Stop the Petition!

A recent edition of a newsletter I receive called Editor's Notes brought to my attention a petition which is circulating to stop Amazon's practice of allowing Kindle book buyers to receive a refund for books which they have purchased.  I believe this is a dangerous petition which is detrimental to the very people who are striving to have it passed.  Their viewpoint is extremely myopic and out of touch with today's reality.

 

This is an issue on which I've turned 180˚ … piracy and the whole topic of Intellectual Property.   One of the best examples of how this applies to the real world today is in the position of Paulo Coelho who reports that because of piracy he has sold 12 million copies of his books in Russia that he would have never sold otherwise.  See: http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2012/01/20/welcome-to-pirate-my-books/.  

The petition explanation makes two gross errors:  First it states that if anyone buys, then returns a book from Amazon, the author is "out of pocket" a certain amount of money.  This is absolutely false.  You can't lose something you never had.  Yes, you have received less than you would have if the person kept the book.  But you certainly are not poorer because you are in exactly the same position you were in before that potential buyer ever appeared on the scene.

Next, it compares the sale to going into a restaurant and eating a meal then asking for a refund after you have eaten it.   In the case of the restaurant, the eater has physically used up the food and the owner of the restaurant is "poorer" because he cannot sell it again, eat it himself, or do anything else with the food which was consumed.  In the case of the book, the author still has the ideas which he is free to use, to offer to others, or to modify in any way they wish, but also, as Coelho points out he is actually potentially richer because he may have gained a supporter who will advertise his work for free.

Amazon's policy is like having your books put out in millions of public libraries (which wouldn't have been possible without Amazon).  I don't know if I'm typical, but I have borrowed books in a library and because I enjoyed the work of a certain author have subsequently purchased something from them.  If I hadn't read that "free" book I might never have bought the thing I did.  If you had a choice between having your own book in just a hand full of libraries, or millions of them, which would you choose?   

I would suggest that even if you received nothing, and if your book were given free to everyone on the planet, you would still be better off when it came around to the next thing you write because you would have a certain number of recipients of your first book who would love to read whatever came next.  Cohuelo gained 12 million of those, and that was just in one country.

An essay  which really convinced me of the errors in current IP laws was written by Stephan Kinsella: Against Intellectual Property.  I highly recommend this to anyone who has an interest in IP.

The Elephant in your Back Yard

Would you be surprised to discover an elephant in your back yard?  And what if, on discovering it, you learned it had been there for several years?

I imagine your reaction might be similar to what I felt after I finished reading a short publication I received a couple of days back entitled Hack Your Showerhead: Ten Ways to Get Big Government Out of Your Home.


What I found most amazing was the variety of ways in which government regulations affects us and our lives without our even being aware of it.  The unfortunate thing about this is that we often have a tendency to blame other the wrong people for the consequences of these regulations.

One of the ten ways that Jeffery Tucker, the author of this article, sees government regulations affecting us is in the shorter life that many --maybe most-- electric appliances have today, in comparison to the way they were a few years back.

I'm sure you've heard the complaint: "They just don't make [insert name of appliance] like they used to!" and then the complainant goes on to blame the greedy manufacturers for cutting down on the quality presumably in the interests of making more profit.

As Tucker sees it, these manufacturers are under the pressure of government pressures and regulations to implement a series of changes to their products, some of which actually make them perform worse than they did before without adding any material benefit to the end user.  So, in order to comply with the government presser so that they can stay in business, they are forced to substitute parts and materials that will meet the government requirements and yet will not increase the price beyond what their customers are prepared to pay.   All too often the consequence of this is to use cheaper parts which will wear out faster than the older ones.

Tucker explains what happened to air conditioners:

Manufacturers are permitted to make units that use only so much electrical power. They must choose among the features in which to allocate this energy ceiling. The lighter, “more efficient” parts tend to break more easily than they once did. This means that you have to replace the units more often than you did in the past. 

And that's just air conditioners.

Adding Tucker's article to my own observations over the years I have started to wonder how many of all the problems we face in the world today, ranging from wide spread diseases, to aberrant social psychopaths, to threats of depleted resources, to animals in danger of extinction, to hunger, to wars, etc. could be traced back to government interference, intervention or stimulation of some sort or the other, regardless of how well intentioned it may have been.

This suspicion is not because I believe that everybody in government has some evil intention to make the world into a living hell for us, but rather that people, both those who are in the government and those to look to the government to solve problems have too much faith in the ability of these people to find solutions.

The people in government are not superhuman before they go to work for the government, nor do they become endowed with any special abilities once they enter the government.  Why then, do we, and they believe that they can solve problems which supposedly couldn't be solved before the government became involved?

So if you discover you have an elephant which you don't want in your garden, do you then look around for another elephant to deal with it, or is it better to consider other alternatives such as finding a new place to plant your garden, start planting things which elephants don't like, or some more imaginative option?