Pirate Publishes Book, Gets Pirated

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**LordofHats**

The delicious irony:

A prominent member of Germany's Pirate Party has come under fire for issuing DMCA takedown notices to sites hosting unauthorized copies of her new book.

Julia Schramm is a well-known German blogger. She's also on the executive committee of Germany's Pirate Party, a political party whose manifesto states, "We demand that copying, providing access to, storing and using creative products for non-commercial purposes must not just be legalized, but actively promoted to improve the public availability of information, knowledge and culture, because this is a prerequisite for the social, technological and economic development of our society." She has in the past referred to the concept of intellectual property as "disgusting" and described copyright holders as the "content mafia."

But she's had a bit of a change of heart with the recent release of her book, Click Me, for which she earned an advance of more than €100,000 ($131,010) from publisher Albrecht Knaus Verlag, a subsidiary of international publishing giant Random House. The book is on sale in bookshops and on Amazon, but unauthorized - which is to say, pirated - copies of the book are also floating around online. That's not cool with Schramm or her publisher, which has been issuing takedown notices to anyone hosting it.

As for the Pirate Party's stance that copyright in the digital era is an "immoral" tool used to create artificial scarcity, she told German site Welt, "There will always be free texts from me on my blog, and there are also book excerpts." Click Me will be available for free in ten years when she gets the copyright back, she added.

I suppose there are worse things to abandon your principles for than a six-figure advance - you can have somebody killed for about a tenth of what Schramm got for her book, after all - and she did acknowledge, after the controversy erupted in Germany, that she dropped the ball a bit. "In retrospect, of course, I could have negotiated more aggressively with the publisher on some aspects," she allowed. "I was just very glad to be able to fulfill my dream to write a book."

**Grey Templar**

I wonder if this will hurt them in the polls...

**Samus_aran115**

Did the pirate party originate in... sweden? I can't remember. I think it was wherever the pirate bay is located.

Anyway, that's funny. I'm surprised she tried to make money off it anyway. Usually, books chronicling internet culture don't make very good shelf books. I know they have a pretty narrow audience in the first place.

**Grey Templar**

out of curiosity would any of their candidates records prevent them from holding office?

or do have to have not been caught

**Samus_aran115**

Grey Templar wrote:
out of curiosity would any of their candidates records prevent them from holding office?

or do have to have not been caught

That's curious. I don't know. If they seized their computers, I'm sure they could dish up some dirt on them, but they would need reasonable suspicion... I wonder if they have any obvious ties to piracy... hmmm....

They probably won't really go anywhere. There are people at the top who wouldn't let it happen.

**Lordhat**

I wonder how long till Anonymous decides to DDoS a website relevant to her for being a hypocrite....

**dogma**

I like how a person trying to use a creative product for commercial purposes is a member of an organization that forbids it*. I also like how said organization wants said creative products to be free, and is too lazy to click "next page" on a Google search which provides plenty of free access points.

*They also, essentially, oppose all creative action.

**Witzkatz**

The German Pirate Party chose that name mainly because Pirates are deemed cool, I think, not so much to really directly declare "We are/were software/copyright pirates". So, nobody is really associating them directly with the Pirate Bay or any other criminal activity here.

Part of their origin is simply being fed-up with existing German political parties like the SPD/CDU/FDP/Grüne package that mostly forms some kind of coalitions - in that, I can somehow agree with them, but unfortunately their political ideas really show how unexperienced they are in politics.

People were actually quite positive about them stirring up the "standard" poltical debate over here, but a year later, they seem to a) lose some of their steam and b) start to get like every other political party - members demanding salaries, high ones, preferrably...that sorta thing.

And, well, this lady enforcing a copyright really is another sign of how hypocritical those guys apparently can be...as well as any other political party, I might add.

**d-usa**

Best I can tell it was the publisher issuing them, not her. But she should have had a better contract to prevent this sort of thing.

And there is nothing wrong with pirates wanting to make money, the platform doesn't push for a free culture. It pushes for IP law reform, not abolishing IP laws.

**LordofHats**

I thing the real irony isn't the CDO, it's that this person raves against intellectual property rights (as quoted in the article, which I suppose is The Escapist), writes a book about it, and then... Sells the intellectual property rights to a publisher? Of course the publisher doesn't want it being pirated, what did she think would happen?

Oh my gawd... It's almost like she realized that she won't make any money by distributing her work freely to "actively promoted to improve the public availability of information, knowledge and culture, because this is a prerequisite for the social, technological and economic development of our society" doesn't have any profit in it...

Hypocrites gonna hypocrate?

**d-usa**

Should have done the publishing herself and release it as Creative Commons book, that's what we did with ours.

**Kilkrazy**

Did you get a $100,000 advance?

**d-usa**

You miss out on those things when you self publish...

**Kilkrazy**

I think you can see why Julia Schramm went to a regular publisher to get published, and why she is so upset that her book has been pirated.

**Manchu**

Perhaps headline should be:

"College Student Grows Up"

**kronk**

Manchu wrote:
Perhaps headline should be:

"College Student Grows Up"

I LOLed.

**KalashnikovMarine**

Manchu wrote:
Perhaps headline should be:

"College Student Grows Up"

Exalted "Money talks" might be another good one.

**Orlanth**

Samus_aran115 wrote:

Anyway, that's funny. I'm surprised she tried to make money off it anyway. Usually, books chronicling internet culture don't make very good shelf books. I know they have a pretty narrow audience in the first place.

It would be sound to say. I published this book, please support me by paying for your copy if you like it.

**Tye_Informer**

It doesn't sound like she is filing the takedown notices, the company that owns the rights to her book is. She just sold those rights for large amounts of money.

If she's smart, she will point out that her stance hasn't change:

1) She has not changed her stance, this is what's wrong with IP laws, etc. People should be able to share digital copies of her book with, as long they aren't making money off of it.
2) The places that are selling pirated copies of her book are making money off of it, so commercial use, and shouldn't be allowed, hence the takedown notices.

**Manchu**

Tye_Informer wrote:
If she's smart, she will point out that her stance hasn't change:

Except when she negotiated publishing her book ...

**d-usa**

Manchu wrote:
Tye_Informer wrote:
If she's smart, she will point out that her stance hasn't change:
Except when she negotiated publishing her book ...

You seem to think that Pirates are anti people making money from what they created.

**Grey Templar**

They arn't, they just seem to think its ok to download anything for free and that paying for it is optional.

**sebster**

I wonder if groups like the one in the OP will ever stop to think if maybe their rhetoric is doing their movement more harm than good. There's plenty of decent arguments for copyright reform, and people on both sides will agree that both sides can benefit from a direct updating of the various badly out of date copyright laws in existance around the world.

But then someone starts shouting about copyright is theft and any sensible point about patents on pre-existing elements like human genes or the overly generous lifespans on various IP just gets thrown out the window.

**Palindrome**

Grey Templar wrote:
They arn't, they just seem to think its ok to download anything for free and that paying for it is optional.

Irrespective of your views on piracy it is a reality and it can't be stopped without severely restricting internet freedoms (and even then piracy would still exist). There needs to be an honest debate about this, free from the industry hyperbole about 'billions of lost sales' derived from dubious statistics, as its never going to go away and middleground must be found.