[riemann42]

It is interesting how these conversations always seem to get around to what is legal, as opposed to ethics.

Elfwreck, I had a long rant about how the right to format shift demonstrates flaws in my argument, but I removed it as it seemed to be getting too legalistic, and I was making an ethical argument, essentially, that by buying a book you were entering into an agreement with the author, publisher, etc. It was a pretty weak argument, essentially assuming that it was ethically wrong to violate a contract.

In the end, however, all attempts to avoid legal arguments will always fail, because Copyright is a legal construction, not an ethical one. The only way to make this into an ethics discussion is to make an argument that author's deserve to get paid when you read their work, but this argument leads to all sorts of problems as well, as we have discussed in detail when I tried to make this argument previously on another thread...