cophnia61 Wrote:in the first chapter of zero no tsukaima vol.1 I've found three mistakes

Green_Airplane Wrote:I've looked at the possibility of providing a fake Japanese address. But the input form contained a mandatory phone number field and from what I understood Amazon will verify that I'm really in Japan by sending a PIN code to the phone and having you enter it on the website. I have a few friends in Japan, I may ask one of them to help me out with that some day.

Green_Airplane Wrote:The thing is, this is not about a shipping address. In order to get around the copyright restriction, I need to set my "Country settings" to Japan. This is something that's within my profile page. I'm not sure how Tenso would go about helping me with that.
In any case, Tenso is an international shipping company, and since I'll be buying ebooks, there's no shipping involved, so what's in it for them?
Also, I remember exchanging a couple of emails with Tenso years ago. I wanted to get something shipped from Japan, and I tried (unsuccessfully) to convince them to add my country to the list of countries they ship to. They didn't seem very forthcoming then.

Green_Airplane Wrote:(…). At least it was until a bunch of old guys caught wind of it and promptly bucked it up with their country restrictions, censorship and other outdated bullshit.

Green_Airplane Wrote:This is more about old ways of thinking than it is about old age. The concept of national borders is simply outdated in the context of today's technologies and has no place on the internet.

Quote:Case in point, I did find two different pirated versions of the book I'm looking to buy. Maybe the txt version was made by OCR, and maybe it was made by somebody taking the official ebook and converting it to txt. It may well have been the latter.

Green_Airplane Wrote:I get what you're saying and I agree that intellectual property of the authors should be protected. But as I said, the problem is they're trying to impose restrictions on a system they don't understand. These kinds of restrictions will NEVER stop the pirates. A pirate is someone who knows the system and knows how to get the files. No matter how hard your restrictions are, sooner or later they'll gonna get the data - and it's enough for just one of them to get the data, for there to be a pirated version available for everyone.

You can't stop the signal.

Case in point, I did find two different pirated versions of the book I'm looking to buy. Maybe the txt version was made by OCR, and maybe it was made by somebody taking the official ebook and converting it to txt. It may well have been the latter.
The only people it will stop is people trying to abide by the law and buy the book.

Let me explain what I mean. There's three kinds of people here:
1. The honest guy, who will try to buy the book, and when can't he'll just let it go. He has nothing to do with pirates, and he may not be technical enough to figure out a VPN and all the other steps to work around the restriction.
2. The pirate. This guy will figure out how to get the book and then put it on the net for everyone to share. You can't stop this guy. If he has to set up a VPN to Japan, he'll do it. If he has to convince his friend in Japan to buy the books and send them to him, he'll do it. He may even just buy the books when he himself is in Japan. He's smart enough to make sure the leaked files don't contain anything that can be traced back to him. The only reason he hasn't pirated your stuff is he hasn't heard of you yet, or hasn't gotten around to it yet.
3. A guy like me. Someone who doesn't usually release copyrighted stuff on the internet, but knows how to do it. I originally wanted to just buy the books, read them and be done with it. I'll admit, it wasn't because I'm highly moral or anything, I just had a bad experience with bootleg copies and didn't want to risk going through it again. But now I'm thinking, what do I do with the books once I've got them? Do I release them on the internet, just to show the fuckers up? I'm technical enough to make sure the files can't be traced back to me.

So here's what you're doing by putting up those senseless restrictions:
- You're frustrating guy number 1, and losing profits from him at the same time. Not just the profit from this purchase, but from a lot of future purchases, because you can be sure he'll go and look for other channels. Plus he'll badmouth you wherever he can.
- You are doing diddly-squat to stop guy number 2. If he wants to pirate your stuff, he will. And if he hears people complaining that they can't buy your stuff because of senseless restrictions, he's more likely to do it. By creating restrictions, you're encouraging piracy.
- You are seriously pissing off guy number 3, giving him an incentive to pirate your stuff. Once again, by creating restrictions, you're encouraging piracy.

It all comes down to this: In a perfect world, there would be a way to stop piracy. There would also be no need for piracy. In a perfect world there would be no hair loss and no pet would ever die. But we live in the real world, and you can either have a completely totalitarian internet, devoid of all privacy and freedom of expression, or you have to accept the fact that there's gonna be some piracy. The question is, do you exhibit attitudes and policies that encourage it, or ones that make people inclined to do the right thing instead?

Green_Airplane Wrote:3. A guy like me. Someone who doesn't usually release copyrighted stuff on the internet, but knows how to do it. I originally wanted to just buy the books, read them and be done with it. I'll admit, it wasn't because I'm highly moral or anything, I just had a bad experience with bootleg copies and didn't want to risk going through it again. But now I'm thinking, what do I do with the books once I've got them? Do I release them on the internet, just to show the fuckers up? I'm technical enough to make sure the files can't be traced back to me.

Green_Airplane Wrote:It all comes down to this: In a perfect world, there would be a way to stop piracy. There would also be no need for piracy. In a perfect world there would be no hair loss and no pet would ever die. But we live in the real world, and you can either have a completely totalitarian internet, devoid of all privacy and freedom of expression, or you have to accept the fact that there's gonna be some piracy. The question is, do you exhibit attitudes and policies that encourage it, or ones that make people inclined to do the right thing instead?

Stansfield123 Wrote:That's the same false dichotomy anarchists use. In fact, anarchy and totalitarianism are not the only options. Totalitarianism is the curbing of freedom, not theft. You can have a free Internet that is governed by laws. Anarchy isn't freedom. You need laws to have freedom.

Quote:...the potential damage caused by their whole library popping up on some Russian or Chinese site, in perfect quality, available for everyone in Japan to download for free.

Quote:All you can do is steal a few books, and share them with a few dozen people.

Quote:2. you can't stop piracy, so why try

Quote:1. Publishers are too stupid to understand why they're wrong

Quote:You can have a free Internet that is governed by laws.

cophnia61 Wrote:

Stansfield123 Wrote:That's the same false dichotomy anarchists use. In fact, anarchy and totalitarianism are not the only options. Totalitarianism is the curbing of freedom, not theft. You can have a free Internet that is governed by laws. Anarchy isn't freedom. You need laws to have freedom.

Good points Stansfield123!

I think anarchy is perfect equilibrium, and not "do what the f**k you want", like steal other people's work. In fact if there is anarchy, the act of stealing a book would break that anarchy. Obviously anarchy, in this acceptation, is more like "peace on earth". But yes, anarchy is not absence of rules or absence of organisation.