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Originally Posted by HansTWN
Why do so many approach the issue from the angle "was the copyright holder really hurt?" Even if he or she was not, the really important angle should be "what on earth has the downloader done to deserve taking something he or she has no right to?"
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Free entertainment has always been the rule rather than the exception. Not that every form has been free for everyone, but music was always available to share with friends--by letting them listen at your house, if nothing else. (Think that's an obvious use of music and ridiculous to assume it could be copyright infringement? ASCAP tried to claim that phone ringtones were a "
public performance" and someone needed to pay a monthly license fee to use them.)
People have always shared entertainment with each other, and most often, the original creator didn't get paid for that. The problem is not "how to stop people from sharing entertainment"--not gonna happen--but "how do we make it profitable enough that creators can keep making stuff?"
Every time there's a breakthrough in technology, the answer changes. With free instant worldwide copies of many types of content, we'll have to get creative in how we can charge for it--but in thirty years, people are not going to be paying a dollar more for an ebook they can't share than they pay for a paperback delivered to their door that they can loan to the whole neighborhood.
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Since when did freeloading become such a noble act? Why not just read or watch something else, that is legally free?
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Is there a complete-and-accurate list of "legally free" content somewhere? Is there a list of out-of-copyright works? A list of works which the rights-holder doesn't mind being copied as long as no money is being made off the exchange? (The Grateful Dead allowed taping & exchanging of tapes of their shows, as long as no money was charged for the tapes--an early version of the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND-SA license.)
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In the end I do blame the Google culture of ad supported "anything is free". Unfortunately the copyright owners do not get anything from the ad revenue on Pirate Bay. So this model does not apply here.
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They don't get any revenue from books I buy at yard sales, either. I'm really not seeing why that's somehow better for the author; when I chop-and-scan a paper book, it becomes a revenue dead-end: I didn't pay royalties for it, and nobody else is going to be inspired to pay royalties for the next one because I read it.
When I read paper, I passed those books along to other people when I was done. I rarely bother recommending books to other people anymore; while I felt comfortable saying "I think you'll like this author! Read this and find out!", I feel much less comfortable saying, "I think you'll like this author! Pay $5 to find out!" (Or $15, which is more likely for books I chop and scan. If it were $5 in a usable-to-me ebook format, I'd've bought it.)
The purchase-per-read model is a terrific way to kill tomorrow's business for a short spike today. That bubble's going to pop--and the survivors will be authors who built a fanbase that will follow them to the next revenue model, not authors who got a royalty payment from every ebook reader.