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I love how copyright arguments become these overdrawn moral debates. I guess law is like that regardless... but without a full explanation of the law, no one can answer these questions and so consumers are left to make their own decision as to what is moral.
You can actually see the same craziness going on with ebooks that messed up the record industry. Because the commercial sector would not provide for consumer demand (ie, selling mp3s on the net), the public took it upon itself to distribute their own copies. Similarly, because the publisher won't release the ebook version, people are creating their own. We don't have a p2p for these small files, so we use IRC.
Will this result in major litigousness by a strong book lobby? I certainly hope not. I hope they're smarter than that and learn that consumer demand is important. The market and the public keep asking, "Who the heck wants to read a book on a device? They'll always be a need for paper books!"
Oh yea? Tell that to the newspaper industry.
Incidentally, I logged onto a nefarious IRC channel when Order of the Phoenix came out just to see how quickly they were able to produce the book online. When you think about it, all you need to do is unbind it and drop it on a good photocopier and you've got a ready-made ebook in about 5 minutes (give or take). Someone should point that out to the head of Scholastic.
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