[bill_mchale]

Originally Posted by Rich_D

There are two differences. First, I didn't obtain illegal copies so I could give my legal copies away. The reasons for obtaining the illegal copies were for personal use. I gave the copies away because I didn't want to waste them.

The order of your choices hardly matter. Whether you decided to give them away and then obtained illegal copies, or obtained illegal copies and then decided to give them away, you broke the social contract with the authors and other rights holders of those works by using illegal copies to allow you to give away other copies of the work.

Second, most everyone on board is assuming that everyone should follow the same ethics. Ethics vary by culture, religion, economic standing and education.

Ethics are not up for an individual choice. At the very least, the ethics of a situation must be agreed upon by all parties involved. Your decision to download books from the darknet and to then give away your legal copies impacts at least two groups whom you have ignored. The first group is the authors and other rights holders, many of whom have stated an express desire not to have their works distributed this way. The second group is other book lovers who may be indirectly hurt through your actions (Through higher book prices, fewer books since illegal file sharing might reduce the financial incentive of some authors to write more books, etc.).

Ultimately lets put it this way, when the scope involved is global or nearly so (as it is with copyrighted works), then everyone has to play by the same ethical standards or there are essentially no ethics at all.

I'm not rationalizing my decision, I have no need to. I find my solution perfectly acceptable and ethical. If you don't... well... tough. I'm not telling you to follow my beliefs and I sure as heck don't want you telling me that I have to follow yours.

Somehow, I think you might have a different opinion if you were the one who perceived yourself the victim. Or are you saying that I can't tell a murderer not to kill me or a thief not to steal from me either?

Let me ask this. Is it still unethical had I gone through the steps of cutting the binding, scanning, editing, etc... resulting in a format shift and the destruction of the original format?

What if I paid someone to do that for me?

As I noted before (in this or another thread), format shifting is, in the United States, is perfectly legal. As such, it is implicitly accepted by the rights holders when they choose to make a book available to the public.

Indeed, I even noted that I had no particular problems with people who download copies of books they already own, provided they are planning on keeping or destroying the physical copies they own (Because the person has paid the rights holder once already, and is not increasing the supply of the book while doing so, it is essentially a zero sum transaction, having no practical impact on value of the works in question).

What if, instead of downloading, I retyped the book, or was able to scan it without destroying the book still resulting in 2 viable copies? Would your ethics require me to destroy one copy?

No, making copies for personal use is considered fair use (in the United States) and therefore considered as being part of the social contract that is involved in copyright. In addition no harm is done to the rights holder. To my mind, the line is crossed when copies are distributed.

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Bill