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Old 09-02-2013, 07:37 AM   #94
Mivo
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Posts: 556
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Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: Germany
Device: In use: Pocketbook InkPad 3, Kobo Glo, iPad Air 2
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT View Post
The fact that a person buys content legally does not make it acceptable for that same person to also pirate content, any more than parking your car legally makes it acceptable to also park it illegally. You get punished for the laws you break; you can't "balance" your law-breaking against the laws you obey.
I'm not arguing the legal aspect, though. It's clear-cut in many countries: downloading e-books is as illegal as removing the DRM from books (in the EU that is the exact same regulation). I'm not saying that downloading copyrighted material is legally acceptable. It isn't. No question there.

What I was discussing was the claim that people pirating e-books, music or movies jeopardizes the livelihood of the artists. That I do question. This isn't clear-cut at all to me and I don't see evidence that suggests that it is a big deal. Certainly not big enough to invade the privacy of customers and impose additional disadvantages for buying books. This doesn't discourage piracy. It encourages it. There is something fundamentally flawed if buying a book is a worse deal than pirating it (cost aside, obviously). DRM is basically a slap in the face of the people who are willing to pay money. If I fought like this with my customers, I'd soon have none.

I do feel that it's fruitful to focus on practical aspects. The "why" people pirate instead of buying, and how that could be addressed. Punishment works to a degree (takes unreasonable amounts of resources), but I much prefer positive encouragement. It's more effective and also much cheaper. In a perfect world, people wouldn't pirate. But in a perfect world, DRM wouldn't exist and people could re-sell their e-books and digitally purchased music, too, and authors would get the biggest share of the money their works yield, and not the smallest part.

But we're not living in a perfect world, so I think it's worthwhile to look at the reasons for piracy and address those that can be addressed reasonably. Getting stuck on those who never buy anything is aggravating and unproductive. They don't matter economically.
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