Physical 01: You wouldn't steal a book...

    Actually I would, if the circumstances were right. Let me explain:

    There's been a lot of hoopla about copyright law, copyright infringement, pirating, etc. One of the common arguments I hear from the other camp is that infringing copyright is the same as stealing. Now, there are several problems with this, but in this post I will focus on just one: Google Books, specifically those books which it allows you to see the full book online through their application, but doesn't allow you to download the text for offline viewing.¹

    Some might argue that this policy of allowing you to view the work, without letting you keep it, makes Google Books like a library. Let's go with this analogy for a bit. A library has one or more copies of a book in its possession. When you borrow a book from the library, that is one less copy of the book that they have. Books cost money, and there are lots of them, so in all probability the library has only a few copies of a single book relative to the possible number of people who would be interested in reading it.

    If after borrowing a book from the library I decided not to return it, I am depriving the library of one of its relatively scare resources. Either I have cut short others people's access to the same book, or I have cost the library money because they had to buy the book again. If a significant sub-population of  people did this sort of thing², the library would at some point have to close down, and the net good for everybody would be significantly diminished.

    Here's the thing, however: strong proponents of copyright law might make this argument, which I completely agree with, and then say this is exactly the same thing as what I would be doing if I found a way to download full preview copies of Google Books, and this I strongly disagree with. This analogy is either very misinformed, or very, very dishonest. Equating these two actions - stealing a book from the library and downloading a copy of a full-preview book which Google and the book's publishers don't want me to have except through the online application - only works if the person you are describing this to doesn't really understand how computers and the Internet work³. Thankfully, I am a student in the field of Computer Science, and while I am not an expert on the subject of networking, I am smarter than the average citizen/bear about how these things work.

    If Google Books were a library, this is how it would operate: this library would maybe have about one copy of each book it possesses⁴. When you go to this library and check out a book, instead of handing you their one and only version of this book, they instantly create a copy of this book for basically nothing. Seriously. In this analogy, act of making a new copy of the book and handing you this copy is essentially the same act, and probably costs even less than it would to pay a minimum wage hourly worker for the time they went to the shelf and brought back the book⁵. The librarian then instructs you to destroy this copy of the book once the allotted time for viewing has passed.

    Yes, you read me right. But that's not quite right, because just like it's improbable that you would actually destroy the book in this scenario, you probably wouldn't delete a pdf of the same book, either. So instead, the library makes self-destroying books. Not only this, but it's actually much harder and much more expensive to add and enforce this self-destroying feature than it is to just give the copy of the book to you! And best of all, it's almost impossible to perfect - someone like me, who in this case is an expert on bookmaking, is almost always going to be able to find a way to preserve a copy of the book⁶.

    What's the purpose of all this, then? A library usually serves the purpose of a public good; the reason you feel wrong about stealing their books is that lots of people would be negatively affected by your actions. In contrast, these limitations do not apply to Google Books and its partner publishers. The only purpose I can perceive in their actions is the desire to control a resource⁷, for the purposes of making a profit from it.

    Returning to the first statement in this post: if the people who owned the content were actively trying to limit access to information and eradicate certain books/ideas from the world, you had better believe I would steal a physical book. I would then make as many copies as I could, and distribute them to as many people as I could, without demanding charge. For the greater good of society.


1: I discovered this while I was looking for an online version of the New Oxford Annotated Bible. Why was I looking for this? I could tell you "intellectual curiosity," but the truth is far less noble - I have a bad habit of debating with Creationists and other Christians online.
2: In game theory, we call actors who behave like this defectors, and those who behave altruistically cooperators.
3: I'm of the opinion that at least some content holders know this, and are therefore guilty of deceiving the public. This is a well-observed consequence of ignorance - getting duped
4: OK, probably more, what with backups and other redundant copies
5: UNSUBSTANTIATED CLAIM ALERT (based on an educated guess)
6: Needless to say, this is not an admission of guilt and I am not condoning any actions which lead to copyright infringement. |:-|
7: There are of course objections you might make: "How will the authors of these works be paid if this isn't enforced?" Needless to say, I believe there are plenty of satisfactory alternatives, which I will talk about in later posts. The only people who are harmed by these are the publishers and content owners, not the authors and content creators.