Not for a minute did I mean or attempt to justify anything; I was simply (or not so simply I guess) describing what I saw. The right or wrong, moral or immoral, that is up to the reader. I not so good or so bad as to presume to decide for anyone how they should act. As Helen said, most people are in that grey zone in between the two extremes and they will have to decide for themselves how to act. I know the path that I have chosen and feel comfortable with. The thing I wanted to bring to the forefront is that while there are at least token measures taken to stem the tide of music and movie piracy, its like nothing is being done to help the authors. Part of the reason for that is that unlike those other industries, it is indeed all already out there (ALL of it, literally every published word up to the most recent books. Without exception, every single book I see people begging for in the thread about wishlists is out there...and in the same download file) and because ebooks are a smaller download than even the shortest song, downloading an ebook is less of a blip on the broadband radar as traffic goes. As any engineer will tell you, nothing compresses like text. Trying to stop it is like trying to unsink the Titanic. What is before us now is how we deal with it. And the cynical side of my heart weeps to realize it is now up to the moral conscience of every reader. I wrote the above to remind people that the power/control/whatever is no longer where it was even twenty or ten years ago.
Long post? I thought we were a collective readers here...not TV addicts
