buy your stuff if they don't know about it and its benefits to them aren't communicated clearly). Also realize that some people are bad actors (pirates) and you need to emotionally and financially protect yourself.
It's not wishful thinking to want people to play fair. That's called being a decent human being, so apologies here, but yes that is a knock towards cynicism. Piracy is illegal. The law already protects me against illegal activities. Expecting people to behave legally, and setting your business to succeed in a legal environment is not unreasonable or wishful thinking.
It isnt unreasonable or wishful thinking to expect to never be robbed. I shouldn't have to lock the door to my apartment, I could probably get away with not locking the door to my apartment, but I lock it anyways.
Arguing that people shouldn't steal shit on a forum where lots of people frequently talk about how they refuse to pay for shit isn't just "dishonesty."
That discussion needs to happen, and bad actors who won't recognize that they're bad actors are a huge problem.
You misrepresent the position of many HNers. Most people here don't mind paying for things, the only mind paying for shit; for stuff that's broken, crippled by bad DRM.
But when an honest author games a system that tries to take advantage of them and manages to make that work, that's something I applaud.
Money doesn't get invested into projects that 'do things honestly', it gets invested into whatever is deemed to make the most profit. There's plenty of people who provide loads of value to those around them (emotional labor, child care, etc) and go largely unpaid. Unless you can generate massive profits, there's little incentive for capitalists to care, and it's capitalists who have all the money and political influence.
That's quite the broad brush you are painting all capitalists with. There are many ways to be successful many forms of capitalism, some degenerate yes, some not so degenerate. It is up to good honest people to set the example, because yes the greedy ones will always greed away. History has shown me that it doesn't matter what economic and political system is instituted, greed will find a way to exploit the good intentions of those systems.
>It is up to good honest people to set the example, because yes the greedy ones will always greed away.
A focus on 'greed' or 'honesty' is missing the mark on what I'm saying here. We currently have an economy built on a foundation of historical expropriation, enclosure, colonialism, subsidy, regulatory capture, rent-seeking, etc, and heavily biased towards the resultant monopolies/oligopolies. As a consequence, prices are set at this inflated level of profit, and those who perform labor outside of the interests of these corporations typically aren't able to afford the costs of living (especially without breaking the law). "Greed" isn't really the issue here; the issue is systemic privilege born through violence.
>History has shown me that it doesn't matter what economic and political system is instituted
It's pretty intuitive that a political system is generally going to be favorable towards those who instituted it, outside of happenstance benevolence from a political elite.
So he spammed all the piracy sites with a version of the book that turned out, after downloading and reading a third of it, to be incomplete.
As someone who has pirated things in the past and ended up being pissed that it didn’t finish/wasn’t complete/etc. I don’t think that would send me screaming to spend money on it.
Quite the opposite, what this is proving is that providing an intro to your work to prove to the customer that they actually like it (like Amazon’s “try a sample”) is hugely valuable.
> As someone who has pirated things in the past and ended up being pissed that it didn’t finish/wasn’t complete/etc. I don’t think that would send me screaming to spend money on it.
So what? You weren't going to buy it anyway, eh? What are you going to do, pirate harder?
maybe, but if that was what I was doing I would write "as someone who has pirated in the past because I want digital copies of books I buy in paper form.." so their not having written that makes me think the what, are you gonna pirate harder crack is reasonable.
The big criticism of the original author is that they got a better experience from a piracy site than from the legitimate product. The author referenced by GP turns that around: ensuring a better experience from the legitimate product than from pirate sites.
It's entirely fair. You've got no business being pissed about something you got for free on a piracy site. Especially not when it actively points you where you can get the legitimate version.
I don't understand how your last line proves the opposite: if it's hugely valuable, that shows that this is a good idea, doesn't it?
I remember the story somewhat, so I found it after searching for 'author writing series almost cancels because piracy uploads incomplete books instead'
There are more than a few books I have found this way...
The first part, or first book in the series, is published for free, then a reasonable (key being reasonable) price to buy the rest of the series or book
This man makes $13000/month (not a typo) putting free content out on royalroad, no need to buy anything: https://www.patreon.com/Shirtaloon
The patreons just get that free content a bit in advance. And in pdf form.
It took him around a year to reach that number.
He writes utter shit, sub-mediocre literature.
Check other top writers on royalroad, they also make lots of money.
The reason books don't sell isn't because of piracy, is because there's TON of free content (not only books) or almost free content (netflix, let's say).
I'm confused as to exactly who "This man" refers to in this instance - is it whoever is Shirtaloon at patreon? Or is it the person who made the parent comment? Are they the same person? Sorry, I just wanted a little more context for the this man part, everything else seems reasonable.
I'm someone who has read that story, at least the public parts of it, and I object slightly to your quality assessment... ;) I don't argue it's great literature or anything, more like the literary equivalent of popcorn - a fun and interesting story with not a lot of depth. So, entertainment, not life-changing prose...
And while I'm surprised he gets $13k a month, I'm not _very_ surprised. I'm one of his $1/month patrons, and I also give $1-$3 a month to a lot of other writers, YouTubers, and other creators. For another internet serial writer, see https://www.patreon.com/Wildbow
One of my criteria for supporting such creators is for them to make their creations public, even if some do it after a time delay. My rationale is that, this way, I both support the creators, and the creation of "culture", for a certain definition of that word, that other people would be able to enjoy for free. And while this might never replace traditional publishing and isn't suitable for everything, you've demonstrated that some people can certainly make a living this way.
there's a lot of these niche creators on patreon like this. I think the key here is that these people have small but really dedicated audiences.
A similar thing that surprised me is 'reaction channels' on youtube. It's often very small youtube channels with say, 10k subscribers, but they have a few hundred paying patreon followers and pull in 3-5k per month just doing tv show reactions.
I'm not a money laundering expert but I thought the point was to get a bunch of cash, from drug sales or whatever you don't want anybody asking questions about, turned into legitimate-looking income. Income from Patreon might look legit, but how would you funnel your cash into Patreon contributions without putting it in a bank account first (and setting off the very alarms you're trying to avoid)?
Imagine I am in a shady business and want to collect $13000 a month clean on my bank account, without attracting IRS etc. attention. I can have people (or myself) load prepaid MasterCard plastic with dirty cash and subscribe them to my Patreon.
Not implying anyone is doing that, just that it looks possible.
You can distribute it across multiple subscribers. $1k/month cash deposits for 1000 people will raise less questions than $1M/month for one person. That said, whole operation looks rather expensive, there should be much cheaper and easier ways than fake Patreon accounts.
I wonder what marketing/advertisement work was done to achieve this. It's not like you just need to open a Patreon account and start getting $10k+ immediately.
P.S.: BTW, all this money is "donations", aren't they? So under a lot of legislations you wouldn't even have to pay taxes on that.
Doubtful, I think for something to qualify as a tax-exempt donation the recipient has to qualify under 501(c) (aka charities/non-profits). These might be classified as "gifts" (which are exempt up to $15,000 per giver per year) but most likely it's considered a subscription (since the patrons get early access to content in return for their payments) and the author would have to pay income tax.
sole proprietorships and llc's, which would be the main mode of organizing a small company for donations, are for the most part pass-through to individual income for tax purposes and so would have roughly the same tax overhead (aka 0%) as a non-profit religious entity
also: one could just as easily create a 'x rights activism' group as a tax-free non-profit so why single out religion specifically?
Do you think this actually hurts sales though? I’ve always been of the impression that the vast majority of people pirating wouldn’t have bought it anyways. Yes they’re getting it for free, but at least they’re enjoying your work when they wouldn’t have otherwise.
> Do you think this actually hurts sales though? I’ve always been of the impression that the vast majority of people pirating wouldn’t have bought it anyways.
I'm not sure how applicable it is for books, because generally prices are more uniform for books than they are for software, but in the case of software I wonder if the ones who lose sales to piracy are the makers of more affordable software?
Imagine a world where piracy was effectively impossible for most people, and you want to do some occasional image editing. You look at Photoshop and it is way out of your budget. But you don't actually need most features of Photoshop. You find that Pixelmator Pro can do everything you want, and at $40 you can afford it and it is a good value. So you buy Pixelmator Pro.
In a world where piracy only takes a little time and effort you pirate Photoshop.
In both scenarios Adobe doesn't get any of your money so we can't say that pirating Photoshop in the second scenario cost Adobe a sale. But it did cost Pixelmator Team a sale.
In general, I suspect that the main effect of piracy is to change our allocation of spending within certain categories or groups of categories, without changing the total we spend in those categories.
That's been my theory as well, that the ultimate victim of Photoshop piracy in the 90s/00s was Paint Shop Pro. Adobe didn't seem to care, professionals still needed their properly licensed copy at Adobe's prices, and students who learn with pirated Photoshop might become actual professionals with paid licenses in the future.
But at $0 vs $0, Paint Shop Pro was a lot less appealing that it would have been at $99 vs $399 or whatever Photoshop used to cost.
“Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though,” [Bill] Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
Charles Piller, "How Piracy Opens Doors for Windows", *Los Angeles Times8, April 9, 2006
Absolutely. It's a common and very old belief that GIMP's worst enemy isn't just Photoshop, it's pirated Photoshop. The same was being said about desktop GNU/Linux and Pirated Windows XP.
That's essentially a price discrimination strategy (intentional or not). Adobe could just offer a free version with super restrictive license, and results would be the same without any piracy involved.
To be honest, these days outside of some categories like games (where the prices are relatively uniform) if you just need something to use casually, there's probably one or more open source options. Of course, the open source option may actually be the best one as well but, even if it isn't, it's probably good enough for the odd task now and then.
That totally makes sense! When I think about pirating, usually movies, tv, music, and books come to mind, but in the case of software, that absolutely makes sense.
I think it does hurt. Some wouldn't buy anyway. But the mindset has changed.
If you do the right thing, you're out say $30 for a book. If you do the wrong thing, you get the book and still have your $30. Some people don't care about others, and that mindset continues. (its kinda a Tragedy of the commons where the "common" is the market place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons).
DRM makes it worse, not only did you do the right thing and buy the book, now its not as useful as the copy someone "didn't pay for". So pushing people toward the free and better.
> I’ve always been of the impression that the vast majority of people pirating wouldn’t have bought it anyways.
I used to generally believe this as well, but then services like Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, etc. came along and put an end to the golden age of music piracy. Maybe these people wouldn't have bought the book at a full retail price, but there is very likely a price they would have paid to get the book in a convenient manner. Even the article basically admits as much. The author's complaint isn't the price, it is the convenience.
> services like Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, etc
Which are all subscription-based and not unit-based. There is no cost to explore and listen to random songs when you've already paid your subscription anyway. Switch to unit-based and suddenly way less exploration. So it's unit-less pricing + convenience.
Fundamentally exploration is much more important for music than it is for books due to the time it takes to consume a single unit. Either way, usually the most important part is showing that a customer is willing to make the jump from $0 to $0.01 and there are numerous music services that have shown that pirates are willing to make that leap in the right circumstances.
It solves part of the problem but quickly imposes a tragedy of the commons. These sub-10$ services pay peanuts to the creators. In order to make any meaningful money you have to have millions or hundreds of millions of views. To reach that scale you have to create something appetising to the masses which frequently entails clichés and sub-standard work. I do hear plenty of songs, movies, books rehashing the same old things following a cookie cutter approach.
I do remember reading a twitter thread of creator who sold books and earned a six figure income when a youtube creator chimed in and reported earning less than $300 for more than million views. Not an apples to apples comparison but you quickly see how youtube/spotify would actually create market pressures which discourage people from creating works of cultural and social significance.
In such a world, books like GEB and Piketty’s Capital would never see the light of the day.
It seems as though taste has not been improving with the Internet's adoption. I was just reflecting on this today and how SEOs rank according to "reputation", which is now just a network of mass media publishers which fill out the first 3-5 search pages. "Reputation" in the 90's was drastically different than today, where the average webmaster was likely a professor.
Also, what's noticeable with cultural works or "products" is the purchasing behavior is very much a crowd-effect. Very few people are inquisitive about such products; they will likely commit to a buy through word-of-mouth, and even then it may be after the 2nd or 3rd different person recommended a film or book. So the "psychology" of such purchases also favors the mass consumer who is looking for some temporary amusement, rather than a soul pathfinder looking for their chords to be plucked.
It might in some situations. With music for example, some bands have successfully encouraged people to buy their releases by including "rare" tracks that, if they were released previously, were done so on obscure titles that even collectors have a hard time finding. If everything an artist creates is easy to find online through piracy, there's no trove of "rare" material unless it's stuff that's never been released (like practice sessions or stuff that didn't make the cut for previous releases, much of this stuff is simply subpar and doesn't encourage purchases much).
Its hard though to carry that idea over to books though. What would be the extra material, unabridged versions? Not many books have abridged/unabridged versions to choose from.
I guess the closest parallel would be books people buy because they have to, not because they want to. By that I mean things like textbooks where, if they were available easily on pirated sites, everyone would just download. I kind of think publishers know this, and that's why so many now carry a one-time use only keycode to unlock online content. If you have to retake the class you can't access the online content again without repurchasing, even if the book itself has not changed.
I pirate most books unless they are available at my local library. I feel bad about it but I do it anyway.
If I'm being honest, if there were no piracy options I would be buying alot more books. Probably not as many as I pirate but still probably 500 dollars a year or so worth.
The catch is that it is true that if a book is unable to pirate I will probably not buy it. This is probably true for a lot of people. The reason is that there are other books available to pirate. That is the key distinction. If there were no piracy options I would be forced to buy some, but because there are piracy options I buy almost none and therefore you could say I wouldn't buy them anyway if they arent available to pirate.
So, Lament for the Fallen sounds fantastic. I've got a break from school coming up, and would like to read it. I cannot find a way to purchase it on your website.
The problem is that every retailer I can find that sells it sells a DRM'd version. Adobe Digital Editions isn't available for my operating system. There's no way for me to purchase a digital copy of your book that I can actually read.
If you sold a DRM-free epub on your website, I'd be reading Lament right now. I wouldn't have batted an eye at paying you $10 for a book Amazon sells for $5.
If I want to read your book on my Kindle, the only option is piracy. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pirate your book. I'll just end up purchasing an ebook from an author that has a DRM-free epub on their site.
Your books sound interesting and I hope you find commercial success as a writer. I just can't contribute to that success until your work's available in a format I can read.
How? My Kindle's quite old (4th gen, I think), it doesn't even support epub files. (I convert epubs to mobi to use on it.)
As far as I know, you can't use the ACSM files Amazon on it. I can't convert them to anything because Adobe hasn't released a version of Digital Editions for my operating system.
Technically, I could set up a Windows vm. But requiring a customer to use a particular OS to read a friggin' book is lunacy.
Your other comments are dead, but I'm still missing something. Why can't you buy it in the kindle store and send to your kindle over WiFi?
P.S. I am very aware that your operating system doesn't support Adobe Digital Editions; I just don't understand why your operating system needs to get involved at all.
This is what I run on my Kobo - it's quite nice! It has an RSS reader, Wallabag integration, cloud storage integration, a Lua plugin API... but it can't open DRM'd ebooks.
This is what's frustrating about DRM for me: it restricts the software you can use to only software from huge corporations. Want to make a small tweak to your reader? Nope, you're not allowed.
I only buy ebooks when I can find a DRM-free source for them, which pretty much means Tor/Baen/Humble/etc. I could buy DRM'd books and strip the DRM, but I'd rather not support the practice; I'm more likely to buy a physical book in that case.
My Kindle's old enough that it doesn't support the ACSM files you get from Amazon. I'd have to convert them to mobi from the DRM'd epub - which I cannot download from the ACSM because Adobe Digital Editions does not exist for my operating system.
Is that the most appropriate thing you can say to someone who bought a book and (somewhat expectedly) got screwed by DRM? Maybe there's a reason they won't support writers. Maybe they'll eventually write a blog post about that!
This someone only bought a book when they couldn't pirate it anywhere, unlike the rest of their "virtual library". They then "lent" the book to "everyone involved who really wanted to read it" and then wondered why DRM exists.
He doesn't claim to pirate all of his books (or any actually), and he only wished to lend it to one friend (whilst noting that lots of other people were interested in the book as well).
There is also no need to put 'lend' in quotes; it is perfectly legal to lend someone a book.
> How else would one build up a library of e-books without purchasing them?
books.google.com and archive.org have a lot of content. Depending on his interests, its possible if not probable that he has not pirated anything because most of his collection is too old to be under copyright.
Maybe his ebook collection consists primarily of product user manuals (pdfs straight from manufacturer websites), or pre1926 trade manuals (hey, I know a guy who collects antique light fixtures...), or he dabs in genealogy and has a few GB of pre1926 genealogies (not all surnames have had their genealogies re-done in print since then).
He literally starts out saying that '[he] crawled the internet [...] but alas, it was nowhere to befound'. At the very least he was intent on pirating this specific book.
>There is also no need to put 'lend' in quotes; it is perfectly legal to lend someone a book.
Yes, and making copies doesn't fall under any normal definition of lending.
> it makes it impossible to afford to write as often as I'd like
DRM is not the solution because the solution doesn't exist. The problem of the impoverished writer predates digital publishing, it's hard to make a decent living by writing anything interesting other than through indirect benefits. Sorry but writing something interesting is a luxury, writing something slutty is the only direct business prospect in writing.
Consider this: did Charles Darwin make a living through the royalties of "the origin of species"? No, he was bankrolled, the book was simply the fruits of his investment.
Not much comfort but it was still the better choice. DRM would have made it worse. Pirates would have still stripped it in 30 seconds while the honest paying readers would have been annoyed and put off. And readers are readers, if enough people like the books hopefully some will pay or recommend it to those who do. Hopefully.
Also, I tried to go and purchase a DRM-free version of your book "Our Memory Like Dust" to see how easy it was. I can't figure out to do so.
I clicked on the title for it, saw that you had some chapters laid out in HTML and figured, "Oh, I guess an HTML book is DRM-free". I clicked through and eventually had to login with Facebook to continue. That rankled, as I hate Facebook, so I checked out the rest of the site, thinking I missed the store page. I did not. I cannot pay you for a DRM-free version of your book on that site. This makes me feel like you're generating drama or something with your comment? I couldn't figure out an easy way to pay you real money for an ePub file.
I'm not going to go pirate your book, but the same result ended up happening: I'm not going to buy it either.
You're being unfair to the OP, and would know if you read their article in full. They purchased a book and hated the DRM wrapped around it for use in their libre software lifestyle.
Remember, piracy is a customer service issue. So perhaps buying your book isn't as easy as you thought, or your marketing is faulty, and you're not reaching the intended audience as well as you hoped.
I'm curious how you know the copy uploaded to ZLib was purchased with a stolen card? From metadata in the book? Or because purchase + upload date match? Years ago I remember seeing services on Alibaba that would get you any Kindle ebook you wanted – I assume they did something similar.
FWIW, I was quite surprised by your comment that "Folks like the OP won't support writers". The OP writes about _only_ being able to purchase a book in a way that involves submitting to very restrictive, platform-dependent DRM and not wanting to do it again. OP specifically contrasts this experience to buying from publishers who sell DRM-free ebooks as a counterpoint to the awful experience buying her/his book.
Both metadata in the uploaded book, and seeing the transaction reversed a few weeks later.
Publishers announce the books they'll be releasing a year in advance,and - seriously, this is a rabbit hole I knew nothing about when I started - people were offering bounties to pirate my book before it was available. I have a Google alert for my books so I can read reviews, so all this chatter was turning up. These are people who had no intention of paying for the work, no matter what, but also seemed to be going out of their way to make sure no-one would have to pay.
You can talk about DRM and clunky websites, but that comes across as post-hoc justification. The pirates seem simply to hate the idea that creators might earn anything, no matter how little.
>OP specifically contrasts this experience to buying from publishers who sell DRM-free ebooks as a counterpoint to the awful experience buying her/his book.
Or maybe he just likes them because they're easier to pirate from? In a prior paragraph he admits that it was the first time he bought an ebook.
I know I have pirated pdf/epubs of book in the past (as a broke college student) but I also support the authors as often as possible, a couple of series I can think of off the top of my head I got into when I pirated the whole series liked and them bought paperback and then the audio-books on audible and have pre-ordered hard covers of new releases in the series then got several fiends to buy read them. Not all piracy is lost sales some is unwanted marketing.
I don't think it should matter all that much if your stuff gets pirated. The reality is that if they're pirating your book, they probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway. I feel like most people I know pirate books to get a feel for the book before they go ahead and purchase it. Almost like an extended sample. All my friends who end up liking their pirated books typically spend the money (given they have money) buying actual copies afterwards.
The real number that would help you is finding out how many unique user downloads there were of your book and asking yourself if your marketing was strong enough to get that number of sales naturally? Or worse, is it that no one is downloading your book even with it being free?
I am biased since I write free content and believe in getting sponsored by supporters, but being the distributor of my free content and able to view download statistics, I can see that marketing is my biggest problem and no one wants to consume even my free content
Not op:
Can you add some unique tracker/signature per purchase so you can tell what copy was used to upload. Probably pointless with regard to the stolen cc comment/new accounts.
Sure :) The biggest barrier is micro-payments. If I could charge as a streaming service, but without having to go through a major platform (I don't want Spotify-for-books), then that would be perfect. I actually pitched this to GrantForTheWeb using their Web Monetization toolkit.
It is surprising that as a writer you engage in this misleading usage of the English language. People copying files without your consent may be financially inconvenient for you, in bad taste, even illegal in some jurisdictions, and definitely an ass move. But it is not stealing. You can firmly condemn this behavior without using metaphors.
"Stealing" as a verb for copying thoughts, ideas, or other intangibles has a long history. Longer than this defensive posture of people who want to feel better about ripping shit off.
Agreed, but this is not the case. It would be "stealing" if they copied the text of his novels and sold them signed by a different author. In that case, the correct verb is "sharing".
I have no idea what you think "stolen" means -- but whatever definition you are using, it is antique and not up to the task of describing the activity of theft as it exists today.
Nevertheless historical usage includes, "stealing someone's idea", etc. which is as least an applicable sense.
I think the OP has a point though. Back in the beginning of the DRM wars, many argued that "IP theft", "thieves", "stealing" were metaphors used by media companies to mislead customers. You know the clumsy anti-piracy advert, "you wouldn't steal a car...". It was clumsy then and it's clumsy now.
Illegal copying is not stealing. Sad to see this narrative won in the end, I thought we were past this. I though we -- the users -- had won.
"Stealing an idea" has been a phrase for far longer than that though. Stealing as a metaphor for intangible objects isn't a creation of the media companies.
> "Stealing an idea" has been a phrase for far longer than that though.
If it was only that, it may be somewhat justified. But in this case the "thief" is not making any profit from the stuff he has "stolen", he has just given away a copy to another person. The correct verb in this case is "sharing".
I refuse to partake in the orwellian newspeak of using the verb "stealing" for the act of sharing. This is a hill I'm happy to die on.
'Infringing copyright' is also a correct verb for this situation. I 100% agree that 'stealing' is not a valid word to use here. But I also don't expect most authors to be happy calling it 'sharing'.
Sure. Both are compatible. The generic act is "sharing", and this act happens to be "copyright infringement" in some cases. I don't see how anybody could say that the sentence "Sharing this file with other people infringes the copyright" uses a misleading language. Somebody may not like the socially positive aspect of the verb "to share", and they will prefer to use morally loaded terms, even if they are incorrect, but nobody can realistically say that using this verb for that act is wrong.
Agreed. But this precise usage, "stealing" digital products, is an invention of media companies. A stretching of a metaphor beyond all reasonable interpretation.
I’m not saying you’re one of them, but it seems the only time this pedantic definition of “stealing” is brought up is when that person is a pirate themselves, and they’re trying to justify what they’re doing as “not stealing.” As in: “I’m not stealing it; I’m just making a copy. The creator isn’t being deprived of anything.” Sure, you’re not literally taking anything from the creator, but you are robbing them of their right to do what they want with their creations.
Meanings change over time.
One can argue all they want about whether IP laws should exist, but as it stands right now (in re. to language and the law) it’s stealing.
We have already generated and put into our scientific manuscript the data that FDA requires for EUA. As a high-complexity CLIA-licensed clinical laboratory, we don't see significant risk in getting the authorization in 2 weeks. However, we need to start working with clinical laboratories across the country today if this is going to scale to hundreds of thousands of tests as soon as we get the EUA. Also, international laboratories don't need EUA and can start using the test immediately. We did not think it would be responsible to hold off on making the technology public when every day is so critical in our response to the current pandemic.
1. Use a non-institutional email address, or have a hospital affiliation, 2. Have no international co-authors.
And they acknowledge 86% sensitivity and 44% specificity. It's a coin-toss which biases massively against research from outside the US and Western Europe.
This "paper" is bigoted nonsense.
https://fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom/110357278154604907