[Worldwalker]

The issue is the definition of "a legal one". According to you, that's re-buying content you already own because the publisher decided to charge you for it a second time. According to a lot of people, buying it once should be sufficient, and they should be able to keep on using it.

For example, the transition in musical formats: the reason people bought new music instead of, say, copying their vinyl records to tape, was they were getting something, usually better sound quality. They had something they didn't have before. In the case of an ebook, however, they're not getting anything they didn't have before. They're being charged to continue doing something they were already doing, and for a "service" (format shifting) that, if the publisher had not added forced controls to the book, they could and would routinely do themselves.

Take my cassettes: I have some cassettes that are, absent eBay searches, quite literally irreplaceable. The publisher is decades out of business and the cassettes (and the songs on them) have never been released in any other form. I'd buy CDs of that music in an instant, but they don't exist. At least one of the artists is dead. According to the publishers' shills, I should simply accept that those tapes are going to wear out or break, and expect that in a few years, I won't be able to listen to the music anymore. Things like that are why I think said shills should be stranded for life on desert islands (one per) with nothing to listen to but "The Barney Song". The tapes are MP3s now, and even if the physical cassettes die, I can keep on listening to the music I paid for -- which, by the way, the "license" is always careful to emphasize is distinct from the physical medium. I would rather have bought up-to-date CDs that didn't sound like transfers of decades-old cassettes, but without having that option, I had to do what worked. And the shills who just want me to throw out the aging tapes can collectively go hang.

It's the same with ebooks. If I bought an ebook for Reader A, and then a couple of years later switched to Reader B, and the publisher was required to do nothing to support that change, then the publisher should not be charging for that change. "You have to pay us again if you want to read the book you already have on your new reader, even though it's still the same book, and your old reader is in the junk" works great for publishers. It works great for publishers' shills. But it doesn't work great for human beings, who know intuitively that they're getting ripped.

And as for some of the loaded language here ... "steal" isn't enough anymore; we had "burglarize" up a way ... that makes it easy to spot who's a shill, or acting as one. "Burglarize" has a very specific meaning, namely to enter a building and convert an object to the burglar's own use, thereby taking it away from its legitimate owner. Illicit copying of ebooks does not involve entering anything. Nor does it take those books away from their legitimate owners. If your building is unentered and your ebooks are still yours, you haven't been burglarized. Copying of ebooks is, in most jurisdictions, illegal. In many, driven by the publishing industry, it's more illegal that acts which harm individuals -- corporations, apparently, are more important than citizens. But it isn't stealing -- that has a definition, and copies that don't take away the original aren't it. And it certainly isn't burglary. Trying to pretend that it is either just muddies the waters, and just makes people think that the whole thing is ridiculous, which in turn means that at least some of them will chuck out baby, bathwater, and tub, and just go to the darknet for their ebooks rather than support the people who say that letting their mother read a book is "burglary".