Hmm, we're drifting a bit towards the old sinkhole...
In the meantime, I ran into this one. An honest man wanted to pay Penguin for John LeCarre ebooks:
http://www.ricday.net/blog/108-tryin...-le-carre.html
Great line in there: "How honest do you feel today?"
Rationalization aside (as Heinlein said/quoted; "Humans aren't a rational species, they're a rationalizing one.") people will do as they want unless other people convince/compel them (one way or another) to do otherwise. (That's what societies do, after all.)
The challenge facing the publishing industry is how to (at best) *minimize* piracy at a time when their actions actively incentivize and *reward* such behavior without providing a compelling argument against it.
Most people *know* piracy is wrong.
Many (most?) refrain from it just on principle. (yay!)
Some indulge with gusto. (Unavoidable: the tech community has long had a minority that believes that might is right and being able to do something is all the justification they need to do it.)
The majority, though, lives in the gray area of temptation and are constantly forced to choose to be ethical/moral/social or not.
The BPHs just aren't helping themselves with their narrowminded obsession on maximizing control and protecting the past.
The link above? Mike Cane, in his blog, got curious:
http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2010/...ks-and-itself/
*He* deleted the pirate editions.
Most people who "get curious" or frustrated won't.
Talking about the ethics and morality and rationalization and choosing sides isn't going to change things significantly on the ground. For things to change, the drivers that push the middle-grounders towards piracy need to be addressed.
And of those drivers, pricing is going to be tough; the BPHs have their lavish lifestyle to uphold, after all, and a business model built on presumtive "bestsellers" showered by monster advances rather than the long tail of the midlist isn't something they'll readily concede is dated and obsolete in a commodity marketplace.
But one of the drivers, georestrictions, is frakking *easy* to fix.
Not trivial, mind you, but easy; it can be solved in a year or so.
All it takes is a simple license database that online retailers can plug into that lists who owns the rights for a given book in a given region and what the terms of sale are for that region. Pretty much the same thing retailers are now doing to *deny* sales based on regional location, no? The difference being, of course, that this Universal Rights Database would be used to enable any online retailer to sell any ebook to anybody that wants it and then forward the appropriate funds to the rightsholder.
Are there issues with this model? Sure. It's just a patch on the 19th-century system we now have that will eventually need to be replaced with a system most likely based on non-exclusive world language rights.
But its a step forward.
And it reduces the need for people to constantly have to decide how badly they want to read a specific volume.
Humans are what they are; neither saints nor sinners, but a bit of each.
Rational people and systems design for it and try to maximize "virtue" and minimize temptation.
Which brings us back to the question of when the BPHs will realze how counterproductive and self-desructive their recent policies have become.