Are there any contributors here who are performers or authors who make a good percentage of her or his income from producing magic books or recordings? I'd be interested in hearing her or his thoughts regarding a profitable but fair system for both seller, buyer, and reseller.

Richard Kaufman, please chime in here.

Someone mentioned that books and such are resold all the time of copyrighted material but when you sell your copy of a book it is transferred and you do not have more of the same book to sell. In the case of digital media, the thief may buy 1 copy of something but then they sell unlimited copies of the same downloaded or digitized CD or DVD.
Theoretically they could buy a download from an artist for let's say $30.00 and then sell it as a download to 1000's or millions of other people for 2 or 3 dollars per download and the artist gets a cut of the $30.00 while the thief gets thousands or millions of dollars for their 30.00 investment.

In my previous post, I said theoretically but in fact this kind of theft does and is happening and it is happening with old and new books as well because the thief is scanning the books and selling them as downloads. The only way I can see for artists to protect themselves is to have non downloadable streaming tutorials.

Danaruns is absolutely correct that the answer is simple. When you buy a dvd or digital download and then share with or sell to multiple people, it would be the same exact thing if you were to go into a store and pocket several widgets and check uout for only 1 hiding the others in your pocket and then sharing or selling the others.
If you sell your dvd, cd, book or download and no longer have a copy of it then that is fine, otherwise it is theft.

Hello

An interesting thread, and as a magic inventor, manufacturer and dealer, I thought that it would be worth adding an opinion from my point of view.
Through Black Artefacts I sell books that I have written and effects that I produce, so I have a vested interest in this subject.

My first book, Black Book 1, was released in way back in 1995, well before any electronic format was widely available. This of course carries my copyright and I was not really concerned with copyright infringements at the time, as to copy the book would mean photocopying all the pages, and so I reasoned, not too many people would do that!

Black Book 1 was eventually followed up by Black Book 2 and Black Book 3. I then produced a combined edition The Big Black Book. By the time this came out there was the possibility of releasing it as a PDF. I was not and am not concerned if someone who buys the book lets a friend read it or even if they sell it on. At least my message not to mention my web store is getting publicised.

Each copy of The Big Black Book has the title page dedicated to the purchaser and is signed by me. This makes it a little less likely that the book will be sold or given away as it is personal to the owner. However, if they decide to do so then that is their choice. At least they paid for the original and another person is getting to know my work, and that person my come onto my web shop and purchase something.

The problem with releasing the work as a PDF then needed to be considered. This problem for me was the worry that the PDF could easily be copied and distributed hundreds or thousands of times without any financial benefit to me. Yes, I get financial benefit from the sales, it is a business and it is how I make my living, pay my bills and live. I am not embarrassed about this why should I be?

If someone has invested a decent amount of money in a written work, then they are less inclined to give it away free to others. If someone gets a freebie PDF file, they are less likely to feel they must keep it to themselves. If they have accepted a free pirate copy of a work, then their moral compass perhaps points in the direction of not bothering about the original author. So, a pirated PDF is more likely to continue being passed around free. Somehow people distinguish between the intellectual property invested in a written work and in a digital file.

Some years back I was browsing on eBay and found that one of my effects was for sale. I was curious, so I bid for it and purchased it. When it arrived, I saw that it was a poor photocopy of the instructions and the tarot cards used were of poor quality but the instructions had MY name on them. I also checked, and the seller was not a customer of mine. So, someone had let them copy the instructions.

I got in touch with them and eBay. The eBay seller apologised and said that they didn't know it was a copy!!! Believe me I still trawl on-line auction sites to check if I'm being ripped off.

Anyway, back to books. Last year I decided that I would finally release The Big Black Book as a PDF, I reasoned that the book had been out for a long time now and it would be good to offer a cheaper way of selling it so that people new to Bizarre Magic could dip their toes int the water and hopefully catch the bug. However, each PDF is also dedicated to the purchaser so if any are pirated then whoever gets the pirate PDF will no for sure that THEY are not entitled to it. Whether or not that will bother them I don't know, but it makes me feel better.

I have now released Black Book 4, in proper printed version. I have no plans to put this onto a PDF file for sale (but it does come with a free DVD).
In conclusion, as an author, manufacturer and seller, I see a big difference between lending or selling a printed book and the distribution of digital work for free. Mainly this is a difference of scale, or at least potential scale.

Keith Hart

Even printed Books are being ripped off and sold by either 1 person or many in China. You can buy all 8 books of tarbell for 5.00. newly released effects show up on these sites almost as soon as they are released. I am not going to mention these sites but I am sure there are many here that know about them. Even if a trick comes with a gimmick or something you must have, anyone can pay 1 or 2.00 just to find out how it's done.

My DVD on Penguin Magic has been already extensively pirated and I wouldn't be happy if I found out that my customers were also sharing it amongst themselves. If 2 people know how my secret works and I only get paid once, it's a loss for me as well as my other customers who want maximum exclusivity. But this is something out of my hands so I try not to think about it too much.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. It's extremely interesting to see how the act of buying something and sharing cost (and possession) is considered theft in the digital era. If I may: would you consider it the same if it was about buying a prop or a physical book? Case 2: Subject A buys your DVD. Learns everything, then re-sells the used DVD to subject B. Would you feel this to be as a theft too?

Thanks again everybody for taking part in this discussion. I personally find it extremely formative.
Andrea

Case 1: A prop or a book has physical value so the original buyer is losing possession when he is selling them. He obviously is okay with not owning and using them anymore and so decided to sell it. So it's not theft. It's like selling a used car.
But the same thing for an online download is different because there the original buyer is learning the secret and then just selling the video link to another person, thereby earning a profit and causing no loss to himself.

Case 2: Nobody really sells used DVD. They just copy the video and email it to subject B. And this is the biggest form of theft in the magic industry. All the magic pirates buy DVDs and then list it online at a fraction of the price in the same way. So in the end, people end up buying from the pirates instead of the creators.

I am afraid I completely disagree with case 2. I myself have sold dozens of DVD's I was not happy with and/or I figured out I would never make use. Especially those I bought in the early days of excitment . You would not imagine how many good people are out there willing not to break the laws. Forget about the kids, those would not care anyway and would find a way to break it regardless of the format. We are talking about adults here ;-).
So lets' see about case 3: Sunject A goes to a conference and buys the conference notes for about the same price as a DVD. The conference notes contain as much material as a DVD (let's say explaination for 10 effects). No props. After a while he resells it on ebay *without making copy of it*. Please try to focus on the logical thought rather than on the funnel that brings you to the "pirate" basket. Would you be able to state that in this case (and in case 2, without the distortion you mentioned) the subject A is a thief and a pirate?

Thanks again,
Andrea

Andrea,

With digital purchases, what you are buying is knowledge. And what the seller is selling is his/her intellectual work product. There is nothing physical to sell or buy. So as a buyer, when you make such a purchase, you are purchasing understanding. Of course, you can sell the only copy of the lecture notes, or you can sell the DVD, or you can sell the digital download and not keep a copy. But that thing you sold is not the thing you bought, it is only the vehicle for the purchase, the "shipping box," if you will. You're still keeping everything of value that you bought, which is the intellectual work product; i.e., the knowledge you gained.

Now, if you can wipe that out of your brain, then sell away. But you can't. So what you're really doing is depriving the creator of a sale of the special knowledge that you lacked and which you bought, which you would not have obtained had it not been for the creator.

The concept is pretty simple. If you don't understand this, you're doing so on purpose, because you are obviously intelligent enough to understand. And while I understand you are talking about this as an intellectual exercise, the person doing it is doing it because you (<-- generic "you") want to profit off someone else's labor, and take money that they are rightfully due for the transfer of that special knowledge, but you want to rationalize it to make yourself feel better about stealing it. The knowledge is the product, not the download/notes/DVD, which is just the vehicle. Try selling the empty file, if you think the vehicle has value. Good luck with that.

Pop Haydn posts here. Pop taught me a trick in person. It was his own creation. It wasn't a download, but he does sell it as a download or a DVD. I subsequently taught the trick to two other people. Is that ethical? I don't think so, even though I didn't "cost share" by charging them for it. So what I did was to go onto Pop's website and buy two download copies of the trick so that he was not deprived of the sales he could have had, had I not intervened and taught it directly. (His wife even asked me why I was buying two copies of a trick I already knew, so I explained it.) I bought the two identical downloads, information Pop gave directly to me, because that information is what Pop sells. He doesn't sell "downloads," he sells information. And he was entitled to payment for the information when I transferred it to two other people.

This isn't difficult. Think of downloads like a classroom, and the secret information is what the teacher teaches in the classroom. The download/classroom is worthless without the secret information. You're paying for the secret information. The instructor is charging students for the secret information he delivers, no matter where he delivers it. The secret information is proprietary knowledge, not common knowledge, and it is owned by the creator. It's not "cost sharing" to sneak someone into the classroom and charge that person half of what you're paying for the secrets. That's theft. It's theft because the secret information, meant for one person at one price, is being illicitly given to two (or three, or four) people for that one "per person" price.

When you sell the information to another and thereby pay less (or nothing) for the secrets you received in exchange for payment, you're not only cheating the creator, you're cheating all the other people who paid the creator's price for the secrets. And you're decreasing the ability of creators to distribute their work to others, reducing the overall availability of secrets to other people.

Hi Dana,
I truly appreciate you keeping going on taking part to this discussion. What makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, honestly, is that your words sounds like you know the answer, when, unfortunately, nor law, neither human beings have given a clear answer so far, simply because we are not there yet.

Your point of view is crystal clear, but I would appreciate you keeping the tone to what the reality is: yours is your opinion. Don't get me wrong, I would die to let you express it.

From your post it looks like I have stolen a lot of money in my life, by buying used books. Thanks God there is nothing to feel guilty about. When you know something (be it a secret, a novel, a movie, a tv serie DVD) and you feel you will not use it anymore (read/view), it is ethically correct, and permitted by the law, to sell the good, rather than trash it. This gives people that cannot afford the new product, the opportunity to own a used one. This is an assumption I will not discuss here. Nor will I discuss about the people that make copies of books and DVD's before selling them. This is simply not the subject of this thread and I am not intersted in a debate on pirates.

What we are discussing is: since there are a lot of examples outside of the magic community about cost sharing of knowledge (libraries for instance), what is the average opinion of the magic community about sharing a digital "secret", given complete intellectual honesty by the buyers to not simultaneously possess the file.

Very happy to keep on discussing about the above in this thread.

Thanks,
Andrea

Hello andrea.corelli. If I read your post correctly, you are saying there is nothing wrong with purchasing a digital magic secret and then posting that secret so that everyone can view the secret so long as no one else possesses the digital file. In other words, an artist spends months or years perfecting a magic effect maybe they had to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars during trial and error and decides to sell this effect as a digital file download for $10.00 per download and someone buys the digital file for $10.00 and then decides to share that file for viewing to thousands of other people for free.
Hundreds or thousands of people learn a cool new trick and the artist gets $10.00 for their work.

I personally have been wondering how long it will be before artists keep their secrets to themselves and say to heck with selling it.

Sorry, but no. I never talked about posting. I asked for the community opionion on sharing the cost of a digital purchase with someone else. Why in the world you understood I wanted to know about exposing the secret to the public I am very curious about.

What a strange, loaded, question. Especially after Andrea went to great length, many times in this thread, explaining how totally not about that his idea is.

That said, and maybe it's *my* turn to read people wrong, but it seems to me some here would most definitely prefer for public libraries not to carry any sort of intellectual property (I of course assume they're fair enough to forego their chick-lit or science-fiction, not just force "their" kind of data out of other's reach).

I think the basic problem with sharing magic, more than with other media, is that you can't really hand over anything without keeping a copy.
That is because, in the end, the knowledge is the key and til the moment we will have chips in our brain so we could delete information after we pass it on, there is no way to forget what we learned.
So even if you are just sharing a trick with someone by lending him a copy of the book or sending him the only existing lecture file, you will have a copy of that in your brain you can still work with and that is totally not okay for someone who earns his money from creating unique knowledge.

I think this is *THE* key point. I see the Card College 3-4-5 out of our local public library all the time.

Everybody is selling knowledge in a book or a lecture note, the difference is that in magic we are talking about knowledge that the fewer people know, the better it is, and the higher value is has. The border between thinking that this kind of knowledge has somehow a "privileged" status and shall not be shared, vs any other kind of knowledge is very thin, but the discussion is getting more and more interesting in my humble opinion!

Yes, almost everything we buy includes "secret information" and you pay access to see it.
Such as movies, novels, how-to-books, even a full song, everything. You pay money to watch a movie, so you can see the information, "the secret inside" of the product.

So, if we need to wipe out the knowledge from our brain before its ok to sell magic product, then you have to also respect the other side, who also feels they are selling a secret. You come to the point you cant never sell anything, share anything, etc..

In the end magic is not much different than how-to-books. Like how to play drums, how to cook, how to anything.

How to play drums DVD? You pay to see the secret how to play drums. If you need to erase your skills before you can sell the DVD, or you cant never use the techniques later, its just nonsense. In magic, you learn how to do DL, or how to do Ambitious Card. You don't really "pay for the secret", you pay for the regular information of how-to, like in any other teaching genre.

When we come down from the glory of "magic is a secret", we have to realize the only reason magic is a secret is because spectator can have better experience. that's it. It don't need to be applied to go against us, who already knows how most of tricks are done.

The problem in magic is that *everything* is a secret, its so secret you cant even talk about it, anywhere. You cant even whisper it to yourself.
The secret thing goes way beyond what it really is. Magic is equal to any how-to information.

That alone cuts so much vital information for the new incoming magicians, who needs it in order to progress in the hobby, or get even started with right track.

You have to buy so much stuff to get the basic knowledge down, "because magic is a secret". You have to know what books, what DVDs, from where, you have to be a master, and then buy them all to get even started. Its just so much and its all because "magic is a secret".

The secret policy has been applied so deep down, that even magicians cant share any information without gettin judged, in order to make progress together.

Magic, *should be secret for the spectator*, and there it should end. Otherwise, its just hobby knowledge, like how to play drums.
How stupid it would be if drumming would be secret. The guys wont tell anything to each other, they cant discuss techniques in the public and progress, they have to use codewords to talk about it, they have to put disclaimer screen for every invented technique he uses, they have to play the drums under some black hood on stage, because "playing drums is a secret".

Next time when you buy a cook book (or any how-to book), remember that its full of unnannounced secrets. Never sell it, and only read it yourself, delete everything after and never do the food you learnd if you don't have the book. Never teach the meals, never loan the book, don't tell anyone, just cook it yourself and praise the copyright holder.

That's bad mental attitude for anybody who is interested in cooking. Once we apply "magic is a secret" attitude to any other genre and look how bad it looks, we must ask, how bad "magic is a secret" is for us? How much more damage it carrys inside, than actual progress between us?

REALLY? This question even needs to be asked, let alone go on for three pages? Come on.

Have you ever tried to check out a required college book from a library? you can't, it must be purchased, colleges have that system locked down.

When you go to a magic lecture why not buy 1 copy of the lecture notes and distribute it among the attendees.

When you sell or give away a how to book or any book, you are transferring the book and that is fine. If you make a copy of that book and sell or give away copies of it, that is definitely unethical and probably a crime.

Sharing among friends happens all the time but it takes away from the artist and some people will always justify to themselves why they should have free stuff but it is always at someones expense.