> Wouldn't this long-term result in publishers offering less advance money? Also, I doubt most people pirating books care to check wether the author is getting royalties or not.
Publishers make money off selling books. Old books do not sell (obviously there's outliers). Publishers offer advances to get new books to sell. If they stop offering advances they won't get new books.
For most authors royalties are not a thing and never will be. Worrying about royalties on their behalf is pointless.
None of that changes the fact that pirates are no different from a non-customer. Equivocating about "reproduction" is just ridiculous. A library loaning a book out to a hundred non-customers is no different than a hundred people pirating a copy of a book or borrowing a copy from a friend. They're all non-customers.
Treating pirates as some special class of non-customers is ridiculous.
>For most authors royalties are not a thing and never will be.
Can you provide some numbers to back up these claims?
Also, I'm not clear on where you addressed my point that this would "long-term result in publishers offering less advance money." If it's that "if they stop offering advances they won't get new books" how do you know that they are already offeringing them exactly the minimum such that if they give them smaller advances they won't write more books? Surely it would depend on how much they think they will make from the sales? And what about self published books? Do you admit that those should not be pirated?
>None of that changes the fact that pirates are no different from a non-customer.
Do you mean on the avergae or in totality? Because there certainly are people who would pay but instead pirate.
>Equivocating about "reproduction" is just ridiculous.
That is what the law of copyright is.
>A library loaning a book out to a hundred non-customers is no different than a hundred people pirating a copy of a book or borrowing a copy from a friend.
Authors do not have conrtol of what buyers do with their books beyond the fact that they cannot copy it. That is the condition of the sale. It is usualy expressed something like:
>All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Basicaly I'm making two points here. One that authors do net lose money from piracy, and second is that even if not, they expressly told all the buyers that the condition of the sale is that they cannot reproduce their works.
As for real evidence for my claim, I point you to the Author's guild[0] which fought against google[1] providing for free copyrighted works even if it contained a link to their store. And it in general defends author's copyright. It "has counted among its board members notable authors of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including numerous winners of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards. It has over 9,000 members."
Publishers make money off selling books. Old books do not sell (obviously there's outliers). Publishers offer advances to get new books to sell. If they stop offering advances they won't get new books.
For most authors royalties are not a thing and never will be. Worrying about royalties on their behalf is pointless.
None of that changes the fact that pirates are no different from a non-customer. Equivocating about "reproduction" is just ridiculous. A library loaning a book out to a hundred non-customers is no different than a hundred people pirating a copy of a book or borrowing a copy from a friend. They're all non-customers.
Treating pirates as some special class of non-customers is ridiculous.