EarlDoherty

Frankly, I find this a little hard to take, and quite insulting. Somehow, this whole issue has gotten turned around on me, and I'm being chastized for complaining that my intellectual property is being blatantly stolen and and I should just 'rise above it'. The times they are a-changin', right? I'm sure all the internet pirates out there are taking heart from your sentiments, it even serves to justify their activities, and they can now sleep at night secure in the concept that I should be working entirely gratis for their enlightenment.

Jesus: Neither God Nor Man cost me $13 per copy for my initial run of 1000. I've still got 250 left, and to judge by recent sales, that will do me for who knows how many years, since the Internet is now awash in free copies. I've got another 1000 copies of The Jesus Puzzle in my basement, and they too will no doubt outlive me in their present location by many years. Well, at least I'll save the roughly $5 per copy it costs me to send them to Amazon, but I don't know that Amazon will be happy to no longer be making their 50% cut on copies of my books that they will no longer have a market for.

This is the reality that cannot just be blithely ignored by any author, regardless of how much he or she may want to enlighten the world (OK, Abe, don't have a fit, I've got my tongue in cheek there). But when they say that this generation is characterized by a sense of entitlement (why pay for valuable work done if you can get it for nothing?), even you, Shesh, are witnessing to that, and be damned the author's own feelings. And thanks for your "tough luck" sympathy.

Anyway, overnight I've realized that there is more to say about this subject. I realize that FRDB does not make available pirated material, and I can sympathize with its concerns about liability, but the file-sharing sites who are the ones offering themselves as go-betweens for the pirates know exactly what they are doing and are fully complicit, despite their yeah-right disclaimers. They ought to be held liable under a measure like SOPA.

I'm sure that at least 90% (if not more) of what they host is copyright infringed. Good grief, the pirates don't even bother to remove the Copyright page where it's as plain as day. Do the hosters think their clients have gotten the author's permission? Give me a break. Why do you think their sites are loaded with disclaimers, and "abuse" e-mail addresses? Who do they think they are kidding? It's like the driver of a getaway car claiming he's innocent. "Gee, Your Honor, I didn't know what my friends were doing, they pulled on their ski masks when they left the car and went into the bank and told me to keep the motor running, but I didn't know! Why have you put me in the dock as well?"

And yet they're the ones screaming the loudest when govt. tries to do something to curb this runaway thievery and raise the specter of holding them responsible for making it possible, as though their basic human rights have been violated. The entire Internet has become a culture of larceny. It started years ago with music, and it's now spread into everything that can be digitized. Those who want free rein to strip authors not only of legitimate return but their self-respect as well, cry Victory in their demand for free entitlement, but they are crowing too soon, because those who have the power to object are NOT going to just lie down in the road and let themselves be run over. I suspect that SOPA is anything but dead. I also suspect that the furor over Internet freedom will turn out to be misplaced; doomsayers are rarely right, since a reasonable middle ground usually develops

Gee, I hate to have to get down in the muck with them, Shesh, but the market is not just "changing rapidly," it's being destroyed, and these pirates don't realize it. When the Romans had endured the piracy that plagued the Mediterranean to the point that it threatened to choke their grain supply routes, they woke up and appointed Pompey with unlimited power and forces to deal with them (67 BCE). The pirates were virtually wiped out in a couple of years.

I would like to suggest to the mods that this topic be stripped out and put into a separate thread (I started it with #112). There is probably not a Forum on this DB that is more book-driven, on a topic that is more reliant on authors of one sort or another. I think it deserves discussion among people whom it affects the most, both writers (amateur and professional) and readers, and I'd like to hope that all don't share the views of Sheshbazzar.

Earl Doherty

Sheshbazzar

What else can you do except either rise above it, or let it take you down and out? :huh:

I'm not trying to trash you. God knows, -you probably could not find a person on this site that is more in agreement with, and more sympathetic to the content of your works, or to your plight than I.

I know other people who have also invested their years and hundreds of thousands of hard earned dollars into their lifeworks and their inventory, only to find that almost overnight, that its marketable value has been plunged to nothing.
There are buildings, warehouses, storage units, and basements all over the world that are filled with once valued and valuable items, that are now moldering away, no longer having enough value to even pay for moving them or burning them.
The owners of the buggy whip factories may have likewise wished for the law to step in and put a stop to the manufacture of that damned horseless carriage that was about to destroy their lifework and livelihood. But eventually most did realize that they had to get over it and move on.

We live in a world that is what it is, one with plenty of two legged worms, rats, vermin, snakes, dogs, and vultures to go around. And as disgusting and painful as it is, its a fact of life that we have always had to deal with.

Oh the injustice of it all! Honest and hard working people are getting hurt by the pirates and the dishonest! So what else is new?
You should know by now that Sky-Daddy or baby Jeebus is not about to swoop down out of the sky and fix everything all better for you.

And this thing that is going on with the Internet is a worldwide phenomenon, there isn't no amount of votes or politicking or national law that can be passed that will control or stop this thundering freight-train with a hundred million wheels.

And yes, look at Rome, when it was given such power to take out a few puny pirates and brigands to protect Roman shipping and trade routes, it didn't stop there, it became ever more corrupt and controlling.
Do you really desire a modern equivalent of a Cesar and Holy Roman Imperial Troops 'protecting', regulating, and running your affairs?

What will you do? What do you plan on doing about your situation tomorrow and the next day? What are you going to be DOING with that time? and the next six months? Sitting and stewing?

No insult intended, but if your plans aren't working out, perhaps it is high time to think about coming up with a new game plan, and a new approach.
Involve your friends and your supporters, get some brainstorming and creative thinking going, gather up the ideas, and get them out on the table where you and your compatriots can discuss and weigh all the options. And use the results to formulate a plan of action.

No discouraging word here. Damn Earl, I want to see you succeed in getting your work well recognized and you well rewarded for you labors.
But I just do not see that happening via way of following the present course.



Your friend, Sheshbazzar

EarlDoherty

Well, you're a real piece of work, Shesh. And your analogies are all wet. Horse and buggy manufacturers were not put out to pasture through outright theft, but by honest invention of better products. My books are hardly the equivalent of horses and buggies. No one has overtaken them with superior proofs for historicism and made them irrelevant. They're the latest ideas in a thriving new industry and to have my work abused and myself cut off at the knees by a bunch of thieves is not my idea of the way the world should work. If you do, then we'll just agree to disagree. Would you tell Steve Jobs or Bill Gates that their work should be open to piracy and that they wouldn't deserve any return if there were no patent laws or legal protection from others stealing their products? Don't be ridiculous. Why should the book industry be any different?

Regrettably, you may well be right that the runaway train has gotten loose, but that doesn't mean those of us who are being run over by it shouldn't have the right to call it what it is and cry foul. And to continue to try to find ways of stopping it. Like I said, I'd be very surprised if SOPA is truly dead and buried. There is simply too much at stake. Technology that makes it possible to commit a crime (and there's plenty of technology that has done just that) does not thereby excuse the crime, nor should it prevent us from trying to rein in the criminal uses of such technology.

And if I did choose to stop writing, that will be my decision. But I don't need you to dump all over me for making it. Instead, if you've got the alternative solution, let's hear it.

If men developed a machine that gave them the ability to walk through walls and enter a woman's bedroom to rape her, would you tell women: listen, it's the wave of the future, you can't prevent technology. Stop complaining and adapt. Would you pressure the govt. to cease and desist if they tried to pass laws to strengthen the walls or disable the machines because that would limit men's freedom of action and expression? (I'm guessing you're an NRA supporter.)

Well, after my sojourn onto the Internet yesterday, I felt raped. But what the hell, unbridled rape is obviously the wave of the future and I guess I just need to learn to assume the position. With a smile on my face.

Earl Doherty

Sheshbazzar

What do I know? Got a me huge stacks of countless hundreds of used books taking up a substantial portion of my living space, and wondering how dispose of them.......
And a new Kindle for Xmas, on the one hand I love those good 'ol fashioned paper books.....but on the other hand.....
You might be missing my point. I am by no means criticizing the quality of, or durability, or value of the premises of your writings.
Do I have an alternative solution? Well I might have a few ideas and suggestions.
If your weren't so busy with being pissed you might have noticed that I already have given you a few positive suggestions.

1. "if your plans aren't working out, perhaps it is high time to think about coming up with a new game plan, and a new approach." Do you find that to be so unthinkable, that even the suggestion of it is insulting?

2. "Involve your friends and your supporters," in sales it is known as 'working your circle of influence' there are a lot of people out there that you know, and that know you, and admire your work, and would be honored to be asked to help you succeed in what you are doing.
Give your fans, especially those who have already bought your books, and can read and recite them like they were their Bible, half a chance to help you out.
But you gotta do the asking. You gotta tell them that you would like to have them, and that you want them to be on your team.

3. "get some brainstorming and creative thinking going, gather up the ideas, and get them out on the table where you and your compatriots can discuss and weigh all the options." No doubt you are a very intelligent person, given the quality of your research and writings. But are you intelligent enough to multiply your brain-power and work day a thousand fold or more by putting others brains and time voluntarily to work for you, twenty four seven?

4. "use the results to formulate a plan of action." Don't wish to insult you, so will not expand on the statement.

You tell us that you have all these books setting around, and if we are to take you at your word, almost no one is buying.
What are you willing to do to get them sold? Could you perhaps arrange and advertise for a book signing at local malls or independent bookstores?
Don't laugh too hard, I have on many occasions bought (for full retail) and read the books of Authors, and of new writers, that I had never before heard of, simply because they were there in the flesh, with a smile and a readiness to spend a few minutes time explaining their works.
Hell, if I were ever to encounter you selling your books at my local mall or bookstore I'd want an autographed copy of everything that you had.
Even if I already had it on my shelf at home. Just saying.

STILL Your friend, Sheshbazzar





.

Horatio Parker

Intellectual property is undergoing a profound change; I wonder if anyone knows how it will play out. It's a historical benchmark as profound as Gutenberg. Digital media can be replicated virtually cost free. There is no historical precedent for this situation. Law and morality have been outpaced by technology. I'm not saying BTW that piracy isn't illegal or immoral, or trying to suggest how you should feel about not being able to extract rents on those files.

It maybe no comfort to you, but still I'll point out that many people would love to have the problems you're having. You have successfully leveraged the Internet to get out your message. You are of figure of national or perhaps international repute, notwithstanding the size of the field. Millions of people are trying to achieve something similar, almost all of them failing.

How to turn that success into a revenue stream is unfortunately another problem.

One suggestion I'd make is borrowed from free software developers; they allow people to pay if they want, essentially a tip jar. If the Internet enables people to take value from you, why should it not allow people to give you value? Your site has no mechanism for people wanting to pay you. Why not allow them to do so? Offer a choice. I suspect that there are those who would be willing to pay you directly who do not want to pay Amazon.

Anyway, just some thoughts. I'm a fan, your online articles led me to this forum, and I've had wonderful interesting times here.

JonA

<removed>

JonA

This, of course, is a brilliant idea, and it demonstrates a way to actually utilize the new internet technology instead of beating it back with a legal stick.

I would bet that there are many people who do want to contribute to Doherty's work who also don't want to jump through the hurtles of Amazon or wherever it is he sells his stuff. By setting a predetermined price on a specific website, he only ends up with a 'gatekeeper effect', where he is perhaps able to control the flow in and out of the gate, but ultimately loses if there is a breach in the wall anywhere else, since he's grounded himself at the gate.

Once someone gets the secret and escapes with it, they can disseminate it to anyone and Doherty has then lost control of the work and any means of profiting off of the free copies, which, it would seem, are going to exist anyway because it is 2012 and the Internet and the free exchange of information and ideas that it provides are here to stay.

If Doherty offered the book for free on his site, no one would have it on their site; why would they bother making it available for free when it's already made available for free? The value of this, of course, is that it allows him to generate donations on his page as people stop by to read it.

As it stands, there are already free copies; but Doherty is unable to benefit from them because they are not on his site.

To be entirely honest, in fact, I would never read an online/eBook. I hate, HATE, looking at screens to read a lot of information. If I found Doherty's book worthwhile (after reading some of it online for free), I'd skip the donation BS and buy a hard copy of the thing.

There is actually a lot of revenue to be generated using the Internet and it doesn't just involve Amazon.

Anyway, the moderators are telling me I'm in trouble for voicing my position on this matter, even though I cannot imagine why on Earth Mr. Doherty would have mentioned this if not to have responses to his posts, but oh well.

Jon

EarlDoherty

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned (and I’m certainly behind the times in a lot of ways), but the thing that hurts me most in all this is the lack of respect. I’m sure you can appreciate that sometimes respect is more important than money. Seeing all those pirate sites (and that’s the only way to style them, because they exist largely to offer copyright-infringed texts for free—let’s call a spade a spade—and no one posting comments on them seems to be bothered one whit about what they’re doing) was quite disturbing. It’s become pervasive, the new lifestyle, and in this case it’s not even being perpetrated by one’s ‘enemies’ but largely one’s supporters. Collectively, I simply can’t understand the ‘what’s wrong with that?’ attitude.

I know I’ve probably been too hard on Shesh and using him as a venting post, since I realize what he’s doing is trying to accept the current situation (since there doesn’t seem to be that much that can be done to reverse it) and work from there in some kind of positive fashion. Although what that positive fashion might be remains murky, to say the least, despite a couple of ideas that have been put forward.

Gutenberg was a positive development for the dissemination of ideas, but at least it wasn’t accompanied by immoral activity (though for the Church, in making the bible available to everyone, it was decidedly immoral!) and printers and writers still got compensated for their work. But it’s going to be hard for me to embark on some future writing project (such as a rebuttal book to Ehrman, if it comes to that) knowing that the very audience I’m writing for is just waiting with bated breath to steal it. Something is not quite right about that situation, no matter what the rationalization. Perhaps I’ll be forced to limit it to a review for my website.

Later today I’m going to raise the whole matter with a small discussion group I’m part of (though we’ve actually done very little discussion), which includes Bob Price, Frank Zindler and Rene Salm and see what their thoughts are and how they’re coping. I may share some of their views with you, if they’re not too personal. They, too, as a group, were thinking of a cooperative book, myself included, in response to Ehrman. We’ll see if they’re still as keen in light of our new Gutenberg moment.

Earl Doherty

JonA

I think you should stop looking at them as your 'supporters', because they are not. Your supporters support you, and these people don't. People who pirate do so largely because they never plan on paying for the stuff anyway. If they don't want to pay the price you're asking, they probably aren't going to pay the price you're asking—no matter what.

You may be lacking in some revenue from this, but as was mentioned, there are ways to recapture that revenue. But by and large, the evidence has shown that pirating doesn't kill business revenue the way many portray it to.

This was a product of the technology; it had nothing to do with morals. It was simply too expensive to print a book on one's own. By owning the technology, the printers also owned the content.

But that isn't the world we live in anymore. Everyone now owns the technology to disseminate. This undoubtedly creates problems for people who would prefer the older model. But that's their own undoing; and despite the admiration that we all have for you for speaking out against the accepted views (even if we ourselves hold those views), I don't think many of us would prefer restrictions on technological progress and the open and free exchange of information just because you happen to disagree with the business model that such a technological superstructure as the Internet requires.

If it helps, I rarely look for books online. I simply hate reading things in that format. If I honestly wanted to read your book cover to cover, I'd try to rent it from the library; and if I liked it after that, I'd maybe buy it, but only maybe because I am poor and cannot afford a lot of things. If I had more money, I'd probably just go and buy your book right now.

How much does it cost to do the research on your book? If you are just seeking to get back your investment of time and lost income from not being able to do other work, figure out how much money you will need to write the book and then ask for donations. I bet you'd get enough to write your book. And if not, then you'll know ahead of time that it will not be a financially viable path and won't have to worry about all those leftover copies.

Best of luck to all of you!

Jon

Toto

Robert M. Price takes donations - he runs a popular podcast, and his fans chip in to keep him going. But he's an entertainer as well as a scholar. He also sells ebooks, and might have some good references on the technology involved in that